4

A medal, a photograph, a whistle, a pair of keys, an unworn wedding-ring. They formed the spoil of my time at Hundreds: a queer little collection, it seemed to me. A week before, they would have told a story, with myself as the hero of the tale. Now they were so many unhappy fragments. I looked to them for a meaning, and was defeated.

Oh, it was a promising book from the beginning. I actually mentioned it in my thesis on “country house novels”, without having read; I couldn’t possibly get through all the titles listed by other researchers, the modern literature being not my main focus. The author of the article that I quoted put the novel in the “gothic” line of the genre, which exists along with the “social” one. The title did have a savour of mystery to it; later I came to know that it was an idiom (maybe slightly old-fashioned) to mean ‘a child’. Well, children are perfect for spookiness. I guess I wanted some chill and damp of a decaying English manor, too, in the midst of an unusually stuffy Siberian June.
Although I had my reasons to deprive this novel of a star, I cannot but remark upon how neatly it is done, and with use of traditional patterns. A stranger’s apparition, in fact, is what sets a CH novel going. The inner space of a country house is free of conflict, and life there has a ritual quality. It takes someone from outside to come and break this steady cycle. So, in the very first chapter, we see a little boy – literally a little stranger – finding his way into the house by a side door and peeping, astonished, from behind the curtain into the imposing marble-floored passages, acutely feeling “the thrill of the house itself”. The mansion, however, stays indifferent to his presence and the minor damage the boy did to it; it is too big and self-assured to call the child to account. Not for long now things would keep like that, but you don’t suppose, seriously, that an occasional ten-year-old might have triggered the decline? If anything, he was much dismayed himself by the sorry state of Hundreds Hall, coming there 30 years later, as a qualified doctor. Unwittingly making friends with the upper-class family (their glamour long since gone, anyway), and sometimes keenly aware of the gap between them, Dr Faraday is a witness to strange and ill-looking events, that are likely to be blamed on a poltergeist, or the unquiet soul of Ayreses’ little girl, Susan, dead at six. “It's just like a sly, spiteful child,” says Roderick Ayres – setting traps, teasing, and playing games. It may be understood that Susan is seeking to take revenge for her early and painful death, but still, there is no clear reason for it all to begin right now. Nobody of the family ever noticed anything ‘queer’ before Betty, the young housemaid, has been in there. Could they really suspect her, also a sort of ‘little stranger’ – little, in the sense of insignificant and plain, just a servant to keep silently in the back? But in fact, the only actual uttering of the phrase in the novel implies a more complex interpretation of the circumstances: “The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let's call it a—a germ. And let's say conditions prove right for that germ to develop—to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps:a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration…” This attempt of his colleague to develop the standard principles of psychology makes Dr Faraday, after all, to suspect Caroline, with her unresolved sexual impulses, just as we readers start to realize his own position in the drama. The question is, whether the doctor himself was conscious of it, and whether he really got the meaning of the last words of his own story.
According to the author, she wanted the ghost story to be fairly subtle. But it looks like ghosts are bound to attract the most attention, and maybe the book would be less popular without its supernatural hint. For, you see, the social conflict and the tragedy of ‘decline and fall’ of old estates are a bit out of date. More precisely, it is not perceived as bitterly nowadays as it was at the time. Do we really want a deep (re)investigation of the matter? Sarah Waters describes it beautifully – I truly enjoyed her style, but somewhat monotonously, checking with all our expectations of the genre, including classic literature allusions. I believe the novel is great for screen adaptation; it is very ‘visual’, but little more than that, to tell the truth. As if you are observing a photograph (maybe even a ‘live’ photograph) – it gives an illusion of volume, but indeed it is flat. And people in that shot are trapped in the same mood and the same situation. They are talking, but it doesn’t bring them anywhere. The dialogues in the book, especially those between Dr Faraday and Caroline, get more and more worthless; he just repeats to her that she’s imagining things, but his own ‘rational’ assumptions sound even more unconvincing. I was slightly disappointed at there being no detective aspect, some revealing of the past to remedy the present; as for the ‘affair’ between the doctor and Caroline, well, it is not thrilling. I cannot believe that Caroline is only twenty-six (younger than me) – she feels a decade older. Maybe that was the point, the effect of isolation and family hardships, but eventually the most gripping and emotional pages of the book are those about the ‘ghost’, even if they should take up a smaller half of the book. The ghost is someone active and purposeful here; the ghost is someone who did the trick, for the characters as well as for the writer. Let us look forward to the 2018 film; the cast seems becoming, and by the way, the age of the actors is adjusted to the impression made by their characters, and not to the sheer statement of the text.