One of the good things about belonging to a book group is that, if run democratically, you will often find yourself reading books you would not have chosen for one reason of many reasons. So with Rebecca which had slipped past me at various points in my reading life when I might have stumbled upon it. For example at the time that we were taking annual holidays in Cornwall I found a copy of Vanishing Cornwall in a local bookshop and found it both informative and engagingly written: readable but writing of a very high calibre. This was my first literary encounter with du Maurier. I subsequently read The House on the Strand (written more than thirty years after Rebecca)which is a compelling read:
Wiki: "Like many of du Maurier's novels, The House on the Strand has a supernatural element, exploring the ability to mentally travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand - but not to influence them. It has been called a Gothic tale, influenced by writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, and the psychologist Carl Jung, in which a sinister potion enables the central character to escape the constraints of his dreary married life by travelling back through time. The narrator agrees to test a drug that transports him back to 14th century Cornwall and becomes absorbed in the lives of people he meets there, to the extent that the two worlds he is living in start to merge. "
And then I found another title in second hand, A Cornish Childhood, by A L Rowse and then I moved on.
And now thanks to the Val de Saire book club I have met Rebecca.
Rebecca is a thriller novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier. A best-seller, Rebecca sold 2,829,313 copies between its publication in 1938 and 1965, and the book has never gone out of print. The novel is remembered especially[1] for the character Mrs Danvers, the fictional estate Manderley, and its opening line:
Literary technique
The famous opening line of the book "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." is an iambic hexameter. The last line of the book "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea" is also in metrical form; almost but not quite an anapestic tetrameter.
What I thought:
A novel that has never been out of print and sold nearly 3 million copies in the 30 year interval after its publication. In 2017, it was voted the UK's favourite book of the past 225 years in a poll by bookseller W H Smith!!!
For me it started as a slow-burner of a novel. Mrs Van Hopper and her companion are staying at a hotel in Monte Carlo. Both these characters made me squirm a bit, Mrs Van Hopper’s shameless pushiness and the younger woman’s reticence and self-effacing manner. These are the opening chapters and then with the marriage of the young woman and Max de Winter the narrative takes off. Our ‘heroine’ was led like a lamb to slaughter. Du Maurier cleverly drew the creepily manipulative and poisonous Mrs Danvers well and the new young wife’s fearfulness and blind innocence at times made me want to shake the book at her! It was hard to feel sorry for her you just wanted her to show some mettle. She does finally gain confidence and become more assertive when Mrs Danvers is humbled. It was hard to warm to any of the characters except the man on the beach who refused to give up his secrets even though it was for fear of being locked into an asylum.
Gradually the novel shifts from a psychological drama about obsession to a thriller: will the killer be unmasked and brought to justice. I thought this plot was cleverly written and at just the right pace. The twists with regard to Rebecca’s visit to the gynecologist and her confrontation with Max in the boat hut were clever. I did guess that Rebecca’s shooting was something which she engineered.
A great ending to the book, rightly famous in the world of literature.
Two further comments: As the story reaches its climax I found myself wanting Max to ‘get away with it’. This sometimes happens when I read a book and a character is so obviously guilty but the author has contrived to make you engage with the guilty one. I think that is skillful writing because the author has manipulated her reader. Secondly it never occurred to me until I came to write this review that the second Mrs de Winter is never named. I went to the opening chapters to check what it was, assuming I had forgotten it, only to find we are never told. I wonder what prompted du Maurier to use that device? Perhaps it was to emphasize her identity as the second Mrs de Winter rather than a person in her own right and perhaps also to subordinate her to Rebecca whose ‘presence’ is constant and who is mentioned so often in the text."
