It seems a very long time since I last wrote here – first my daughter and I spent ten days at my parents’ house in England and then I came home to find computer problems and poor Typepad, mine blog host, under attack. If you have tried to read or comment here and been unable to see anything, those attacks are the reason; I think everything has been resolved now. So rather than writing anything here, or visiting those of you with weblogs, I’ve been rearing tadpoles…
visiting a castle…
(Orford castle, in Suffolk)
near which was a garage for an unusual form of transport, perhaps favoured by the inhabitants of the castle…
(you should click on the picture to make it better and see what is behind the doors...)
and even sewing a dress for Felicity Bunny (there are no bloodstains on it, but it was rather grubby by the time I had finished it) (I know you are all really interested in my handicrafts).
While in Britain I learnt that there was to be a new television series of Jamaica Inn and predictably from that instant the only book in the entire world I wanted to read was Jamaica Inn. How fortunate that my mother had a copy! I rushed to the bookshelves. Alas, there was a row of Daphne du Mauriers, but not the one I particularly wanted. So I consoled myself with Frenchman’s Creek. And then The Flight of the Falcon. And then My Cousin Rachel. At which point I was back in Belgium and with no further Daphnes so the binge had to cease, although my kind mother is sending me a copy of Jamaica Inn she bought online. I am coping.
(Photograph of du Maurier from her obituary by Richard Kelly on the Daphne du Maurier website)
I had forgotten just how good a writer Daphne du Maurier was. (So now I am going to bore on rather a lot about the three I read, and there are lots of spoilers, so if the sun is shining where you are as brightly as it is here, I should stop reading and take a book to a nice leafy reading spot somewhere.) She can write convincing characters and compelling plots, but it’s her ability to create atmosphere, ambiguity and place which really distinguish her writing. Frenchman’s Creek might be a fairly conventional romantic tale of an 
aristocrat and a pirate were it not for the lush descriptions of the Cornish landscape and the loving depiction of Navron, the house where the heroine, Dona St Columb, seeks refuge from her stale life at court in London and her dissatisfaction with her husband. At Navron and in her relationship with a French pirate she finds freedom and a better self. In The Flight of the Falcon, the murder of a beggarwoman drives Arminio Fabbio back to his childhood home in Reggano (a fictional Umbria), and du Maurier layers his present reality (post-war Italy) with his childhood, the more distant past of the Renaissance, illusions, dreams, fantasies, secrets and suspicions, so that the distinctions between them become more and more blurred and the unreal is real. My Cousin Rachel is set in nineteenth-century Cornwall, a less sensual Cornwall than that of Frenchman’s Creek, but one whose blustery sea views and rural isolation is contrasted with a nightmarish, torpid Florence of sinister inhabitants whose expressions, language and behaviour the narrator, Philip Ashley, cannot fathom. Philip visits Florence after receiving worrying letters from his cousin Ambrose, who unexpectedly had married an Italian woman during a sojourn in Italy for his health. When Philip arrives, Ambrose is already dead; shortly after Philip’s return to Cornwall Rachel, the widow, pays him a visit and Philip’s initial hatred of her turns into obsessive love. Philip’s home is old-fashioned, dusty and very definitely arranged to cater for masculine taste without ‘feminine’ comforts (although I can’t imagine anyone reading the descriptions of it who wouldn’t want, like me, to live there); Rachel’s villa outside Florence is beautiful but stripped bare when Philip visits it, its centre a space, a courtyard, containing only a dripping fountain and a poisonous laburnum. Do the houses accurately reflect their owners’ characters, or just Philip’s perception of them? And Rachel’s growing influence over Philip is mirrored by her improvements to his estate (whose name is never given), some of which may be unsuitable given the Cornish weather. Her death comes about through a combination of place and character: it is directly caused by an incomplete bridgeway in one of the improvements she had begun in the gardens, and less directly to the changes she’s wrought on Philip, inspiring first obsessive hate, then love, then hate again, so that he chooses not to warn her of the danger of stepping on that particular construction.
These two latter novels have much in common. Both Arminio and Philip have intense relationships with older brother figures, and both tell us about a charismatic central character whom they do not understand but whose actions they interpret for us anyway. Both stories bear an element of predestination. In The Flight of the Falcon, Aldo is explicitly linked with the fifteenth-century duke Claudio, who may have been 
insane and was certainly cruel, while Arminio is implicitly allied with Claudio’s younger brother, the ‘good’ Carlo, and the modern brothers suffer the same fate as their predecessors. Yet Claudio is associated both with Christ (when tempted in the wilderness by the Devil to seize earthly power) and with the Devil, while in Ruggano's annual festival both Arminio and Aldo play the part of Claudio. Du Maurier seems to be using the idea of predestination here to open up questions of moral interpretation. Is Aldo’s megalomania exonerated because his exercise of power has had ‘good’ results, and because his festival, which could so easily have become a bloodbath, has instead united the townspeople and the students? She also uses it to reveal Arminio’s complicity in what happens, his similarity to Aldo and his weakness. The drama of Philip and Rachel also contains an element of predestination in that Philip is so strikingly like his ‘guardian, father, brother, counsellor’ Ambrose in appearance and temperament he is bound to fall in love with Rachel too. But Philip’s identification of himself with Ambrose and his belief in their shared fate may encourage him to see connexions where there are none, to assume responsibilities which he does not have (giving his estate to Rachel because Ambrose should have done so) and to misread not only what happens, but also his own character.
Both Arminio and Philip are unreliable, concealing secrets, failing to understand their own motives, passing off their perceptions, tainted as they are by suspicions and emotions, as fact. Philip is particularly culpable. (And he doesn’t like reading!) As readers, we’re locked inside his head and forced to look out of his eyes, but du Maurier gives us glimpses of alternative viewpoints and allows us to read against his narrative, for instance when he is incredulous that Rachel might be afraid of him after he attempts to strangle her. (!!!) Since facts are often hard to discern and emotions change so rapidly, clear distinctions between right and wrong are hard to make. Is Rachel innocent or guilty – or both? Is Aldo insane or wise – or both? On what terms can we judge either of them? I am now drumming my fingers with anticipation of the moment when our lovely postman delivers Jamaica Inn...