Author: Daphne du Maurier
Title: The House On The Strand
Year of publication: 1969
Page count: 336
Rating: ★★★
Sudden cold spells in late summer are the perfect time of year to pick up a du Maurier novel, and this time, I felt inclined to go for a lesser known work, rather than continue with yet another hailed classic. This was her penultimate novel, and the last which was somewhat well-received—written, set, and published at the end of the 60’s, when psychedelics were all the rage, this is a rather unusual story about hallucinogenic drugs and time travel. A slight supernatural element is something I’m used to in du Maurier’s work, but I was not expecting science fiction from her!
While fascinating because it certainly was a departure from the gothic tales of hers I’ve read thus far, this novel failed to reel me in the way she has always managed to do. A mysterious drug, concocted by the scientist and old friend to our narrator, enables him to travel back in time to 14th century Cornwall, and he becomes so absorbed in the lives of the long-dead people he gets to observe that he starts becoming addicted to these trips, until his two realities start to dangerously merge. Whether the drug causes such vivid hallucinations, or whether it opens an actual window to the past, is left up to the reader.
“The first thing I noticed was the clarity of the air, and then the sharp green colour of the land. There was no softness anywhere. The distant hills did not blend into the sky but stood out like rocks, so close that I could almost touch them, their proximity giving me that shock of surprise and wonder which a child feels looking for the first time through a telescope. Nearer to me, too, each object had the same hard quality, the very grass turning to single blades, springing from a younger, harsher soil than the soil I knew.
I had expected—if I expected anything—a transformation of another kind: a tranquil sense of well-being, the blurred intoxication of a dream, with everything about me misty, ill-defined; not this tremendous impact, a reality more vivid than anything hitherto experienced, sleeping or awake. Now every impression was heightened, every part of me singularly aware: eyesight, hearing, sense of smell, all had been in some way sharpened.”
The narrative starts in medias res, with the protagonist “arriving” in the past on his first experimental drug trip. The chapters more or less alternate between the present day narrative and the drug-induced time travel, and while this managed to evoke a sense of tension and anxious expectation in me (as I suppose any junkie might feel at the promise of a fix), there was something about the pacing that felt off and was really unsatisfying—which may have been the intended effect. The prose was as vivid as ever, but the imposing house and brooding Cornish landscape didn’t feel as essential to the story as in the other novels of hers that I’ve read, and rather than adding to the atmosphere, I would find myself skimming over the descriptions of craggy coastlines, foggy riverbanks, and marshy fields.
Thanks to the author recycling the same handful of names for a variety of 14th century characters, I had trouble keeping them straight, despite the provided family tree and map. Using them might’ve eased some of my confusion, but I read it on Kindle and honestly wasn’t inclined to flip to the front of the ebook every time I encountered another John or Henry I couldn’t place, so I just bumbled along. Everyone seemed to be related or having affairs with one another, and it was all the same to me—for this reason, the present day storyline was the much more engaging narrative, and du Maurier certainly did a fantastic job at getting the narrator’s increasing loss of his grip on reality across, as he slowly loses interest in his mundane life and becomes engrossed in the more dramatic soap opera style lives he gets to watch on his trips. The repressed homosexuality which was often alluded to also added to the fascination, although ultimately, it felt a bit gratuitous. I also rather liked how the trips came with a cost – it’s pretty clear that du Maurier thought the pleasures drugs provide don’t justify the long-term consequences of them.
All in all, it wasn’t as engrossing as her other stories, but it was wonderfully written, and it was interesting to explore this different side of her body of work—there was something decidedly unsatisfying about the book though (and I don’t mean the ambiguous ending)—it was almost as if she didn’t flesh her own premise out enough. Two and a half stars, rounded up for the wonderful prose and her daring to try something outside her usual story realm.
watercolorstain 