The Book Tower

But the thing in her hand was not quite silent, after all. As she raised the cup to her ear she could hear, coming from it, a faint, moist susurration – as if wet silk, or something fine like that, were being slowly and haltingly drawn through the tube. The sound, she realised with a shock, was that of a laboured breath, which kept catching and bubbling as if in a narrow, constricted throat. In an instant she was transported back, twenty-eight years, to her first child’s sickbed. She whispered her daughter’s name – ‘Susan?’ – and the breathing quickened and grew more liquid. A voice began to emerge from the bubbling mess of sound: a child’s voice, she took it to be, high and pitiful, attempting, as if with tremendous effort, to form words.

The Little Stranger was my introduction to Sarah Waters, and I have come away very impressed. Her latest novel is a brilliantly written study of the shifting changes in the English post-war class system. It is beautifully paced, full of subtle observations and quite simply a pleasure to read. It is also one of the most effective, chilling and original ghost stories I have read for some time. I finished The Little Stranger a few days ago but, still thinking it through, I have been unable to start a new book.

Hundreds Hall is a crumbling mansion and we find it in disrepair just after the war. The Ayers family, mother son and daughter, are struggling to keep alive the dusty rooms and prevent their home sinking more and more into decay. The middle aged Doctor Faraday narrates the story, which begins when he is called to attend to one of the few servants the Ayers can cling onto. Their maid, feigning sickness, claims to Faraday that the house is haunted. Whilst he dismisses this belief, Faraday is slowly drawn into the Ayers world and the family are indeed revealed to be haunted, although Waters is clever enough not to reveal the true cause of their resulting anguish and tragedy.

And being a very intelligent and clever novel makes The Little Stranger such an achievement. Waters creates an intriguing narrator in Faraday, a middle aged man who at first appears to be dull, lifeless and set in his ways who begins to slowly reveal a deep resentment for his working class origins and a fascination with the Ayers family that grows more uneasy with every page. The book has received few criticisms but one of them is its lack of likeable characters. The Ayers family are indeed odd; the eccentric and nervous brother who eventually loses his mind, the plain and frumpy sister who Faraday slowly begins to fall for. Faraday himself is almost a misfit, a tense and unimaginiative loner, but I found them all fascinating. And fascination, and obsession, is something that makes this novel tick.

The Thirteenth Tale has been cited as a comparison to this novel and I can see why; The Little Stranger is certainly as good. I also thought of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, which constantly taunt the reader with seemingly supernatural events then only to wring out the fantastic and reveal the rational reasoning behind them. The Little Stranger taunts in similar ways, with many spooky scenes that Faraday urges the reader to dismiss as thinking the work of ghosts. They are still chilling though; the sudden fire in the house, creeping irrational madness, strange childlike writing on the walls, mysteriously locked doors, footsteps forever out of sight. It’s all so well crafted you begin to secretly hope that there is a ghost at work, although Waters ultimately delivers something far more subtle and imaginitive.

The Little Stranger kept me gripped right to the end of its 500 pages. The ending, which I was expecting to reveal a twist, was far from the conclusion I was expecting. But on reflection I think that Sarah Waters delivered a masterly ending, and one that had me rereading it several times, along with the novel’s opening and several other key scenes. This is an ambiguous book, where the reader cannot firmly conclude on the role of the supernatural or if there really was one at all, but for this reason I found the almost uncomfortable outcome all the more unsettling. And it’s one I’m still deciding about. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.