"The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters
Dec. 4th, 2009 04:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesHas anyone else noticed the increasing incidence of mainstream, 'literary' novels with supernatural content in the nation's bookshops? I failed to find a single decent book to buy in Sheffield Waterstone's Horror section the other week, but to my surprise a grumpy shuffle through the much larger Literature section turned up an embarrassment of ghostly or occult novels! As I didn't have an unlimited budget I decided to plump for The Little Stranger, the weighty new novel by Sarah Waters. I thought some of her earlier novels were quite good (especially Affinity) and I was attracted by the slightly silly jacket art, which is done to look like a battered old book of urbane, thrilling ghost stories from the 50s or 60s (something by A M Burrage or Wakefield perhaps).
As it turned out, the book and the cover are two very different things. Silliness and fun, however faint, are two things conspicuously absent from The Little Stranger. From the opening chapter it became obvious that I had a solemn, lumbering behemoth of a novel on my hands. The action unfurls at a pace that is sometimes leisurely, sometimes just agonizingly slow. I suspect Waters' fame as an author has prevented her editor from doing their job properly, as is too often the case when novelists make it big (none of her previous novels where anywhere near this big, or this wordy.) But in a way, a certain stateliness of pace becomes the story, which is set in the wake of WW2 and deals with the odd relationship between a country doctor of working-class origin and the family of posh neurotics that peoples the local 'stately home', Hundreds. The latter have some very good reasons for being neurotic - the young Squire got badly smashed up in the war, his sister is so plain that no-one will marry her, their father is dead and the entire estate is falling down about their heads due to lack of money and the dreaded 'servant problem'. The Doctor eventually becomes quite taken by the sister, Caroline, despite her mannish appearance and terrible knitted hats, and begins hanging around the Hall in earnest, only to witness a series of tragedies assail the house in quick succession. Some of these disasters actually appear to flout the flaws of Nature, and the doctor's common sense is tested to the full when Roderick professes to be haunted by a 'filthy', 'grotesque' thing with the potential to destroy his mother and sister too.
Things go from bad to worse, and anyone looking for a ripping yarn or light entertainment is advised to seek elsewhere, because this book is unrelentingly doomy, as well as long. But it would be wrong to suggest that it's entirely unrewarding. The many supernatural passages in the book - usually traditional hauntings, often with a sadistic twist - are very well-done, and it's clear that Waters, unlike so many 'literary' authors, has some respect for the genre she's chosen to write in. The writing is almost never lazy, and although the setting is more recent than many of her books, The Little Stranger has the feel of a decent Victorian melodrama where you can lose yourself in the book, and characters are given plenty of time to develop. Some of the characters are interesting as well. Caroline is in many ways a modern-day Marion Halcombe (the unlovely but resourceful heroine of Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White) and unlike many of the critics who've reviewed this book online, I thought the doctor seemed like a nice, normal man rather than the conceited bore they make him out to be. And of course there's plenty of social comment to keep the lovers of Sirius Literature happy. In fact, Waters' depiction of the vanishing world of Hundreds, now staffed by a single teenage maid, is a major source of doom throughout the book. While the overwheening entitlement of Caroline's mother's generation is hard to bear, you can still feel some compassion for the marooned aristocrats, with their peeling wallpaper, mounting debts and crumbling mental health. There is little by way of preaching in the novel, which is good.
God, though, the reviews. I was looking forward to reading what other people thought of this novel - after all, I don't often review books that are the focus of so much interest from the literary establishment. But I should've known better...The Grate Branes in the culture sections of the Guardian, Telegraph, Times etc. have all hastened to review Waters' book, and virtually everyone except for Hilary Mantel (in the Guardian) has made a complete ass of themselves in the process. An author of supernatural fiction herself, she is the only broadsheet critic able to treat the supernatural component of the novel with the respect it deserves, and captures the novels' key points and themes far better than anyone else. Everybody else seemed happy to hand in lazy, sneering pieces about how Waters 'transcends' the 'middle-brow' genre of horror fiction by stuffing her writing with social themes (because no genre authors ever do that, of course not) and treating 'horror fiction' and 'pulp fiction' as interchangeable concepts. Some of the reviewers don't even bother to get their basic plot facts right, and needless to say, no-one has given much thought to context. To hear this lot, you'd think Waters had single-handedly invented the horror story, with no debts to any other writer past or present. Even Mantel only manages to trot out the inevitable Margaret Atwood for comparison.
