An inbetweener: The Little Stranger

The Little Stranger is a multitude of books. 
It's a ghost story. 
It's a post-war epilogue of life in England and mainly life for the upper classes, the dying class of that particular day and age.
It's an unconventional love story. 
It's about deterioration and not adjusting to a changing time. 

All that combined in a unique novel is extraordinary. Waters is a master with words. She has an uncanny wit about her and with her dialogues and prose in old english style you feel like you are reading a novel from an early 20th century author. 

The whole novel is the point of view of a single character, Dr Faraday, a country doctor, who becomes entangled with the Ayres and their estate Hundreds Hall. 
His somewhat dry and dull way of seeing life somehow suits it well. 
You come to love him and you come to want to smack his head against a brick wall as well. 

In what seems at first to be a struggling upperclass family, Faraday soon realises more is underneath the surface. 
For not wanting to share too many details for those who still are to read this book, I'll be brief and hopefully as spoilerfree as can be. 

This is a ghost story, I said earlier, but ask me later and I'd say it's not. 
This novel made me change my mind over and over. 
Sometimes I wholeheartedly agreed with Faraday, stating that mental decay was the seed that brought on everything. 
And other times I knew there had to be something, that there had to be a presence of some kind, haunting the inhabitants of Hundreds. 

I can't put my finger on it quite yet, I may need a reread before I'm absolutely positive which of these former statements is true. 
For now.. I don't think there was a ghost as such, but that the presence of Faraday himself, set a lot in motion. 
This may sound very eary, but when reading the novel, you'll know what I mean. 

Characterwise, this is a gem, but it needs adapting to the prose, I do warn you for that. Don't put it aside, because of it, I promise, once used to it, you'll feel the eariness and chills this book will definitely give you. 
In many ways, it reminded me of a movie, The Blair Witch Project. Equally unclear, but giving goosebumps nonetheless.

My score: 8 out of 10.

Review of Fingersmith - A novel about crime and passion

Author: Sarah Waters

First published in 2002

Thickness: 556 pages (Dutch edition)
Dutch title: Vingervlug

Personal rating: 4 stars

Fingersmith sets about in Englands 19th century underground crime scene. We follow the story of a girl, Susan Trinder, coming of age on her first real experience with crime after having been sheltered and merely a bystander of various petty crimes going on around her.

A man of questionable background, "Gentleman",  comes in and sweeps her away on a breathtaking scheme. He needs her to be the maid of a wealthy young girl and be her confidante while he moves in and tries to marry the rich girl and when they are married, ship her off to an asylum in order to get the money.
Susan agrees and travels to the remote estate. She becomes friends with the young heiress, Maud, even more than friends which complicates the scheme beyond imagination.
Torn apart by her own feelings and under the influence of Gentleman, she makes her choices ill-informed and lands in a whirlpool of emotions and becomes more a victim than a perpetrator.

The story takes us from a London dirty and foggy to a countryside gloom and grey, where blossoms still grow and where love finds a way, although not conventionally. The story delivers a few amazing plot turns that will stop your heart.

I liked reading this novel, even when it took me quite a while to finish it. Mainly because it's quite a thick novel, with over 500 pages I had to get through. In some places the pace lingers and I wondered if it would ever pick up again, only to be amazed that I hadn't seen it coming when it did.
I do recommend this novel. Sarah Waters has a reputation of writing gay fiction, but in being straight myself I found that label to be generic. It's the same in calling Stephen King chiefly a horror writer. There are more layers to her than you first would think. She can create a 19th century London that lives and breathes.
With only one Sarah Waters novels left for me to read, I do include her in my list of favourite authors.

Affinity - The rest of the review

Me and my husband carpool to work. Since we have the luxury of being only a few miles apart when at work, and working the same hours, he drops me off in the mornings and comes to get me after work.

This agreement gives me about a half an hour reading time after work and before he calls to inform me he's there. I love that half hour, because once I'm home I need to do a million things and reading seems like a luxury.

Today, however, he had to work overtime and I spend almost 2 hours reading. I finished my book after 1 hour and hadn't counted on this misfortune to carry a spare one. Extremely annoying.
But the moral of this being, I finished the book.

And I was AMAZED!! 
Affinity  is a splendid novel. It resembles one of those very good movies, like Gone with the wind (of which the novel is wicked awesome also) which start out so slowly and with so much information but it all comes together beautifully in the end.

The ending is superb and even though I had clues there might be some misschief in the workings, I hadn't thought it out so clearly as it was.
I have already posted some ideas and questions about the novel before, while I was reading it.
Now that I'm done, I'm filled with so much emotion I can't stop thinking about the novel.

Someone on Goodreads named Sarah Waters the queen of gothic historian lesbian fiction, and while she is all that, her prose doesn't feel that way. You don't get the feeling you're reading lesbian fiction, although you must be blind to not see the distinct difference between her descriptions of women and men. Men have been ushered into the supporting role and this whole novel is being carried by very strong female characters.

