Category: Book Reviews

Still a Favourite

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Rebecca001

Rebecca begins with a dream:

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

That first line has never failed to delight me and that dream sets the tone for the book. I’ve read it many times and each time I fall under its spell. Identity is a recurrent theme, just who was Rebecca, what was she really like and what lead to her death. I still want to know the narrator’s name and her awe of Rebecca still exasperates me. Daphne du Maurier described the book to her publisher as:

a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower … Pyschological and rather macabre.

Dreaming is another theme. The new Mrs de Winter is in awe of Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife, and has nightmares about her. She daydreams, imagining what Rebecca was like, how beautiful she was, how much Maxim and everyone else must have loved her and how capable and talented she was. She pictures what she thinks life was like for the family in the past and imagines what will happen in the future. She builds up false pictures in her mind and lacks the courage to demand the truth.

Then of course there is the house, Manderley:

A thing of grace and beauty, exquisite and faultless, lovelier even than I had ever dreamed, built in its hollow of smooth grassland and mossy lawns, the terraces sloping to the gardens, and the gardens to the sea. (page 73)

There is a nightmarish quality to the house, approached down with a dark and twisting drive, that turns and twists like

“a serpent … very silent, very still … like an enchanted ribbon through the dark and silent woods.

Then coming out of the dark woods the drive is edged on either side by

a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were among the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddeness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. they startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before. (pages 71 and 72)

The “slaughterous red”  symbolises blood and death. The rhododendrons intrude into the house, not only are they growing outside the morning room “blood-red and luscious”, making the room glow with their colour, but they are also filling the room – on the mantlepiece, on the writing desk and floating in a bowl on a table. There are more shocks lying in wait for the new Mrs de Winter, a shy and socially awkward young woman, married to a man twice her age, haunted by Rebecca and as she struggles to fit in with the social class, her confidence is continually undermined by her own insecurity and the hostile and resentful presence of the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, whose eyes were “dark and sombre” in her “white skull’s face”, “malevolent” and “full of hatred”.

A novel where secrets are only just  supressed, like a ticking bomb waiting to explode revealing the devastating truth.

Fire in the Blood

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I bought Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky ages ago, full of enthusiasm to read it at once. I read a few pages and then for some unknown reason left it lying around unread. A few weeks ago I borrowed Fire in the Blood from my local library and once I started to read it I just had to finish it. Now I’ll have to read Suite Francaise as soon as possible.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Russia in 1903 and fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a best selling novelist. She moved from Paris just before the German occupation in 1940 and went to live in the small village of Issy-l’Eveque (in German occupied territory). She was arrested in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz where she died in August 1942.

Fire in the Blood is set in a small village based on Issy-l’Eveque between the two world wars. The narrator is Silvio looking back on his life and gradually secrets that have long been hidden rise to the surface, disrupting the lives of the small community. The people are insular, concerned only with their own lives, distrusting their neighbours. All Silvio wants now is a quiet life, but he cannot avoid being drawn into helping Colette, his cousin Helene’ s daughter, when her husband Jean is found drowned in the mill stream.

Although only a short book (153 pages) it is an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men,  lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. Silvio in his old age feels rejected by life and lonely. In his youth he had travelled the world, seeking his fortune, propelled by the fire in his blood.  Now his passions are extinguished and he no longer knows who he is. He remembers :

When you’re twenty love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it’s over you can hardly remember how it happened … Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out. Faced with this blaze of dreams and desires, I felt so old, so cold, so wise. (page 45)

The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire … That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest. (page 152)

The characters are drawn with simplicity and detachment, but this is deceptive as there are layers upon layers and there is a brooding, silent and haunting atmosphere, almost menacing as the truth emerges. Added to this is the writing itself full of rich descriptive passages of the land and the people. It is indeed a gem of a book.

The End of Summer by Rosamunde Pilcher

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

end of summerI don’t often listen to audiobooks but a car journey up to Scotland seemed the ideal time to do so – reading in the car just makes me feel queasy. Rosamunde Pilcher’s The End of Summer read by Geraldine James was entertaining enough to fill in three hours of the journey. It’s easy listening, and though the ending was predictable I did enjoy it.

After years living in America, Jane Marsh is summoned back to Scotland by her grandmother to stay at her beloved Elvie, the remote and beautiful family estate. There she is reunited with her dashing and handsome cousin Sinclair, whom she had idolised as a child. She had dreamed of marrying Sinclair but meeting him again she finds he is not as she remembered and she wonders whether he can be trusted. In contrast to Sinclair is David Stewart, the dependable and efficient family lawyer.

This is a gentle story, although there is one dramatic episode towards the end of the book. The most enjoyable parts for me were the descriptions of Elvie, the loch and the surrounding landscape and Geraldine James’s reading of the story.

