The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters' latest novel follows in the creepy Gothic vein that her previous work Affinity featured. Affinity was my first Waters novel and I was completely gripped by the tale of a woman who volunteered at a local prison and got terribly tangled up in the life of one of the inmates.

A similar tale of gentle interest into hideous entanglement is followed in The Little Stranger. The bachelor middle-aged Dr Farady has spent his life looking after the inhabitants of a small village in Warwickshire. When his co-practitioner, Dr Graham, is called on an emergency case, Farady takes one of his minor cases at a house named Hundreds Hall. Once a fine family mansion, the house is slowly falling into disrepair. The remaining Ayreses struggle to adjust to the post-Second World War life. There is Mrs Ayres, the matriarch who still requires maids and grand parties, Caroline Ayres the oldest daughter who is not quite beautiful and who seems to do much of the house work herself and Roderick Ayres, the son who was badly injured in the war and is absorbed in the declining finances of the estate. Farady's one-time visit turns into weekly and then almost daily visits to the Ayres household, as it becomes slowly gripped with a mysterious spirit-like thing that begins to slowly destroy all its inhabitants.

Told mostly through the eyes of Farady, Waters' latest novel is chilling, frightening and brilliant. The crumbling hall has a hint of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and the novel is referenced when Caroline points out a broken clock that her and Roderick set to 8.40 when they were young.

Waters expertly portrays a fading class, with modern society-with its legal action and council building slowly creeping in on them. The mental decline of the characters, as the house itself seems to take them over is particularly effective, with Roderick's decline from a flippant, somewhat arrogant young man to an (apparently) mentally ill man is both scary and heartbreaking.

Reading this so soon after finishing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (which was wonderful) and also as we begin to disect The Yellow Wallpaper in English Literature has made me realise how much I really adore Gothic fiction, done well. I find it fascinating that the stories that began with the likes of the Brontes have continued through the years with The Yellow Wallpaper at the end of 1800's, the brilliant (she's one of my favourite authors) Daphne du Maurier and now Sarah Waters, among I'm sure many others.