This book was read by Stephen King on the recommendation of "Entertainment Weekly" when he first came to the United States, and it was one of the ten books he recommended that year. At that time, my English was not good, so I could not read it, and even wrote a book review, which shows how worthless my book review is. Recently, I was driving to work, and I found the Chinese version and read it again, and then I understood a lot.
Author Sarah Waters's work is always inseparable from lesbian, and this is the only book that has nothing to do with homosexuality. It is four or five hundred pages thick, and tells a horror story that is not scary - at that time, I thought that Stephen King's recommendations were all exciting horror novels. As the name suggests, the book tells the story of a "little stranger" who took root in a decaying manor in Britain after World War II and destroyed the remnants of the entire family. The lady mother of the old times, the son who was physically and psychologically traumatized by the war, the rough and tough eldest daughter who has no noble manners, and the doctor who is narrated in the first person and runs through the story. Just by looking at the characters, you can imagine what kind of story this is. The dark and deep mansion - see Downton Abbey twenty years after the end of the TV series, struggling to live, selling land and houses, but still maintaining the noble demeanor of the old family... In such an environment, the generation of ghosts is not too much. easy?
"Little Stranger", readers who first read this book thought it was Mrs. Iris' eldest daughter, Susan, who died young. In 1919, after the First World War, a celebration was held at the manor, which was almost the last glory of this ancient manor. The narrator of the story, Doctor Faraday, the son of the manor's maid, also attended the rally and met Susan. That night, Susan contracted diphtheria and died in agony. Her soul seems to have been tormenting her mother and later siblings at the manor, leading to a series of tragedies. It's interesting that Dr. Faraday, as an outsider, is always telling the owners of the manor a scientific explanation of all kinds of strange events - in fact, he is also emphasizing to the readers over and over again that there are no ghosts here. The madness of the younger brother Roderick is obviously the result of the dual war PTSD and the survival pressure of the manor; the little girl was bitten by the jeep is probably just an accident; and the death of the mother, Mrs. Iris, is her heart for the dead child. Missing. Strange noises in the manor - rattles, telephones, pipes, knocking on the walls - even on the roof of my house there is often all sorts of rattling; it is strange that there is no sound in such a big old house Woolen cloth.
So, if the ghost of the eldest daughter doesn't exist, who is the little stranger?
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After reading the whole book, I suddenly realized that the "Little Stranger" turned out to be Faraday who has always been on the sidelines, and has always been an outsider in the eyes of readers, but he has always had a longing for the manor, and more importantly, the noble class he does not belong to. Doctor. The author fakes a shot, tricks the reader with the ghost of Susan that doesn't exist, and creates the illusion of a horror novel. When the reader realizes that this is not a genre novel, but a serious literature, the answer is ready to come out. As the son of a servant back then, Dr. Faraday's admiration for the manor made the "little stranger" subconscious personality in his heart play a role: he has been trying to enter this class, and his love for Caroline is wrapped in the love for the manor. Under the possessiveness of the manor; and when Caroline discovered his intention and rejected him, his subconscious personality needed to destroy the manor; and in a broad sense, the lower class represented by Faraday was in World War II. After the rapid rise (imagine the real estate developer Barry bought the land of the manor and built one after another of the modern townhouses of the twentieth century), their rise also accelerated the destruction of the old squire class. That "stranger" is not only Dr. Faraday himself, but also the migration and turmoil of the whole society. This kind of life is too foreign for the Iris family, they can neither accept nor survive.
In the book, because Faraday has always acted as a first-person narrative role, the reader turns a blind eye to many blanks, and when the truth is finally revealed, he finds himself missing many foreshadowings in the book. I didn't know who the "it" was until Caroline said after her mother's death: "It killed her, and I've been helping her": she wasn't referring to the "bad stuff" in the manor ”, but to the outsider she brought in, the doctor who had been monitoring, affecting their home, and making her so dependent.
The story is a good one, but I don't think Sarah Waters knows much about aristocratic life, although she said she stayed in the manor converted hotel in order to experience life. Compared with the dozens of people in Downton Abbey and Gosford Manor, and the extended family and social relationships, the people in Baixia Manor seem to be isolated from the world, without relatives, There is no social relationship, and it was not until the funeral of the wife that they found out that their family had relatives. Of course, the author wants to put the whole story in a claustrophobic environment to enhance the atmosphere, but I think it is better to compare the situation of the fallen aristocrats with the description of the scene and the atmosphere, or to put them in a wider society.
The filming of the movie was really bad. On the one hand, because the time was too short, a lot of details in the book and the slow and hot layers of progress were abandoned. It was like an MTV for readers who had read the book; I think it should be done well. This book has at least the weight of six episodes of BBC TV series. On the other hand, the movie does a mediocre job of shaping the atmosphere. Such an old manor, with so many ghosts, why do you keep shooting the light like building socialism, and those who don't know it think you're doing demolition in the dust.
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