The Little Stranger

One of my all-time favorite books is Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a pair of twin tales about the intertwined lives of a Victorian guttersnipe and a privileged, sheltered young lady. I’d already loved Waters for Tipping the Velvet, a literary box of bon-bons with a bold lesbian narrator whose picaresque journey through Victorian London’s music halls, back alleys, bedrooms, lands her in the arms of the organized labor movement. I’d loved the creepy, seductive Affinity, with its world of mediums and apparitions.

But Fingersmith manage to push every pleasure button in my system. Not only was it a ripping good read, but its intricate narrative structure provided twists and turns and double-crosses that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens would’ve been proud. Appalled, and proud.

When I recently finally got my hands on Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, I was a little apprehensive, however. Waters’ post-Fingersmith effort, The Night Watch, was set during and after World War II London, and though it was beautifully-written, it wasn’t exactly exciting. When I saw that The Little Stranger was also set after the war, I was slightly apprehensive. I needn’t have been.

Like The Turn of the Screw, The Little Stranger is a ghost story. Narrated in memoir style, the book is the tale of a physician of limited stature and means who becomes increasingly involved in the madness of a once-proud family of a country squire. Both the family and their rambling estate —which is the kind of architecture to which Mrs. Danvers might have been found, skulking about and mumbling about her precious Rebecca—are falling apart at the seams as the ghost of a lost child toys with its occupants, one by one.

The chills of The Little Stranger are subtle. The ghost manifests itself through the slightest of sounds and shadows, with only the smallest of traces left behind. As the doctor narrator struggles with his own skepticism and the dogma of modern-day science, the ghost eats away at the house’s inhabitants from within, leaving them empty and hollow at the core before doing away with them entirely. It’s a tale of subtle chills and goosebumps, rather than morbid images and shrieks.

In fact, the novel is so subtle that it wasn’t until I was three-quarters of the way through that I wondered to myself where it was going. From a literary standpoint it’s a great homage to Du Maurier, Henry James, Le Fanu, and most especially the very early Agatha Christie, but in reading, it seems very little more than a well-told fireside ghost tale. It wasn’t until I recalled the twisty, devious Waters of Fingersmith and Affliction that I realized exactly what was happening but was left unsaid in her story, and I plowed through the book’s last quarter, eager to see it resolved.

And it wasn’t. The book came to a suitable conclusion, but it was so ambiguous that it left the impression of something being omitted. It was like watching The Sixth Sense without that grand reveal at the end that snaps everything into perspective. There’s no peek behind the magician’s cabinet, to see how it all was done.

Only, of course, the reveal is there all along, for those who are sharp-eyed enough to find it. It’s in the novel’s lush first pages; it’s laid at its barest in its very last sentence. Understanding what’s really afoot in the novel requires reading it fairly closely, though. Judging the reviews from ordinary readers that I browsed through on the Amazon web site, most of which had kind of a um, what was the big deal? kind reaction, that might be a lost art.

For anyone who enjoys the milieu or a well-told tale, however, The Little Stranger is full of shivery, dreadful pleasures.