A few years after the Second World War, a country doctor is called in to Hundreds Hall, where the Ayres family has lived the original quiet life for more than two centuries. What Dr. Faraday finds is damage at every level: the slow destruction of the estate by wear and tear, billeted soldiers and nature's incursions (wind, water, mould) that the Ayres, in these high-tax times, no longer have enough money to keep at bay.
The young squire, Roddie, is scarred and crippled, physically and mentally, from the shooting down of his plane. His mother is still mourning her first daughter, whom she lost to diphtheria at 6 (a strong hint that the prewar world was no idyll).
The most intriguing of the family is Caroline Ayres, the plain-faced, 26-year-old daughter whose adventure with the Wrens was cut short when she was summoned home to nurse her brother.
- The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters, McClelland & Stewart, 480 pages, $32.99
Caroline, with her terrible clothes and boundless energy, is almost unmarriageable, in a class in which a girl's duty is to safeguard her family by alliance. By delicate allusion, Sarah Waters links her with two contrasting archetypes of frozenness - Miss Havisham in Dickens's Great Expectations and Sleeping Beauty awaiting her prince behind the hedge of thorns. One of the pleasures of The Little Stranger is the way Waters gradually turns this hearty but discontented spinster into a figure of sexual magnetism. "Her bare legs were still unshaven; each little hair, I noticed, was laden with dust, like an eye-blacked lash."
The noticing is all; the bachelor doctor, like other subtly unreliable narrators (think of Nick in The Great Gatsby), is up to his neck in what he is reporting. As the 10-year-old son of one of the nursemaids, sneaking into Hundreds Hall during a fete, he gouged a plaster acorn out of a decorative border. This incident, in which the yearning for beauty shades into class rage, foreshadows the whole novel. Mrs. Ayres wonders if the family is cursed: "What have we done? Whom have we angered? Do you know?" she asks Dr. Faraday.
Waters is very interesting on the psychology of class; the way the doctor's parents sacrificed themselves to pay for his education, and make him a stranger to them in the process, and the curious sense the Ayres have of clinging to Hundreds Hall as a gallant attempt to "keep up our side of the bargain." Hundreds itself, that "lovely monster" that eats up its owners' money and work, is the novel's anti-hero.
Elements of The Little Stranger will remind Sarah Waters's fans of her previous books: the supernatural guessing-game she plays in Affinity; the oppressive country house (and dread of its alter ego, the asylum) in Fingersmith; and the 1940s rationing-era setting of The Night Watch. Whatever the era, Waters evokes it with a precision that is based not just on research but on sensory imagination.
The Little Stranger is a more traditional piece of storytelling than those previous bestsellers, relying hardly at all on the narrative twists for which she is known. With its single narrator and tense but unhurried linear movement, it tackles tricky matters - family secrets, madness, poltergeists - with a minimum of tricks. While her matter is lurid (and plenty of blood eventually gets splashed on the ripped carpets), her manner is not; though the story might belong in a Stephen King novel, The Little Stranger is notable for its restraint. Perhaps because of my relish for the Waters of Affinity and Fingersmith, I waited in a state of suspense for some revelation that would make me rethink the whole story, and felt let down when it never came.
But if her reliance on plot varies from book to book, Waters is always very strong on personality, and here she creates four main characters - the family and the doctor - who are very different but equally ambiguous, and take turns to appear as victim or villain. The reader will strain to apportion blame, and really that is the novel's deepest theme: the unpindownability of evil. "None of it was real," Caroline laments to Dr. Faraday, but the unreal, whether in the form of imaginary bogeys or clumsy, self-deluding love, can do real damage.
If something is wrong - with the Ayres as individuals and as gentry, with England, with the times that seem so out of joint - whose fault is it? Might there be a some "dark germ," "filthy thing" or "miasma" that bears only an indirect relationship to human consciousness? The Little Stranger finally poses not just a technical question, of the borderline between science and the paranormal, but a philosophical one.
Really, this novel belongs in an 18th-century tradition, the Gothic line that stretches from Ann Radcliffe through Mary Stewart to Barbara Vine: a brave heroine facing terrors in an isolated mansion. As ever, Waters is intelligent and wry in her use of literary models. My favourite moment in the book comes when Dr. Faraday confides to a colleague: "It's as if - well, as if something's slowly sucking the life out of the whole family."
"Something is," he said with another bark of laughter. "It's called a Labour government."
This is a good example of the way the timeless elements in Waters's novels - the desire, the horror - are always rooted in the specific, even the political. If she will disappoint some of her readers on this occasion by refusing to rip away the veil and reveal the heart of darkness, it is perhaps because darkness, the "little stranger," can creep in anywhere.
Emma Donoghue would risk some night terrors to live in a Georgian mansion. Her 18th-century whydunnit, Slammerkin, is being reissued soon by HarperCollins Canada in their Modern Classics series.