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I recently asked my reading buddies who their favourite historical author was and one answer that came back was unexpected, to me anyway – Daphne du Maurier. I have to admit I have read very little Daphne du Maurier, historical or otherwise, not even Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek or Jamaica Inn. And this is despite my mother being a du Maurier fan and even regularly stopping us on our journeys down to Cornwall at the real Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.

 

However, I do have a lovely cloth bound, stitched not glued, copy of Don’t Look Now on my bookshelf.

 

Don’t Look Now is a collection of five short stories published in 1966:

 

            Don’t Look Now

            The Breakthrough

            Not After Midnight

            A Border-Line Case

            The Way of the Cross

 

Those are clever titles. Every one has a double meaning. Every story is more than it seems on the surface.

 

These stories are contemporary, to 1966. They weren’t written as historical fiction, although they feel historical reading them now. The characters are almost all a certain type of upper-middle class English person – I can only think of one who did not attend a fee paying school. Their children are safely enclosed in boarding school while they take a holiday in Venice. They never carry their own luggage. The men are army or navy veterans. The women over thirty don’t drive cars. Retired female teachers are described as ‘a couple of pathetic old retired school mistresses on holiday’, and a girl with learning difficulties as ‘a backward child, a sad little object of no interest’. These are hardly descriptions you would expect to find in a modern novel.

 

But I’m not sure du Maurier thought those descriptions were entirely ok either. They are attitudes in the thoughts of the characters. And the characters are not entirely trustworthy.

 

Each story is told from the point of view of a character, except the last, The Way of the Cross, where the point of view moves from one person to another as a group of tourists walks along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. None of these characters is a hero -  the person you  admire and are rooting for. They are people with dubious moral failings, or their thoughts and conclusions are distorted by strong emotion, such as grief.  There is no authorial voice telling you how to react either. Just your own little voice in your head saying “Wait a minute. That doesn’t seem right. Don’t do that.”

 

In this sense these are classic horror stories – there is something awful lurking in the wings, something that shouldn’t be disturbed. In fact you’d be better off turning round and running fast in the other direction. Quite often the something that prevails.

 

They are horror stories then. But they don’t reel in blood and guts and torture. They  quiver with unease and don’t end happily.

 

The tourists in The Way of the Cross experience their own personal suffering on the Via Dolorosa, in the form of intense embarrassment and loss of self-respect. Unease pervades the entire telling of The Breakthrough leaving the reader wondering if anybody involved in the experiment truly recognized the immorality of their actions. In a Border Line Case terrorism is seen through the eyes of an emotionally immature nineteen year old who steps over so many of the boundaries that a woman should acknowledge if she is to keep herself safe that you want to shake her. Not After Midnight is the classic slippery slope of one ill-advised action sliding into another. And Don’t Look Now is a masterful portrayal of how the mind ceases to work logically when overwhelmed by grief.

 

Du Maurier’s writing is lucid and straightforward. Her plots move steadily forward. Her characters think the limited thoughts of limited people. Yet, somehow, she manages to let you know there is another layer to all this and that layer is you, the reader. What are your mistakes, your moral failings? How much danger are you in? Would you put one foot in front of another until you finally slipped down the slope? Or is there another voice somewhere, keeping you safe?

 

If you don’t like reading books that are disturbing, then don’t read this one. Du Maurier did, after all, write The Birds, the story in the classic Hitchcock film. She knows what will make you squirm. However, there are no cheap scares here. It’s masterful story telling and highly perceptive observation of human failings. It might make you think.