Author: Daphne du Maurier
Title: The King’s General
Year of publication: 1946
Page count: 384
Rating: ★★★★
The King’s General was the first novel written during du Maurier’s twenty years residency at Menabilly—the model for Manderley in her earlier masterpiece Rebecca—and her inspiration stemmed from a 19th century discovery on its grounds: During renovations, a skeleton wearing Cavalier clothing was found walled up in a secret room. From that image, she spun a story set in Cornwall during the English Civil War—a tale of a country and families caught up in the conflict, with a romance at the heart of it. Particular care was put into its historical accuracy, and the resulting novel is a testament to du Maurier’s skill at taking real situations and real people and weaving them into a narrative in a way that blurs the lines between truth and fiction.
The story is narrated by a middle-aged Honor Harris, who met Richard Grenville, ten years her senior, when she was eighteen. They fall in love, but when Honor suffers a riding accident and loses the use of her legs, she not only refuses to marry Richard, but even to see him again, not wanting to burden him with a crippled wife. They don’t see each other again until fifteen years later, and as the tides of the Civil War ebb and flow around them, the chair-ridden spinster and the Royalist leader get caught up in an unusual relationship.
“When the water drains from the marshes, and little by little the yellow sands appear, rippling and hard and firm, it seems to my foolish fancy, as I lie here, that I too go seaward with the tide, and all my old hidden dreams that I thought buried for all time are bare and naked to the day, just as the shells and the stones are on the sands.”
I am of two minds about this novel. Where du Maurier lost me a little were all the battles and war politics—historically accurate, yes, but often plodding. The reason I picked the novel up is because I have a trip to Cornwall planned this summer, and I was glad to have a passing knowledge of Cornish geography, or I would’ve been hopelessly lost without referencing a map. Where she lost me a lot was that for all the factual historical authenticity, the fact that this plays out in the 17th century is all too easily forgotten—she failed at recreating a genuinely believable historical atmosphere; everything about it is much too modern. Language, dialogues, manners, mindset… everything reflects du Maurier’s time, and I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t set at the turn of the 20th century, but in the 1640’s.
Still, The King’s General has a lot of the things I love about du Maurier’s writing: A fascinating heroine, family intrigue, a gothic atmosphere, surprising twists, a gloomy Cornish setting… I was particularly taken by the slow uncovering of Menabilly’s secret, and liked the ending and how it tied back to her inspiration very much. The titular general though—a towering presence even when he is absent—is a terribly arrogant, irascible, ruthless, all around unlikable person who cares for no one but Honor, his bastard son, and the monarchy, not necessarily in that order. Yet at the same time it was precisely this ambiguity that made for a believably complex and captivating romance lacking any vapid sentimentality—the reader won’t like Richard, and Honor often doesn’t either, yet she loves him still. Out of all the du Maurier novels I’ve read so far, it’s probably the one that best conveys a sort of bittersweet, foreboding hope, but without ever devolving into melodrama; she was much too good a writer for that.
“Time heals all wounds, say the complacent, but I think it is not so much time that does it as determination of the spirit. And the spirit can often turn to devil in the darkness.”
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