Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca

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Book Review, Daphne du Maurier, Gothic Novel, Gothic Romance, Psychological Thriller, Rebecca

“The salt wind from the sea”

I must have read Rebecca at least twice, over the years, the first time in my teens, and have seen the film also at least once, but reading it again after many years is a bit of a revelation.

I’m amazed that the very obvious homage to Jane Eyre did not strike me when I read it previously, because this time, that came into clear focus – no doubt helped by the rather excellent forward by Sally Beauman, in the Virago Modern Classics version I recently found in a charity shop, and snapped up, thinking a re-read would be a very good thing.

Now I always knew that du Maurier was a good writer, as well as a popular one, but, again, my re-read this time absolutely underlined how good she was. Freed from any ‘what happens next’ I soaked up structure, atmosphere, and could not help but compare this book to the sometimes relentless ‘psychological thrillers’ subgenre which burgeons on the bestsellers. Rebecca is a literary fiction book, surely, and it’s easy to see how Hitchcock was enamoured by her wonderfully structured, tellingly visual, darkly sub-textural visions

From that wonderfully brilliant, evocative opening line and paragraph, to the masterly ending where she trusts her readers, so that there is no need to spell out, as though to a child, exactly what has happened, but expects that the reader will connect the little clues, the phrases, and complete the picture themselves, she kept me close and spellbound on a disturbing, unsettling, dreamlike journey, almost skating over all sorts of myths lying beneath. Not only were there the clear nods to Jane Eyre, the scary archetypes of female madness, the charismatic, domineering older man – but I thought also of Bluebeard.

Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine

I won’t spell plot, in case, despite this book’s perennial popularity, a lucky person who has never met it happens on this review, but something which struck me forcibly on this reading is the rightness of never naming our narrator, despite the fact that Max de Winter informs her that she has a lovely name. The second ‘Mrs de Winter’ is remarkably unformed. Here is where the young, innocent, exploited ‘companion’ to a spoilt, rich, emotionally unintelligent woman, differs from the innocent and also sometimes exploited Jane Eyre. Jane may be gauche at times, but she has such a clear sense of herself, such discernment. Mrs de Winter has no boundaries, she has incredibly fine empathy and ‘feels the feelings’ of others, but she lacks a healthy and resilient sense of self-worth. She is almost like a mirror-image, or extreme opposite of Rebecca. In this book, we have not one, but I think two (and of course three, if you count the fearsome Mrs Danvers) women with some kind of psychological flaw. Rebecca, the charismatic, is deeply narcissistic, and has boundaries of steel and rock. She is invulnerable to the needs of others. The second ‘Mrs de Winter’ deeply imagines and inhabits what others are feeling; so much so that she loses herself. The other archetype which is played out, is that of Svengali/Trilby – almost anyone can be the second Mrs de Winter’s Svengali – Rebecca’s pervading presence, Mrs Danvers, Maxim, Mrs Van Hopper, and she is manipulated with ease.

Judith Anderson, Joan Fontaine

And of course Trilby was a work of fiction written by du Maurier’s grandfather, George.

Although I can’t read this as part of my ‘Reading the Twentieth’ challenge, as I am still firmly stuck in 1900, I am finding that my reading or re-reading of books from the first half of the twentieth is being influenced by ‘Reading the Twentieth’ Given that the book was published in 1938, it is surprising that there is absolutely no reference to the events brewing in the wider world, although of course the implacable, sociopathic Rebecca, might be a domestic version of tyranny and dictatorship. Du Maurier is I think creating a dark and mythic world here. It is assuredly realistic, not magical realism, yet the at times highly charged language, the implied, destructive eroticism, take the book into a kind of free-floating world of myth, metaphor and sub-consciousness. The only glancing intrusion of politics happens when Max’s sister, Beatrice, imagines that the central crime which the book leads towards might have been carried out by:

a Communist perhaps. There are heaps of them about. Just the sort of thing a Communist would do

I was intrigued to discover, that when the book came out it was pretty well dismissed by the ‘literaries’ – who only saw its populist appeal, and little more. The Times dismissively said “the material is of the humblest…nothing in this is beyond the novelette.” . The novelist V.S. Pritchett predicted the book “would be here today, gone tomorrow”. Inevitably, one can’t help but wonder how the book would have been viewed if the author had been male. Post-feminism, it has been re-assessed by readers and writers precisely with a feminist perspective, in its examination of the power differential between powerful, worldly men, and young inexperienced women.

