Paul's Reviews > The Little Stranger
The Little Stranger
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This is classified as a ghost story, but as a ghost story it is very unconvincing and not really very chilling; no Whistle and I'll Come To You menace here. However this is actually a really good novel which captures the zeitgeist of post war Britain in the 1940s and Waters has done her research well. The real themes are class and the decline of the landed gentry, the rise of the welfare state and the NHS.
It is less Edgar Allan Poe more Josephine Tey; it reminded me of The Franchise Affair. The themes are very similar. The narrator Dr Faraday is a doctor who tends to the residents of the Big House, the Hundreds, the Ayres family; mother, daughter and son. At one time he would have been trade; he now almost becomes a friend, even a potential suitor for the daughter, almost. It is a very English novel in its treatment of class, respectability and the inability of a certain section of the landed gentry to maintain their impossibly large and crumbling houses. There is, of course the spectre of a socialist government and death duties in the background and the encroachment of large council estates being built way too close to the hosue for comfort, on land that had to be sold to try to maintain an impossible lifestyle.
The ghost part of the story seems to be something stalking the residents of the house; possibly the ghost of a dead child, but it feels more like the dead hand of a lost Edwardian and 1920s past forever gone.
There are homages to lots of other novels. There is a touch of the Miss Havisham's about the decay of the house. The son is called Roderick (Fall of the House of Usher, I think) and of course The Turn of the Screw is recollected. There was almost a feel of Trollope in the plot construction and the interrelation of the characters and a touch of the detective story about the goings on in the house.
The story is slow to start, but on reflection, I enjoyed it, not as a ghost story, but like Night Watch, as historical novel exploring the changes Britain underwent in the 1940s
It is less Edgar Allan Poe more Josephine Tey; it reminded me of The Franchise Affair. The themes are very similar. The narrator Dr Faraday is a doctor who tends to the residents of the Big House, the Hundreds, the Ayres family; mother, daughter and son. At one time he would have been trade; he now almost becomes a friend, even a potential suitor for the daughter, almost. It is a very English novel in its treatment of class, respectability and the inability of a certain section of the landed gentry to maintain their impossibly large and crumbling houses. There is, of course the spectre of a socialist government and death duties in the background and the encroachment of large council estates being built way too close to the hosue for comfort, on land that had to be sold to try to maintain an impossible lifestyle.
The ghost part of the story seems to be something stalking the residents of the house; possibly the ghost of a dead child, but it feels more like the dead hand of a lost Edwardian and 1920s past forever gone.
There are homages to lots of other novels. There is a touch of the Miss Havisham's about the decay of the house. The son is called Roderick (Fall of the House of Usher, I think) and of course The Turn of the Screw is recollected. There was almost a feel of Trollope in the plot construction and the interrelation of the characters and a touch of the detective story about the goings on in the house.
The story is slow to start, but on reflection, I enjoyed it, not as a ghost story, but like Night Watch, as historical novel exploring the changes Britain underwent in the 1940s
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
December 13, 2012
–
Finished Reading
December 14, 2012
– Shelved
December 14, 2012
– Shelved as:
ghost-stories
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But yes, it does record a certain phase of Britain's social history.