New: The Little Stranger

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Book review
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters
Virago 2009
By Garry W. Gibbs
THE idea of a doting doctor who comes out to visit me and who would even offer me the latest trailblazing therapy in the comfort of my own home at no charge predisposed me to like Dr Faraday, the apparently generous GP in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.
After all, what are the chances of my GP even setting foot inside my home in these cash-strapped days where you have to be almost literally at death’s door to get an ambulance. I find it almost impossible to book an appointment with my GP now, he’s either on holiday or is permanently fully booked two weeks in advance.
But back in 1947, pre-NHS (never mind NHS reforms) and pre Harold Shipman, local GPs treated patients as customers and, obviously, the richer the patient the better the service (which probably explains why the service I get is so lousy).
So when Faraday arrives at Hundreds Hall, county seat of the decaying but “still big people in the district” Ayres family, to treat their servant Betty for a psychosomatic complaint, he knows this could be the beginning of a new adventure. Quite how terrifying an adventure he doesn’t know – or does he?
Faraday is not a stranger to the house as his mother was a nursemaid there and the visit affords him the opportunity to get acquainted with the “big” family in the big house on a more equal social footing now he has qualified as a medic.
He uncovers a horrendous casebook of psychosomatic phenomena at the hall with poltergeists, terrifying psychic fires and dead of night disturbances in locked up upstairs rooms which literally frighten the life out of the Ayres family. The doctor acts as our narrator and tells the story from his perspective, including the details he thinks important and omitting those he does not, testing out, perhaps in a clever and intriguing way, the theory that we can always trust a doctor with their forensic, practical approach. He offers cold, rational scientific explanations for the irrational occurrences consistently in exactly the way medically-minded people who have an internal locus of control would be expected to to prevent hysterical and melodramatic ravings of the mind taking hold.
All the characters seem either sexually disinterested or repressed (epitomised by Caroline who “can’t” yield to the sexual advances made by the underwhelming and humdrum Faraday) and one of the doctor’s colleagues warns him “the sexual impulse is the darkest of all, and has to emerge somewhere. It’s like an electrical current; it has a tendency, you know, to find its own conductors. But if it goes untapped – well, then it’s a rather dangerous energy.”
This was a time when psychological explanations for sexual energy were mostly Freudian and doctors were still trapped in less permissive, culturally restricted theories around issues like nymphomania and around the libido being mainly male so that women were seen as more passive and less voracious in their appetites generally.
The sex object for Dr Faraday, Caroline Ayres, plays up to this stereotype as she is inexperienced and neutral sexually (she is one of those people who seems genuinely far happier working up a sweat exercising her dog in the open air than working one up indoors in her bedroom). But there is longing and desire in Faraday’s observations of her “nude” eye lids and “thickish” bare legs and ankles and “large, well-shaped and mobile” mouth. He views her consistently in a slightly voyeuristic, coldly functional way, more through the eyes of a faintly lascivious pathologist than a potential lover.
The “little stranger” (the real reason for all the psychic disturbances in Hundreds Hall) is summed up by Faraday thus: “I’d rather there were some physical problem here; it would be easier to treat. But I’m afraid what we’re dealing with is some kind of, well, mental illness.” This diagnosis – whispered discreetly rather than trumpeted loudly because of the eviscerating stigma for a well-bred county family with rich pedigree and well-connected antecedents - enables him to consign Caroline’s brother Roderick to an asylum, treat her mother for delusional impulses and drug them all as well as shape their future in accord with his own wish to social climb and gain a firm foothold in the “county set” by marrying Caroline and become new master of the mansion.
The reader is again invited to trust in the process of diagnosis, to accept that doctor knows best; but there are supernatural forces – a young girl is savaged by an otherwise docile dog, a “presence” is felt in the house and frightening electrical energies, he is a Faraday after all, persist to wreak havoc repeatedly - which the doctor cannot rationalise and he cannot offer a prescription as they seem to defy any conventional medical treatment. An exorcism might be considered appropriate but this is the upper middle class English home-counties where churches are strictly for formal occasions like births, deaths and marriages and there is disdain and contempt for outward shows of faith.
Everybody loses and nobody gains in this unrelenting tale of misery and madness. What makes it so gripping is the taut and logical description of the extraordinary events always from a rational, reasoned and scientific perspective, which reminded me somewhat of Dr Watson’s narration of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures. Like Watson, Faraday is an unremarkable man with few special qualities or attributes (both are self-contained, controlled and inclined to be controlling in disposition) describing remarkable events with frightening special qualities and attributes.
Where the novel fails is in its superficial, disappointing analysis of the hugely exciting conflict between faith and reason, between hard, cold, science and the frighteningly illogical supernatural. It leaves the reader feeling that the battle at Hundreds Hall has definitely been lost – there is a lingering feeling of gloom from the beginning which resonates throughout - but the rules of battle were never properly explained and the combatants never properly introduced to each.