First of all, Margaret and Selina. Yin and Yang. One couldn't be great without the other. The way the two women interact, get to know each other and ultimately depend on each other is phenomenal. You, as reader, live through it together with them. Slowly, by the entries in their diaries, you get to know both the woman better than is comfortable.

Other strong characters, are the wardens of the prison, especially Mrs Jelf. She's too kind to work in that place and is easily influenced by the women she is responsible for, which leads to terrifying results.

I'm torn between telling you more about the plot, and letting you reveal it on your own. I'll thread the fine line between a good review and plain spoilers carefully, hoping not to fall off. But to be sure, the rest of the review is for those who've read it already, or those who don't mind a spoiler or two.

BEWARE of SPOILERS

As my first half of this review said, Margaret has some secrets she hadn't yet revealed to us readers.
She has once given up on life, after her father died and her best friend married her brother, but was brought back. Selina picked up on this and drained it for all it was worth.
She tries to influence Margaret to believe in her, to help her and once Margaret says yes, she shows typical predator behaviour.

From experience I read the signs of the sudden lack of touching each other on Selina's persistence, as a sign she wasn't truthful. Once she had accomplished what she wanted, she drew back.
From then on, I knew she wasn't to be trusted and for a long time I actually tried to believe in the spiritual world of ghosts, just in case.
Margaret helps her escape, not by letting her out of prison but assuring a safe passage. A way out of England and to Italy. Little did she know that all along her maid and Selina worked behind her back to take her identity and escape.
When Mrs Jelf comes to her house, after the escape of Selina, she suddenly realises the awful truth. She is desperate and only sees one way out.

I don't know how I feel about Selina. She seems to be quite honest at first, maybe a little naive, but her actions tell otherwise. Or is it the influence of Vigers? Still so many questions.. that's why I love this book so.

For me this is a MAGNIFICENT read.

Reading now: Affinity - a bit of a review

Twenty-something Margaret Prior comes from one of London's finer families, but that doesn't protect her from suffering a very common malady: a broken heart. She attempts suicide by overdosing on laudanum and as part of her therapy following this attempt, she volunteers to visit inmates on the women's ward at nearby Millbank prison. Here she finds herself mingling with a wide array of women whose social backgrounds range from street beggars to London's upper crust. Their stories are as equally diverse and intriguing as they are suspect, from the petty thieves who stole food to assuage their hunger to cold-blooded murderers who killed for little more than revenge.

Although the plights of these sad women help take Margaret's mind off her broken heart, she can't completely put her lover out of her mind. Complicating that problem are two things. The first is that Margaret can talk to no one about her affair and is forced to keep her battered emotions bottled up inside to avoid a heinous scandal. The second is the stress of proximity, for her lover is another woman, one who is about to marry Margaret's brother. Desperate to get past her pain, Margaret throws herself into the prison environment and soon becomes curiously drawn to one young woman who, like most of the others, declares her innocence. But this woman, Selina Dawes, is intriguingly different.

For one thing, Selina claims to be a spiritualist and blames the crime for which she is being punished -- fraud and battery -- on a ghost. At first Margaret thinks this is just another story -- albeit a more inventive one than most -- designed to cover up true guilt. But before long, Margaret has reason to rethink things. First she delves into Selina's background and discovers several things that lend credence to Selina's claims. Then mysterious things start to happen that seem to support the existence of a spiritual world. Selina demonstrates her intimate knowledge of happenings in Margaret's life -- things she has no way of knowing. Plus, certain items appear -- a bloody collar and a braided hank of hair -- and disappear -- Margaret's favorite, treasured locket. Convinced that Selina is indeed innocent, and growing more captivated by this enigmatic woman with each passing day, Margaret thinks up a plan for escape from Millbank, one that will allow her and Selina to be together. But her plans go horribly awry and set both women on a devastating course of hope and betrayal that will leave one of them forever changed.


I'm about 100 pages in now, and already have a mind filled with questions.
What did Margaret Prior do to herself?
What kind of illness did she have?
How was the relationship with her father and the circumstances of his death?
What happened between her and Helen?

Selena is a recurring character in the novel, not sure if she is meant as a second protagonist or the antagonist. She could be the latter, because otherwise the occupation still needs to be filled.

I'm aware that most novels of Sarah Waters are slowpaced. I've read The Little Stranger and The Night Watch, and both novels have a certain laziness in building up a suspense. Waters mainly focusses on setting the mood right and then lets her characters do the things they were meant to do.
In this novel, the 19th century London is depicted stylishly. There's a passage about how the mist comes upon London in early October and it actually takes your breath away (as it must have been back then, albeit in a slightly different way).
Margaret remains a mystery still. I'm intrigued, what can I say.

On with the show!!