"Sherlock Holmes & The Christmas Demon" by James Lovegrove

This novel is an entertaining mash-up of Radciffean Gothic complete with the usual tropes of a castle with uninhabited rooms and a cellar, a damsel in distress, on the edge of madness, a dastardly villain and a Byronically wayward son, a family legend and, of course, the (eventually explained) supernatural with a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery.

All the classic Sherlockian moments are there including some wonderfully Victorian phraseology, the delightful misunderstandings of the stalwart Dr Watson and Sherlock's eclectic learning and incredible powers of observation, although the reader is given a fair chance of cracking the puzzle (I did!) which is often frustratingly absent in the Conan Doyle originals. 

It was quick and easy to read: I completed it in two sittings. It's  perfectly paced with a murder happening almost exactly at the half-way turning-point. Clues and red herrings are carefully scattered and there is opportunity for Watson to use his "service revolver"! An enjoyable and well-written tribute to the great detective, and the incomparable Mrs Radcliffe.

Selected quotes:

There is one moment of description which impressed me with its careful and precise accuracy: 

• "What can I say about the long, cold watch? Shall I mention how the frigid air seemed to seep through my muscles into my bones and made them ache? Shall I relate how the silence filled my ears as though it had actual substance? Shall I talk about the continual, stealthy shifting of feet and wriggling of fingers that was required in order not to lose all sensation in my extremities? What about the way that time, as though made torpid by the cold, crawled by?" (Ch 26) 

My other four favourite moments are all tongue-in-cheek examples of Watson as the genial, slightly pompous bumbler, at least in comparison to the superhuman if immensely arrogant Holmes:

• "'You have a way with a proverb, old friend, as befits a wordsmith of your calibre.' Compliment? Or not? With Sherlock Holmes it was sometimes hard to tell." (Ch 7)
• "Watson, you have done it again! In your chronicles of my exploits you often paint yourself as something of a dunderhead, but that does you a disservice." (Ch 10)
• "It behoved me, as an author, to look for my own work amongst the multitude, but a cursory inspection turned up nothing. I consoled myself with the thought that my literary career was still in its infancy." (Ch 18)
• "A touch louder, old fellow. I don't think the entire castle heard you." (Ch 19)

March 2024; 372 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake

An heir, Titus,is born to Lord Supulchrave, the seventy-sixth Earl of Groan, in the castle of Gormenghast, a place in which every day is governed by tradition and ritual. An ambitious, ruthless and clever seventeen-year-old scullion, Steerpike, leaves his place in the kitchen determined to disrupt and destroy so that he can gain power. Despite the title of the book, it is Steerpike who is the protagonist-villain, who encapsualtes “The hatred of the young for the authority vested in age.” (The Un-Earthing of Barquentine)

It is difficult to find parallels for this work. It has been described as Gothic but I think this is on account of the setting (a castle) and the consequent feeling of claustrophobia. Classic Gothic literature involves the present being haunted by the past and in many ways this novel is its inversion: the present, in the shape of Steerpike, is destroying the present-as-shaped-by-the-past. It has been described as fantasy but there is no magic and very little in the way of supernatural happenings. There is a strong feeling of Lewis Carroll about it (among Peake's most critically acclaimed illustrations were those for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark) and the characters are classic Dickensian grotesques. The creation of such a complete world is reminiscent of science fiction (and Peake's novella about Titus was published together with science fiction stories by William Golding and John Wyndham). 

It is a masterpiece of description. Peake's day job was as an artist and he describes things so that they can be seen. A member of my U3A group who read this book said that Peake often describes a scene in detail and then homes in upon the character in the scene who will carry that part of the story; this is a little like the way a camera sometimes zooms in upon a character in an establishing shot. The descriptions are detailed and rich and wonderful (and they reminded me, again, of Dickens, but they're better). “This is the most painterly form of literature imaginable" although it is true, in the beginning, before the story gets going properly, that the book seems "to move from set tableau to set tableau, more like a series of paintings than like a fluid narrative” (reference here) But I think it is because of these descriptions that Peake convinces us, reading a story about an impossible place, to suspend our disbelief. Anthony Burgess, writing in the introduction to the Penguin edition,  says “It is difficult, in post-war English writing, to get away with big, rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness; there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions; he is always exact.” It is that precision of description that creates verisimilitude, even while you know that what is being described is unreal. (Kafka achieves the same in a very different fashion, by being utterly matter-of-fact about the madness he is describing.)

Written during the second world war, I imagine that the writer, a talented artist and illustrator with a taste for the grotesque, would have seen how Hitler had come from obscurity to smash traditional Germany; he might have seen the battle between the old and the new reflected in the Spanish Civil War, in the consequences of an overthrown Empire in the China where he grew up, in social changes in England following the First World War, and in the impact of Futurism and Vorticism in art. 

