As with Wyndham, too, du Maurier’s characters tend to be stout, hearty types, everymen to whom strange things happen. The build-up of atmosphere is superb, and it ends up a Wyndhamesque thing, bleak, apocalyptic and really quite frightening. This doesn’t matter, as it’s quite different, and better, in written form. It’s a story that’s hard to come to fresh, so famous has the Hitchcock adaptation become (achieving the sort of cultural osmosis so that even people who haven’t seen the film know what it’s about). The only weak point is the very last sentence, which risks reducing the whole thing to bathos – it’s very badly judged and should have been removed, leaving the penultimate sentence to do its unsettling work.ĭu Maurier’s other most famous story, ‘The Birds’, comes next. – and, cleverly, is actually a joke and not a sinister opening … only for it to become sinister very quickly. “Don’t look now,” John said to his wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.” I knew the vague bones of the story – dead child, couple go on hols to recuperate, spooky goings-on, child in red cloak omnipresent, lots of water – and that’s all you need to know too if you’re a newcomer like me. Having read the title story, I can see why the film it inspired – which I haven’t seen – is so famous (and not because of the realistic sex: none of that between these covers): it’s brilliantly creepy and sinister, wonderfully reducing Venice from city of romance to a tawdry, soiled backdrop for cruelty and paranoia.
I felt the stories here – nine of them, filling 360 pages – to be of better quality than the Penguin book – which they well might be, as a sort of best-of.
Now the du Maurier estate have clearly decided to have another crack at my defences, with a double whammy of a selection of her stories chosen by Patrick McGrath, and published by NYRB Classics. Other than the title story, I had mixed feelings about it. That volume – Don’t Look Now and other stories – was a collection published in her lifetime (original UK title: Not After Midnight). It’s typical of my wrongheaded priorities that the only time I’ve been inclined to read a book by Daphne du Maurier – author of Rebecca! Creator of The Birds! – was when I saw a book of her stories issued in Penguin Modern Classics.
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