The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

A haunted house story set in England in the years just after WWII, The Little Stranger’s creepiness comes not just from the decaying mansion and its inhabitants, living and otherwise, but also from the claustrophobically rigid habits of thought of its extremely unreliable narrator.

The house is Hundreds Hall, a grand Georgian mansion now left to rot in the hands of the Ayres family: a bitter, disabled war veteran; his plain, sturdy, self-effacing sister; and their doddering, once-elegant widowed mother. Our protagonist, Dr. Faraday, is a country doctor who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps from working-class roots. In a supremely British way he is very conscious of this, and very white, and very male.

Ms. Waters does a terrific job creating a window into the mind of a man who has no idea how blinkered he is, or how condescending. He’s such a man of his place and time, the book almost reads as if it had been written by a man of that period. This is, to me, what makes it interesting: the character study of Dr. Faraday.

In his mind, there’s a natural order to things that it would never occur to him to question. People of the lower classes and women of all classes either function properly and stay in their places, in which case he can safely disregard them; or they don’t, in which case he can chasten them or doctor them or send them off to the appropriate institution.

Meanwhile, the Ayres family is terribly isolated. The local folks see them as wealthy and powerful, which of course they once were at one point, and therefore too snobbish to rub elbows with the hoi polloi. But it has been decades since the estate could support itself and in fact its inhabitants are reduced to selling it off, bit by bit, just to keep food in the pantry and gasoline in the generator.

The Ayreses, being both proud of their heritage and ashamed of their current financial state, feel they have to keep to themselves. Until Dr. Faraday appears on the scene and slowly insinuates himself into the household. Around the same time, things at The Hundreds start going weirdly amiss, and naturally the good doctor won’t entertain any supernatural explanations. Hijinks ensue and the plot thickens, with the assistance of everybody’s God-given prejudices.

Verdict: read it if you love a good haunted house story, or if you enjoy a well-written period piece whose characters’ psychology is true to their time and place, or if you just want to read the book first so you can sneer at the movie. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Narrated by Polly Stone

This is the story of two sisters in Vichy France during World War II. The older sister, Viann, is a school teacher and a young mother in a small village; having been more or less orphaned at age 14, she has found love and a life that she loves for herself and wants nothing more than to live that life, quiet and safe. The younger, Isabelle, is a rebellious girl who keeps getting kicked out of the various boarding schools their father, a Great War veteran and a coldly distant father, keeps sending her to. She's not willing to accept anything life hands her if it doesn't meet her standards, and doesn't see why she should be quiet about it. When the Germans invade France, each sister copes in her own way.

Viann’s husband goes off to fight in the war, so she is left taking care of their children, and teaching at the local school, and keeping up the house, with its orchard and vegetable garden. With all of these responsibilities, and with the husband she adores and relies on far away, her response to the Germans is to keep her head down and just survive, and keep her children alive, the best she can. As time goes on, though, she finds herself compelled by her own conscience to extend what protection she can offer not just to her own children, but to the son of her best friend, who is Jewish, and then to other Jewish children whose parents have been deported to the concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Isabelle is far too outspoken for her own good. After Paris is occupied, she ends up living with her sister. But she can’t bring herself to be polite to the German officer billeted at her sister’s house, or to hold her tongue when she sees atrocities being committed. Apparently she never heard of discretion being the better part of valor. When a villager catches her defacing Nazi signs, he recruits her into the local resistance. At first she just distributes pamphlets, but eventually she rescues a downed English pilot by guiding him, on foot, through the Pyrennes mountains to Spain. Having done this once, she sets up a route and does it repeatedly, under the code name "The Nightingale" and earning the irate and abiding interest of the SS.

I have my quibbles with this book. There are a couple of places near the beginning where the timeline just seems wonky and people behave as if things have been going on for weeks and months that have only been happening for a few days at most; a good editor would have corrected that. Isabelle is far too loose a cannon to be an effective member of a resistance that has to fly under the radar at all times, and Viann’s difficulties and losses feel overly sentimentalized—Isabelle’s, too, toward the end of the book. Not that they aren’t horrific difficulties and losses, but that being the case, they should stand on their own and not be sentimentalized, played to jerk tears out of the reader.

Nevertheless it’s a good read. Knowing about the way the Nazis treated the French in order to break them, and the degree to which they succeeded, is one thing; living it vicariously through an absorbing story is something else again. The author paints a vivid, complex portrait of life in a country brought to its knees, not neglecting either the humanity or the inhumanity of the invaders, nor the strengths or weaknesses of the invaded.

Recommend—especially if you plan to see the movie, which I understand will be released next year.