It is followed by the sequels Gormenghast, which is perhaps even better, and Titus Alone, which is rather different (perhaps because it was being written while Peake, still in his forties, was struggling with early onset dementia). A fourth novel, written by Maeve Gilmore, Peake's widow, based on the notes he left, has recently been published.

Selected quotes:

Some of those brilliant descriptions:

• “The Tower of Flints ... patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “Like a vast spider suspended by a metal chord, a candelabrum presided over the room ... long stalactites of wax lowered their pale spilths drip by drip.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “Where the dust was like pollen and lay softly on all things.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “Seven clouds like a group of naked cherubs or sucking-pigs, floated their plump pink bodies across a sea of slate.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “To her right was an enormous crumbling organ. Its pipes were broken and the keyboard shattered. Across its front the labour of a decade of grey spiders had woven their webs into a shawl of lace.” (The Attic)
• “The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shrivelling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.” (Knives in the Moon)
• “His Lordship is dressed in black. His knees are drawn up almost to his chin. His long, fine white hands are curled slightly inwards as they hang over his knees, between which, and his supported chun, the wrists are wedged. But it is the eyes that strike a chill to the centre of those who watch, for they have become circular. The smile which plated across his lips ... is gone forever. His mouth is entirely expressionless.” (Early One Morning)
• “The first descent of the rain ... is falling from they sky in long upright and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “Summer was on the roofs of Gormenghast. It lay inert, like a sick thing. Its limbs spread. It took the shape of what it smothered. The masonry sweated and was horribly silent.” (In Preparation for Violence)
• “Rolls of lard-coloured fat filled in the space between the chin and the clavicles.” (Blood at Midnight)

There are also some very funny moments:

• “In the dimness he flung his arms apart so that the buttons of his tunic were torn away, one of them whizzing across the room and stunning a cockroach on the opposite wall.” (Swelter)
• “As this was the first joke she had made for over a year, she tried to smile, but her facial muscles had become, through long neglect, unusable.” (The Room of Roots)
• “Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.” (The Twins Again)
• “The navel, that pivot for a draughtsman’s eye, that relic whose potentiality appears to have been appreciated only by the dead Swelter, who saw in it a reliable salt-cellar, when that gentleman decided upon eggs for his breakfast.” (Barquentine and Steerpike)
• “The Doctor showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an ell set upon its end, while Irma ... had ... a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac’s cupboard.” (By Gormenghast Lake)

Other selected quotes:

• “Their sole passion was directed, once their days of love had guttered, on the production of this wooden sculpture” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “The air between them was turgid with contempt and jealousy.” (The Hall of Bright Carvings)
• “He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “The attacked the bungs as though unweaned.” (The Great Kitchen)
• “He was lost in a labyrinth of stone corridors, lit here and there by candles sunk in their own wax.” (The Stone Lanes)
• “Even the bed was at an angle, slanting away from the wall and crying out to be pushed back flush against the wallpaper.” (Tallow and Birdseed)
• “To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would have been like asking a man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat.” (Sepulchrave)
• “Her dressing became interrupted between the addition of each garment by dance movements of her own invention.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “She appeared rather to inhabit, than to wear her clothes.” (Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap)
• “It was as though she enjoyed the artist telling her something quite fresh and new. Something she had never thought of before.” (The Attic)
• “She [Fuschia] said, dear, that she’d burn down the whole place, burn down Gormenghast when she was the ruler and she’d live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was - everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits.” (Keda)
• “The Countess never entered it, preferring those parts of the castle where the lights and the shadows were on the move.” (First Blood)
• “The negative dignity of the room threw him out in relief as a positive scarecrow.” (First Blood)
• “I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generation to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased.” (Assemblage)
• “‘It’s power we want,’ lady Clarice repeated. ... ‘Yes, that’s what we want’, echoed Cora, ‘lots of power. Then we could make people do things’.” (Assemblage)
• “He knelt on the windowsill and then, turning around, slowly raised himself to his feet and stood outside the window, the hollow twilight at his shoulder-blades.” (Means of Escape)
• “He only knew that his throat was parched and beneath his belt a tiger was clawing in his stomach.” (A Body by the Window)
• “He was not the artist. He was the exact imitation of one.” (Soap for Greasepaint)
• “Prunesquallor and his sister both felt a certain delight in making the acquaintance of a young gentleman with brains, however twisted those brains might be.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Steerpike’s gallantry had for a moment taken the chill off her heart.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “His face remained like a mask, but deep down in his stomach he grinned.” (A Gift of the Gab)
• “Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. ... He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers.” (The Grotto)
• “He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power.” (The Grotto)
• “‘Equality’, said Steerpike, ‘is the thing. It is the only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “‘There should be no rich, no poor, no strong, no weak,’ said Steerpike, methodically pulling the legs off the stag-beetle, one by one, as he spoke. ‘Equality is the great thing. Equality is everything’.” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “But don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have nothing to eat and others have so much they throw most of it away? Don’t you think it’s wrong if some people have to work all their lives for a little money to exist while others never do any work and live in luxury?” (The Sun Goes Down Again)
• “To wear rich and becoming apparel no doubt engenders a sense of well-being in the wearer, but to be draped, as was Sourdust, in a sacrosanct habit of crimson rags is to be a world above such considerations as the price and fit of clothes and to experience a sense of propriety that no wealth could buy.” (The Burning)
• “The long shelves surrounded them, tier upon tier, circumscribing their world with a wall of other worlds imprisoned yet breathing among the network of a million commas, semi-colons, full stops, hyphens and every other sort of printed symbol.” (The Burning)
• “The old man would be complete, if not homogenous. He would not be headless, and his funeral would be no slipshod, bury-as-you-please affair.” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “Why must one try and be respectful to old people when they aren’t considerate?” (Sourdust is Buried)
• “‘I am not your father’, he replied. ... ‘I am the death-owl’.” (Half Light)
• “There are great pearls upon his forehead, and in each pearl is the reflection of a candle flame.” (A Change of Colour)
• “Five claws rip out a crimson wedge from his cheek immediately below the right eye.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “You will be as fit as the most expensive of fiddles.” (A Bloody Cheekbone)
• “What use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook’s nest with every twig a duty?” (The Reveries: Reverie of Gertrude the Countess of Gormenghast)
• “He now moved his bulk across the earth as silently as the passing of a cloud through the dusk.” (Here and There)
• “A few feet above his head a spider scrawled itself across the ceiling.” (Presage)
• “The most disgusting sound - as of some kind of low animal with gastric trouble. Mr Swelter was laughing.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “Something was changing - changing in a world where change was crime.” (Blood at Midnight)
• “You don’t matter. You’re not going to be anything.” (The Earling)
• “What were problems for if not to be solved.” (The Earling)

