Book #27 The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger

This book was one of my longest standing Kindle items in that I bought it in 2011, and read it this week, 3 years later. I had previously read Fingersmith, The Night Watch and Tipping The Velvet and enjoyed each to a different degree. I was utterly blown away by Fingersmith and stayed up all night reading it, but try as I might I kept false starting with The Little Stranger, not getting past the first 3 or 4 pages until my breakthrough the other day.

It concerns the Ayres family, once landed gentry, struggling to survive in the high taxation post World War Two landscape. Roderick, the son and heir is doing his best to hold back the tide, but Hundreds Hall becomes shabbier by the day. Dr Faraday is called in by chance to treat their one remaining live-in servant Betty, and thus becomes attached to their family, a frequent visitor to tea, and observer of events.

But something strange is happening at Hundreds Hall, things that go bump in the night, markings appear on walls and bells ring without anyone to ring them - does all this have a rational explanation as Faraday believes it must? Or is something more sinister at work?

I really liked this book, and read it finally, in two sittings, I think the end sentence is supposed to be ambiguous, an open ending, but I think if you've followed the clues well enough the answer will meet you. The book has an old fashioned ghost story and a riddle at its heart, but is more the sort of book to make you think and anaylse and make your flesh creep than to give you nightmares. Think The Woman In Black yet vastly better written. A lot of other readers have compared it to Turn Of The Screw but I have not read it and so don't know if its an accurate comparison.

As with Fingersmith I enjoyed the way psychiatric care was painted in a very sinister and ultimately abusive light.

There is also the real sense that we are bearing witness to the of the end of an era, not just of Hundreds Hall but of the torch passing from the likes of the Ayres, onwards into the modern age.

This is a really good book, though perhaps dry in parts

8/10       

Book #71 The Woman In Black by Susan Hill

The Woman In Black

One Christmas, the stepchildren of Arthur Kipps begin telling ghost stories for fun, and are shocked when their normally benign stepfather loses his temper and goes out into the night. Arthur, it turns out has his own ghost story, and a true one at that, which he begins to relate in the first person to the reader.

As a young solicitor Arthur was sent to close the estate of a woman who died without family in an isolated house in the marshes. Whilst there he begins seeing visions of a mysterious woman in black and experiences other supernatural occurrences, that leave him altered forever.

Sadly, I had several problems with the book, although period pieces are exactly my thing whether they be written in the past as in Dickens or a modern attempt to write a novel in that style such as Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; this novel felt affected, like an attempt at a period tone rather than believable as an actual period novel. A pastiche. For a ghost story I was not particularly scared and as a result of being a short novel it lacked much in the way of incident ghostly or otherwise.

Though the story of the Woman In Black when explained and played out is very sad, it is hard to see why she would harbour a vendetta against either the town or Arthur. The ending is actually bizarre, in many ways it is the novels big reveal, following the opening but once the final event is described the novel ends immediately, abruptly, badly. Almost as if a schoolchild had done it and hadn't known how to conclude the story once all the events had been told. It ends something like "There you are, thats my story" It's weird.

The novel has recently been adapted for the screen and will feature Daniel Radcliffe in the lead, the trailer coincidentally was released today, in contrast to the book, the film seems genuinely creepy and I think this could be one of the occasions whereby the film may prove more enjoyable than the source material it came from. 6/10 

Book #12 Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Her Fearful Symmetry

Welcome to the "difficult second novel", when you've had a seriously massive hit with your first real novel, 'The Time Travelers Wife' (note intended for cave dwellers and well, time travellers) where on earth do you go?

It's tough as the weight of expectation is upon Niffenegger, and I expect many people picked up this book in the hopes of a new Time Travelers Wife, and were sorely disappointed. Not so me, if it had been a story with a similar feel to the former, I would have felt the author had just been and churned it out, and thought her initial success was a fluke and she lacked talent and imagination. This new novel proves she has both those qualities.

For me, though I will not have the same affection for it as I do its predecessor it is neither a greater nor a lesser book, it is more a shift sideways.

The novel has three strands to it, I suppose. The first is a study of the complex nature of the relationship of twins, particularly identical twins, and how that relationship can be at once joyful and suffocating. It focuses on two sets of twins, Edie and Elspeth Noblin and Edie's daughters Julia & Valentina Poole, who are similar in their problems yet different too.

The novel begins with the words 'The End', Elspeth's end, her death, and the novel begins from there, which reminded me of a line from a TS Eliot poem 'in my end is my beginning', because Elspeth's death is the catalyst of the first chain of events.

Elspeth leaves her estate to her nieces, who she has never met and who are barely aware of her existence. It is clear that at some point in the past, something happened between Edie and Elspeth, their relationship irretrievably broke down and despite being twins, they never saw one another again.
Julia and Valentina's relationship is overly interwoven, with Julia controlling what choices they make as a duo never as individuals, and, Valentina fragile and timid, unable to strike out alone.

The second strand of the book is three interlocking love stories. The first is Elspeth and her lover Robert, their tale being told partly through Robert's memories, and partly by Elspeth herself. The second is Martin and Marijke, their upstairs neighbours, which I wondered if it was included solely for light relief from the rest of the novel, and the third is Robert and Valentina, after Robert becomes drawn to her following Elspeth's death.

The third strand is what gives the novel it's uniqueness, it's a ghost story as well as a love story, Elspeth's ghost is trapped in her flat, and with the Highgate Cemetary in London serving as the novels backdrop, there is a clear attempt to add Gothic flair to the novel, which sometimes succeeds.

The novel is in so many ways about death, the death of relationships, the feeling that you are dead inside, the idea of being alive but not really living, and death and the afterlife itself, but it's still a very alive book.

The final third of the book brings with it two almighty twists, one of which there are earlier hints of and the other which shocks, at least it didn't occur to me personally that it was coming, and so that added to the novel's enjoyment for me, despite a more than passing nod to 'Beloved' by Toni Morrison.

I probably will never read this book again, but I would recommend it, just don't come looking for a Henry DeTamble and a Clare Abshire, you won't find them here. 8/10