The Little Stranger

Dr Faraday, whose mother was once a servant at Hundreds Hall, is called to the house professionally and begins to make himself indispensable. The Ayres family — a widow, a war-injured son, a practical daughter — are running out of money, staff and options in post-war Britain.

Things begin to happen in the house. Faraday, a rationalist, narrates all of it.

The house is failing for entirely economic reasons before anything unexplained occurs.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Waters's device is a narrator who is certain he is reasonable. Faraday explains every event, dismisses every witness, and the reader is left to notice how consistently his explanations serve his own interests.

The pacing is that of a realist novel about declining gentry, with the supernatural material admitted slowly and always at second hand. Almost nothing frightening happens in front of the narrator.

Everything uncanny is reported to Faraday by someone he has already decided not to believe.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The real subject is class resentment and the post-war dismantling of the English country house. Faraday's attachment to Hundreds is about what it represented to him as a child, and the novel is precise about the shape of that desire.

Waters has said the title refers to something specific in the text. Readers disagree about what the haunting is, and the novel supports more than one answer without endorsing any.

The setting is the specific moment when the English country house became unaffordable: post-war austerity, the new National Health Service, death duties, land sold for council housing, and servants who will no longer work for what the family can pay. The decline is economic and documented before anything uncanny occurs.

The narrator is a country GP whose mother was once a maid at the house, and whose class resentment and longing are inseparable. He narrates everything, he is present for very little of it, and his reasonableness is the surface the whole novel rests on.

He is calm, rational and medically qualified. He is also the only witness you have.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Waters constructs the book so that a supernatural reading and a psychological one are both fully supported to the last page, and neither is confirmed. The title is a clue and a pun, and the identity of the stranger is the question the novel exists to leave open.

The Ayres family are drawn with real sympathy rather than satire: a mother holding onto a vanished world and the manners that went with it, a daughter doing all of the practical work of a failing estate, and a son disfigured and traumatised in the war who cannot manage the land and knows it. Waters declines the easy option of making their decline feel deserved, which is what gives the book its unease.

The daughter — described as plain, capable and unmarriageable by the standards of everyone around her — is the novel's centre, and her relationship with Faraday is its most uncomfortable material. What he wants from her, and whether it is her at all, is the book's real subject.

It is long, slow and overwhelmingly domestic, with very few incidents and a great deal of careful conversation about money, repairs, servants and what can no longer be afforded. Readers who arrive expecting a conventional haunted-house novel frequently find the first half frustrating. The accumulation is entirely deliberate, and the effect of the final third depends on having sat through all of it.

Waters has said she was interested in the Gothic as a literature produced by and about the insecure middle class, and the novel makes that point structurally rather than thematically. The destructive force in the book, whatever the reader concludes it is, does not arrive out of the house's ancient history. It arrives with social mobility, in a motor car, holding a doctor's bag.