Castle Dor

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Castle Dor

Castle Dor by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier is the first book I’ve read for the What’s In a Name 2 Challenge ( a book with a “building” in its title). It’s also been on my to-be-read list for at least a year. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was born in Fowey, an English professor, writer and critic, the editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), who wrote under the pseudonym “Q”.

Although not as good as Rebecca it’s an interesting book, mainly because of its joint authorship and its retelling of the legend of the tragic lovers Tristan and Isolde. It was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s last unfinished novel and Daphne took it over at the request of his daughter after his death. It came at a low point in her life and I think she struggled to complete the book. The first part (by Quiller-Couch) has a more mysterious, mystical and dreamlike atmosphere than the latter part which is written in a more straight forward and somewhat chatty style.

Place and time are fluid as events from the past are repeated in the present and the characters are held by something stronger than themselves, linking them inexorably to the past. The land itself, its history and above all the ancient earthworks at Castle Dor are central to the story. Castle Dor, an “ancient cirque, deserted, bramble-grown”, once a bastion “filled with men commanding this whole wilderness now grass mounds, sleeping under a quiet sky.”

There are different versions of the Tristan and Isolde legend and these are explored in the story by Dr Carfax and his patient Mr Tregentil. Set in Cornwall in the 1860s, Dr Carfax recognises the signs that Linnet and Amyot Trestane are unknowingly re-enacting the tragic events that befell Tristan and Isolde. He tries to to keep them apart but from the moment she heard his name and met him

… she had a strange sensation of something breaking out of the past to connect itself with something immediately to come.

And Linnet too late realises

 … that bliss is transient, that nothing perfect lasts…

Cider With Rosie

Published on by Margaret

Woolpack Slad1
Woolpack Inn, Slad

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee was one of the best books I read last year. It’s one of those books that I’ve been meaning to read for years. The in 2007 D and I had a holiday in a cottage at Wick Street near Painswick  and one day we walked from the cottage to Slad where Laurie Lee used to live. We dropped into the Woolpack for a drink and had a look at the church.

Slad church
Slad Church

Knowing what a place looks like makes reading about it much more real and so when I finally read Cider with Rosie I could easily visualise what it was like when Laurie Lee lived there as a child. He was born in Stroud (another place we visited) and moved to Slad when he was three in 1917. Cider with Rosie covers his childhood years and it is absolutely fascinating. His love for his mother permeates the book (his father had left his wife with seven young children):

 She lived by the easy laws of the hedgerow, loved the world, and made no plans, had a quick holy eye for natural wonders and couldn’t have kept a neat house in her life. What my father wished for was something quite different, something she could never give him – the protective order of an unimpeachable suburbia, which is what he got in the end. (page 121)

Although they never had enough money they were happy, his mother “possessed an indestructible gaiety which welled up like a thermal spring.”

I’ve already written a bit about the book – about how village of Laurie Lee’s childhood is no more. The village was still linked to the past. It …

had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens.

It was something we just had time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know – the blood and beliefs of generations who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did, at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something as old as the glaciers.

…

There was a frank and unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as a kind of ritual which no one accused or pardoned. (pages 104 -5)

I feel I could reach back and experience some of that way of life through this book. Slad even today is a beautiful place, set in a valley in the Cotswolds, surrounded by fields, streams and woodland.

woodland-near-slad
Woodland near Slad

Book Notes – Les Misérables

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

I’m so behind with writing about the books I’ve read. I now have eight to do – five from the end of last year and three that I’ve read this month.

I’ve already written a snippet (see this post) about Les Misérables, so I’ll begin with this book. My first encounter with the story was many years ago watching a serialisation on TV and what stood out in my mind from that was the horror of Fantine, desperate for money selling her two front teeth and then towards the end of the book seeing Valjean trudging through the French sewers surrounded by excrement and rats. Reading it last year I realised there is so much more, with a huge cast of characters and covering a sweep of French history in the early 19th century; there’s the Battle of Waterloo and the July Revolution of 1830 which Hugo describes in great detail; there are many digressions and meditations, but basically it’s the story of Jean Valjean the ex-prisoner who is transformed by the actions of Monseigneur Bienvenue, the Bishop of Digne and is pursued by the indefatigable Inspector Javert.

Parts of the book are quite easy reading and I read them quickly. These were parts about the main characters, Valjean, Fantine, her daughter Cosette who Valjean is dedicated to protect, Marius who falls in love with Cosette, the evil Thénardiers and Éponine and Gavroche, their daughter and son. But other parts had me yawning and dragged, when there was too much detail about battles and sieges. Les Misérables cannot compete with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which I think is just so beautifully descriptive that I forget that I don’t like reading about battles and war. Having said that, it is a remarkable book about the forces of good and evil and I enjoyed reading it.