Wonderful. February 2023; 506 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

A classic ghost novella. A never-named governess goes to an old house to take charge of a little girl, Flora, and her older brother Miles, who has been expelled from school though no-one is quite sure why. The governess then starts seeing apparitions which she decides are the ghosts of valet Peter Quint and his paramour, the last governess Miss Jessel, who were considered by housekeeper Mrs Grose to have had too much influence on the children. But are the ghosts real or is the hysterical governess hallucinating? Are the children naughty or in league with devils? Why was Miles expelled (the governess tells us that the school say was was "an injury to others"; what does this mean?)? And have the children been damaged by their experiences of the ghosts when they were still alive?

The book is brilliantly written. Narrated by the governess, a classic early example of an unreliable narrator, the book is full of ambiguities that are never resolved. How, for example, did Quint and Jessel die? Miss Jessel dies while on a holiday (reading between the lines she is pregnant by Quint and dies having his baby but this is never stated). As for her lover:  “Peter Quint was found ... stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained - superficially at least - by a visible wound to his head” and it is assumed he has, in liquor, slipped on the icy road but the words "superficially at least" allow the possibility that there is a more sinister interpretation

The governess is a hysterical character (although she is described as "a most charming person ... my sister’s governess ... the most agreeable person I’ve ever known in her position ... awfully clever and nice” in a frame narrative by someone who appears to have had a crush on her when he was a boy) who has immense mood swings. She is convinced that 'the master' has fallen in love with her at first sight, as she clearly has with him. One moment she believes that the children  are paragons of innocent perfection and the next that they are in league with the devil. When she explains her self it is in long, convoluted and complex sentences in which words are used in unusual contexts (I wasn't quite sure is this was just Henry James whose prose style is sometimes fiendishly complicated). She repeatedly jumps to conclusions: “He was looking for little Miles ... But how do you know? ... I know, I know, I know!” (Ch 5). In dialogue she repeatedly interrupts her interlocutor and finishes their sentences for them (for example when the housekeeper, meaning Miles, says “Surely you don’t accuse him -” but before she can say what Miles shouldn't be accused of the governess says “Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me?”), thus putting words into their mouth and so validating her own opinions, whilst leaving the reader uncertain as to what they wanted to say. (All dialogue is naturalistic, so that people rarely ever make definitive statements.) 

The book has provided opportunities for debate for generations of scholars and the discussion in the Eastbourne Central U3A English Novel group had a very stimulating discussion which covered a number of topics.

