If you're going to write slushy romantic fiction, write well and write hard. This is the ultimate. Set during the Restoration (romantic enough already!) this is the tale of a headstrong lady escaping from her husband to live on her Cornish estate. She encounters a French (of course) pirate and she falls in love. But the local gentility are searching for the pirate and the noose is tightening.
Classic and very enjoyable. October 2014; 253 pages
Showing posts with label du Maurier. Show all posts
Showing posts with label du Maurier. Show all posts
Monday, 27 October 2014
Saturday, 11 January 2014
"Trilby" by George Du Maurier
Three stars: a classic novel but not as great as its reputation might suggest.
George du Maurier was an Anglo-French Victorian artist who, having studied in Paris alongside James Whistler, became a contributor to Punch (both satirical writing and cartoons) who wrote three novels late in life, the second being the best-seller Trilby. He was the father of actor Gerald du Maurier and grandfather of novelist Daphne du Maurier whose biographies of Bramwell Bronte and Francis Bacon I have reviewed in this blog.
Artist's model Trilby O'Ferrall, living in Paris of mixed Anglo-French parentage, meets three British artists. All three fall in love with her but one, nicknamed Little Billee, proposes. Then his mother, horrified that he is going to marry a woman of an inferior social class (and one who has posed nude) interferes and persuades Trilby to promise to leave Paris and never see Little Billee again. Little Billee becomes ill through grief and is taken back to England.
Five years later all of Europe is rocked by the sensational singing star Madame Svengali. Little Billee, now a successful artist, meets up with his three old friends to return to Paris to see her. They realise that she is Trilby. This is a surprise because the old Trilby was tone deaf. Herr Svengali was an acquaintance in Paris; he was a marvellous pianist. They meet him but he spits at Little Billee and they fight.
How has Trilby learned to sing? Will Little Billee be able to meet her again and propose again? Will true love conquer all?
True to his satirical nature, du Maurier's tone throughout is light and teasing. This makes the creation of the monster Svengali, who became a Gothic Horror character along the lines of Dracula or Frankenstein, more compelling. But the bulk of the novel focuses not on Svengali and his evil plans but on Little Billee and his tribulations and on his two mates. This is a shame because while Trilby is a brilliant character and Svengali, although stereotyped, is a worthy villain, Little Billee is a colourless milksop. Indeed, the three British artists make up a single character between them. Du Maurier's main intent seems to be on making gentle fun of the artistic bohemian community in 1850s Paris; the story sometimes seems incidental to this. In fact, the true chief villain is Little Billee's mum whose narrow bourgeois sensibilities prevent love's true dream.
Du Maurier is clearly critical of the suffocating late Victorian society in which marriage was only possible between two people of appropriate class. Other characters include a French Duke who marries an ugly American for her father's millions and a gentlemen who damns himself by going into trade (retail drapery no less) and then marries the boss's daughter. DM also dislikes the Church: Little Billee is an avid reader of Darwin's Origin of Species and argues with a clergyman who might otherwise have been his father-in-law; Trilby makes an impassioned speech explaining why she didn't need religion to be assured of a place in heaven. But at the same time, DM is a racist (Svengali is the stereotype evil German Jew, wickeder and more horrible than Fagin) and hints at a belief in eugenics (he endorses Trilby's nude modelling on the basis that if we were all nude it would have the advantage that ugly people wouldn't marry and propagate their ugly genes and he makes the same point about the ugly American heiress).
In many ways this is a complex and fascinating book (even if sidetracked from the main story for most of the time). However, it is made virtually unreadable by the author's repeated use of French within the narrative. There is some French on nearly every page. I was fortunate to have a book with notes which translated almost all of this but I had to continually flick to the back to discover what was going on. To make it even less readable, Trilby talks in slang Parisian, Svengali talks with a heavy German accent rendered by the author by the swapping of letters such as b and p (so that bien becomes pien and petit becomes betit) and one of Little Billee's friends speaks French with a heavy English accent, thus combiang for combien and je prong for je prends. So even Google Translate would find this difficult! I have repeatedly in this blog condemned the use of untranslated foreign language in books on the grounds that it is only there to make the author look clever and the reader feel stupid but the frequency of DM's use of French, whilst no doubt adding to the characterisations, made Trilby far less readable than it would otherwise have been.
