Looking back at my recent reads I was reminded of this 2009 novel by Sarah Waters.
Its 1947 and when Dr Faraday is urgently called to Hundreds Hall, he is both curious and nostalgic. Nearly thirty years before, he had visited the house with his mother, who had once worked there as a maid. As a ten year-old boy, he had been deeply impressed by the grandness of the house and of the Ayres family. But as he approaches the Hall, Dr Faraday immediately recognises that much has changed there, as it has virtually everywhere in post war Britain. The crumbling house and its overgrown gardens are badly in need of maintenance, and the Ayres family is clearly struggling to maintain some semblance of their former way of life as well-respected country gentry.
So begins Dr Faraday’s friendship with the remaining Ayres family, a relationship complicated by his lingering class resentments, by his growing attraction to daughter of the house, Caroline and more importantly, by the oddness and drama of events that begin to occur in the house as the hot summer gives way to a dark and gloomy winter.
The Ayres family is left in a demoralised state after a shocking incident at a party. Roderick seems particularly badly affected, becoming anxious and secretive, and while Dr Faraday believes his behaviour to have its roots in nervous exhaustion, there are hints that there may be something odder at work. Betty, the maid, believes the house to be haunted; Caroline is uneasy, and Mrs Ayres is troubled with memories of her first child, Susan. Soon Roderick’s behaviour tips over into something more alarming and the house begins almost to take on a life of its own, even Dr Faraday’s scientific assurances are challenged.
Looking into the background of it I was interested to read about Waters research for the book. She mentions many authors that Persephone and Persephone-like readers are more than familiar with;
"It's actually pretty hard to miss the prejudices of the class system in post-war Britain, once you
start reading books and diaries from the period. Post-war detective fiction is
particularly conservative. Josephine Tey's fascinating but rather toxic The
Franchise Affair was a big influence on me; another great resource were
the novels of Angela Thirkell, which at times are unbearably snobbish. Other
post-war writers attempted to grapple with class in a more generous and liberal
kind of way, and that was also revealing. Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Jenkins,
Mollie Panter-Downes, for example: they tried to capture this very particular
moment in British rural history when an older way of life was dying off and
working-class people had all sorts of new opportunities; their middle-class
characters, however, are pained and struggling, and the feeling you take from
their novels is one of loss and sadness, not of excitement at the prospect of
social and cultural change. But the earnestness with which they address the
issue of class shows what a hot topic it was for them, and that was my
starting-point, really: that deep anxiety about class; that fear and uncertainty
about what was going to happen to the nation next."
Of the supernatural element of the story she says;
"I tried to find
books about the supernatural from the 1940s or earlier, and my favourite is
a 1903 work by Frederic Myers, called Human Personality and its Survival of
Bodily Death. It's about how bits of the mind can break free and roam
around by themselves, perhaps appearing to other people in the process -
effectively, as ghosts of the living. It's full of fascinating case histories,
and even though its claims are rather wild, well, it's amazing how
convincing stories about ghosts and astral travelling can seem when they are
told to you by a sober Edwardian. What interests me most about ghost stories, actually, is not whether
they're true or not, but the simple fact that they exist. I'm interested in why
the supernatural draws us: what it offers us, in the way of catharsis or
consolation, or in the articulation of the unspeakable."
The setting;
"There wasn't one particular building that inspired me, but while I was
writing the novel I tried to visit as many historic houses as I could -
especially eighteenth-century ones, since Hundreds is early Georgian - and I
think the Hall ended up being a collage of bits of all of them. There's a
'little parlour' at Uppark in Sussex - I liked the term, so gave it to the
Ayreses for a room in their house. And staying at West Dean College, near
Chichester, a couple of years ago, I wandered into the lovely walled gardens
there - and ended up realising how strangely claustrophobic a walled garden can
be, if you're in the wrong sort of mood for it... Ultimately, in fact, like all
haunted houses, Hundreds Hall is a psychological structure as well as an actual
one - a place perhaps of threat, of lurking secrets. That's what I like about
houses, in fact: that they are always more than bricks and mortar; that they're
somehow imbued with the lives of the people who inhabit them."
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| Little Parlour Uppark |
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| West Dean walled garden. |
There is an ever tightening grip of tension throughout the novel. Its atmosphere intrigued me and kept me reading to the end, but ultimately I felt it never really fulfilled it's promise. It was like an ever-inflating balloon that fizzled rather than went out with a bang.