The Stranger House

Reginald Hill likes to remind readers that his work is hardly limited to the Dalziel and Pascoe series, and The Stranger House offers a different twist on his usual Northern territory.  It's not a police procedural, although Hill slyly reintroduces a character from same; nor is it a detective story, strictly speaking, because there are no detectives.  Instead, we have a half-English, half-Spanish graduate student researching the lives of English Catholics during the Reformation and an Australian mathematician seeking more information about her grandmother, who arrived in Australia as a child migrant.  The historian, Miguel Madero, is also a lapsed seminarian (but active Catholic) who sees ghosts and once experienced stigmata on an annual basis; the mathematician, Samantha "Sam" Flood, is a blunt-spoken atheist and rationalist with a photographic memory.  Both of them converge on "The Stranger House," a tiny inn that was once part of a long-destroyed abbey, in the equally tiny village of Illthwaite.  And both of their archival quest-romances turn out to hinge on the brutalities meted out in the name of religion: the horrific tortures meted out to Catholic priests during Elizabeth I's reign; the abuse of migrant children relocated to overseas Catholic orphanages in the mid-twentieth century. 

Hill's literary techniques in this novel are not as baroquely experimental as they have been in the D&P series; as a number of writers (including, for that matter, Hill himself) have noted, the later D&P novels deliberately resist translation into television scripts.  For example, Hill gives over about 2/3 of Arms and the Women to a mock-epic and the first-person ruminations of a dying, sibylline observer.  While The Stranger House has some characteristically Hillian features, including inset narratives and a allusive frame derived from the Prose Edda, it by and large rests on straightforward linear plotting.  Similarly, Hill cuts down on the extravagant wordplay--although there is an amusing thematic pun on "the fall."  When characters have fortunate falls, they really fall--off cliffs and church towers, into basements...

Still, for all that Hill claims to be working outside the D&P box here, fans of that series may feel a nagging sense that something is familiar.  In fact, intentionally or not, The Stranger House reworks many of the themes and events from the odd man out in the D&P series, Pictures of Perfection.  Hill sets PoP in Jane Austen land: the tiny village is Enscombe (from Emma), some of the characters have obscure Austen connections, and the main plot rewrites Pride and Prejudice as a gay romance between the world's most astonishingly ugly policeman and Enscombe's tart-tongued bookdealer.  Enscombe isn't "perfect," but it is a kind of utopian space, one that resists what Hill represents as the corrosive tendencies of Thatcherism; the very literariness of its origin puts it outside the "real" world of the rest of the series.  (Dalziel is more on target than he knows when he later dubs it "Brigadoon.")  Illthwaite, the tiny village of The Stranger House, has many of Enscombe's local dynamics, but in a much darker key.  The village may be isolated, but it has noticeably eroded in the face of modernization.  The squire really is frightening, and his heir suffers from guilt for a long-ago (but very real) crime.  The oddball Gowder twins are genuinely destructive and dangerous, not love-lorn mopes.  The stunningly beautiful woman is unavailable to our ex-seminarian, but not because she's in love with the local artist.  (Miguel is a bit slow on the uptake here; readers will figure out what's going on well before someone finally points out the obvious.)  The protagonists' romance is nearly as whirlwind as that of Sgt. Wield* and Edwin Digweed, but any fairy tale ending exists beyond the novel's own end.  The villagers know everything there is to know about each other, but there are some things they would truly like to forget.  And so forth. 

Hill's police procedurals usually work on the strength of their characterization instead of their plotting, although Good Morning, Midnight was more tightly constructed than usual.  TSH is much better than Hill's usual when it comes to pacing, but there's a slight stumble when it comes to the "moral."  Or perhaps it isn't a stumble at all. Since that requires me to give away the ending and the occasional major plot point, let's go below the fold. 

*--Who, like Sam Flood, is eidetic.