• One member insisted that James had been purposely ambiguous and so trying to work out what 'really' happened missed the point.
• One member felt sorry for the two children who had suffered repeated bereavements: they had been forced to leave India (where they might have been very close to the servants) on the death of their parents and had then suffered the death of their uncle; they were now living under the guardianship of another uncle who refused to have anything to do with them and had suffered the death of the two servants who had looked after them most closely: Quint and Jessel. Miles had then been sent to school. The children were therefore likely to be traumatised, which might explain all sorts of behaviours.
• There was the member who suggested that all these deaths was no more than a plot device so that the two children would be at the mercy of the mad governess and the single protective figure of the illiterate housekeeper, Mrs Grose.
• Several members saw this as in the tradition of gothic literature. The narrator refers to "Udolpho" (the Mysteries of Udolpho was perhaps the first work of gothic literature, written by Ann Radcliffe) and there is also reference to “an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement” which suggests either Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family by Sheridan Le Fanu. There was one member who felt the entire story was a sort of parody of Jane Eyre: there is a governess in love with the master and something sinister going on upstairs.
  Several members thought that the children had been sexually abused by Quint and Jessel and that this was the reason that Miles was sent home from school. Clearly, Henry James could not write openly about sexual abuse of children in the dying days of the nineteenth century when the book was written. But the way the governess set up the children (Flora is described by the narrator as the “most beautiful child”, and to possess “extraordinary charm”, and “without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants”; of Miles the narrator says: “To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgement.”; Ch 8) may be a sign that Henry James is critiquing the Victorian paradigm of childhood innocence. The idea that Miles is expelled for being "an injury to others" fits the interpretation that he has somehow morally subverted his schoolmates (he says he told his friends things and they told their friends ... ?). Mrs Grose hints at improper influence but gives it a class spin: “For a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together ... she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.” (Ch 8) To support this theory it was pointed out that Henry James was the brother of William James the philosopher and psychologist and this may have given him an insight into children, although he never fathered any himself.
• Some members suggested that Miles in particular was just a little boy seeking the freedom to be a little boy and that he felt smothered by the governess.
• Some people hated the sudden ending and thought that the frame narrative should have been resumed to remove some of the perplexities of the story but most members thought the sudden ending was perfect. I myself have used sudden endings in my novels Motherdarling and Bally and Bro and the epilogue in The Kids of God is designed to challenge the reader. 
• But the biggest debate of all was: were the ghosts real?
• Immediately before her first sighting (of Peter Quint), the governess has been imagining meeting the master with whom she has fallen in love. “It would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone who would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that ... What arrested me on the spot ... was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!” (Ch 3) This seems to suggest that the governess has conjured the ghost out of her imagination.
• She says, talking of the children: “I walked in a world of their invention” (Ch 5). This suggests that she is susceptible to suggestion which in turn implies that the ghosts aren't real.
• “There was no ambiguity in anything: none whatever at least in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see” (Ch 6) and this is the point where she has her second sighting, this time of the other ghost.
• When, in chapter 20, the governess, accompanied by Flora and Mrs Grose, sees Mrs Jessel the others don't see anything. “What a dreadful turn, to be sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?” says Mrs Grose (I love the word ‘turn’: another and another and another turn of the screw). This event leads to Mrs Grose taking charge of Flora (presumably at Flora's, frightened, request) and keeping her away from the governess.
• In the last few pages, Miles doesn't see the ghost either. The governess believes she has prevented this (so protecting him): “At last, by my success, his sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence but he knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know.” When Peter Quint appears, Miles asks “Is she here?” (presumably thinking about Miss Jessel. “His head made the movement of a baffled dog’s on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly" Even after Miles, in response to a leading question from the governess, says identifies Peter Quint "his face gave again, round the room, its confused supplication. ‘Where’?” Miles still can't see the ghost. He never will.

Selected quotes:

• “He seems to like us young and pretty!” says the governess, referring to the master who she has fallen in love with on first sight and whom she is never going to see again, and the housekeeper replies “Oh he did ... it was the way he liked everyone!” and this use of the past tense tells us that she is referring to Peter Quint and then she corrects herself “I mean that’s his way - the master’s” (Ch 2)
• "I was struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she  asked, rang out and led me on.” (Ch 1)
• “I learnt something - at first certainly - that had not been one of the teachings of my small smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think of the morrow” (Ch 3)
• “And then there was consideration - and consideration was sweet.” (Ch 3)
• “An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.” (Ch 3) I'm intrigued by 'privately bred'. Surely she means 'privately brought up'. Her thoughts seem to have been infiltrated by thoughts of sex.
• “I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well.” (Ch 4)
• “The silence itself ... became the element into which I saw the figure disappear.” (Ch 10)
• “She was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination.” (Ch 11)
• “He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears.” (Ch 11)
• “I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made you do; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.” (Ch 12)
• “They’re not mine - they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers.” (Ch 12)
• “It revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad time - for there had been a worse even than this! - must have occurred.” (Ch 12)
• “Another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue” (Ch 22)
• "Peter Quint - you devil!" (Ch 24) But does the devil refer to the valet or the new governess?

A literary tour de force.

