The Little Stranger By Sarah Waters, Virago, Rs 550

Only a bad attack of nostalgia could have prompted Sarah Waters to write The Little Stranger. The novel is set in Warwickshire in the late Forties, when England is still trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the war. The old order is changing. And accommodating the new means that the gentry, represented in the novel by the Ayreses, must die a natural death. Since numerous writers, notably Evelyn Waugh, have already dealt with the decay of the English aristocracy in the Thirties and Forties, one expects Waters to at least add something new to the theme as she has ventured to take it up again after so many decades. But far from providing a fresh look at the social changes taking place in post-war Britain, this novel does not even recreate that age properly. There is a gratuitousness to the plot that makes the act of reading the novel an exercise in futility.

The Little Stranger is, in fact, less a novel than a study in Georgian architecture. At its centre is the crumbling Hundreds Hall built in 1733, and Waters seems intent on taking the readers on never-ending guided tours of its decaying rooms, overgrown garden and the disintegrating estate surrounding it. In the Hall, time has, expectedly, stopped (in the disused “saloon”, the ornamental hands of the clock are stuck at twenty to nine, which is the time Miss Havisham’s clocks are stopped in Great Expectations). It is frustrating that all the painstakingly detailed descriptions of the derelict Hundreds Hall merely aim to create a space in which the readers, along with the characters, would feel that “ordinary life has fractionally tilted, and... [they] had slipped into some other, odder, rather rarer realm”.

Waters seems unable to make up her mind on whether to use the bare social realist style or to be unashamedly Gothic in her descriptions. She tilts towards the former and then brings in a smattering of the supernatural, which sticks out. The narrator, Faraday, has a lot to contribute in producing this mismatch.

As a member of the rising middle class, this doctor is clearly in awe of the imposing Hundreds Hall, so much so that he would not rest until he has made it his own. After Faraday has been summoned once to the Hall to treat the ailing servant girl, he slowly makes himself indispensable to the Ayreses, who own the house. His is the voice of reason against which the paranormal happenings in the Hall are to be judged. But so doggedly does Faraday go about his task of refusing to believe that he comes across as irredeemably dull, even stupid. Since he is the narrator, the novel remains trapped in his consciousness, and readers cannot even begin to suspend their disbelief which is, presumably, what the novel wants them to do.

In the exchanges between the Ayreses and Faraday, the class angle, is, of course, important. Faraday is at first put off by the hauteur of the Ayreses, but once he figures out their financial distress, he assumes a proprietory attitude towards them. His half-formed desires to appropriate Hundreds Hall and all that it signifies slowly take shape as he makes himself fall in love with the unattractive daughter of the house, Caroline. But the relationship must fail and the Hundreds’s ghosts are brought in to prove that the twain can never meet. At their behest, all the Ayreses dutifully give up their ghosts, and the unclaimed Hundreds becomes Faraday’s, as it were. So there is also a moral to the story. It is a pity that only the bravest will be left standing at the end of 499 pages to lend an ear.