Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger - The Death of English Literature
A doctor answers a call from a local stately home, Hundreds Hall, where the young maid has been taken ill. However, on examination it appears there is nothing wrong with her, apart from an uneasy feeling about her new employment, in this house that ‘gives her the creeps’ in which she thinks she ‘will die of fright sometimes.’ Our rational doctor is sympathetic and prescribes some simple stomach mixture, but is taken in by the grand mansion in which he finds himself, and its occupants, the surly Roderick, his pragmatic sister Caroline and their rather glamorous mother Mrs Ayres. Soon he starts to treat the former for an war-injury to his leg. However, there appears to be something sinister happening to the family, particularly to Roderick, as he straggles with the upkeep of a stately home going to the dogs, at the same time beginning to have nightmarish visions at night. One by one these visions intensify and pass to each member of the family, with increasingly tragic results. Can our cynical doctor find the reason behind all these goings on, or does the house itself have a secret that it is not quite applicable to the scientific mind of a man of medicine.
Have I missed something? This book has been nominated for the Booker Prize, the highest literary accolade in Britain. Okay, the wiring in very competent, the historical details is impeccable and there are some cleverly tense moments, but that is it. Nothing else here stands it much above the classic English ghost story. Everything reminds me of something I have read before. The rational doctor, sceptical to the end, forms an awkward romance with our heroine, the plain-Jane Caroline, providing an excellent prosaic foreground to heighten the shocks that lie behind. The dissipating Roderick, shipped off to a mental home early on, the mother locked in a romantic past and a grand house with dirty secrets hidden in its decadence – pick up a hundred books written since Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and you will find all of this and more, over and over again.
This is why English Literature in this country has an endemic problem. This stuff sells, brilliantly. Ghosts in stately homes, post-war social comment, doomed romances – housewives read this on the garden on a Sunday afternoon, pass it round at the Book Club on a Tuesday and then each go about trying to write something similar themselves. It’s almost a literary movement – novels locked in a world that only exists in the minds of people with National Trust memberships who watch Richard and Judy and have too much time to do anything else. Okay, there not all bad books, but award winning exciting literature? Do me a favour.
Kafka, Rushdie, McEwan this is not. What has happened to the novel? Why has it become so pitifully middle-class and dull. Where are the books about counter-culture, rebellion, ideas? Thats the point of a novel, to give us something new, not to take us to a world so familiar they are almost beyond cliché.
It’s the way the novel is marketed. The Hay Festival, Waterstones, Richard and Judy, thanks to this – the act of reading has been transformed into this idyllic, relaxing pursuit, where people sit in fields and gardens with nice cups of tea, happily smug about how intelligent they are and engage in the occasional police conversation about some cod-philosophy they don’t really care about because they are pretty happy where they are thank you very much. Novels are sold to this image, and are lauded as such. It is like modernism never happened.
No wonder kids don’t give a shit about reading, because the publishers don’t give a shit about them either. All they get sold is another re-issue of The Catcher in the Rye, or some comedic tripe written by a music journalist pertaining to be cool. None of them want to pick up a pen and think of something new, something different, or express the worlds that they live in that adults don’t understand, and you can hardly blame them. Does Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel, Alice Sebold, Audrey Niffenegger touch their souls?
I’m not saying that Sarah Waters book is particularly bad. It isn’t. Its clever and has moments of true tension. But fundamentally this is a book about the decline of traditional values and British pomp and artistry. Fine. But the day I see this a ‘literary’ awards ceremony is the day when writing in, and about this country truly dies.
Have I missed something? This book has been nominated for the Booker Prize, the highest literary accolade in Britain. Okay, the wiring in very competent, the historical details is impeccable and there are some cleverly tense moments, but that is it. Nothing else here stands it much above the classic English ghost story. Everything reminds me of something I have read before. The rational doctor, sceptical to the end, forms an awkward romance with our heroine, the plain-Jane Caroline, providing an excellent prosaic foreground to heighten the shocks that lie behind. The dissipating Roderick, shipped off to a mental home early on, the mother locked in a romantic past and a grand house with dirty secrets hidden in its decadence – pick up a hundred books written since Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and you will find all of this and more, over and over again.
This is why English Literature in this country has an endemic problem. This stuff sells, brilliantly. Ghosts in stately homes, post-war social comment, doomed romances – housewives read this on the garden on a Sunday afternoon, pass it round at the Book Club on a Tuesday and then each go about trying to write something similar themselves. It’s almost a literary movement – novels locked in a world that only exists in the minds of people with National Trust memberships who watch Richard and Judy and have too much time to do anything else. Okay, there not all bad books, but award winning exciting literature? Do me a favour.
Kafka, Rushdie, McEwan this is not. What has happened to the novel? Why has it become so pitifully middle-class and dull. Where are the books about counter-culture, rebellion, ideas? Thats the point of a novel, to give us something new, not to take us to a world so familiar they are almost beyond cliché.
It’s the way the novel is marketed. The Hay Festival, Waterstones, Richard and Judy, thanks to this – the act of reading has been transformed into this idyllic, relaxing pursuit, where people sit in fields and gardens with nice cups of tea, happily smug about how intelligent they are and engage in the occasional police conversation about some cod-philosophy they don’t really care about because they are pretty happy where they are thank you very much. Novels are sold to this image, and are lauded as such. It is like modernism never happened.
No wonder kids don’t give a shit about reading, because the publishers don’t give a shit about them either. All they get sold is another re-issue of The Catcher in the Rye, or some comedic tripe written by a music journalist pertaining to be cool. None of them want to pick up a pen and think of something new, something different, or express the worlds that they live in that adults don’t understand, and you can hardly blame them. Does Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel, Alice Sebold, Audrey Niffenegger touch their souls?
I’m not saying that Sarah Waters book is particularly bad. It isn’t. Its clever and has moments of true tension. But fundamentally this is a book about the decline of traditional values and British pomp and artistry. Fine. But the day I see this a ‘literary’ awards ceremony is the day when writing in, and about this country truly dies.
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