My Cousin Rachel By Daphne Du Maurier – Words Of The ’50s Still Haunt

I normally do not read books that are written before I was born.  I mean, way before I was born.  This book “My Cousin Rachel” was published in 1951.  I cannot even relate to what the world was like back then.  Inside a library, deflated by my return of a book that I was not able to even get through the second chapter, I was looking for one that is nourishing, yet easy to read.  I was attracted by this book’s hardcover design.  Very unique, and elegant.  I flipped to chapter one and immediately, I was hooked.

They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.  Not any more, though.  Now, when a murderer pays the penalty for his crime, he does so up at Bodmin, after fair trial at the Assizes.  That is, if the law convicts him, before his own conscience kills him.  It is better so.  Like a surgical operation.  And the body has decent burial, though a nameless grave.

I was intrigued.  What is going to happen next?  I read on.  Before I realized, I was reading in the library, continued reading at Subway over my lunch, and I read it while waiting for Cynthia to leave the office.  I read it in the evening and in the morning over breakfast.  I could not stop.  It became, briefly, my obsession.

The narrator Philip from Cornwall is 24 years old (or shall I say four-and-twenty like in the novel?) when he inherits his elder cousin Ambrose’s estate and wealth.  Ambrose has died in Italy and at that time, was married to his cousin Rachel (who is half English half Italian).  Did Ambrose really die of brain tumor?  Or was he murdered by his new young wife?  Now that Rachel is heading to England, what is her motive and what will happen when the two meet?

“My Cousin Rachel” is a mystery novel, a masterpiece of its genre.  There are layers upon layers that are built onto the story.  There are hooks within the story that lead you onto seeing the characters from different perspectives.  What if this is true?  What if that is true?  Which one is the truth?  Characters come alive by the hands of Du Maurier.  Philip is young and inexperience, arrogance yet innocent.  Rachel is charming and mysterious, unpredictable and full of mood swing.  Both characters are acting on impulse.  Philip’s actions are rather predictable but Rachel’s not.  Other characters too.  Such as Philip’s wise godfather who is always cautious and selfless, knows where to draw a line and when to step aside.  His godfather’s daughter who has always been a good friend of Philip no matter what.  As well as Philip’s servants.  The characters are alive, even those who are dead.  Such mastery in literature, it is a rare gem I have found in recent days.

The center theme, to me, is about the collision of the two worlds – Philip’s and Rachel’s.  It is jealousy and obsession mixed with delusion and deception.  Because Philip is blinded by his background (he has not been raised or around women in his childhood), his infatuation, and his lack of experience, it is hard for the readers to truly decipher who Rachel is, through a man’s and through such a man’s eyes.  This rift could also be caused by the cultural difference between England and the Continent back in the old days whereby there was a certain expectation on a woman’s role in the society in England.  Should a woman yield to money, gift, and power when it came to her marriage?  Could a woman decide for herself?  After reading the novel once, I must admit that there are still much I am unable to grasp.  I feel as though I am hopelessly charmed by Du Maurier’s writing yet at the same time rendered helpless, wondering what the truth is.  I may never find the answer.  It could as well be a mysterious that Du Maurier has taken to the other world.

Part of this book has invoked a powerful and vivid recollection of my younger days.  I am sure most of you can relate too.  The days when we were young and innocent, thinking that anything is possible.  Days when we could give it all without reservation, just gambling everything away.  Days when we first fell in love, the silly things we thought, said, and did.  The clumpy things we did to the opposite sex.  The misunderstanding.  The make ups and the break ups.  The frustration, the infatuation.  Hope and despair.

On a side note, this version I am reading contains an introduction by Sally Beauman.  It is beautifully written.  If I am to take her words for it, “My Cousin Rachel” could well be Daphne Du Maurier’s best work in her entire career.

The next bit of this entry are some of my favorite quotes that I wish to share.  First, on women whom some men cannot live with, cannot live without.

‘I don’t know what’s come over you,’ she said; ‘you are losing your sense of humour.’  And she patted me on the shoulder and went upstairs.  That was the infuriating thing about a woman.  Always the last word.  Leaving one to grapple with ill-temper, and she herself serene.  A woman, it seemed, was never in the wrong.  Or if she was, she twisted the fault to her advantage, making it seem otherwise.  She would fling these pin-pricks in the air, these hints of moonlight strolls with y godfather, or some other expedition, a visit to Lostwithiel market, and ask me in all seriousness whether she should wear the new bonnet that had come by parcel post from London – the veil had a wider mesh and did not shroud her, and my godfather had told her it became her well.  And when I fell to sulking, saying I did not care whether she concealed her features with a mask, her mood soared to serenity yet higher – the conversation was at dinner on the Monday – and while I sat frowning she carried on her talk with Seecombe, making me seem more sulky than I was.

Perhaps it is a high time to note that literature written in the old days has a foreign touch to it.  Fortunately, this book is highly readable.  I found myself chuckle at times by the unfamiliar usage of words.  I find it charming.

Du Maurier describes the scenery well.  The era of the story is unknown.  There is something magical when reading how she paints the picture with words.  Such enchantment.

In December the first frosts came with the full moon, and then my nights of vigil held a quality harder to bear.  There was a sort of beauty to them, cold and clear, that caught at the heart and made me stare in wonder.  From my windows the long lawns dipped to the meadows, and the meadows to the sea, and all of them were white with frost, and white too under the moon.  The trees that ringed the lawns were black and still.  Rabbits came out and pricked about the grass, then scattered to their burrows; and suddenly, from the hush and stillness, I heard that high sharp bark of a vixen, with the little sob that follows it, eerie, unmistakable, unlike any other call that comes by night, and out of the woods I saw the lean low body creep and run out upon the lawn, and hide again where the trees would cover it.  Later I hard the call again, away from the distance, in the open park, and now the full moon topped the trees and held the sky, and nothing stirred on the lawns beneath my window.

Yet another view of a woman through the eye of the narrative (written by a woman!)  I approve the entire paragraph.

Why, in a sudden, had she changed?  If Ambrose had known little about women, I knew less.  That warmth so unexpected, catching a man unaware and lifting him to rapture, and then swiftly, for no reason, the changing mood, casting him back where he had stood before.  What trail of though, confused and indirect, drove through those minds of theirs, to cloud their judgement?  What waves of impulse swept about their being, moving them to anger and withdrawal, or else to sudden generosity?  We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.

This quote is my favorite.  Because it seems so true.

My tutor at Harrow, when teaching in Fifth Form, told us once that truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognise, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.