My Weekly Book

Don’t Look Now and other stories - Daphne du Maurier

On the face of it, this looks like a quick and easy read - five short stories, each about 50 pages long, a book by a favourite writer neatly broken down into easily-digestible chunks. In reality, it is anything but. It is not quick because I found that, without exception, I had to stop and think hard about every one of the five tales it contained, sometimes taking two or three days to get it clear in my head exactly what had happened in each one. And not easy because each story, to different degrees, is challenging and disturbing. If I had to assign a genre I would be tempted to say ‘horror’ since the supernatural features to some extent in every single one - however these are not horror stories in the conventional sense.

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The best approach seems to be to deal with the stories one by one. Don’t Look Now is possibly the most cohesive in the anthology and it is not at all surprising to find it has been filmed. It tells the story of a couple mourning the death of a child who attempt to draw a line under tragic events with a holiday in Venice. A disturbing brush with the supernatural piles on the pressure and soon causes events to spiral out of control. It has an almost noirish preoccupation with brooding location, of the dank canal and looming tenement variety, and the pacing and gradual generation of suspense is masterful. As reader we have to try to decide whether the character viewpoint that we are being presented with is objective or not and, if not, what is actually going on. An excellent piece of psychological drama.

Not Before Midnight gave me a lot of trouble in figuring out what on earth was supposed to have happened. This, I think, is down to an overly modern sensibility - I’m not going to spoil things by stating it outright but the vice succumbed to by the schoolteacher protagonist and referred to in the opening pages is considerably less serious than one might initially imagine. I have heard it referred to as ‘coy’ by other reviewers - but it is a du Maurier trope to sometimes write an exceedingly puzzling introduction to a story that only becomes explicable when you’ve read the whole thing (Frenchman’s Creek being the perfect example). This is a clever tale that again uses its location superbly and which showcases the author’s wonderful knack in evoking character voice. And the fact that this took a while to figure out rather added to it, I thought.

A Borderline Case was, to my mind, both the least appealing and by far the most disturbing of the stories in this book. It concerns a fey young actress, possessing the all the supposed indestructibility of the young, the death of her father and a chain of events put into action as a result. I found this the most far-fetched and unlikely of the stories in terms of the events depicted although, as above, the ability of the author to switch between characters of all ages and sexes is clearly evident. And a theatrical milieu is something you’ll find du Maurier using a lot. It’s typical of this collection of stories in that the character faces truly life-changing events - but I turned the last page with a shudder and then spent several days trying to forget about it.

The Way of the Cross is, thankfully, less of a struggle. This story is perhaps less conventional in form than the others, containing multiple character viewpoints, and I feel it might have proved less popular with readers as a result. It follows a collection of (I thought fairly unpleasant) individuals on a trip to Jerusalem on the eve of Passover. The adults are initially so preoccupied with their own concerns that they might as well have travelled to the Isle of Wight, or Rhyl, for all the Holy City has the power to affect them. But gradually it works its magic and each of them returns home having had a character-altering experience. All painful, some with positive effects and some decidedly negative. We are also invited to enjoy the irony that the only member of the party capable of truly appreciating his surroundings is a young child. Again this story may suffer from its lack of obviousness - put the book down and you may find yourself thinking: “So, what was that about?” But let your mind run on it for a day or two and it will become clear.

The collection concludes with The Breakthrough, a science-fiction tale very much in the same vein as the author’s full-length novel The House on the Strand. It’s probably the most self-contained of the stories here and one that I found very satisfying to read. It deals with a very particular form of sci-fi - not of the Mulder and Scully alien-invasion variety, but more of the kind written by John Wyndham in the 1950s where existing and imaginable science is taken to its logical conclusion and beyond. I like this kind of thing when written elsewhere both by Wyndham and du Maurier, and I liked this too.

I’m not sure that I would recommend anyone with no acquaintance whatever with du Maurier’s work to go in via the short stories. With some authors this is a safe bet, but I feel that she used the shorter form in a freer and more experimental way which means that new readers will not necessarily get a good feel for what she is about. Many of these experiments are hits, but some are misses. This collection contains, in my view, a very successful collection of stories but not one that is particularly representative of her work.

I can never come up with a really sure-fire reading order for her novels either, despite lots of time spent trying. But I think I would suggest starting with either Rebecca or Jamaica Inn followed by Frenchman’s Creek, My Cousin Rachel, The House on the Strand or The Scapegoat. If it’s the ‘romance author’ tag putting you off then opt for one of the last three and avoid Frenchman’s Creek like the plague; if you don’t like historical novels make it one of the last two which are a sci-fi story (much like The Breakthrough, above) and a thriller respectively.

But, naturally, you might have a completely different approach.

Some links:

• The Guardian: Mistress of menace
• Wikipedia: Don’t Look Now
• DuMaurier.org fansite – a summary of the stories
• Penguin readers’ notes (intended for teachers)
• The Guardian: on the challenge of adapting the title story for the stage
• Cornwall Guide: The Lady of Kilmarth - recollections of an interview with Daphne du Maurier
• Penguin authors: Daphne du Maurier

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 12:52 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.