Any reader of Fingersmith will know how Sarah Waters drags the old tricks of ancient fiction out of retirement and makes them dance for us again. There it was Dickens and Wilkie Collins; here its Henry James and his Turn of the Screw, The Fall of the House of Usher, and any number of novels and movies with huge crumbling stately homes at their centre. Operating where the psychological and the supernatural ooze along together, The Little Stranger unhurriedly creeps the reader into its Gothic murderousness. Lightly and effortlessly the political-cultural background weaves into the tale, which is set in 1947, as the radical Labour government steams ahead with such socialist solutions as the National Health Service, and the upper classes, personified by the blighted Ayreses, crumble and visibly wither. One of the many pleasures of this wonderful novel.... 
 No, I'm so sorry. That is the review I would have liked to write. 
 But I can't. 
 Sorry Sarah, but, you know, what were you thinking? You who wrote the mighty Fingersmith? And who latterly thrilled my very ventricles with The Paying Guests? 
 (In parenthesis : is she trying to win Most Boring Novel Title of the Year? The Paying Guests? The Night Watchman? The Little Stranger? What next, The Middle Manager, The Folded Knapkin, The Acceptable Reservation ?) 
 For here we have a lengthy tale of a working class lad made good, he's become a doctor, and the local decayed upper class family he befriends. These toffs have the stately home and the land but they have no money at all, so the whole pile is gradually falling to bits. For 500 pages. 
 Yes, it's a metaphor. Like all huge old houses, or castles. Dracula, Gormenghast, Bleak House. The Shining. Manderley. Wuthering Heights. Hill House. 
 A typical passage from The Little Stranger 
 A couple of panes in the window were cracked, the sash frame crumbling around them. A corner hand-basin gave off a sour, uriney smell, and the boards beneath were almost rotting where a leaking tap had dripped. The wallpaper had a raised pattern of loops and arabesques that had once, she recalled suddenly, been very colourful. It had been painted over with a drab distemper, which the damp was turning to a sort of curd. 
 It's a long slow mournful crepuscular celebration of decay, but what, we may ask, is the point of it all? That the upper classes were clapped out and finished by the convulsing social order of the post-WW2 radicalism? What nonsense. A lot of families like the Ayreses had to look sharp and reposition themselves - get with the new land management and farming sciences for example, or open their vast mansions to the public - otherwise I'm sure some did go the way of the unpleasant posh tossers here exhibited. But has the upper class gone away? Oh no, I don't think so! 
 The 7th Duke of Westminster, 25-year-old Hugh Grosvenor, is now the heir to a legacy worth more than PS9bn. 
 Thanks to a series of trusts, which are thought to date to the death of the 2nd Duke in 1953, Hugh and his three sisters will avoid having to pay the 40% levy ordinary families are faced with when parents die. 
 "For people who are really wealthy, inheritance tax has become an optional choice," said John Christensen, director of the Tax Justice Network. "If you are lucky to be born into a very wealthy family you will be untaxed. For most normal people this is extraordinary and unacceptable." 
 The Guardian, 10 August, 2016 
 Reading The Little Stranger one might think that 1947 was Britain's more melancholy and sepia tinted version of St Petersburg 1917. 
 So then we have the spooky-ookums stuff. As with all these rascally writers, they have their cake and they eat it. They will never come out and declare this stuff is either in their characters' unbalanced psyches or that there really is a poltygeist moving ashtrays three inches to the left and knocking from inside the cupboard and what all. No, they are perfectly ambiguous all the time. It's a cop out. Fans of this kind of guff like to stroke their chins and ponder. Sarah Waters even puts the rational point of view centre stage, in the brain of her protagonist - but what a meanminded insidious creep this guy is. If he was the last rationalist in the world gimme the Tibetan Book of the Dead. 
 In the end this was a story where a succession of unpleasant things happen to a small number of unpleasant people. 
 But hey, at least I broke my run of seven three-star novels!