It’be been a while, and the Chap didn’t let me get close enough to check if it was a big vole or a little mouse…
Sébastian’s kill count
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters
Virago, 2010
Sarah Waters has been gradually moving forward in time. She started out specialising in lesbian Victoriana, but her fiction has moved into the twentieth century and into hetrosexuality. The Night Watch was set during WW2, going backwards in time to pre-war era. The Little Stranger is set in the immediate post-war austerity period, leading up to the launch of the NHS in 1948. By chance, my non-fiction reading at the moment is Austerity Britain, 1945-1951
Faraday is a country doctor, the son of a servant at Hundreds Hall, who may have been educated out of his Warwickshire accent but is still looked down on by the middle-classes in his neighbourhood. As a child, he was captivated by the Hall. As an adult, when he is called in to treat a servant he becomes obsessed with it as well as its occupants, the now down-at-heel Ayres family. Mrs Ayres has the faded beauty of a rich socialite, even as she does what she can to keep the now wild garden from encroaching on the Hall or sits huddled under shawls in one of the few rooms they still use. Her daughter Caroline, a plain outdoorsy girl, had to return home from life in the WRAF to nurse her younger brother Roderick, who was badly burnt when his plane was brought down. The servant girl, Betty, claims the house is haunted. Roderick starts to see things in his room, and mysterious marks start to appear on the wall. Then the first fire breaks out…
Waters has written a haunting story, strongly in the style of real post-war fiction such as Du Maurier. The reader hesitates between real and unreal explanations. Our narrator in this world is a doctor, a man of science, who provides rational, psychological reasons for events. The strange events are related to him by various members of the Ayres, so we get them second hand. Yet they are so strongly evoked that, having read Roderick’s haunting at my own bedtime, I had to think of something else for a while before I could sleep. Is Betty playing trick on them? Is the house haunted by Mrs Ayres’ first, long dead, child Susan? Or is the house itself malevolent, trying to reject the family that inhabits it?
The book is also about that change in British society. In Austerity Britain, there is a telling anecdote about how attitudes to the upper classes was changing: a porter, being addressed as “my man” by a public school boy, replies “there’ll be no more of that”. The Ayres, along with the other families of their class in their pocket of Warwickshire, fear the new socialist government and think they are being drained by them. The doctors, including the once working class Faraday, think the arrival of the NHS will destroy their practices. Hundreds Hall, once a proud symbol of the country’s social hierarchy and the Ayres’ place at the top, is falling into ruin. Damp has seeped in, the gardens have gone wild, and the parade of live-in servants has been reduced to one maid of all work. Without the working classes that ran the house, it has crumbled. Betty doesn’t even want to be in service, she wants to be a factory girl.
So, what is wrong at the house? Tricks, pyschodrama or a real ghost? Is the house dying in the brave new world of a socialist Britain, and trying to take the Ayres with it? Like all truly good ghost stories, the novel refuses to reveal a reality or provide an explanation. And that, along with Waters’ classic simple prose and clear narrative drive, makes it a damn good read.
***
I have my own theory. The Little Stranger is a euphemism for an unborn child. If there was a ghost, someone that haunted the house, it was Faraday himself and what he accidentally represents. Faraday, as a child, stole a tiny acorn from a plasterwork frieze in the main hall of Hundreds Hall. During the novel he becomes haunts the Hall, calling on the Ayres all the time. In the epilogue, Faraday keeps being drawn back to the Hall’s location. Faraday, a working class child turned middle class professional, symbolises the new society growing in the ashes of WW2 despite his own dislike of socialism. He – and all his baggage – is the real ghost.
Dead Until Dark: A True Blood Novel
Charlaine Harris
Gollancz, 2009
Sometimes, what a girl really needs is a vampire. After two disappointing reads, I wanted my palette cleansed. With blood and pulp. Handily, Big Magpie had the first two Sookie Stackhouse (aka True Blood) novels to lend me. I’ve only read the first so far…
Sookie Stackhouse is from an old family in Bon Temps, northern Louisiana, but the family is fallen so far that she works as a waitress in a bar. She’s also got “my disability”: she’s telepathic. When vampire Bill Compton returns to town to reclaim his family home, she discovers she can’t read his mind and is instantly drawn to him. Vampires are “out of the coffin” and can live on synthetic blood, but the humans are still prejudiced against them. Then dead girls start turning up, with fang marks on their thighs…
The story is considerably more simple than the first season of the tv series: focussing purely on the murders of fangbangers and the arrival of vampire Bill in Bon Temps. With no Tara, and Lafayette merely a background character, the post-segregation subtext – with people’s fears of the vampires echoing the fears expressed about black men a hundred years ago – vanishes.
The world created in the novel remains compelling (and since I was after a pulp read I can’t really complain about minimalist subtexts). Yes, vampires in the Deep South is a cliché, thanks to Anne Rice, but these aren’t rich romantics slumming it in New Orleans. This is a rural town off the beaten track, with pockets of trailer trash, and still showing scars from the American Civil War. When Sookie mentions the duplexes on the main street, they replaced houses destroyed in the war. Bill Compton is, well, not exactly a survivor on account of being dead, but someone who fought in the Civil War. At one point he reacts with surprise that one family is still in town, suggesting some grudge or betrayal 150 years ago. The plot sets up things for the book series to become the supernatural detective fiction I understand it becomes.
Everything is told from Sookie’s first person point of view: she’s given a strong clear voice by Harris but it does slip sometimes. She does seem to jump a bit suddenly from thinking one way to thinking another. Not all the descriptions – of passions or horrors – grabbed me: there seemed to be a wall created through the need to keep Sookie’s voice intact. The story does race along though, and is engaging enough that you keep reading compulsively.
In short, it was just what I needed.
The Hitting Women fan site was removed.
Curiously, and I’m sure co-incidentally, it finally vanished just as a journo I know asked them for a comment on the story he had put together.
This is a call to action to the people who follow my blog: either directly or via the livejournal syndication.
Nearly 1 in 3 UK women have experienced domestic violence (source). Domestic violence is defined as:
Violence against women is any violence that targets a woman because she is a woman. It is also violence that disproportionately affects women.
It includes physical, sexual or psychological harm such as domestic violence, sexual assault, forced marriage, stalking, ‘honour’ attacks, human trafficking and female genital mutilation. It also includes threats of violence and kidnapping.
(source: Home Office)
Facebook currently has 500+ ‘fans’ of hitting women. The group has been reported by various people but still exists. The discussion topic ‘best place to hit them’ includes suggestions to “punch them in the ovaries”. The picture shows a blond man punching a woman with braiding, which can be read as rascist.
If you are on facebook, even if you only log in once a month to see what that kid you hated at school is up to now, please take a moment to report the group and have it removed. It promotes violence against women.
I don’t care if they say it is ‘just for fun’ or ‘just a laugh’. Violence against women is a hate crime. Joking about violence against women helps validate the people who assault women and encourages them to think what they are doing is okay.
And please post about this through your status update, or your twitter, or on livejournal. Please raise awareness that facebook have yet to remove a group inciting violence and hatred, despite it breaking their terms and conditions.
(I’d like to point out I’m against violence towards people based on gender, sexuality, religion or race. This one is just really bugging me.)
I’m trying to keep up this year with the 365 challenge. Last year’s failed sometime around March. I foresee June being the crunch point this year. We’ll see.
2010 slideshow – in progress
2009 slideshow – abandoned