Menabilly House, Fowey, du Maurier’s Manderley

Du Maurier interestingly wrote this not in her beloved Cornwall, but in Alexandria, Egypt, where her husband, ‘Boy’ Browning, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, was posted with his battalion. She longed for home, and that longing is most powerfully expressed in this book. There was also, by all accounts, a close to home exploration for du Maurier herself, of the powerful drive of female jealousy ‘Boy’ Browning had been engaged before, to a brilliantly dark haired beauty.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited

I will, in fairly short due course, before the wonderful atmosphere of the book begins to let me go, be watching the film on DVD. It will be interesting to compare. I believe (though I can’t quite remember) that Hitchcock went for a less dark ending.

Certainly, du Maurier, in the ‘present’ of the book – most of it involved the second Mrs de Winter looking back at the events of her new married life – gives us a sense of a terrible sterility. The polite forms are observed, and they are used to paper over the chasms of what must remain unsaid.

This is, of course, a properly fabulous book. Perfectly inhabiting genre, and much, much more

Rebecca Amazon UK
Rebecca Amazon USA

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Andrew Michael Hurley – The Loney

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Andrew Michael Hurley, Book Reivew, Gothic Novel, The Loney

Take two crumbling creaking gothic mansions, a hostile, sea-fretted landscape, a small group of incomers, stir well, and shiver……….

Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney is a proper, Gothic literature horror story. But it may disappoint some genre aficionados because Hurley is a writer of literary fiction, subject matter of the book, psychological horror. Though there is certainly creepiness and terror, not to mention a whiff of brimstone within its pages, there are no lovingly lingered over schlocky buckets of gore, crude descriptions of unbelievable monsters and triple headed foul breathed roaring demons. The horror is not laughable or BANG! a sudden shock, rather is steadily mounting, seeping anxiety. Hurley carefully winds his readers in, ratcheting up disquiet, and lets the reader’s own imagination paint un-nameable creep.

Yes this was a book I which I had, on a few evenings, to put aside and not continue with as ‘bedtime read’, because I was feeling distinctly anxious, and had to distract myself with lighter hearted fare.

The setting is the 1970s, and forty years later, with the central character and first person narrator looking back to the events of that time. Tonto and his brother Hanny (Andrew) were the teenage children of strict Catholic parents, living in London. Hanny has never spoken, and goes to a special school. His parents, particularly his rigidly doctrinaire mother, fervently hope and pray that God will vouchsafe a miracle. Every year, they go on pilgrimage to a very low level ‘British Lourdes’ on the North West coast, with their priest and a small handful of other church goers. Every year, the place they visit becomes a little more spooky, a little less wholesome, a little darker.

In fact there are other, older forces at work in the treacherous, inhospitable landscape. The ‘shrine’ which Christianity saw as sacred to St Anne, appeared to be in territory where paganism, witchcraft, and possibly devil worship had an earlier background and continue to exert a dark influence.

Lugworm, Whitehaven Beach, Cumbria Wiki Commons – suitably slithery feeling!

So…..what we have is almost the classic Gothic set-up, beautifully done, and managing to evoke the memory of some cultish, noirish films – I thought of American Werewolf in London (though not a werewolf is in sight – it’s the clannish, sinister mien of some of the locals) Straw Dogs – ditto, though it’s the mounting menace, rather than graphic violence, and, of course, in evocation of a horribly sinister landscape, Susan Hill’s Woman In Black.

And in the middle of nowhere, not one, but two crumbling old houses with history, and a sucking, treacherous tidal path between the two, sea-fret, bone-cold sea, rip-tides………and, oh, the horror, the horror!