October 2022; 121 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Jamaica Inn" by Daphne Du Maurier

Jamaica Inn is a classically Gothic novel with a very strong sense of setting. There are some strong and enormously conflicted characters such as the violent alcoholic Joss Merlyn and his much abused wife Aunt Patience. The heroine falls for Byronic bad boy Jem Merlyn which leads to an interesting ending.

The characters

An unusual feature of the book is that there are two principal antagonists: Joss Merlyn and Francis Davey. These two are almost opposites of one another: black and white. Our introduction to Joss is: “He was a great husk of a man, nearly seven feet high, with a creased black brow and a skin the colour of a gypsy. His thick dark hair fell over his eyes in a fringe and hung about his ears. He looked as if he had the strength of a horse, with immense powerful shoulders, long arms that reached almost to his knees, and large fists like hams. His frame was so big that in a sense his head was dwarfed, and sunk between his shoulders, giving that half-stooping impression of a giant gorilla, with his black eyebrows and his mat of hair.” (Ch 20): in other words, Joss is a classic neanderthal, huge and ape-like, and his principal colour is black. Francis Davey is, on the other hand, an albino: “Mary looked up at the pale eyes in the colourless face, the halo of cropped white hair” (Ch 7). Joss is, of course, from the lower classes and Francis Davey is a Vicar, a professional man, who is from the educated classes (although he serves the poor). It is as if Du Maurier has created twin villains, each one the mirror image of the other. The twins even have their own sections of the book: Joss is the villain at the start (whilst Davey is seen by the narrator as a good guy) and then Davey takes over as the villain after Joss is killed.

Joss Merlyn

Joss is, in the words of Sarah Dubant, "near to caricature ... His brooding figure, craggy looks and wild temper are in their own way all attributes of the romantic hero inverted into violence and self-loathing – a Mr Rochester without a Jane to redeem him" (though I felt him closer to Heathcliff). At first Joss seems to be a stereotype but Du Maurier works to make him three-dimensional. One of our U3A members said that she found one of the most sinister moments in the book to be when Joss cuts and butters a slice of bread for Mary: “He proceeded to cut carefully a thin slice from the loaf, which he quartered in pieces and buttered for her, the whole business very delicately done and in striking contrast to his manner in serving himself – so much so that to Mary there was something almost horrifying in the change from rough brutality to fastidious care. It was as though there was some latent power in his fingers which turned them from bludgeons into deft and cunning servants. Had he cut her a chunk of bread and hurled it at her she would not have minded so much" (Ch 2).

This dual personality is typical of Joss. For example, he is sexually threatening (there is always a subtext of sex with Joss) but he reassures Mary: "I’ve better things to do than to play cat’s-cradle with me own niece." (C 2) On the other hand, when he is under the influence of alcohol, he threatens her with violence: “I’m master in this house, and I’ll have you know it. You’ll do as you’re told, and help in the house and serve my customers, and I’ll not lay a finger on you. But, by God, if you open your mouth and squark, I’ll break you until you eat out of my hand the same as your aunt yonder.”

Mary recognises that there are two versions of Joss: 

• "There was still something fine about his great dark eyes, in spite of the lines and pouches and the red blood-flecks." (C 2)

• "Though there should be a world of difference between the smile of a man and the bared fangs of a wolf, with Joss Merlyn they were one and the same." (C 2)

The ‘two sides of the coin’ is seen in his attitude to alcohol: on the one hand he sees it will be his downfall but on the other it makes him feel powerful: “There’s been one weakness in my life, and I’ll tell you what it is ... ‘It’s drink. It’s a curse, and I know it. I can’t stop myself. One day it’ll be the end of me, and a good job too. There’s days go by and I don’t touch more than a drop, same as I’ve done tonight. And then I’ll feel the thirst come on me and I’ll soak. Soak for hours. It’s power, and glory, and women, and the Kingdom of God, all rolled into one. I feel a king then, Mary. I feel I’ve got the strings of the world between my two fingers.” 

Joss is given a back story which he tells Mary (he is given to somewhat self-pitying monologues when drunk; he is a typical maudlin drunk). His father was hanged for killing another man in a fight, his grandfather was transported for thieving, his elder brother was found drowned in a Marsh. 

He also blabs secrets when he is drunk. It is during another binge that he tells Mary that he is the leader of a gang of wreckers and has killed multiple times, including women and children, rather than saving them from drowning. 

It is suggested in the Introduction to the Virago edition that Joss is based in part on the author’s father, an actor who was a sometimes violent alcoholic, and in part upon her husband who suffered ‘shell-shock’ (PTSD) cause by his times in the trenches during the First World War and had nightmarish dreams.