Oh well. Maybe in a few years' time, if respected authors keep plugging away at it, the ghost story will finally begin to be treated with the respect it deserves. In the meantime, if you like a doorstop novel and don't mind Waters' forsaking the whole prancing lesbian bit in favour of some more subtle human interaction, then you should probably pick up a copy of this. Possibly second-hand though, as I'm not sure it was worth the £12 I paid (and that was with £4 off!)
As it turned out, the book and the cover are two very different things. Silliness and fun, however faint, are two things conspicuously absent from The Little Stranger. From the opening chapter it became obvious that I had a solemn, lumbering behemoth of a novel on my hands. The action unfurls at a pace that is sometimes leisurely, sometimes just agonizingly slow. I suspect Waters' fame as an author has prevented her editor from doing their job properly, as is too often the case when novelists make it big (none of her previous novels where anywhere near this big, or this wordy.) But in a way, a certain stateliness of pace becomes the story, which is set in the wake of WW2 and deals with the odd relationship between a country doctor of working-class origin and the family of posh neurotics that peoples the local 'stately home', Hundreds. The latter have some very good reasons for being neurotic - the young Squire got badly smashed up in the war, his sister is so plain that no-one will marry her, their father is dead and the entire estate is falling down about their heads due to lack of money and the dreaded 'servant problem'. The Doctor eventually becomes quite taken by the sister, Caroline, despite her mannish appearance and terrible knitted hats, and begins hanging around the Hall in earnest, only to witness a series of tragedies assail the house in quick succession. Some of these disasters actually appear to flout the flaws of Nature, and the doctor's common sense is tested to the full when Roderick professes to be haunted by a 'filthy', 'grotesque' thing with the potential to destroy his mother and sister too.
Things go from bad to worse, and anyone looking for a ripping yarn or light entertainment is advised to seek elsewhere, because this book is unrelentingly doomy, as well as long. But it would be wrong to suggest that it's entirely unrewarding. The many supernatural passages in the book - usually traditional hauntings, often with a sadistic twist - are very well-done, and it's clear that Waters, unlike so many 'literary' authors, has some respect for the genre she's chosen to write in. The writing is almost never lazy, and although the setting is more recent than many of her books, The Little Stranger has the feel of a decent Victorian melodrama where you can lose yourself in the book, and characters are given plenty of time to develop. Some of the characters are interesting as well. Caroline is in many ways a modern-day Marion Halcombe (the unlovely but resourceful heroine of Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White) and unlike many of the critics who've reviewed this book online, I thought the doctor seemed like a nice, normal man rather than the conceited bore they make him out to be. And of course there's plenty of social comment to keep the lovers of Sirius Literature happy. In fact, Waters' depiction of the vanishing world of Hundreds, now staffed by a single teenage maid, is a major source of doom throughout the book. While the overwheening entitlement of Caroline's mother's generation is hard to bear, you can still feel some compassion for the marooned aristocrats, with their peeling wallpaper, mounting debts and crumbling mental health. There is little by way of preaching in the novel, which is good.
God, though, the reviews. I was looking forward to reading what other people thought of this novel - after all, I don't often review books that are the focus of so much interest from the literary establishment. But I should've known better...The Grate Branes in the culture sections of the Guardian, Telegraph, Times etc. have all hastened to review Waters' book, and virtually everyone except for Hilary Mantel (in the Guardian) has made a complete ass of themselves in the process. An author of supernatural fiction herself, she is the only broadsheet critic able to treat the supernatural component of the novel with the respect it deserves, and captures the novels' key points and themes far better than anyone else. Everybody else seemed happy to hand in lazy, sneering pieces about how Waters 'transcends' the 'middle-brow' genre of horror fiction by stuffing her writing with social themes (because no genre authors ever do that, of course not) and treating 'horror fiction' and 'pulp fiction' as interchangeable concepts. Some of the reviewers don't even bother to get their basic plot facts right, and needless to say, no-one has given much thought to context. To hear this lot, you'd think Waters had single-handedly invented the horror story, with no debts to any other writer past or present. Even Mantel only manages to trot out the inevitable Margaret Atwood for comparison.
Oh well. Maybe in a few years' time, if respected authors keep plugging away at it, the ghost story will finally begin to be treated with the respect it deserves. In the meantime, if you like a doorstop novel and don't mind Waters' forsaking the whole prancing lesbian bit in favour of some more subtle human interaction, then you should probably pick up a copy of this. Possibly second-hand though, as I'm not sure it was worth the £12 I paid (and that was with £4 off!)
