The Little Stranger
Ratings36
Average rating3.7
"The #1 book of 2009...Several sleepless nights are guaranteed."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.
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A lot of creepiness only somewhat offset by the many mundane details of a family trying to maintain a decaying manor. I do like Sarah Waters.
This one was hard to star. I think it is quite a masterful book, which stays true to it's narrative form and for that it deserves at least 4 stars. But I dreaded reading it. I think that was a combo of the increasing anxiety that pervades the book combined with how slowly it builds that anxiety. It did manage to completely scare the crap out of me at one point though.
Doctor Faraday is a physician called out to a patient in an old run-down Georgian house in the summer of 1947. The patient is a young servant girl with a wild imagination. The family is from another world, a world of glamour and money and condescension, a world which disappeared with WWII but the family are desperately trying to hold on to. The strain begins to show when a fire mysteriously starts in in one of the bedrooms, strange noises are heard through the walls and ceiling and the family discover marking scratched in the paintwork.
As a haunted house mystery I found this didn't work too well, there wasn't enough tension and spookiness. What did work was reading it as a psychological study of a disappearing class in a world they no longer recognised. After WWII the welfare state had a huge impact on Britain, touched on here by the building of council estates and the introduction of the NHS. At the same time nobody wanted a ‘lord of the manor' anymore and the gentry were being forced to sell off their land bit by bit just to keep their heads over water. The detail used in the story lets the reader feel the strain the family are under and I was totally engrossed although sometimes the story felt a little slow. I like the ambiguous ending and the question of how much Doctor Faraday himself was involved in the destruction of the Ayres family.