Aunt Patience

Aunt Patience is, in many ways, a foreshadowing of Mary. She made her choice to marry a bad boy (Joss, the landlord of the Inn) and has now become a weak and terrified woman, shaped by mental cruelty and physical abuse. There is conflict within her between the would-be loving wife and the would-be conscientious aunt: she tries to warn Mary and even, in tiny ways, to help her, but at the end she is loyal to Joss.

Mary’s mother tells Mary: “You’ll like your Aunt Patience; she was always a great one for games and laughing, with a heart as large as life." But Mary’s first encounter is described thus: "Her eyes were large and staring, as though they asked perpetually a question, and she had a little nervous trick of working her mouth, now pursing the lips and now relaxing them." (C 2)

Mary. the protagonist

Mary, the narrator/ protagonist, is a courageously stubborn goody-goody who can be surprisingly naive. For much of the plot she is at the mercy of circumstances. 

Her essential conflict is between the safety of her ordered upbringing and the danger of passionate love, with all its opportunities and threats. This conflict drives much of the story. It is, of course, foreshadowed by the choices that her uncle and aunt made, particularly her aunt, so the disadvantages of choosing bad boy Jem are obvious. 

Jem Merlyn, romantic hero, Byronic figure, the bad boy that the good girls love

Jem is the romantic hero with a Byronic twist, the bad boy that the good girl falls in love with. "He lacked tenderness; he was rude; and he had more than a streak of cruelty in him; he was a thief and a liar. He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him." (C 9)

The key scene is when Jem takes Mary to Launceston for a picnic and to sell a stolen horse at the market. The picnic involves a hugely symbolic moment: "You can eat the apple, if you’re feeling religious. There’s an apple comes in the Bible, I know that much." (C 9) This is the moment when Mary as Eve (I suspect that the choice of the name ‘Mary’ reflects the idea that in Christianity Mary is a sort of second Eve) falls ... and the tempter is the man, Jem as Adam. With Jem, Mary is portrayed as  fundamentally morally flawed: she takes pleasure in Jem’s cleverness as he sells the stolen horse back to its original owners (a horse that she is later offered as a gift for herself!)

Mary is also weak. She knows the parallels between the way Aunt Patience married Joss for love (and it destroyed her) and how marrying Jem is likely to destroy Mary: “He was too like his brother. His eyes, and his mouth, and his smile. That was the danger of it. She could see her uncle in his walk, in the turn of his head; and she knew why Aunt Patience had made a fool of herself ten years ago. It would be easy enough to fall in love with Jem Merlyn." She even tells Jem that she likes his hands because “they are like your brother’s”; but the hands of Joss are the hands she has seen delicately cutting bread and the hands that Mary has imagined killed innocent women and children in the service of the wreckers. Nevertheless (and this is reprise of the ‘two sides of the coin’ theme, she can’t resist Jem: “whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time." (C 9). 

Francis Davey, the albino priest

I found the portrait of Francis Davey unconvincing. He was too obviously the sinister hidden force behind the smugglers, too obviously the reflected image of Joss. Perhaps he was more convincing when the book was written when Church of England vicars were pillars of the establishment and a wicked one must have been shocking but there is a long tradition in Gothic literature of wicked priests (from The Monk by Matthew Lewis, one of the founding stories of the genre) and Davey’s albinism was also a huge clue (a significant 'deficiency' in melanin has been used by many authors as a shorthand for moral deficiency, for example in The Da Vinci Code,  (though not nearly so many as use an 'excess' of melanin). And while Joss is the villain who gets drunk and blabs all the secrets, Davey is the villain whose ultimate wickedness and ruthlessness (after he has filled in cold blood both Joss and Aunt Patience) is no match for the innocence and purity of the heroine so that, instead of slaughtering her on the spot as he should have done, he encumbers himself with her on his flight. 

The obviousness (to the reader) of Davey’s wickedness makes Mary look gullible to the point of stupidity. “She could trust him; that at least was certain." (C 7)

Dialogue

There are times when the dialogue is stilted and unreal. Here is the protagonist at the peak of her distress: "Why I have been living there does not matter now, and the story would take too long in the telling. I fear and detest him more than you or anyone in the country, and with reason. I came here to warn Mr Bassat that the landlord intended to leave the inn tonight, and so escape justice. I have definite proof of his guilt, which I did not believe Mr Bassat to possess. You tell me that he has already gone, and perhaps even now is at Jamaica Inn. Therefore I have wasted my time in coming here." (C 14) She is far too self-composed; she speaks in well-formed sentences! The 'therefore' at the end is ludicrous.

