FICTION: The Little StrangerBy Sarah Waters Virago, 499pp. £16.99
IT IS ALMOST 10 years since Tipping the Velvet, the first part of Sarah Water's Victorian trilogy, fire-balled her onto the literary scene. At the time, Waters herself described the novel as "a lesbo-historical romp" (a phrase she apparently now regrets) and with a title derived from the Victorian slang for cunnilingus it wasn't surprising that copies of the book seemed to fly off the shelves. The trilogy continued with Affinity(1999) and ended with Fingersmithin 2002, when Waters finally left Victoriana behind and turned her lens on wartime London. The result was The Night Watch, an absorbing and multilayered account of life on the home front and the subsequent effects of war on a city and its people. That novel was shortlisted for both the Orange and Man Booker prizes, and contained one or two lesbian relationships, but really these were very small parts of a very large book. Yet the "lesbo romp" tag stuck and, if to judge by the pre-publication interviews for her new novel, continues to do so. However, there is not a lesbian – much less a romping one – to be seen in her new novel, The Little Stranger, and the book is none the worse for that.
Waters is an English writer in every sense of the word. She writes of English matters that occur on English terrain and her characters, be they Victorian pickpockets or wartime ambulance drivers, are quintessentially English. She is as English as Dickens and Wilkie Collins; as Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier – all of whom, in one way or another, could be said to have had an influence on her work.
Indeed, The Little Strangerhas many of the ingredients of the traditional English whodunnit; a big house in a rural landscape where queer goings-on abound. A family on the decline: the widowed Mrs Ayres, desperate to keep up appearances no matter the cost; her son Rod, a former fighter pilot, who bears the scars of his wartime injuries within and without; and the capable daughter Caroline, plain, pleasant and painfully reliable. We even have the simple parlour maid who may know more than she's letting on, along with a housekeeper who speaks as she sees. Our hero, Dr Faraday, a GP of humble origins, takes on the role of detective. However, in place of the usual murderer, we have a ghost. Or do we?
The story begins when Faraday is called out to Hundreds Hall and in so doing returns to the house where his mother was once a nursemaid. This house, in all its decaying splendour, is central to the story and will not only become a character in its own right but also a metaphor for the declining class it represents. Faraday is a self-professed bachelor, a solid sort of chap and set in his ways. A man of science, with his feet firmly on the ground, he proves to be the ideal narrator. As Faraday finds himself becoming more entangled with the Ayres household, and the house itself takes on a life of its own, the suspense builds and builds, leaving the reader gripped and guessing from start to finish.
THIS IS MOREthan a detective and/or ghost story. It is also a study of post-war Britain, a country that emerged from the second World War bankrupt and broken, more victim than victor. This is 1947, when rationing and clothes coupons were still the norm and when meat and cigarettes could be used to bribe politicians. When country estates were being sold off and carved up to be replaced by council estates. It was the year that would see the arrival of the National Health Service – an advent that was anticipated with suspicion and fear. The year that would endure the harshest winter in decades and when Attlee's Labour government would have the gentry quaking in their increasingly threadbare boots.
Waters has always been fond of research, and just as well because all five novels have certainly demanded it. Here, however, she appears to use it with a lighter touch – there are no superfluous references and each period detail is made to work for its supper. This allows the story to proceed at just the right pace and to do so without ever losing credibility – an achievement in itself, given the supernatural aspect of the novel.
Always good on interiors (if I can’t recall the names of some of the characters from her previous novels, I can almost always remember the house, flat or even prison cell where they lived), this time around she also shows an impressive understanding of the Warwickshire landscape. Moving over it with a slow camera, through the ravages of the black winter, or in May, when the landscape is “tense with colour”, Waters lingers just long enough to allow us to see lower-class families reduced to living in abandoned huts while malnourished gentry struggle with tasks once carried out by servants they can no longer afford to keep.
Social document; intriguing detective yarn; chilling ghost story, romance or thriller - call it what you will (but never a romp) - The Little Strangeris a marvellous read on so very many levels.
Christine Dwyer Hickey is a short-story writer and novelist. Her new novel,
Last Train from Liguria
, is published this month by Atlantic Books
* Sarah Waters takes part in the Dublin Writers Festival event on Sunday June 7th in the Abbey Theatre at 7.30pm