House on the Strand

Daphne du Maurier's iconic novel, Rebecca, has been one of my top five favourite books for over a decade, yet I'd not managed to bring myself to read any of her other novels until now. I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps I subconsciously thought they couldn't possibly be as good, but that hasn't put me off other authors. Let's just put it down to being one of those strange reading quirks, a quirk that I am delighted to have overcome when I spotted a copy of The House On The Strand at a charity shop recently.

Published some thirty years after Rebecca, The House On The Strand is a very different novel and a wonderfully bizarre one. I'm not sure whether to categorise it as a thriller or a mystery or even science fiction. Its timeslip premise is so brilliantly executed that I had no trouble at all in overlooking the actual impossibility of the effects that Professor Lane's drug brings on and, instead, allowed myself to be swept into Dick Young's complex reality - or realities as they soon become.

I think I loved reading The House On The Strand as much as I did Rebecca even though the two works brought out such different reactions. The House On The Strand is such a beautiful evocation of Cornwall in the 1960s and in the 1330s and I was absolutely fascinated by the way du Maurier lays the physical landscape of the one over the other. I could clearly envisage both thanks to her lush, enthusiastic descriptions and having her characters see one landscape whilst walking through another is just inspired. The narrative itself is so tense, especially once the drug's perils are understood and Dick's clumsy attempts to keep Magnus's secrets from Vita provide the perfect contrasting relief. The stilted relationship between Dick and Vita felt painfully real so I understood his desire to hide in an alternate reality and du Maurier deftly portrays the drive of addiction. There's so much going on across multiple layers in this novel that I can imagine even after two or three reads I would still pick up on nuances that I had previously missed.

I think I love The House On The Strand almost as much as Rebecca and I am certainly not going to wait another decade to pick up more of du Maurier's work.