The Genre

"Jamaica Inn opens with echoes of Dracula: a carriage rattling through a desolate landscape and wild weather to a place where even the locals won't go ... We are in the territory of the gothic novel ... there’s no doubt that many of the ingredients of Jamaica Inn – wild men, wild land, dark secrets and violent ends – are close to gothic cliché".” (Sarah Dunant, in the Introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition)

Is it a 'feminist' novel? Mary is a female hero and she has significant strengths but she is also (essentially so for a hero) muddled and misguided (although heroes must necessarily be, at least in the first 90% of a book, so that the story can progress). But, in the end, she needs to be rescued by men. Furthermore, there are a number of occasions on which Du Maurier reflects on the different character of womanhood and some of it can be linked to the time when Du Maurier was alive; at this time I imagine her thoughts were quite challenging, especially the classically romantic notion that the woman should be helplessly attracted to the bad boy. Nowadays, however, a number of her remarks might be seen as pandering to stereotypical notions of femininity of the day:

• "Why were women such fools, so short-sighted and unwise? wondered Mary; and she scrubbed the last stone flag of the hall with venom, as though by her very action she might cleanse the world and blot out the indiscretions of her kind." (C 5)

• "Senseless or conscious, women are pretty much the same when you come down to it" (C 5)

• "Here she was, with tears ready to the surface and an aching head, being hurried from the scene of action with smooth words and gestures, a nuisance and a factor of delay, like every woman and every child after a tragedy." (C 16)

The Plot

Although the book opens with Mary in a coach, travelling across Bodmin Moor to Jamaica Inn, which provides a compelling hook, considered in the chronology of the novel the beginning is the death of Mary’s mother. Until then Mary has been a farm girl, living a domesticated life, governed by the turning of the seasons and the everyday patterns of birth, growth, reproduction and death. This rural idyll, this Garden of Eden existence, comes to an end when she travels to Jamaica Inn. Bodmin Moor is the otherworld, the land of heroes and adventures. This is typical of the  ‘Voyage and Return’ type of novel as described by Christopher Booker in ‘Seven Basic Plots’. But in the classic version of this story, Mary should return to her ‘real’ world, changed, having learnt important truths. The genius of the ending of Jamaica Inn is that Mary chooses to stay in the otherworld, despite the prophetic foreshadowing of the life of Aunt Patience married to Joss Merlyn. 

The pacing

The pacing of the plot conforms to the four part model with one of the major characters, the romantic interest, introduced almost exactly at the 25% mark, and the sinister albino priest half way through the second quarter. Following the protagonist's near-seduction at 50%, the albino turns up perfectly on time. The third quarter contains the peak of the villainy and ends with the protagonist taking decisive action; the final quarter deals with the consequences of this move.

Looking out of the window

 In Seven Types of Ambiguity (p 19),  William Empson states: “A dramatic situation is always heightened by breaking off the dialogue to look out of the window." This is what Shakespeare does in Macbeth when he puts the only comic scene (the porter at Hell’s gate) immediately after the murder of Duncan. And when Mary discovers the murdered bodies of Joss and Aunt Patience, du Maurier repeatedly slows down the action with description:

• "There was no other sound except the husky wheezing of the clock in the hall and the sudden whirring note preparatory to the strike. It rang the hour – three o’clock – and then ticked on, choking and gasping like a dying man who cannot catch his breath." (C 4)

• "Her eyes dwelt upon little immaterial things: the fragments of glass from the smashed clock-face that were bloodstained too, and the discoloured patch of wall where the clock had stood." (C 15)

• "A spider settled on her uncle’s hand; and it seemed strange to her that the hand stayed motionless and did not seek to rid itself of the spider. Her uncle would have shaken it free. Then it crawled from his hand and ran up his arm, working its way beyond the shoulder. When it came to the wound it hesitated, and then made a circuit, returning to it again in curiosity, and there was a lack of fear in its rapidity that was somehow horrible and desecrating to death. The spider knew that the landlord could not harm him. Mary knew this too, but she had not lost her fear, like the spider." (C 15)

The Hero’s Journey

In Chapter One, as Mary is being carried to Jamaica Inn, both the coachman and a woman at a coaching inn in Bodmin (the threshold of civilization)  try to dissuade her; this is a classic trope. That Mary doesn’t, in the end, return to the safe world is a flouting of the Voyage and Return convention.

The setting

My U3A group agreed that Du Maurier excels at describing the setting of the book. One of them pointed out that the story is anchored in ‘geographical reality’; all of the locations is authentic. This gives what might otherwise be a far-fetched Gothic story verisimilitude.

But the physical landscape is considerably more than just a backdrop. It is a metaphor for the psychological landscape. Having come from a placid farming life, where animals are domesticated and even time is organised into a seasonal calendar, Mary (a passive onlooker of the world) enters a realm of bleak, wild and desolate scenery and wild weather to match the feral behaviour of the law-breaking, violent and dangerous men. This is a hugely romantic, Byronic notion: that wilderness and danger can be attractive and Mary falls in love with the land and the people. 

