This is by Welsh-born Sarah Waters (kind of appropriate, then, that I finished it while still in Wales, although the novel's setting is Warwickshire in England, so maybe I'm stretching a point there...). It was published in 2009, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year.

And I was reading it why? Well, in 2023, I read The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, which came out in 1948. It was a gripping read, but the treatment of one particular character -- Betty, a teenager -- is somewhat problematic. Waters argues very cogently that poor Betty becomes the focus for an "almost apocalyptic mixture of loss, rage and peril" because she's "a powerful meeting point for anxieties about gender, sexuality and class -- all categories that the war had done a great deal to disturb..."

Waters explains how she found herself revisiting Tey's story (itself a reworking of a tale from the 18th century). She wonders about writing it from Betty's perspective. "What I kept coming back to, however, was not so much Betty herself as the burden of menace she is obliged, by Tey, to shoulder. The Franchise Affair is a phobic novel -- one might even say, a hysterical novel; and it was somewhere in that hysteria, I started to think, that the germ of my next novel might really lie... I began to see a crumbling country house, rather grander than The Franchise but sharing its isolated Midlands setting. I began to imagine the fading gentry family who might, in the late 1940s, inhabit such a house... In a mischievous nod to Tey, I gave them a teenage maid named Betty, and a bland local ally, Dr Faraday, who would find himself caught up and transformed by the coils of their increasingly unnerving story. Finally, I gave them something like a ghost..."

The Little Stranger, not so much a ghost story as a "haunted house novel", is what she wrote on the basis of that impetus. It has taken me three years to get round to reading it, but it was worth the wait, because it's really, really good.



***

Our narrator is Dr Faraday, who clawed his way to a medical career through the sacrifice of his now dead parents, thus pulling off that trickiest of British exploits -- the transcendence of one's class. It's a precarious position that he occupies, though. He has money worries; he fears the imminent arrival of the National Health Service; and he inhabits a kind of in-between class: No longer a labouring man, but not entirely accepted on equal terms by the gentry either. We open with his first recollection of the country house that becomes its own character in the course of the book:

"I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. It was the summer after the war [WWI], and the Ayreses still had most of their money then, were still big people in the district. The event was an Empire Day fete... I recall most vividly the house itself, which struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings. They made it look blurred and slightly uncertain -- like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun."

Because Dr Faraday's mother was once a servant at the Hall, and still has connections there, the boy gets to see inside -- and is even able to do a minor bit of vandalism involving the theft of a plaster acorn. "I wasn't a spiteful or destructive boy," he explains. "It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it... I was like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of."

You'll want to revisit that paragraph once you've reached the end... But for the time being, we fast forward in the narrative. The second of the World Wars is now behind us, and Waters' reimagining of Tey's novel starts to take shape. Hundreds Hall is decaying, and post-war economic conditions have rendered it impossible to maintain. The genteel family (now reduced to permanent financial worry and manual labour) consists of the widowed and slightly ineffectual Mrs Ayres; her son Roderick, back from the war with various injuries, and suffering not just from pain and bad memories, but from anxiety about how to keep the estate afloat; and her daughter Caroline, practical, down-to-earth, inelegant, and probably unmarriageable. And Betty, of course... It's Betty's pseudo-illness that provides a reason for Dr Faraday to enter the house, and strike up a relationship with the family.


All the photos are from Warwickshire. This is War Memorial Park near Coventry

From the beginning, we are conscious that something is terribly off... Partly, it's scale of the Hundreds problem, and the palpable feeing that the Ayreses and their ilk are living on borrowed time. Roderick is particularly brittle. But the class divide is destructive, too. Dr Faraday has a fairly large chip on his shoulder, and the family, while accepting and befriending him, are still clearly aware of his "difference".

