I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old.
With the opening line, the narrator takes the reader back in time and presents the 18th century home Hundreds Hall as it was, or at least as it seemed, to an economically underprivileged little boy. He sees the home as a mansion, perfect as possible. That trip when he was ten afforded him, by virtue of his mother’s relationship with not the owners, but the servants; even a furtive peek at the upstairs by one who works in the downstairs is offered. The little boy takes home a secret souvenir: a decorative plaster acorn. And, of course, you already know what it is from which little acorns grow.
“I see what’s in front of me. Then I make sensible deductions. That’s what doctors do.”
Except that, well, Dr. Faraday is not diagnosing stomach pain or a ringing in the ears here. He is diagnosing a sick house. By this point in the narrative, Faraday has already been witness to events and phenomena which by definition defy any sense. Therefore, any deductions based on sense becoming a de facto example of insensibility. Faraday is the narrator and in a haunted house story a first person narrator is expected to fulfill certain responsibilities because he is the symbolic perspective of the reader. The reader expects this role to be filled by someone with a healthy skepticism and the easy ability to at least commit to what something is not even if they have no idea what something is. What they don’t expect is to be led on this journey by a narrator who increasingly comes to seem as if he has a specific agenda in his bullheaded resistance to not really see what’s right in front of him.
“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.”
Seeley is a colleague of Faraday who puts into direct description exactly what Faraday has been seeing in front of him the whole time. So it is quite telling that it is not Faraday who comes up with his theory to explain the weird things happening at Hundreds Hall. Despite Faraday mentioning infection several times with reference to the home and its inhabitants, ultimately—quite near the end—that theory is given sustenance by someone other than the narrator.
“Something is. It’s called a Labour Government. The Ayreses’ problem—don’t you think?—is that they can’t, or won’t, adapt. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve a lot of sympathy for them. But what’s left for an old family like that in England nowadays? Class-wise, they’ve had their chips. Nerve-wise, perhaps they’ve run their course.”
This quote is a direct response to something said by the narrator, that all the weirdness taking place in Hundreds Hall is “as if something’s slowly sucking the life out of the whole family.” Seeley’s response penetrates to the very soul of the novel. The Little Stranger is as much a book about the collapse of the British gentry following two world wars as it a haunted house tale. Throughout the book can be found imagery of decay and the crumbling of the once glorious home and it is worth reading with the consideration that it is not just Hundreds Hall about which the author is writing.
