Decline and fall

English writer Sarah Waters. Photo / Supplied

When Dr Faraday, the first-person narrator of Sarah Waters' spine-tingling new novel The Little Stranger, first saw Hundreds Hall, the country house where his mother worked as a maid, he was 10 years old. It was the summer just after the end of World War I, and the hall was owned by upper class family the Ayres, who "still had most of their money then, were still big people in the district".

As a treat, the Ayres hosted an Empire Day fete for the villagers and although Faraday can barely remember the family 30 years later, strong memories of the house - "an absolute mansion" - have lingered. But he does recall that the parents were handsome and that their little girl Susan, aged 6 at the time he visited, died soon after. The reason Dr Faraday is thinking about the house once more after so long is because he has been called out to attend a patient - the Ayres' young maid, Betty. His heart sinks when he sees how the isolated house has decayed, its gardens in chaos, windows dirty, wallpaper hanging off the walls and many rooms closed off.

Betty, he quickly deduces, is not sick but frightened. It's the house, she tells the doctor. "It in't like a proper house at all! ... it gives you the creeps ... I think I shall die of fright sometimes!" Faraday, being a man of science, dismisses this as nonsense. But in the following months, as he becomes more closely engaged with the family -

Mrs Ayres, now an elegant elderly widow, and her two grown-up children, Roderick and Caroline - he finds he has to keep finding logical answers to inexplicable and increasingly violent episodes which seem to be generated by something within the house itself. Could it be that the house is haunted? Or is there a more rational explanation?

Waters, the much-acclaimed author of novels Affinity, Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and The Night Watch (the first three of which have been made into equally well-regarded BBC productions), says she has long been interested in ghost stories and did a huge amount of research into poltergeists before writing the book. "I have been interested in the paranormal since I was quite a young child," says the 42-year-old on the phone from London. "For me, one of the most interesting things about poltergeists and hauntings is not even 'is it true?' but why is it happening here now? What's going on for the people involved? With poltergeists in particular, they often happen in unhappy situations, with people in some sort of crisis.

For me, that is almost as interesting as anything else, whether you think it is trickery or not." Waters takes her time, early in the story, to build a compelling picture of each member of the family - including gentle old black labrador Gyp - and the house, as Faraday draws closer to their inner circle. But he is always aware he is of working class stock, while they are above him, even if they have no money.

On the first meeting, he isn't even sure he likes them much as they sit "playing gaily with gentry life" while the house collapses around them. But he returns to try to treat Roderick's leg, badly wounded during the war, and falls in love with the house as Caroline, captured in a splendid piece of descriptive writing, takes him (and us) on a guided tour, room by room. Looking through the french doors of the huge saloon, he notices the clock above the stable door stuck at 20 to nine. "Twenty to nine is the time Miss Havisham's clocks are stopped at in Great Expectations," Caroline tells Faraday. "We thought it awfully funny, then [when she and Roderick first noticed]. It seems a bit less funny now."

"Great Expectations often creeps into all my books," explains Waters. "Certainly there is a direct reference to it with the clock stopped. I love the way Dickens manages to use physical details to suggest much larger psychological details so the clock seemed a great image, a rusted emotional and physical life, the repressed guilt and anxieties under the surface. It's a great book to evoke because it can suggest so much."

It's only with hindsight that one realises Faraday is never given a first name. He is always "the doctor", Dr Faraday or just plain Faraday. "I hadn't planned it that way. I realised after a while that I didn't have a sense of his first name, no one was calling him by his first name. Then I realised that seemed quite appropriate given how attached he is to his status and his professional life and he is slightly cut off from the depths of his own feelings." As the crises start to occur, matched by Faraday's increasingly desperate resistance to any sort of paranormal explanation, he becomes engaged to Caroline and starts to make plans to move into the house and start "fixing" things.

As their relationship progresses, it's hard to tell if he really loves Caroline, or what she represents. Did Waters like her narrator? "He's an odd character," she laughs. "I did like him, actually. Inevitably when you are writing a first-person narrator you end up feeling quite close to them. You inhabit their perspective. He's not exactly a likeable character - he is quite sinister in some ways. "It was interesting writing about his desire for Caroline. It was very much part of its time when men did have that sense of entitlement towards women and I could feel that creeping into his voice. Almost despite myself." She agrees when I call him passive-aggressive, the instrument for some of the more catastrophic events. His first direct involvement comes when he cleans up the consequences of a shocking "accident" when Mrs Ayres attempts to hold a party for their nouveau-riche neighbours, the Baker-Hydes.

"Yes, he is passive-aggressive, that's exactly right," she says. "I enjoyed that about writing him. He starts out as a disinterested observer of events but he does end up being quite an agent in the family's decline really, which to me felt appropriate given his slightly conflicted feelings towards the family. I liked that a lot."

