The Visitor (Waters)
The visitor (original title The Little Stranger ) is a 2009 novel by the British author Sarah Waters , which is in the narrative tradition of Edgar Allan Poe , Daphne du Maurier , Shirley Jackson , Wilkie Collins and Henry James ' novel The Turn of the Screw : One The family of the English landed gentry saw their fortunes dwindle in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War. With two last servants, they are fighting the decay of their family home. A series of strange, seemingly inexplicable events trigger several tragedies.
The visitor was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2009 , but was subject to Hilary Mantel's historical novel Wölfe . In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars voted the novel one of the most important British novels . Critics repeatedly emphasize how aptly Sarah Waters describes the social upheavals in Great Britain in the years after the Second World War in this novel.
action
Faraday, the first-person narrator of the novel and a country doctor in the English county of Warwickshire , is called to the Ayres' mansion Hundreds Hall to treat the young maid Betty. Faraday is not in this house for the first time: his mother was employed by the Ayres, who belong to the gentry , as a maid herself before their wedding. When the Ayres organized a garden party for the people of the surrounding villages in the 1910s, his mother first gave him secret access to the kitchen wing of the house and later one of the maids took him to the master’s living quarters and made him wait in the entrance hall. while she serves the gentlemen. While the young Faraday waits for the maid to return, he uses his pocket knife to break out a tiny piece of acorn-shaped stucco from the entrance hall as a memento.
On his second visit, Faraday recognizes the grandeur of the family seat, which was so impressive to him at the time. However, the house is marked by the decline of the family. In the hall in which he broke off a piece of the stucco, the stucco has now been largely destroyed.
Faraday befriends the siblings Roderick and Caroline Ayres, who, together with their mother, are the last of their family to live in Hundreds Hall. Roderick Ayres was a member of the Royal Air Force during World War II until his plane crashed. Roderick is physically and mentally marked by this crash. His sister Caroline was a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II but returned to Hundreds Hall to care for her convalescent brother. Roderick suffers from the fact that he has been the head of the family and landlord since the death of his father and he is unable to restore the Hundreds Hall to its former glory. Mrs. Ayres, on the other hand, is still mourning her first daughter Susan, who died early, and is still under illusions about the family's financially desperate situation.
In an attempt to remember the family's past glory and perhaps find a spouse for Caroline as well, the Ayres throw another party. One of the invited couples brings their young daughter with them and she is bitten in the face by Caroline's old and so far so good-natured Labrador Gyp. The Ayres cannot afford a lawsuit or compensation for pain and suffering. You have to follow the wishes of the married couple and kill Gyp. It is Faraday, who has now become a friend, who gives Gyp the fatal injection. Roderick wasn't among the guests that night of the little party - the family pretends it's overwork and a migraine that is keeping Roderick from joining the partying. Roderick, who previously showed signs of excessive tension, complains to Faraday that an ominous force has manifested itself in his room. He would be the one who would have to put a stop to this force in order to prevent his mother and sister from being harmed by it. After his room catches fire while lying in bed drunk, Roderick is eventually admitted to a mental hospital. In order to raise money, part of the park around Hundred Halls has to be sold for the first time. Terraced houses are emerging on the land that has been sold, and Hundred Halls are losing their seclusion. When the first parts of the park wall around Hundred Halls were torn down, Faraday was almost more affected by this development than the pragmatic thinking Caroline.
Faraday is courting Caroline more and more resolutely, while at the same time the strange occurrences repeat themselves in Hundred Halls. Strange noises can be heard in the house at night, and strange scrawls reminiscent of children's handwriting can be found on the walls of the rooms from which these noises seem to be coming. The phone rings at night without anyone on the other end of the line. The servants are rung without anyone asking for them. Finally, Mrs. Aires follows noises and finds herself locked in the children's wing, where Susan, her first daughter at the age of eight, died of diphtheria. She finds comfort in the belief that Susan is trying to be close to her, even if it seems to hurt her at times. One morning, however, Caroline and the maid, Betty, find Mrs. Aires hanged.