In many ways the book is one long pathetic fallacy. It starts by describing the weather: “a cold grey day ... a backing wind ... a granite sky ...a mizzling rain [though very soon “driving rain”] ... clammy cold” (Ch 1) This is swiftly contrasted with “the shining waters of Helford” at the start of Mary’s journey, “the green hills and the sloping valleys, the white cluster of cottages at the water’s edge. It was a gentle rain that fell at Helford, a rain that pattered in the many trees and lost itself in the lush grass" and “sank into the grateful soil which gave back flowers in payment.” This is, in the very next paragraph, contrasted with the moor “a country of stones, black heather, and stunted broom”. [Blackness is recurring a motif.] But farming life, even in idyllic Helford, is hard and Mary’s mother’s dying words are to instruct her to go to Aunt Patience because “A girl can’t live alone, Mary, without she goes queer in the head, or comes to evil. It’s either one or the other." (C 1)

Even when the landscape can seem innocent and even pretty, the ground can be treacherous. The brother of Joss and Jem was drowned in a bog and the metaphor of the marsh corresponds to the character of the Vicar: he takes Mary in and when she is helpless he threatens to kill her. 

The landscape affects its inhabitants. Mary’s first view of Bodmin Moor makes her reflect “No human being could live in this wasted country, thought Mary, and remain like other people; the very children would be born twisted" (C 1) The extended pathetic fallacy of the book means that the character of Joss is a reflection of his setting. And the landscape and the people swap places, at least in Mary’s imagination. In the final, desperate chase with Frances Davey, Mary “could see the stones turning to men beside her. Their faces were inhuman, older than time, carved and rugged like the granite; and they spoke in a tongue she could not understand, and their hands and feet were curved like the claws of a bird." (C 17)

Other setting-oriented quotes:

• "Here on the summit the wind fretted and wept, whispering of fear, sobbing old memories of bloodshed and despair" (C 17)

• "The sun had already disappeared behind the furthest hill ... before many hours had passed the grey malevolence of a November dusk would have fallen." (C 4)

• "Colour came in patches; sometimes the hills were purple, ink-stained, and mottled, and then a feeble ray of sun would come from a wisp of cloud, and one hill would be golden-brown while his neighbour still languished in the dark." (C 3)

• "The mist parted and dissolved. It rose from the ground in a twisting column of smoke" (C 17)

• "The texture of the ground was crisp, and the short grass crunched beneath the foot like shingle." (C 18)

Other Selected Quotes

• "Never before had she known there was malevolence in solitude." (C 1)

• "She spoke much as a child does who tells herself a story and has a talent for invention." (C 2)

• "There are nights when every cottage on the moors is dark and silent, and the only lights for miles are the blazing windows of Jamaica Inn." (C 2)

• "betraying by the very secrecy of their movements their desire to remain unseen." (C 4)

• "You’ve got a clever little monkey face, and a ferreting monkey mind, and you’re not easily scared. But I tell you this, Mary Yellan; I’ll break that mind of yours if you let it go astray, and I’ll break your body too." (C 4)

• "I heard another man say that once, and five minutes later he was treading the air. On the end of a rope it was, my friend, and his big toe missed the floor by half an inch. I asked him if he liked to be so near the ground, but he didn’t answer. The rope forced the tongue out of his mouth, and he bit it clean in half. They said afterwards he had taken seven and three-quarter minutes to die." (C 4)

• ""He preached the same sermon always on Christmas Day, and his parishioners could have prompted him anywhere." (C 7)

• "Men and women were like the animals on the farm at Helford, she supposed; there was a common law of attraction for all living things, some similarity of skin or touch, and they would go to one another. This was no choice made with the mind. Animals did not reason, neither did the birds in the air." (C 9)

• "If loving a man meant this pain and anguish and sickness, she wanted none of it. It did away with sanity and composure, and made havoc of courage." (C 9)

• "I don’t want to love like a woman or feel like a woman, Mr Davey; there’s pain that way, and suffering, and misery that can last a lifetime." (C 10)

• "‘You are very young, Mary Yellan,’ he said softly; ‘you are nothing but a chicken with the broken shell still around you.'" (C 10)

• "Like all men who have been badly scared, he threw the blame of his own panic upon the shoulders of another, and now blustered to reassure himself." (C 12)

• "She dreaded panic, above all things; the scream that forced itself to the lips, the wild stumble of groping feet and hands that beat the air for passage." (C 15)

• "Jem was safe from her, and he would ride away with a song on his lips and a laugh at her expense, forgetful of her, and of his brother, and of God; while she dragged through the years, sullen and bitter, the stain of silence marking her, coming in the end to ridicule as a soured spinster who had been kissed once in her life and could not forget it." (C 16)

• "‘You should have heard me preach,’ he said softly. ‘They sat there in the stalls like sheep, even as I drew them, with their mouths agape and their souls asleep.'" (C 17)

Du Maurier's grandad wrote Trilby, a phenomenally successful book of the time, after which the hat was named, which introduced the character of Svengali.

December 2021

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God