But there's more. We wonder at first whether Betty is the source of all the jiggery-pokery that starts to happen in the house. But no, Betty is just frightened, because she believes absolutely that the house is haunted. Hilary Mantel, who really rates The Little Stranger, comments: "In a classic ghost narrative, it is often the children and the dogs who are first to feel the cold draught, the creep and slither of the uncanny. It is a mark of the author's perfect understanding of her period that Dr Faraday and her employers regard Betty as being hardly on the human level. After each messy disaster, each shock, each stroke of fate, Betty is summoned with a blackly comic inevitability, to mop up the blood and the broken glass, to carry buckets of water, to brew tea and calm the nerves of her social superiors. Inarticulate, gauche, she is not considered to have the sensibility to feel the higher types of terror. No one offers Betty an explanation as gruesome events escalate. She is being paid a wage, after all, to stand by without complaining as the laws of nature are broken..."

And indeed, as the narrative progresses, the troubling events pile up. (Note that this is probably the place to stop reading if you've not read the story, and want to encounter no spoilers. Do read the story, though...)

A placid dog, in an unprecedented act of aggression, attacks a visiting child, and has to be destroyed. Roderick is now also attesting to a malevolent presence in the house; his mind cracks under the strain not only of managing the unmanageable, but also of keeping -- as he sees it -- this "infection" from reaching his mother and sister. After finding himself at the centre of an unexplained fire at the Hall, triggering worries that he'll eventually kill everyone, he is sent by Dr Faraday to an upper-class asylum.

Then the tricksy Hundreds presence, which has all the hallmarks of a poltergeist, uses the old communication paraphernalia (speaking tubes and bell pulls) to play on everyone's nerves. Mrs Ayres is the one most affected at this stage, as she comes to believe that the "little stranger" is the ghost of her beloved daughter, Susan, who died while still a child. Dr Faraday sees reason to commit Mrs Ayres, too, but before he has the chance to do so, she commits suicide.

By now he has struck up something more than a friendship with Caroline, and an engagement -- albeit unofficial and unannounced -- has come into being. She has always seemed a little reluctant, though, and eventually pulls out altogether. And then she meets with an "accident"... A mysterious encounter at the top of the stairs one minute (Betty hears her saying, "You!"), and she's spreadeagled at the bottom the next. She couldn't have fallen. Did she jump, or was she pushed?

By the end of the story, then, all the Ayreses are hors de combat. One sectioned; two dead.


Atherstone

***

The really, really clever thing about this book is that it never comes down categorically on one side or the other. There is always the possibility of a physical explanation. The wiring is old: It can do weird things. There are vermin: Ditto. Or we can opt for a psychological explanation: Minds go wrong, and see stuff that's not there. And the Ayerses' situation offers fertile ground for such drifting, as Mantel points out: "The window panes are dim and warped; they reflect nothing truly. Its corridors are dark, light spilling unexpectedly from open doors and the great dome above. The psyches of the inhabitants are riddled with ambivalence, holed by self-doubt, worn away by genteel, stifled frustration. They speak the soothing language of upper-class good manners, but all are unable to face their damaged selves, or contemplate their capacity for doing damage in their turn..."

Dr Faraday is always the spokesperson for scepticism, shepherding the reader away from a supernatural interpretation with such dogged determination that you start to wonder whether he's in denial, too.

But Waters also offers us more complex psychological possibilities. Mantel again: "The Little Stranger operates in the queasy borderlands between the supernatural and the psychopathological, and it is territory in which Waters moves with an air of supreme ease. One of the pleasures of the book is the way she combines spookiness with sharp social observation. She is at home in a convincing postwar setting; however much we pity the family at Hundreds Hall, as their ancestral pile and their sanity collapse about them, Waters never lets us lose sight of their repulsive social attitudes. It does seem, at one point, as if it is the spirit of snobbery that is haunting them."

Talking to Lisa Allardice, Waters explains that the term "little stranger" was used in old-fashioned maternity manuals to refer to an unborn child. She, however, was drawn to the darker implication 'that it's like a thing that you might give birth to that's not a child, some more troubling emanation'. Faraday discusses with a colleague, Dr Seeley, the possibility that troubled people might project a "bundle of bad energy", and though he dismisses this idea, he does occasionally wonder whether Caroline is the source of the blackness that keeps manifesting as the activity of a poltergeist...



