Dr Faraday is a medical doctor, struggling to make a success of his practice in post-war rural Warwickshire. Although his career has not hit the heights he had hoped for, he has made respectable progress through life after humble beginnings - his mother was a nursery maid at local manor house Hundreds Hall, and she and his father underwent great privations in order to send their son to medical school.
By chance, Dr Faraday - now middle-aged - is called out to Hundreds Hall to treat a malingering maid, and strikes up an acquaintance with the family who have lived there for over two hundred years. The current members of the Ayres family - an aging but beautiful mother, a plain and practical daughter, and a war-scarred son - invite Dr Faraday to a drinks party that will herald the start of a string of increasingly macabre events.
The Ghost of a Little Girl?
Mrs Ayres is happy to explain away the mysterious happenings as visitations from her beloved daughter Susan, who died in childhood. Dr Faraday, whose life becomes increasingly entwined with that of the Ayres family, is not so sure; perhaps the family are simply crumbling under the pressure of living in such a lonely and dilapidated old house. Or maybe there really is something there, something far more malevolent than the innocent spirit of a little girl.
Waters' novel is beautifully paced, resisting the temptation to rush straight into a string of dramatic events at the expense of characterisation. Each of the main characters - the ambiguous first person narrator Dr Faraday, the stand-offish daughter Caroline, the troubled son Roderick, the nervy maid Betty and the charming mother Mrs Ayres - is utterly convincing, meaning that the reader actually cares what happens to them when their world starts to fall apart.
Susan Hill's The Woman in Black
The novel also manages to achieve an air of genuine fear, gradually building up the tension as the events become more and more extreme, reminiscent of the atmosphere created in Susan Hill's classic ghost story The Woman in Black. However, as you would expect from a writer of Waters' quality this is far more than a simple supernatural tale. Through her depiction of the Ayres family, struggling to maintain their place in society against the backdrop of a house that is physically falling down around them, Waters has produced a sympathetic consideration of the post-war British class system that will grip the reader from the the first page to the last.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters is published in paperback in the UK (2010) by Virago, ISBN 978-1-84408-606-1.
Elizabeth Gregory - Liz graduated from Manchester University with a BA (Hons) in English Language & Literature, and also holds an MA in Literature from the ...
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