Literary genius or too poetic to move a plot forward - let's find out.
Dates Read: 14/09/24 to 26/07/24
Star rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Word to describe: Dragging
Genre: Gothic Fiction
Trigger warnings: alcoholism, domestic violence, spousal abuse, suggested sexual assault and themes of sexual violence.
After, rather effectively, being told that Daphne Du Maurier is a literary genius, and her books have to strongly take a top position on my shelf, it is no wonder that Jamaica Inn and Rebecca were the two books I had chosen. The latter because of the movie reviews and it's fame and the former because a criminal pub in the middle of nowhere sounds like a recipe for disaster.
We start this book introduced to the opinionated and newly orphaned Mary Yellan. The death of her mother was so tragic it is failed to be mentioned again throughout the book. (Though I guess Jamaica Inn would do that to a girl). So, Mary is packed up and sent to live with her eccentric Aunt Patience and an uncle she has never met (this is Joss Merlyn by the way). She finds her Aunt a shell of her former self, flitting around the kitchen like a skittish wraith, and her uncle, an ape-like man with a foul mouth and a tendency for alcohol abuse and violence. Her new home a battered and half-boarded inn which had definitely seen its glory days the millennia prior. All in all, a great introduction to her new home and family life.
This is where my attention started to wane, and admittedly it had taken me longer than expected to get through this book. Daphne Du Maurier has exceptional writing skills. Vivid imagery and a carefully crafted art of building tension to lead that perfectly timed climax of the story. But - and hear me out. It just went on forever and ever! For approximately two-thirds of the book absolutely nothing happened. There is only so much clambering over the moors a character can do before that entire plot point becomes mute and it is simply a young girl deliberately trying to get pneumonia.
Mary is set to work immediately and warned against upsetting her uncle (should the brute decide to punish her with that suggested a mixture of physical and sexual violence). Utterly charming. And then spends a large amount of the book having the most insufferable commentary about her family. This inner dialogue would have been interesting if it had not felt un-necessarily repetitive. But nonetheless, I continued because I did want to see where the plot was heading and the secondary characters in this book were a delight to read about.
Insert a rakish youth Jem Merlyn (her uncles younger brother but we'll just ignore these incest vibes), who sets his eyes upon Mary and, well you get the picture, it's love at first insult. Jem is a bad boy and Mary's awfully black and white moral compass self cannot bear to fall for him. Because, what else is a classic book if the female main character is not absolutely torn apart by her feminine desires to bed a man eye roll.
And then he disappears for while, true love indeed. The secondary characters seem to do this frequently. They appear and become Mary's fascination for a few chapters and then are seemingly never mentioned again for over half of the book.
Mary then finds herself wrapped in a living nightmare of alcohol fuelled fits of rage, witnessing a murder, and the numerous bouts of illegal activity that take place at her new home. This is where the plot finally begins to get interesting. The tension builds, the writing is more fast paced and filled with dark imagery, and is effectively a literary students wet dream. And then just when you think that the plot could not get any more out-there in wildness it just ends. Everything is seemingly perfect and would you know Daphne Du Maurier is one hell of a plot twist writer.
My initial review on Goodreads after reading this book for the first time is the perfect summary for my extended babbling.
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