Little Stranger is told by Daisy and begins with the departure of a much-loved nanny and the arrival of a new one, Margaret Pride.
Daisy is part-Dutch, a work-from-home editor (a job she isn't sure is worthwhile), the mother of a small boy called John and the wife of a frequently absent but very wealthy husband called Solomon, who remains shadowy and with whom she has what might be described most charitably as an old-fashioned relationship. The family live in a house in the country, looked after by a cook plus indoor servants and outside staff, (plus the nanny).
The family's cook is called Lizzie. In Daisy's description of Lizzie, we see some of Candia McWilliam's talent as a writer. Lizzie, we learn, "was sensible and knew children, having had several, She was not discontented with repetition, but comforted by it, so that her cooking and her conversation had a soothing constancy. She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting". Daisy explains that John liked to sit beside Lizzie "as she made stew".
"She was free of any urban compulsion to entertain, so she was always interesting" - I loved this sentence.
McWilliam also gives us pen portraits of two very long-serving maids. Edie "looked like someone who might have a singular, solitary talent - marquetry or the violin". Bet, on the other hand "in private was unimaginable; she was entirely public...a tub with tiny hands and feet; she always wore high heels...she loved pretty things and was violently maternal. 'Oh John' she shouted, 'Oh look at you, I could eat you on toast.' From most people he flinched, but he loved Bet. She bought him presents she could not afford, and often asked to take him home with her. To John too this was an unspeakably glamorous prospect...Her husband bred fancy guinea-pigs with whorls in their fur; sometimes she brought one for John to look at, in a box, in the back of her car." The boxes are "as a rule from the supermarket, having contained slightly substandard crisps, or imperfect pizzas. Bet knew where to get seconds of the already most inedible foods; her best connection in this way was the friend who got her unlabelled cans." "Could be giblets, could be niblets, they're not fussy, but I must say I would not eat those dirty pheasants", Bet declares.
Food is everywhere in the novel and appetite is its central preoccupation. While Bet is not judged for eating rubbish, at the very start Margaret's suitability is questioned by the much-loved departing nanny, who disapproves of giving a child sweets, as Margaret has done. Daisy also does not find sweet things appealing. She tells us that she loves, "fresh, clean food, pickled and salted to an alerting brackishness", adding that "for lunch, I had eaten approximately seventy black olives, of the type which is wrinkled and black as tar on a summer road...accompanied...with a jug of black coffee" (as her husband does not share her taste, she explains that she eats the things he likes in the evening while "most days I ate a plateful of something he disliked for lunch ... smoked roes or raw steak or the vinegar of capers. Sometimes I even managed to find the gelatinous pinkish herring, 'haring", of my Dutch childhood").
Margaret's food, as described by Daisy, stands in stark contrast to these things:
"Margaret loved sweet things and her shopping bags were full of those strange foods made for consumers addicted to bulk and sweetness but desirous of no nourishment. She bought those strange costly foods whose colours are of an unconvincing brightness. She drank chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion, cheesecake which sighed to the knife. At the end of each day she calculated the value in calories of all she had eaten. The refrigerator in the nursery kitchen was full of bright drinks in clear vessels like aqualungs, and bread the colour of snow. For butter she had grease which reeked faintly of town water and her jam contained neither fruit nor sugar but was red as ric-rac. She did not seem to be aware that a lettuce and an omelette made from our own eggs would taste better and do her less harm than these weightless hefty meals of cloud and promise. In brown bags, John's food had its own place in the refrigerator, unseductive and plain. "
Again McWilliam's phrasemaking impresses me - I will never look at flavoured milk in the same way, since reading "chocolate milk so thick it resembled a bodily secretion."
Daisy points out that: "Our farm produced meat, the garden vegetables, we had milk and eggs and the cook made bread. I wondered sometimes whether these things were too physical for Margaret to bear."
Daisy describes herself as an "ex-beauty" and at one point tells us that she is "quirky" - (and as a narrator she definitely is - at one point, she suddenly breaks whatever the equivalent of the fourth wall is in fiction and, after stating, "I read much too quickly and want really only to read long simple stories with happy endings", asks the reader, "Can you think of any?"). Her job is solitary and as a result of this and being surrounded by staff:
"Sometimes I talked too much, not having spoken to anyone for a time. When I did talk to people, they were frequently the wrong ones...I was not often alone but I was never precisely more than accompanied."
Having done similar solitary work while living in diplomatic households with an Edwardian number of staff, I empathise with Daisy when she describes how she feels in her unusual role (especially the three words "useless but essential"):
"Inside our house women worked; in the garden men were employed. There were two women who cleaned, and one who cooked; there was Margaret and there was me. No two of us were equal, though I felt that it was not I who established the hierarchy. There was me, useless but essential, with the others below, each at her allotted, or, it may have been, chosen, level."
McWilliam's writing is full of insight, but what keeps one reading this novel is a dread that builds as it progresses, a dread centred on Margaret, with her apron that reads "Have you hugged someone today" and her twee way of speaking: "To listen to her was to hear language strangled at birth." The sense of mounting unease and vague menace is similar to that felt while reading Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
Daisy becomes pregnant - "Once you are pregnant, you have an unbreakable appointment to meet a stranger", she tells us, which is a rather a good perception, I think. Be that as it may, Margaret gains a more dominant position in John's life as the pregnancy progresses, even taking him to London without Daisy, where Daisy tells us snobbishly (Daisy is nothing if not a snob) that they spend there time there doing "everything that a middle American with a good job and no idea of Europe would have done."
In the end, the unease is not maintained with the skill of Henry James. Things come to a head and appear to be resolved satisfactorily. Daisy tells us that the tale is a story of two madnesses and admits that the strangest thing of all was that she agreed to employ Margaret Pride "because I hated her on sight, and was ashamed of myself for doing so." Pride, the nanny, seems to have been seen off and life apparently returns to normal, if Daisy is a reliable narrator. I think the book might be a better one, if she isn't. Each reader will have to decide for themselves
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Quotations that struck me from the book
(1) While on the whole Candia McWilliam's writing is rather beautiful, she overdoes it on occasion, as when describing a dish of butterscotch instant whip as "a dish of quivering brown dancer's belly, its jewel a pitiless carmine cherry" or declaring that, "Like women, the Low Countries are used to invasion"
(2) I wasn't sure what the function of Daisy's Dutchness was, but possibly it was to allow McWilliam to make these two statements through her:
"The British, even the rich ones, drink envy with ice and a slice"
"In all flat lands, the sky is bigger."
(3) The story is partly an examination of how females interact. As Daisy remarks:
"Women all together could affect each other like small moons."
(4) On a practical level, if you read this novel, you will come away having learned (a) how to skin an eel and (b) how to eat a smoked eel, as well as (c) what to use to preserve wedding dresses:
(a) and (b): "To skin an eel, imagine taking down the socks of a soaked child, swiftly and mercifully. To eat a smoked eel as the Dutch did in my childhood, lift your head and swallow like a cormorant"
(c) "black, acid-free tissue paper".
(4) I cannot decide if this statement, made by Daisy, is profound or just the bleeding obvious:
"Fear is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds."
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