On the floor and on top of the long wardrobes were Victorian curious under dusty glass domes that had always frightened me to death when I was a child. Exotic butterflies, horribly bright, impaled to a stump of silver birch, two squirrels playing cricket in caps and pads, a spider monkey wearing a fez and smoking a pipe……….between our beds sat a clock on which the hours were indicated by little paintings of the apostles. Mummer thought it wonderful, of course, and when we were children she told us the story of each of them: how Andrew had elected to be crucified on a saltire; how James was chosen to be with Jesus during the transfiguration and how he was beheaded by Herod Agrippa on his return to Judea

Hurley has several pin-sharp arrows which hit the target – he is excellent at bringing landscape into being as an important ‘character’ As mentioned, the fact that this is ‘about stuff’ and not just a pile of old horrid gore for the sake of creating a pile of old horrid gore made this compulsive reading. I also liked the sympathetic as well as the unsympathetic view of faith – Hurley presents us with credible and rounded people. And, in with the dark mix there are also characters who are warm, wise, and humorous

An extremely positive review of this in the Guardian (quoted on the book jacket) compared Hurley, as an equal, to Du Maurier, Walpole and Shirley Jackson – writers who delved admirably in dark psychology, told a winching up the horror by degrees tale, and wrote with a suitably sharp and precise pen. Generally comparisons have me snorting in derision. This didn’t.

As well as being a fine fine ‘horror’ there’s also lots of ‘about stuff’. I was left thinking on faith, the losing of faith – there is a marvellous, heart-breaking, sickening (in the right way) section on this.

I wasn’t altogether satisfied with the final ten pages where the narrator is in present time, and some ‘closure’ is reached. It seemed a little bit of a let-down after a marvellous, unsettling journey, but this is not enough to retreat from a five star read

I was delighted to receive this as a copy for review from the publishers, John Murray, via bookbridgr. Hurley’s book was published last year, on a print run of 300 by a small independent publishing house, Tartarus Press. It sold out remarkably quickly and a deserved buzz led to the pick-up by Murray. It certainly feels to me like the book is an organic success, rather than something created by the over spinning and over hyping of money men and women

Recommended. Keep the lights on. One word of warning – this may not be the book for those who do like the genre to be high octane action on every page, but if you like your creep to be slowly and inexorably twisted, by increments, this should get you imperceptibly shivering more and more!

The Loney Amazon UK
The Loney Amazon USA

I believe it is only currently available in digital in the States, and won’t make it to hardback till 2016. Available both ‘in wood’ and in digital in the UK.

Lynn Shepherd – The Pierced Heart

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Book Review, Bram Stoker, Dracula, Gothic Novel, Literary pastiche, Lynn Shepherd, The Pierced Heart

Finally, alluring, disciplined, properly disturbing Gothic. Shepherd does The Undead proud!

I am not, by any means, a fan of the vampire genre, which seems to have drowned in a sea of its own overdone gore.

However………….when a writer whose work I admire happens to write a book which features the pointy teethed, sanguinary creatures, that might well draw me in. The writer, not the genre.

Lynn Shepherd is a writer with a wonderful feel for nineteenth century literary fiction, primarily using classics of that period, as springboards to twist and skew and refocus, into detective novels. Her first, Murder at Mansfield Park, made a brilliant reversal of class and fortune out of Fanny Price, an Austen heroine who seemed far more pliant and submissive than most of Austen’s bright, intelligent women.

Her second, Tom All Alone’s (published in the States as The Solitary House) forayed into Bleak House.

Her third was a slight departure. Her central character, private detective Charles Maddox investigates events in the household of the Shelley/Godwin families. I found this third book more troubling, as she made free with the lives of real people, inventing unpleasantness around them. A Treacherous Likeness Like her second, this had another title in the States, as A Fatal Likeness

With her fourth, she returns to the territory of an original classic text, and writing something which her imagination takes her into a kind of parallel course with.

One of the several versions Johann Heinrich Fuseli painted of his iconic The Nightmare. Wki Commons

Having already stated I do not find the vampire genre appealing, I must also say I avoid ‘pastiches’ like the plague, because generally the original does the whatever so much better. The exception, is where something is written which is substantially different, substantially true to itself, and where acquaintance with the original can only delight and enhance reading of the new work – which, however, could PROPERLY be enjoyed on its own substantial merits, without any prior knowledge of ‘the original.