Faraday finally manages to set a date for the planned wedding with Caroline. However, Caroline cancels the wedding when she realizes that she will continue to live by Faraday's side at Hundred Halls. Together with the maid Betty, she begins to sell the last remaining household items. She wants to sell Hundred Halls and leave the UK. England, she says to Faraday, is no longer sympathetic to people like you. She no longer wants it. A little later, Caroline also dies by falling from the second floor into the entrance hall of Hundred Halls one night. During the inquest into her death, the maid, Betty, testifies that she heard Caroline rush up to the second floor at night and yell "you" before falling. The judicial investigation concludes that it was suicide.
Three years later, Hundred Halls is still unsold and abandoned. Faraday still has keys to the house and is trying to stop further deterioration.
Reviews
Martin Halter titled his review of the novel for the FAZ in reminiscence of Edgar Allan Poe's story Der Untergang des Haus Usher as Der Untergang des Haus Ayre and justified his choice of title not only with the similarity in content, but also with the reference that both Poe and also in Waters the male protagonist is called Roderick. Both stories have in common, in addition to the subject of family decay, the first-person narrator, who, as an outsider, reports skeptically about the strange events.
Halter describes the novel as an eerily beautiful book for long, rainy evenings. However, he also points out that it is disappointing as a horror novel. The uncanny would creep along very slowly and on quiet paws, and, just as Faraday's doctor colleague Seele suspected, it is not a product of hell, but only the repressed secret that is at work here. On the positive side, Halter emphasizes that the novel draws its tension and narrative charm not from cheap horror effects, but from the abysses of bourgeois souls and the fine balance between retarding and forward-pressing moments. “The visitor” comes from the past, but he is up to date: an almost classic social and rather unromantic romance novel in the worn out costumes and peeling backdrops of the Victorian epic novel.
Hilary Mantel has a similarly positive opinion of her fellow writer Waters' novel in her Guardian review and describes it as a masterfully written one. She, too, emphasizes the apt description of the social developments in Great Britain in 1947: the old landed gentry is losing its influence, a new middle class of doctors and building contractors is growing up, but they are not yet sure of their social role and some are concerned about the future . Faraday, for example, comes from the lower class; his parents sacrificed their health so that he could receive an adequate education. Now he is a country doctor, but lives modestly and does not belong to the lower class, nor is he regarded by the gentry as his own.
Mantel, however, sees the maid Betty as the person in the novel with which Sarah Waters demonstrates her accurate capture of this period of British history. 14-year-old Betty comes from a dysfunctional lower-class family: the father drinks, the mother hangs out with other men and Betty actually only stays at Hundreds Hall because it is even worse in her home. As is typical of the genre, she is the first to notice that strange things are happening. " There is something bad in this house " she says earlier than her gentlemen, but she is laughed at and her remark is classified as evidence of her ignorance. Neither Faraday nor her employers treat Betty as equals. Mantel states that it borders on black humor when Betty, with her childlike disposition, is called in after every disaster, after every misfortune, after every further stroke of fate, to wipe up blood and pick up broken glass, to carry buckets of water or to serve tea with it the nerves of their socially superior people calm down. With her awkward manner and her inability to articulate herself appropriately, the others do not consider her the sensitivity to grasp the horror of the events.
Scarlett Thomas also highlights Sarah Waters' masterful storytelling in her review in the New York Times . She complains, however, that the Ayres family is portrayed so lovingly and realistically that, unlike, for example, in Jonathan Coe's novel Alone with Shirley, the reader finds it difficult to accept their inexorable decline. In her review, she also refers to one of the first encounters between Caroline and Faraday. When the latter admits to her that he once broke an acorn out of the stucco in the entrance hall with a pocket knife, Caroline replies that these are actually only there to be broken out. Thomas questions whether this also applies to people like the Ayres and their country estate, if the progress that is destroying them and their way of life does not produce anything better than townhouses and medical centers.
expenditure
- The Little Stranger , 2009.
- The visitor. Translated from the English by Ute Leibmann. Lübbe Ehrenwirt, Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-431-03830-9 .
Single receipts
- ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed on January 23, 2016
- ↑ a b c Review from the FAZ on July 26, 2011 , accessed on January 23, 2016
- ↑ a b c Review in the Guardian of May 23, 2009 , accessed January 24, 2016
- ↑ Review in The New York Times, May 29, 2009 , accessed January 24, 2016