Author: Daphne du Maurier
Title: Jamaica Inn
Year of publication: 1936
Page count: 302
Rating: ★★★★
The mood for Du Maurier always seems to strike me in high summer, and, without fail, I end up regretting not putting it off until late autumn, because her prose is just so wonderfully atmospheric, it’s perfect for a chilly, rainy day. Jamaica Inn was no exception, and the true protagonist is the Cornish landscape—cold, lonely, vaguely threatening, but infinitely charming despite it all. I hope to someday make it to Cornwall, and the real Jamaica Inn, where du Maurier stayed, and which inspired her to write this period piece.
Admittedly, as a huge Tori Amos fan, some of the lyrics of her song of the same name, inspired by the novel, certainly made more sense after reading it, but after listening to it for many, many years, it had also subtly colored my expectations. I thought that there would be more pirate action—not that I’d necessarily have wanted more than I got, but I just thought there’d be more of it. Instead, our protagonist never sets foot in a boat, and lays eyes on the sea and treacherous craggy coastline exactly once throughout the novel, which mostly plays out at the neglected Jamaica Inn and its surrounding moors—du Maurier likes to take gothic tropes and run with them, and all the novels of hers I’ve read feature a foreboding abode, essentially a central character in its own right, and I absolutely love it.
Our heroine is twenty-three year old Mary, who, following her recently deceased mother’s wish, sells the farm they owned and goes to live with her only surviving relative, her mother’s sister. She remembers her fondly as a pretty, happy, and outgoing woman, but instead she finds Aunt Patience aged, gaunt, and nervous, under the thumb of an abusive and alcoholic husband who runs a gloomy inn that no respectable traveler would think of stopping at. The book opens with Mary sitting in a coach on her way to her new home, and the description of the landscape sets the scene for what she is about to find, and for what her life is soon to become.
“On either side of the road the country stretched interminably into space. No trees, no lanes, no cluster of cottages or hamlet, but mile upon mile of bleak moorland, dark and untraversed, rolling like a desert land to some unseen horizon. No human being could live in this wasted country, thought Mary, and remain like other people; the very children would be born twisted, like the blackened shrubs of broom, bent by the force of a wind that never ceased, blow as it would from east and west, from north and south. Their minds would be twisted, too, their thoughts evil, dwelling as they must amidst marshland and granite, harsh heather and crumbling stone. They would be born of strange stock who slept with this earth as a pillow, beneath this black sky. They would have something of the Devil left in them still.”
I suggest going in with as little prior knowledge as possible—the slow reveal of what’s going on at the inn should come as a shocking surprise. The final twist seemed inevitable and very obvious from early on to me, but despite much of what the final suspense hinged on falling flat in my case, the brooding mood of the novel still affected me, and I was left feeling anxious and restless between chapters, much the same way Mary felt. I loved the way gender issues were frequently brought up, while the romance, however subtle, really didn’t work for me—I don’t think that du Maurier did a good job at developing it enough for the reader to empathize and understand why there’s sudden talk of “love” of such magnitude that it makes the level-headed protagonist act foolishly. It evened out though, because this lackluster development makes for what I choose to interpret as an ominous ending, rather than a happy or romantic one, which worked much better for my taste. All in all, Jamaica Inn wasn’t exactly what I had expected, and while I mostly enjoyed it (a 3.5 stars rating would be more truthful—better than The House on the Strand, not as good as My Cousin Rachel), I felt a little detached from it, and wouldn’t recommend it as a first touching point with du Maurier—her masterpiece Rebecca still is, and always will be, the way to go.
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