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The story pivots around Hundreds Hall, a once regal stately home which has fallen steadily into decay and disrepair and with it what’s left of the land-owning Ayres family. In Hundreds Hall we find the once glamorous, widowed Mrs Ayres and her two remaining children; Caroline a sturdy and practical spinster in her twenties and her older brother Roderick, injured in the war and struggling to perform his role as of Lord of the Manor.
Our narrator is the prim family doctor, Dr Farrady who is about as unsympathetic a narrator as you can imagine. As the story goes on the Doctors true colours are revealed and it is a testament to Walters’s story telling ability that you continue to be drawn so into a tale told by a selfish, self-righteous, whiney man. A man who carries a chip so huge it threatens to topple him over, taking the Ayres family with him. Bitter about his lot as an upwardly mobile professional, Farrady wishes he was born into the upper-classes. His fixation on class is a theme the book explores subtly and well and it translates into a fixation with Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a nursery nurse, and the family that live there.
Without giving too much away, the book plots the Ayres’ demise and Farrady’s role in it. The doctor believes himself a helpful, needed confidante to the family and wise medical man. He is deluded. His obsession (however unconscious it may be) with the Hall as a representation of what he hasn’t got but wants to the point of desperation has a chilling impact on the Ayres’ fate.
Walters is able to expertly intertwine a delicate debate about the changing landscape of English society and class with a haunting tale which at times was so scary I had to stop reading it at night! The subtly of the writing makes it frighteningly believable yet at the same time leaves open the question of what really is happening at Hundreds Hall. Is it an external supernatural force which haunts the isolated Ayres’? Or is it their internal madness which causes them to self destruct rather than change to meet the increasingly modern world? Or is it something/someone else entirely? I’ll leave that to you to decide. The author herself points in one direction with the brilliant ending which rounds the events of the book off so well and so disturbingly you’ll need to sleep with the lights on.
C
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