The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I entered this book with high hopes and exited with a sigh that it had taken it so long to do so little. The story telegraphs its next move so far ahead of time that it becomes a slog to read. The writing is clear and precise; would that it were more concise. From the moment the death of Sarah, the oldest and forgotten daughter, is mentioned, it’s clear that what’s coming is something like a poltergeist novel. It is not Waters’ fault that I am tired of reading about the upper class of England; that’s my problem. But it would be a blessing if she added something new to the mix. The novel feels as if it will never end, especially once you realize that the cause of the disturbances at the Hundreds is never going to be clear. Ambiguity is a fine thing but better when paired with brevity. In a book like Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard the story also takes forever but the writing is lively, the portraits of the Irish villagers rich, and the comic turns make the waiting for the mystery to reveal itself worth all the time. In this novel, the characters are uniformly bitter, dark, depressed, unhappy, living in the wrong era, decaying like the house. The house itself is a bright spot, depicted in such delapidated detail, you feel as though you are sitting under a ceiling that is about to collapse. The high point of the haunting is told by the “as I heard this story later” device made necessary by the fact that the novel is in first person and the person in question was not in the house during those events. This is the most perplexing choice. It renders the crux of the book as a ghost story told to us rather than one that we experience in the direct way that is possible with fiction. This was flat disappointment, I am sorry to say, since I know how good Sarah Waters can be.