The build-up to the first incident occupies nearly 90 pages, a master-stroke in the hands of such a skilled mood creator as Waters. "I had a sense right at the start that I wanted it to be almost like a countryhouse murder. I wanted the family to be picked off one by one, which sounds very ghoulish to say it so brutally. I knew it was going to be about the decline of the family, I wanted them to go one after the other in increasingly spooky ways. With [the first loss] it has no obvious supernatural element to it while you are reading it but in retrospect I think you can see it.

"Certainly Betty is the only one who thinks there might be a supernatural element. There was a slow build-up, then you get this very dramatic moment that in some ways does lead on to following events in quite irrational ways. The family are upset, Roderick's upset - maybe he's just going mad, but the doctor has this very rational explanation. If you look at it from the supernatural angle, it has quite a different meaning." Given that Waters, a lesbian, has earned a reputation for her self-styled "lesbo Victorian romps" (in Affinity, Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, while The Night Watch is a London Blitz saga), The Little Stranger is restrained in terms of sex scenes. In fact, there are none, although there is a great deal of repressed desire on the part of the doctor. "Affinity doesn't have any rampant sex," Waters giggles.

"To be fair, I've got this reputation and it's only really Tipping the Velvet that's got a fair bit of sex in it. I mean - ha, ha - Affinity doesn't have any, Fingersmith has one scene, The Night Watch has a few moments, certainly no more than you'd find in lots and lots of mainstream books, so I think I rather unfairly have this reputation. It's a kind of fun reputation as well." She was criticised by some of her gay fans when they discovered The Little Stranger would feature no gay characters.

"They felt they were disappointed that I was, as they saw it, turning my back on the opportunity to keep on doing that. It is a bit dismaying as well," she continues. "I feel I have a very 'out' lesbian profile as a writer and I enjoy doing something positive for lesbian culture but with this book it wasn't a conscious decision to move away from lesbian themes - it just didn't seem appropriate. It was very obviously not a lesbian story. I wanted to write it and I enjoyed writing it."

Writing from a male point of view made her feel "slightly trepidatious at the start. But pretty quickly I became comfortable with the character - it didn't really feel that different from other voices which are always, even if they are female, involve an element of ventriloquism. You are always thinking about how this particular character will think and react so with the doctor it was just another example of that - an imaginative exercise." The Little Stranger is another fine example of Waters' characteristic close attention to detail. Through the doctor's eyes, we can see the clothing, the jewellery, little things like Caroline's chewed nails, her dry hair - which "might, with proper treatment, have been handsome".

"Clothing tells such a lot about people, especially going back a few years," she points out. "It was such an indicator of class and personality and it was so gendered in a way that it isn't quite any more. It was interesting because the narrator was male, so I did have to rein that in a bit. I'm sure I was noticing things a man wouldn't notice." As the house exacts a toll on the family, Faraday panics that the marriage won't happen, and starts to pressure Caroline, even buying her a dress to wear on the wedding day when it's quite apparent she is trying to pull away. "The more he feels her absence the more he wants to hurry along," says Waters.

"He puts more and more pressure on her. I'm sure everybody, from time to time, has been in a relationship that they know in their heart is not right. It's amazing how often we will go along with those relationships and with Caroline, there is that extra pressure. She feels the hall is a drain on her so in a sense the doctor does kind of offer an escape but not the right kind of escape. He sees her as a way into the hall and she wants a way out."


The book also offers a terrific snapshot of the post-WWI times in England, when the "old" families were losing their money and properties, and the middle class was gaining in affluence and status. Mrs Ayres' guests, the Baker-Hydes, represent the brittle nouveau riche. Dr Faraday "rather takes against" Mrs Baker-Hyde's brother - "he had smarmed-down hair and rimless American glasses ... I saw him looking me over and dismissing me".

"The doctor has very much got a chip on his shoulder about his status," Waters agrees. "It was a big deal and still is, unfortunately, in the UK. There was an awful lot of tension and anxiety around class which is why I went for that period to tell this story. I think it was a real time of crisis for the upper middle class and a time of anger and excitement for working class people. Somebody like the doctor is caught between those two sets of feelings and he has a chip on his shoulder about it all - which, for a writer, is quite fruitful."

In an earlier interview, Waters has referred to Pip in Great Expectations, when he describes the first day he met Miss Havisham and Estella, the two women who damage his life so deeply. That day, he says, "made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been." The Little Stranger also has characters wishing "if only this hadn't happened", or that they had done something in a different way, averting one tragic outcome after another.

"Yes, if the doctor hadn't been called out for Betty in the first place, the course of the book would have been quite different again," says Waters. "I am interested in the pull of stories and I think anybody who enjoys stories would be able to identify with that quote from Great Expectations. Stories are chains made up of links and you only have to start thinking about how those links might have been placed differently ... it's a fantastic metaphor."

With Waters about to set off for the United States on a book tour, she says she is not thinking about writing for the next few months, although she is "letting ideas mull around" for her next book. And she confirms she'll be visiting Auckland and Wellington next year. Meanwhile, I'd recommend reading The Little Stranger with every light in the house at full blaze, trying to ignore those old-house creaks and groans above, below and all around you.

* The Little Stranger (Virago $38.99).