And, I must say, that knowing Shepherd had used the Bram Stoker novel, and her love of nineteenth century literature, and her understanding of place, time, culture and language of the period, and a kind of ability to inhabit the world of the original, I bought this book (not available as a download) eagerly, knowing I would not be disappointed.

And I wasn’t, I absolutely wasn’t. It becomes the fourth ‘vampire’ book I can read – and re-read – Stoker himself, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Marcus Sedgewick’s rather more scientific imagining A Love Like Blood and now, what Shepherd has done.

Her research into historical events (The Great Exhibition, scientific investigations, thinking, and inventions) not to mention her inhabitation of Stoker’s text, is prodigious – but lightly handled. I was swept up feverishly turning pages, and it was only in the pauses between reading that I thought about that research, that plotting, that characterisation, those little embroiders of the text that are sly nods to the original.

Louis Haghe Painting. Crystal Palace – Queen Victoria Opens the Great Exhibition, 1851. Wiki Commons

Inevitably, there IS gore (well, it is within the subject matter) and, yes, it is rather shocking and horrid, but, she really doesn’t luridly indulge the X-rated aspects. And the violence is also plausible, (sadly) in its manner

It’s quite a short book – 233 pages, and is – magnificent.

What I particularly love, love with Shepherd, is her delectable, precise use of language, her structure is beautifully measured, there is a real craft here, which does remind me so much of the more formal language of nineteenth century literature

I found it hard to believe so great a tempest could be coming, seeing the white mares’tails high in the pearly blue sky and the wide sweep of sea barely rippling in the breeze, but the man had some knowledge that I did not possess, for by sunset the clouds had amassed into great heaving battlements of every colour –red, violet, orange, and green, flaming at the west in the dying sun, and darkening behind us as the storm gathered pace. We could see far ahead in the distance, the lights of the little town my father told me was our destination, and as the wind began to rise the captain rigged the ship as high as he dared, desperate to outrun the storm and make port before nightfall. But there was no time. There was a moment of deathly stillness, when the wind seemed to die in the sails………I could hear sea-birds wailing like lost spirits above our heads

Yes, that is right, it’s the arrival, in an unholy storm, by sea, to Whitby

There are several stories going on here. Charles Maddox, like Jonathan Harker, visits the ‘Dracula character’ in his castle home in the Austro-Hungarian empire. And the bulk of the novel is written through the voice of the omnipotent author, describing Maddox’s thoughts and actions.

1797 Robertson Phantasmagoria Capuchine Chapel Paris. Wiki Commons

There is also a parallel story involving ‘Lucy’ the daughter of a kind of stage magician, performing magical acts, and capitalising on the growing success and fashion for spiritualism, in the wake of the American Fox Sisters. Lucy’s story is told in her journal, and is in the first person (from which you can deduce, Lucy’s is the arrival in the storm)

Fox Sisters, Wiki Commons

There is also the omnipotent authorial voice revealing herself to be the self-conscious writer of this book, occasionally making mentions of scientific and social advances which will come in time. This is not in any way intrusive (well, not to me, anyway) and adds another layer, reminding us that this is a referential piece, springing from an established literary heritage, and that writing itself has a history, and that there are cultural fashions in writing.

Shepherd is playful, and she plays well; I like the way she teased me into actively thinking about what I was reading, even whilst my heart was in my mouth and I was being swept along by the ‘what-next, what-next’ of narrative. I needed to be slowed down, to appreciate the detail

There is an afterword, which also explains how her springboard for this book was not only Bram Stoker’s text, but some real history. And I was pleased to note that no REAL persons were harmed in the telling of this story

There is, also a genuine shocker of a climax. One which is ultimately most satisfying

Curiously, as mentioned, this book is not available as digital download in the UK (though Statesiders can get it in this format) It was also not released as an ARC ahead of publication either for NetGalley, UK, or in Vine, UK. Sadly, I suspect Shepherd and her publishers have kept things very low profile indeed over here, following a rather injudicious comment Shepherd made about another author some time earlier this year or last, which attracted loyal fans of the other author out in droves to negative vote on all her previous works. She is a very fine writer, and I hope will be able to recover the growing appreciation she had had from readers, prior to her foolish outburst.

The Pierced Heart Amazon UK
The Pierced Heart Amazon USA