I was interested by the expression 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Gentleman, Apothecary, Ploughboy, Thief' which is presumably is a late Victorian version of the modern 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief'.
An interesting book which perhaps betrayed the fact that du Maurier was but a beginner as a novelist. January 2014; 302 pages.
George du Maurier was an Anglo-French Victorian artist who, having studied in Paris alongside James Whistler, became a contributor to Punch (both satirical writing and cartoons) who wrote three novels late in life, the second being the best-seller Trilby. He was the father of actor Gerald du Maurier and grandfather of novelist Daphne du Maurier whose biographies of Bramwell Bronte and Francis Bacon I have reviewed in this blog.
Artist's model Trilby O'Ferrall, living in Paris of mixed Anglo-French parentage, meets three British artists. All three fall in love with her but one, nicknamed Little Billee, proposes. Then his mother, horrified that he is going to marry a woman of an inferior social class (and one who has posed nude) interferes and persuades Trilby to promise to leave Paris and never see Little Billee again. Little Billee becomes ill through grief and is taken back to England.
Five years later all of Europe is rocked by the sensational singing star Madame Svengali. Little Billee, now a successful artist, meets up with his three old friends to return to Paris to see her. They realise that she is Trilby. This is a surprise because the old Trilby was tone deaf. Herr Svengali was an acquaintance in Paris; he was a marvellous pianist. They meet him but he spits at Little Billee and they fight.
How has Trilby learned to sing? Will Little Billee be able to meet her again and propose again? Will true love conquer all?
True to his satirical nature, du Maurier's tone throughout is light and teasing. This makes the creation of the monster Svengali, who became a Gothic Horror character along the lines of Dracula or Frankenstein, more compelling. But the bulk of the novel focuses not on Svengali and his evil plans but on Little Billee and his tribulations and on his two mates. This is a shame because while Trilby is a brilliant character and Svengali, although stereotyped, is a worthy villain, Little Billee is a colourless milksop. Indeed, the three British artists make up a single character between them. Du Maurier's main intent seems to be on making gentle fun of the artistic bohemian community in 1850s Paris; the story sometimes seems incidental to this. In fact, the true chief villain is Little Billee's mum whose narrow bourgeois sensibilities prevent love's true dream.
Du Maurier is clearly critical of the suffocating late Victorian society in which marriage was only possible between two people of appropriate class. Other characters include a French Duke who marries an ugly American for her father's millions and a gentlemen who damns himself by going into trade (retail drapery no less) and then marries the boss's daughter. DM also dislikes the Church: Little Billee is an avid reader of Darwin's Origin of Species and argues with a clergyman who might otherwise have been his father-in-law; Trilby makes an impassioned speech explaining why she didn't need religion to be assured of a place in heaven. But at the same time, DM is a racist (Svengali is the stereotype evil German Jew, wickeder and more horrible than Fagin) and hints at a belief in eugenics (he endorses Trilby's nude modelling on the basis that if we were all nude it would have the advantage that ugly people wouldn't marry and propagate their ugly genes and he makes the same point about the ugly American heiress).
In many ways this is a complex and fascinating book (even if sidetracked from the main story for most of the time). However, it is made virtually unreadable by the author's repeated use of French within the narrative. There is some French on nearly every page. I was fortunate to have a book with notes which translated almost all of this but I had to continually flick to the back to discover what was going on. To make it even less readable, Trilby talks in slang Parisian, Svengali talks with a heavy German accent rendered by the author by the swapping of letters such as b and p (so that bien becomes pien and petit becomes betit) and one of Little Billee's friends speaks French with a heavy English accent, thus combiang for combien and je prong for je prends. So even Google Translate would find this difficult! I have repeatedly in this blog condemned the use of untranslated foreign language in books on the grounds that it is only there to make the author look clever and the reader feel stupid but the frequency of DM's use of French, whilst no doubt adding to the characterisations, made Trilby far less readable than it would otherwise have been.
I was interested by the expression 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Gentleman, Apothecary, Ploughboy, Thief' which is presumably is a late Victorian version of the modern 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief'.
An interesting book which perhaps betrayed the fact that du Maurier was but a beginner as a novelist. January 2014; 302 pages.
