How not to write a ghost story

Cover of The Little Stranger

I started a book a couple of weeks ago that I had been looking forward to reading. I love a good ghost story, so the opportunity to read a rare literary treatment of one came as a treat to be savoured. Unfortunately Sarah Waters The Little Stranger was a very disappointing read.

Waters comes with good literary cred. I’ve not read any of her previous stuff, but she seems a serious talent much liked by the literati. On top of that she appears a bright and interesting personality. Well and good, but writing a quality ghost story is a different challenge altogether, and difficult to do well.

I’m not sure what her intention was with this. Was it to write a Henry James type story – that is, the densely written creeping creepiness set amid the decaying upper class? That’s a very narrow genre, though well trodden by the likes of James. Waters updates her novel from the late 19th century of James to the period just after the second war, though superficially her novel follows a similar pattern and with similar characters. Too superficially unfortunately. Henry James was a great writer and a master of this milieu not just because he mixed with it, but because he was a keen observer within it. His was a gimlet eye for elegant detail, the telling moment, not to mention the subtle nuances of class and status. Waters, by contrast, appears like she is trying this on. What fun it would be to write a ghost story set in the crumbling home of the aristocracy! Oh let’s do, shall we? And she does, or tries to.

Others have reviewed this book favourably, but in my eyes – and I consider an amateur expert on the ghost genre – she falls well short on three counts.

In the first place the novel is way too long. The first half of it meanders along setting a scene which I found dreary more often than not, and unnecessary. It is terribly overwritten, perhaps in an attempt to imitate the Victorian novels of this ilk, but little of substance is said or revealed. James may have been famous for his dense writing, but he did not waste time on unnecessary scene-setting. The two of his novels which most closely belong in this genre are better described as novellas of no more than 80-100 pages. The relative brevity of The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw condenses the story and builds the suspense layer upon layer. Nothing relieves the growing tension because he does not stray from the linear progression of the story – there is nothing that does not drive the story forward, no matter how inconsequential it may appear. The Turn of the Screw is a masterpiece by any measure.

The Little Stranger is nearly 500 pages long. It could be cut to 230 pages and it would gain a lot.

The second mistake she makes is in main protagonist. He is a stuffy, boring and infuriating character, somewhat dim in certain aspects and self-indulgent in his own way (and vaguely pathetic). I dare say he is meant to be something of that, but perhaps not to that degree. He has that very British diffidence which forthright colonials like me find very frustrating. In a reader like me it’s hard to engender any sympathy for him, but here I must admit to an aversion to these very British characters, both in print and in person. As much as anything they frustrate me because they muddle around blindly, emotionally and intellectually swathed in cotton wool. In a book as verbose as this and written in the first person it’s hard for the narrator to appear anything but verbose himself. It does the story no favours though (and if a British stereotype had to be employed why not the Mr Chips – diffident still (what else?), but endearingly gentle, the best of British, the innocent lost and finding his way in this strangeness?) 

Probably the most basic error she makes is in technique. There are two mistakes she makes in this. The first, characteristic of the book itself, is that she says too much. The best suspense stories in any genre work in building up tension by what they leave out. Of course there must be a narrative of the events and some exposition, speculation even, towards cause, but the most powerful tool in a story of this ilk is the reader’s imagination. You lead a reader to a place, but then let him populate it with his own fears and imagination. You build tension by stretching it out, not by explaining it. Hitchcock knew this in film, countless others in print. If you put the reader into a state of tense uncertainty then he will leap ahead, waiting, wondering, his imagination conjuring up demons while he holds his breath restraining the urge to skip ahead to know.

There is none of that in this story. No tension, no fear. You don’t know what the cause of the strange things are, but nor do you care much. Which is where the other very sophomore mistake is made. There is no immediacy in this story. We are stuck looking through the eyes of this blithering doctor and forced to swallow his pompous commentary.  That’s bad enough, but then we are made to learn things second hand and after the event. It amazes me that no-one pointed out this fatal flaw. How much better it is to discover things as the protagonists do, to be there watching, hearing, wondering as these things occur, in a sense to be a witness to the story rather than having it explained to us. Yet this is what she does. Scene after scene is of Caroline explaining to the doctor what has already happened. Well, at best it makes it curious – but we know it turns out pretty alright because she is sitting there telling the doctor about it. It may appear strange, even odd at times, but there is no tension because the air has already been let out of the balloon.

As you can tell I’m pretty disappointed. I’m not sure why I have persisted with this book, except out of duty.

It’s interesting to contrast this with another book I picked up for nothing at a second-hand bookshop the other week. And Then There Were None is described as Agatha Christie’s masterpiece, which, in my book, is a pretty low bar to get over. I read a few of her books when I was a kid, but these days they are more curiosity value than anything else – this is the first book of hers I have read in 20 years.

There is none of the detail in relating place or environment as there is in Waters. Waters could do with less, Christie could do with some. And Christie’s characters are largely paper-thin stereotypes, ciphers for a particular type. I don’t doubt that the board game Cluedo was born out her books. There are retired colonels and bitter spinsters and shady good looking types, and so on. They belong to a certain and very particular time when everyone had a butler and tongue sandwiches were de rigueur. In actual fact her stories recall to mind the picture your imagination has set aside for this era, formed over years reading other books of this time.

In actual fact I am often put in mind of the Enid Blyton books I read growing up. The Famous Five and Secret Seven were a bunch of good public school types, kids who would stumble upon mysterious goings on that would lead to the discovery of some dastardly crime in commission. Naturally they would take it upon themselves to thwart the villainous smugglers or thieves, and naturally they would ultimately manage this despite a few hairy moments and in between flasks of hot chocolate and lashings of yummy crumpets, tongue and cucumber sandwiches. Thus the victory of wholesome virtue and English values was assured in a time when the British Empire meant something.  

Christie writes to a similar pattern, though an adult version and with a fatal edge missing from Blyton’s innocuous children’s books. Christie’s books are set in the drawing rooms and servants quarters of country estates, manors and the occasional exotic foreign locale. She doesn’t waste time with most of the fripperies that make Waters book 500 pages long. While that gives her books a certain momentum they are not firmly lodged in your head because of the lack. What she does do well is plot.

I read this book well aware of these deficiencies, and yet I raced to the end. It’s not just because it is an easy read, but because for all those deficiencies you are intrigued to understand the mystery at the heart of the story. They are not great literature by any stretch of the imagination, there is no racy prose, but it is a proven formula that she is the mistress of.

At the end of the day the sheer entertainment value of And Then There Were None far surpasses the studied literature of The Little Stranger. Waters gets in the way of her story while Christie lets hers flow. For all their relative literary merits perhaps Sarah Waters should have used Agatha Christie as her model, rather than Henry James.