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The Stranger House, for which this novel is named, is an inn in Illthwaite, a Cumbrian village that time forgot. To it have come Sam Flood, an Australian mathematician about to take up a place at Cambridge and Miguel Madero (Mig), a failed priest and history student with an interest in the Catholic Recusancy of Elizabethan times and particularly in one Father Simeon, who may or may not have buckled under the torturous attentions of a notorious priest-hunter. Sam, too, has an interest in Illthwaite's past, as it was from here that her grandmother, under the infamous Child Relocation scheme, was dispatched as a child to Australia and an early death. When Sam's father learned that his mother had died giving birth to him when she was only 12, he became convinced that she must have been raped by one of the priests overseeing her in the Australian Catholic orphanage she ended up in and he developed a hatred for the Church and all its works that he has passed on to his daughter. Both Sam and Mig have peculiar talents: in addition to her mathematical genius, Sam has an eidetic memory whilst Mig suffers from occasional bouts of stigmata and sees ghosts. The antipathy between them is only to be expected; the experienced reader may also expect how it will end. The emotional climate of the novel is tense and stormy. Both Mig and Sam are very tightly wound, Sam in particular harbouring a grievance on her grandmother's behalf that expresses itself in uncontrolled anger, violent verbal outburst, and general rudeness that seems out of character for the rational mathematician she is supposed to be. We long for her to dial it back a bit -- so much rage seems disproportionate, if not to the original injustice, at least for one who suffered it personally not at all. And, despite Hill's fond memories of a sojourn in Australia, it is hard to avoid seeing in her portrayal a certain residual British snobbery when confronted with brash Oz. Mig, too, seems unduly perturbed at the possible fate of one of his ancestors who may have come to a sticky end in the 16th century in the environs of Illthwaite. Others in the neighbourhood are similarly obsessed with the past, but they are largely determined to keep it well-buried and with it whatever guilt or responsibility they may have incurred for what went on almost 50 years ago. At the core of this book, despite its surface silliness and Gothic carry-on, is a serious centre, one that raises grave questions of personal responsibility, the persistence of injustice, the conflict between faith and reason, and the potential of religion for both good and evil. I may myself prefer Hill's extravagances curtailed by the discipline of the police procedural, as they are in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, but one cannot argue with Ian Rankin's observation (quoted on the book jacket) that "Reginald Hill's novels are really dances to the music of time, his heroes and villains interconnecting, their stories entwining." Readers willing to adopt Rankin's generous perspective will happily overlook Hill's excesses and be rewarded with a dazzling journey through history and time.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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