Saturday, 16 November 2013
"The infernal world of Branwell Bronte" by Daphne du Maurier
Branwell was the only brother of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. As children and adolescents and into early adulthood they invented imaginary worlds and scribbled stories and poems. Eventually the three sisters became famous authors but the boy never had a single line published in his lifetime; he died very shortly after the triumph of Jane Eyre.
Perhaps the fault lay within himself. He couldn't hold down a job. After failing to be admitted to the Royal Academy School he gave up painting. He tried tutoring but didn't like it. He became a railway booking clerk and later a station master but was sacked for his slapdash book-keeping. He then tried tutoring again but was dismissed for some sort of scandal: he later claimed it was because he had fallen in love with the lady of the house although this may have been his fantasy. Disheartened by failure he took to drink and laudanum: this may have contributed to his later failures.
Du Maurier writes biography as historical fiction: she gets inside the character and presents a narrative rather than sifting endless evidence. (She also does this in Golden Lads about Sir Anthony Bacon.) This makes for easy reading. In this case, however, the flow of the story is marred by then long quotations from Branwell's juvenilia, his poems and his letters. Some of these were, to say the least, tedious.
An interesting story of a man haunted by failure. November 2013; 231 pages
Perhaps the fault lay within himself. He couldn't hold down a job. After failing to be admitted to the Royal Academy School he gave up painting. He tried tutoring but didn't like it. He became a railway booking clerk and later a station master but was sacked for his slapdash book-keeping. He then tried tutoring again but was dismissed for some sort of scandal: he later claimed it was because he had fallen in love with the lady of the house although this may have been his fantasy. Disheartened by failure he took to drink and laudanum: this may have contributed to his later failures.
Du Maurier writes biography as historical fiction: she gets inside the character and presents a narrative rather than sifting endless evidence. (She also does this in Golden Lads about Sir Anthony Bacon.) This makes for easy reading. In this case, however, the flow of the story is marred by then long quotations from Branwell's juvenilia, his poems and his letters. Some of these were, to say the least, tedious.
An interesting story of a man haunted by failure. November 2013; 231 pages
Friday, 30 August 2013
"Golden Lads" by Daphne du Maurier
The famous novelist does fact rather than fiction. This is the first part of the biography of Anthony and Francis Bacon. Written in the 1970s, Ms du Maurier brings her story-writing skills into the telling of history, creating characters and speculating on feelings while marshalling her material into a clear plot-line.
Wordsworth stated the "the child is father of the man" and Ian Mortimer in The Perfect King has suggested that "childhood is the most important" stage in life and therefore essential to a biography even though the early years are least likely to be well-documented. This biography starts on page one with their mother, Ann. She was a remarkable, a formidable, woman! Intensely protestant, she became a minor best-seller in Calvinist circles for her translations of Italian sermons. Fanatically protestant, her letters to her sons repeatedly warn them of the dangers of Roman Catholicism lurking in every foreigner and anyone else who might not conform to her strict ideals. Instead she insists that they behave in accordance with her highly limited and puritanical code. She moaned a lot! Not that it seems to have done any good at all.
Anthony spent most of his young life abroad, especially in France, mingling with Papists and fondling young pages. There is evidence that his Romish connections may have been because he was spying on behalf of Walsingham. There is also evidence that he probably was homosexual: he broke off an early engagement and never subsequently married, there are a number of reports about the young boys, and while in France he was accused of sodomy and only escaped being burned alive by the intervention of the future Henri IV of France.
Back in Britain he was more circumspect, at least in this respect. Becoming spymaster to the Earl of Essex was not in hindsight a brilliant career move. The Earl repeatedly fell out with Queen Elizabeth, once being placed under house arrest for laying his hand upon his sword after she boxed his ears for turning his ack on her and finally being executed for treason following an abortive coup.
Meanwhile Francis spent most of these years as a lawyer. He redeemed himself (and his brother?) following the fall of Essex by being part of the prosecution team at the Earl's trial. This despite the Earl repeatedly trying (although failing) to help him in his career: many historians have seen this as base ingratitude on the part of Francisd although it might have just been his way of extrication the Bacon brothers from the tricky situation in which the anyway-doomed Earl had already placed them.
