The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
Just a quick update, having read Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand. I must say, it’s excellent, if a little different from some of the earlier work – I think it was one of the last full-length novels she wrote.
It’s set at Kilmarth – the house she was living in at the time, between Fowey and Par in Cornwall and it’s passionately rooted in the landscape surrounding it – I actually read it with an OS map of the area to hand and could trace most of the action and locations on it. ‘House on the strand’ is the literal meaning of ‘Tywardreath’, one of the settlements in the area.
This intense engagement with the actual landscape that du Maurier was looking out on while writing was not the only striking feature, however. Like ‘Frenchman’s Creek’ in particular, I felt it had a plot that, if you read it on the back of the dust jacket, sounded so incredible as to make the novel barely worth reading. But, as in ‘Frenchman’s Creek’, it is du Maurier’s great skill that she can render these plots into deeply satisfying and complex narratives.
My last thought was to do with time travel, which is the explicit theme of this book – re-read the above comment before wincing at that. I’ve decided that time-travel might be suggested as the dominant theme in all du Maurier’s work. In ‘Rebecca’ the characters are haunted by the past, in some senses stuck in it, and must find a way to break through into the present. In ‘Frenchman’s Creek’ it’s a case of the author’s ability to transport readers seamlessly back 400 years or so into another world, and yet make it utterly credible and believable. This applies too to Jamaica Inn, but there among her other problems Mary Yelland must seize her future, break the claims that the past makes on her, and escape. Just a thought, anyway.
Tags: Daphne du Maurier, literary fiction, speculative fiction