The Little Stranger

I just finished reading Sarah Waters' latest novel, The Little Stranger, and I'm pleased to report that it's something of a return to form for my favorite contemporary novelist.

Not that I thought The Night Watch was a bad novel. Quite the contrary, in fact. It's just that after her first three novels, with their engaging narrators and fascinating fusion of the genre conventions of the Victorian era with insights into elements of Victorian culture that the Victorians themselves would never have discussed (for instance, unless Silas Marner or Romola turn out vastly different than I'm expecting, I don't think George Eliot ever gave us an informed look into the wide, wonderful world of Victorian pornography), it was a little jarring to read a very modernistic tale of WWII era England delivered by an utterly dispassionate 3rd-person narrator. I agree wholeheartedly with these sentiments of Rohan's:

I would also appreciate some exposition, a thicker layer of narrative commentary, even some philosophizing! Waters's touch is so light that I find it hard to be sure what she thinks is important about the moment she has chosen, or why she develops the kinds of characters and linkages she does.

Where Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and especially Fingersmith all draw the reader in to their richly imagined worlds, The Night Watch almost seems determined to hold you at arm's length. Again, it's not a bad novel; in fact, it's an excellent read. I'd certainly rate it higher than Tipping the Velvet, which, for all that it's a fun read, is more than a little overstuffed and less than a lot focused. But, all the same, three years after I first read them, I can still intimately remember the plots of her first three novels. Hell, I can still shut my eyes and imagine myself into their settings, as though I were a fly on the wall watching Sue's first departure Mrs. Sucksby's home, her final showdown with Gentleman, or (*blush!*) her first awkward lovemakings with Maud. I read The Night Watch more recently than all three of those, and all that springs to mind when I think of the novel is it's reverse-chronological structure and one particularly squirm-inducing scene involving a botched abortion.

So I opened up The Little Stranger with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I was certainly expecting a great read, but would it be a great read like The Night Watch, or a GREAT read like her previous novels? Turns out it's GREAT. Not on the level of Fingersmith, but certainly a cut above Tipping the Velvet and maybe even Affinity, to which it bears the most similarities.

Waters doesn't return to the Victorian settings of her early works: we're dealing again with post-War England. What she does return to is a heartfully (my spellchecker claims that's not a word, but fuck it, I'm coining it) rendered first-person narrative that draws you in to the emotional lives of its characters, all the while confronting you with more interesting questions to ponder than "are we going backwards in time for a reason?" and "why is the narrator so bored with its own story?" Here some thorny, fascinating thematic issues are presented without the aseptic subtlety of The Night Watch. Hell, without any subtlety at all: Waters probably could have cut ten pages worth of narrative asides from her final draft had she simply opened the novel with a disclaimer announcing "This is a novel that considers the complex thoughts and feelings people of both the upper and lower social classes have to the stratified history of English society, and how those thoughts and feelings are upended by the rapid social change of the post-War era." I don't mean that as a criticism, mind you. While Waters' chosen theme is very, very obvious, it is skilfully used to inform every aspect of the book, from the possibly supernatural "ghost story" elements of the plot, to the motivations and aspirations of all the beautifully realized characters.

At the same time, Waters' outright abandons the lesbian themes of her previous work. We're dealing here with a straight male narrator, surrounded by a handful of well-developed straight supporting characters, both male and female (well... one of these women might be gay, but the thought certainly never occurs to the other characters, or especially the narrator). And, being a red-blooded young straight male, it's a relief to be able to report that I find Waters' ability to weave a compelling narrative in no way diminished by a lack of hot lesbian sex scenes.

To sum up: this is a well-crafted, occasionally suspenseful, definitely gothic, possibly ghostly novel that makes up for any occasional lapse in the momentum its gothic narrative by simultaneously telling a compelling human story about some fascinating characters. This is a great novelist at work, people. I don't really care what your usual literary tastes may be: do yourself a favor and pick it up as soon as it hits paperback.