Du Maurier highlights the crazy way in which Elizabethan finances worked. Both Bacon brothers spent huge amounts of their own money in pursuit of their patron's interests. Anthony paid many of Essex's spies from his own pocket; he also subsidised his brother because Francis had inherited nothing from their father. As a result of both brothers' expenses, they had to borrow, top mortgage and to sell much of their inheritance. This draw predictable and repeated complaints from their mother who was expected to live from the income of at least some of these properties; clearly this income dwindled with time. The Bacon's were not alone. The great Walsingham died in poverty because he had pauperised himself running and paying for Elizabeth's secret service. Given she escaped repeated assassination attempts and plots against her life and throne, this does seem somewhat ungrateful of her.
One thing that really annoyed me about this book is du Maurier's habit of quoting in French and Latin without offering a translation. I have ranted about this before! It seems to me that the author is saying: 'I am fluent in foreign languages and if you aren't then perhaps you are too stupid to read my book'. I beg all future editors not to allow this practice.
Despite this flaw, this is an interesting tale, engagingly told. I read it in a single sitting (albeit I was a captive audience on a ten hour flight to Cuba not forgetting the two hour train ride to the airport and the two hours sitting in the departures lounge). It was particularly illuminating about Anthony, of whom I had not previously heard.
August 2013; 260 pages
Also considering Francis Bacon is Lytton Strachey's double biography of Elizabeth and Essex
Wordsworth stated the "the child is father of the man" and Ian Mortimer in The Perfect King has suggested that "childhood is the most important" stage in life and therefore essential to a biography even though the early years are least likely to be well-documented. This biography starts on page one with their mother, Ann. She was a remarkable, a formidable, woman! Intensely protestant, she became a minor best-seller in Calvinist circles for her translations of Italian sermons. Fanatically protestant, her letters to her sons repeatedly warn them of the dangers of Roman Catholicism lurking in every foreigner and anyone else who might not conform to her strict ideals. Instead she insists that they behave in accordance with her highly limited and puritanical code. She moaned a lot! Not that it seems to have done any good at all.
Anthony spent most of his young life abroad, especially in France, mingling with Papists and fondling young pages. There is evidence that his Romish connections may have been because he was spying on behalf of Walsingham. There is also evidence that he probably was homosexual: he broke off an early engagement and never subsequently married, there are a number of reports about the young boys, and while in France he was accused of sodomy and only escaped being burned alive by the intervention of the future Henri IV of France.
Back in Britain he was more circumspect, at least in this respect. Becoming spymaster to the Earl of Essex was not in hindsight a brilliant career move. The Earl repeatedly fell out with Queen Elizabeth, once being placed under house arrest for laying his hand upon his sword after she boxed his ears for turning his ack on her and finally being executed for treason following an abortive coup.
Meanwhile Francis spent most of these years as a lawyer. He redeemed himself (and his brother?) following the fall of Essex by being part of the prosecution team at the Earl's trial. This despite the Earl repeatedly trying (although failing) to help him in his career: many historians have seen this as base ingratitude on the part of Francisd although it might have just been his way of extrication the Bacon brothers from the tricky situation in which the anyway-doomed Earl had already placed them.
Du Maurier highlights the crazy way in which Elizabethan finances worked. Both Bacon brothers spent huge amounts of their own money in pursuit of their patron's interests. Anthony paid many of Essex's spies from his own pocket; he also subsidised his brother because Francis had inherited nothing from their father. As a result of both brothers' expenses, they had to borrow, top mortgage and to sell much of their inheritance. This draw predictable and repeated complaints from their mother who was expected to live from the income of at least some of these properties; clearly this income dwindled with time. The Bacon's were not alone. The great Walsingham died in poverty because he had pauperised himself running and paying for Elizabeth's secret service. Given she escaped repeated assassination attempts and plots against her life and throne, this does seem somewhat ungrateful of her.
One thing that really annoyed me about this book is du Maurier's habit of quoting in French and Latin without offering a translation. I have ranted about this before! It seems to me that the author is saying: 'I am fluent in foreign languages and if you aren't then perhaps you are too stupid to read my book'. I beg all future editors not to allow this practice.
Despite this flaw, this is an interesting tale, engagingly told. I read it in a single sitting (albeit I was a captive audience on a ten hour flight to Cuba not forgetting the two hour train ride to the airport and the two hours sitting in the departures lounge). It was particularly illuminating about Anthony, of whom I had not previously heard.
August 2013; 260 pages
Also considering Francis Bacon is Lytton Strachey's double biography of Elizabeth and Essex
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)