The Little Stranger jellemzők
It is 1947; the nation is exhausted by victory, and neither the National Health Service nor the National Trust has yet come along to pick up the pieces. The scars of war heroes are fresh and great country houses are battered from the military's occupation, their parks dug over for vegetable plots. The civilian population is depressed by rationing, homelessness, postwar gloom and austerity. Dr Faraday is a country GP practising in Warwickshire, in the area where he was born, to poor parents who sacrificed everything for his education. Unmarried, he is slouching into an impecunious and unloved middle age, apprehensive about the coming changes in medical practice and pessimistic about his future. Many of his patients live in rural slums; he has never been taken up by the local gentry. Socially, he finds himself awkwardly poised between classes. He is conscious that some of the boys with whom he shared a school bench are now no more than labourers. He has grasped his opportunities, but the strain shows; he is unable to eradicate, within himself, the signs of his past struggle.
