The difference between “Escort,” narrated by a naval captain, and “Split Second,” told from the point of view of a young upper-middle class widow is stark. Reading these stories, I was also struck by how easily du Maurier could slip from a masculine to feminine voice. She was the type of writer who could be both commercially and critically acclaimed. du Maurier was fascinated with the liminal space between the human world and psychic terrains. Yet the themes of her stories merit analysis. Her plotting skills ensured her popularity.
I hope I don’t sound derogatory, but I mean it in the best way possible. I think a good way to describe du Maurier’s output is, at the spectrum between general and literary fiction, her work falls slightly beyond the center. Nah, not enough! There’s also the threatening husband demanding co-directorship of her trust fund! In du Maurier’s world the stakes are high, the stories exciting, and the pages keep turning. Hey, let’s up the stakes and put a murderer on the loose! In “Blue Lenses,” a woman gets her sight back… but it came back wrong. In “Don’t Look Now,” a wife and husband are divided over a psychic vision of their dead child. Spooky supernatural premises aren’t enough for du Maurier. The reason why du Maurier got me so hooked was her expertise in ratcheting up tension. du Maurier is so thrilling I delayed my gym time by an hour because I just had to finish the title story “Don’t Look Now.” I was so absorbed in “Split Second” that someone had to kick at a nearby chair to get my attention. But she was, above all, a superb, furious plotter. Her prose can feel a little dated, a little fusty.
I can see where the critics were coming from: du Maurier was no literary stylist. du Maurier lamented the fact that she was “dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller” during her lifetime. I think I may have found myself a new favorite author.
0 kommentar(er)
