A Cornish manor house sometime in the nineteenth century; an almost exclusively male, inward-looking world, one of contentment and routine; a trip abroad with terrible consequences, and a visitor, unwelcome at first but who then becomes an object of infatuation.
Those are the bare bones of Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, the story of Philip Ashley and his eponymous relative, a book with a subtle atmosphere of unease which creates in the reader a sense of foreboding and a desire to wrest the central character from a fate largely of his own making.
Philip's feelings about Rachel, the widow of his cousin Ambrose who has brought him up and been his companion, corkscrew from imagined hate and despising to surprised tolerance and then love - of a sort. His head is turned, and he shows himself as variously rash, foolish, impetuous, petulant, immature and vulnerable. Rachel, as we discover, has the whip hand, the shady accomplice (Rainaldi), the greed and profligacy to lead her to adopt desperate measures, and the means by which to dispose of unwanted men. Did she do it? Did she murder Ambrose and try to poison Philip? Is Philip a reliable narrator?
Whether or not we can satisfactorily answer these questions we can, I think, admire the story-telling here, and the way in which du Maurier seems to know her 'hero' inside out; the narrative struck me as very complete, thoroughly worked through, and the edge of menace is palpably sharp. What did you think of it?
