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The other day an ARC turned up of Michael Marshall Smith's newish novel The Servants (2007), and for some reason I decided to read it as soon as I'd finished book #27 (Alan Lightman's Time Travel & Papa Joe's Pipe). Don't misinterpret that "for some reason"! I'm not implying any irrationality in wanting to read an MMS book as soon as poss. I've read a couple of his books and enjoyed them. Although I wouldn't describe myself as a major fan, I'd choose to read something of his over books by about 99% of other authors.
11-year-old Mark is stuck in a Brighton house with his mother, who's evidently dying, and his new stepfather, against whose presence in their lives Mark is acting out with a vengeance. Oh, and the house also contains, in its basement, a sitting tenant: an old lady who befriends Mark and who shows him the unseen, unknown part of the building, all those passages and stairs, now dilapidated, that were once upon a time the province of the servants. Over successive visits to the servants' quarters, as upstairs his mother declines, Mark becomes able to see the long-departed staff, then more and more involved in their world -- and they in his.
The Servants presents itself initially as a sort of Jonathan Aycliffe-style ghost story . . . which is a pity, because Aycliffe (aka Daniel Easterman) was so much better than just about anyone else at this sort of thing. Further, while Mark's acting out is accurately portrayed, it is so rather heavy-handedly; as any parent will tell you, the great thing about kids' acting out is that it's completely, unbelievably, mind-rottingly goddam boring, so an accurate and if anything overstated depiction is not exactly the recipe for reader delight. Nonetheless, MMS is never anything but an eminently readable writer, and so I kept turning the pages happily enough.
If ever there were a novel that hides its splendours until the later pages, The Servants is it. What I'd come to believe was a nicely written but frankly rather modest ghost story turns out to be a sort of allegorical-reification tale along similar lines to the trick Connie Willis pulled off in her 2001 novel Passages. In a way, The Servants is the better of the two books: for one thing, it's very, very much shorter, so lacks much of the flaccidity that mars the Willis work. Further, The Strangers is content with a much smaller stage: its concern is not with catastrophe (Willis's book has the sinking of the Titanic as a focus) but with the more localized (and hence even more fearful) disaster of a boy losing his father to divorce and his mother to cancer.
But all of these good things happen in the last fifty or so pages -- as does the influx of a few nice Lewis Carroll touches. I happen to like it that this is the case. I can imagine many readers being frustrated by it.
Overall, then, The Strangers is . . . how can I express this? . . . a minor work, but a good minor work.
NB: I have a major nitpick with the ARC, which came from Eos. The 2008 Eos edition is not, as stated on the title verso, the first edition. The first edition was issued by the small, Massachusetts, PS-style press Earthling Publications in 2007.
Oh, and Nitpick #2: I assume (perhaps wrongly) that Earthling were responsible for a few of the odd Americanizations of the text. Even if not, Eos are guilty of failing to amend this. No, Virginia, people in Brighton do not eat cookies. This is a very, very English novel, and in that context there are some amerenglish translations that are just plain idiotic. The "cookies" usage grates almost (not quite) as much as the time I read the US edition of a Brit thriller and there was a long discussion of the Cornish pastries the cast were eating.