Waters doesn't spell things out for us at the end (some reviewers, including Sam Jordison, have criticized the ambiguity of the ending), but more and more we're led to suspect that there's something up with our apparently sensible and noble doctor friend...

As Jordison points out: "[Waters] leaves open the tantalising possibility that rational Dr Faraday might actually be a bit of a psycho, or even a malign psychic presence. There are hints that this singularly unreliable narrator might be the root and cause of much of the trouble. He seems prone to blackouts, is desperate to get his hands on the house, has a motive rooted in class envy, is alibi-free at important times, and there are a number of references to his potential involvement in the closing pages."

So let's look at that last chapter, which takes us three years on from Caroline's death. Dr Faraday's business has benefited both from the publicity the Ayres family case brought him, and from the council housing that went up on part of the estate sold off by the family. He bumps into Betty one day, and reflects that he and she are the only "survivors".

Hundreds Hall, meanwhile, remains unsold. And he still has the keys...

It's his concluding reflections on this circumstance that really give us pause:

"I go out there whenever my busy days will allow... The downstairs rooms I tend to keep shuttered. The second floor has been giving me some anxiety lately... Every so often I go right through the house, sweeping up the dust and the mouse-dirt. The saloon ceiling still holds, though it can only be a matter of time before the bloated stucco tumbles... Despite all this, the house retains its beauty. In some ways it is handsomer than ever... Wandering softly through the twilit spaces, I can even seem to see the house as its architect must have done when it was new... In those moments there is no trace of the Ayreses at all. It is as if the house has thrown the family off, like springing turf throwing off a footprint.

"I am no nearer now to understanding just what happened at the Hall than I was three years ago... [Seeley] has come down firmly in favour of his old, rational view that Hundreds was, in effect, defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. In his opinion, the Ayreses, unable to advance with the times, simply opted for retreat -- for suicide, and madness...

"I've never attempted to remind Seeley of his other, odder theory: that Hundreds was consumed by some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some 'little stranger', spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself. But on my solitary visits, I find myself growing watchful. Every so often I'll sense a presence, or catch a movement at the corner of my eye, and my heart will give a jolt of fear and expectation: I'll imagine that the secret is about to be revealed to me at last; that I will see what Caroline saw, and recognise it, as she did.

"If Hundreds Hall is haunted, however, its ghost doesn't show itself to me. For I'll turn, and am disappointed -- realising that what I am looking at is only a cracked window-pane, and that the face gazing distortedly from it, baffled and longing, is my own."



Which does seem like a very, very big hint...

The really scary implication is that Faraday may not even have been conscious of what he was doing... We have sometimes worried about his refusal to really HEAR what terrified people are telling him, and about his insistence on people's quiescence (he keeps telling them they're tired, and maybe they are, but his preference for his patients to be in a drugged, resting, biddable state does start to seem a bit excessive).

We can put all this down to his rationality and his individual methods. But in sectioning Roderick, and suggesting the same fate for Mrs Ayers (the impetus for her suicide), he was covertly paving the way for Caroline to own Hundreds, and himself to "own" Caroline through marriage. When she backed off, presumably intuiting, in her good, common-sense way, that there was something weird about him, and when she then started proceedings for the sale of the house, something had to be done to keep Hundreds close...

As I said, though, nothing is definitively spelled out. It's up to the reader to decide...

***

Perhaps it's unfair to compare, but The Little Stranger ticked all the boxes that Mexican Gothic failed to tick (for me, at least). Masterfully displayed here are restraint (less is more), ambiguity (room for competing interpretations), a strong female lead (Caroline is a great character), and a sense that Waters was absolutely grounded in the era she was depicting. As this review points out, the period detail is superb: "You'll smell the soap and coal, see the bells-and-wires callboard in the servants' corridor, hear the creak of the wooden stairs, feel how dark a house like that would be in winter. Waters has discussed how deeply she delved into diaries, films, and ephemera to capture the time, down to the way people swore in private. It's all sewn so well into the world of the novel that you'll forget you're reading historical fiction. Because it isn't a dreamt past, it's immersion..."

Really well done. Absolutely must read more...