Fun and games until ...

Yesterday I finished the Daphne du Maurier novel "The House on the Strand." I've yet to go over the supplementary material in the Companion, but she dedicates the book to the former occupants of her home, and it's obvious a lot of research went into the writing. It reminded me of A.M. Homes researching her genealogy in "The Mistress's Daughter," except in memoir form the process was fairly boring and in novel form the process exploded into a life-altering experience on mental and physical levels. 

The narrator, Dick Young, spends the summer in his professor friend's historical Cornwall home and begins secretly testing a drug that transports him six centuries into the past to observe some yesteryear drama. While unable to involve himself in the events, he feels drawn into the action as though he were mysteriously connected -- as though there were some reason he needed to be there, to solve a mystery or to validate certain actions. But in reality, and much to the bewilderment of his wife, his obsession leads him into a double life whose secrets are revealed only when events turn lethal. The professor takes a hypnotic drug walk into a freight train, and Dick takes a hypnotic drug walk into his wife, choking her (but not to death). If only she had been a cohort in the drug testing, perhaps a safer environment could have been created. Alas, the reader wonders, was this marriage headed for instability either way? Their best moment as a couple came when he teased her: "Husbands loathe wives who understand them. It makes for monotony." There is some truth to that statement, but if she could have been trusted, maybe the professor's life could have been saved. And just perhaps, Dick would not have ended up taking the final dose of drug -- the one which paralyzes him. Was it worth witnessing the finale to his story? He saw the plague kill his hero, Roger, and many others. He saw it kill the liveliness of the era, and now a plague is on him, one which he will likely live through for many years. He enjoyed the way his life commingled with the past, popping in and out as though he were reading a book, I thought. And now that's the only way he'll be able to visit any other place or time. If Vita can stand it, she'll read to him at bedside, sending him into other worlds at intervals. Will he allow himself to connect to fiction, or will his misery overshadow any spark of happiness?


"There was no past, no present, no future. Everything living is part of the whole. We are all bound, one to the other, through time and eternity.... I felt myself on the brink of some tremendous discovery when I fell asleep."


Du Maurier's sense of humor never ceases to surprise me.