RETRO READS
VAL HENNESSY
REBECCA (1938) by Daphne Du Maurier (Virago £7.99)
If you have yet to discover Du Maurier’s great masterpiece, then you are in for a treat.
from the hypnotic opening — ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . ’ — you are in thrall to the narrator, a timid young woman who, after a whirlwind romance, has married Maxim de Winter, a wealthy widower old enough to be her dad.
The couple move to his isolated, clifftop Cornish mansion, a place of secrets and silences ruled over by a malevolent housekeeper.
The unassertive bride struggles to cope with servants, Maxim’s moodiness and a growing sense of inferiority as she contrasts her plain, self-effacing self to Rebecca, the glamorous, fun-loving, not-tobe-mentioned first Mrs de Winter who drowned in a boating accident, her body never found.
a brilliant plot twist transforms a rags-to-riches tale into a thriller of spectacular dimensions that is still capable — after 77 years — of sending shivers up your spine.
A GOAT’S SONG (1994) by Dermot Healy (Faber £9.99)
BOTH the horrors of alcohol abuse and the savage repercussions of a politically divided Ireland are issues depicted in healy’s big, mesmerising, passionate novel.
Lapsed Catholic Jack, whose morning orange juice is ‘laced with vodka’, is a playwright who lives in a fisherman’s cottage on Eire’s bleak West Coast.
obsessed to the point of madness by the collapse of his love affair with a Protestant actress, he conjures up her presence and their past relationship in his fevered imagination. she, too, is a boozer, and promiscuous, and you hold out very little hope for their future together.
But through Jack’s rollercoaster reminiscences, you see how the fracturing of his love echoes the fracturing of an entire country riven with political and religious feuding.
THE PUMPKIN EATER (1962) by Penelope Mortimer (Penguin £8.99)
MOTHERHOOD, marriage and monogamy are torn apart in Penelope Mortimer’s once- controversial, semi-autobiographical depiction of a wife on the edge of a nervous breakdown. narrator Mrs armitage, obsessive producer of babies, is on her fourth marriage.
What with her army of children, nannies and servants, a large house and money no object, you’d think she’d be happy. But no.
a doctor prescribes pills for her ‘little weeps’. horrible, cheating husband Jake implores: ‘What joy do you think I get out of this god-awful boring family life of yours? Where do I come in?’, until she finally cracks up — in harrods of all places.
It’s difficult to warm to either her or Jake, who says: ‘she’s got everything a woman could want: clothes, car, servants, she’s attractive . . . why doesn’t she go abroad, or make some friends?’
Instead, she wants another baby. By the end of this irritating novel, you feel like banging together the two protagonists’ selfish heads.