Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (Virago)

On her website, Sarah Waters nominates Rebecca as the book she would most like to have written and in this latest novel, she's almost there. Hundreds Hall and its troubled history are as much a character in this as Manderley is in Daphne du Maurier's classic.

The problem with ghost stories, or anything involving the supernatural, is that a sceptical or rational person knows that there is either a sensible explanation for everything or the author is just making it up. One litmus test I have with fiction is whether I notice that I am reading fiction or if I'm tempted to think at regular intervals that it is all made up and then I start contradicting the text by thinking, 'no they didn't' whenever the author tries to tell me that a character either did this or said that.

Sarah Waters is among the last fiction writers that should fail such a test. Her characters and places are superbly well realised, perhaps her descriptions of characters a bit too detailed at times to be forensically convincing, but when we are asked to consider the series of unfortunate events that happen in Hundreds Hall, we don't really want to believe in poltergeists or phantoms, as the narrator, Dr. Faraday doesn't either.

The sequence of horrors claims a greedy share of the family and one wonders why the young servant girl, Betty, sees it all through. The faded glory of Hundreds Hall becomes a desolate shell. The unhappy details of the past, as well as Roderick's war wound, grow and grow in their after effects to vast proportions. Much of it one can see coming but that is more of a tribute to Sarah Waters' gradually revealing writing than a criticism of any failure to shock. For a time, it does seem to shock and thrill but not quite as much as some of the early reviews suggested it would, and once the pattern is established and the nature and extent of the mystery apparently set, it is more a psychological drama than genuine spine-tingler.

I don't know what one has to do to tingle spines nowadays. The Little Stranger is an engaging and involving story. Very few 500 page novels will be read quite so quickly or avidly. It is another period piece, just post World War II, in which doctors smoke and worry about the coming of the National Health Service and pay more for a wedding ring, £15, than they did for their car. I'm not quite sure it lived up to the enormous expectations of being the new Sarah Waters but perhaps not much could have. That is the enviable problem one faces when one's reputation is so high, one would imagine. It will, of course, make a tremendous film.