The Little Stranger - more than a little strange

After having read all five of Sarah Waters's novels, and enjoying all of them, I thought it appropriate to review her latest publication: The Little Stranger, which came out last May.

Waters, like me, is big on historic domesticity. Victorian parlour stories and whatnot. Her stories are about 'normal' people and the dynamics that happen within households. She writes about these so vividly it's as if she were alive at the time - how does a woman in her forties recall in such colourful detail the awkwardness of 1940s class distinction in Stranger; the charged atmosphere of bombed and blitzed London in WWII; the babyfarming industry in the crime-choked streets of Victorian London?

But Waters, unlike me, is a lesbian. This is what makes her stories extra-delicious for me - there is no boring, predictable heterosexual love story between the protagonist and their object of affection. Which is exactly what happens in Stranger. So I was surpised when Waters introduced the main woman character of Caroline, describing her as butch, unpretty, plain and clever, and then did not give her a lesbian storyline. Instead, there is a rather stolid, mundane theme of heterosexual desire between her and the loveless, dull protagonist, Dr. Faraday.

Stranger sells itself as a ghost story; a 'chilling' one at that. I don't know if it was because my brother was playing Dante's Inferno on the XBox for the majority of my reading it (I wouldn't read a 'chilling ghost story' alone in my room), but I was not chilled, and I am usually the easiest person to chill. The ghostly happenings and supernatural occurances in Hundreds Hall, (who is undisputably the main character in the book) were slightly contradticted by Dr Faraday's resolutely down-to-earth beliefs.

I read the first hundred pages quite easily; a Sarah Waters reader knows it would be foolish to abandon her early on, even if the material drags. And this dragged. I was expecting a punch-in-the-gut plot twist, as in Fingersmith, but it didn't come. So I persevered the other four hundred, but no explanations; no twist. In fact, the story ended extremely abruptly and in an entirely unsatisfying way. It would be rude of me to give the ending away, but there is nothing to give.

Perhaps I set my sights too high, but Stranger is not a page-turner. Waters has let down her page-turning fans. Stranger is one big anticlimax. Stick to the Victorian lesbianism, Sarah!