[I decided to read this 1957 novel in three sections. As I finish reading each of these (I’ve read one third so far) I write about it before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
27 January 2024
Chapters 1-9 (of 27)
This feels very post-war English middle-class. Is that a criticism? I suppose I mean that despite its wow-factor what-if? premise—shy, unfulfilled academic is tricked into exchanging identities with his far more charismatic French doppelganger—it’s all a little cosy and safe. Yes, I know that this is exactly the familiar world that du Maurier is going to overturn for her hapless narrator… but it doesn’t stop the pace being slow and over-described, and the scenes from French provincial life feeling like run-of-the-mill travel writing. Our man’s 24 hours of becoming ever more inextricably identified as an entitled, aristocratic rogue ought to be vertiginous. So why is it rather plodding?
Maybe I’ll come back to that. But I ought to mention first du Maurier’s focus on her man’s interior life. He’s suffering from an almost terminal sense of anomie—he feels his life is pointless, he has no friends, he doesn’t believe in the value of any of his work as a writer and lecturer on French history. But who would? Du Maurier has scrupulously avoided giving him anything like a back story. He has no family, no social life, little in his life at all outside a dull round of chilly cultural pursuits. This is all well and good, marginally adding to the plausibility of his not scurrying back to the life he’s left behind in England. But, once he’s almost accidentally slipped into letting everybody believe he’s the other man—he just goes with the flow of their expectations—plausibility counts for very little. This bookish mouse of a man is remarkably resourceful, finds himself saying just the right things, often accidentally, and ends up fooling every single member of the family, and anybody else he meets. Only the dogs can tell he’s no Comte de Gue, but an impostor.
It’s clear that du Maurier is making a point here. John—Doe, or whatever his surname might be, which we’ve never found out—finds himself able to slip into a world in which almost whatever he says is accepted. He is terribly hung-over from brandy and some ‘sleeping draught,’ and says this to Gaston, the factotum who arrives at his no-questions-asked seedy hotel room. Fine. This is just the sort of lame excuse the real Comte would come out with. People are used to accepting whatever the privileged man he is impersonating says, not because they believe it but because he’s always been allowed to get away with it. It’s as though he’s never had to live by the same rules as everyone else—a recognisable trait, as du Maurier knows, in many members of his class. Gender, a lifetime of privilege and the easy charm of those who take their entitlement for granted makes their passage through life very easy. Hard to justify your actions? Why even bother to try?
This, of course, is highly useful for du Maurier. She has set herself a task that seems impossible: to make up a preposterous ‘what if?’ McGuffin and get her readers to believe that, well, it might happen. So she’s taken us through the incremental steps our man finds himself taking, by accident at first, and done her best to make them seem feasible. We’re not in a court of law, but a fantasy—and by the point I’ve reached, the question is less about how plausible it all is, and more about what du Maurier is going to get her man to do about the seemingly terminal mess the Comte has made of his rakish, self-indulgent life.
Like so much else, the facts reach John, and the reader, incrementally. When they meet, the Comte had been on his way back from Paris and is avoiding going home. We guess he’s been unsuccessful in some business meeting—we later discover it had been a last-chance bid to save the family business. Over several chapters, we piece together how his expensive lifestyle and carelessness over the glass-foundry the family owns have led to a crisis. Like John, the Comte had been at a crossroads in his life when they met. Or, rather, the edge of an abyss—things can’t go on like this. The Comte had dropped dark hints to John about his family responsibilities and other pressures, telling him how lucky he was to have none of that in his life. John, meanwhile, has been very open about his sense of failure. Since the start of the novel, he has been thinking about visiting the monastery of la Grande Trappe, and explains why. ‘I thought if I went,’ I said, ‘and stayed there before returning to England, I might find the courage to go on living.’
Whatever. It’s another reason to go along with the Comte’s deception. Once he realises he has no proof of his real identity—and every proof that he is the Comte—it’s a tiny step to just go with the flow. (Older readers might remember a fantasy TV science fiction series, Quantum Leap. The viewer sees the lead actor plunged into different situations, whereas the characters around him see the person whose identity he has temporarily taken over. He has to use his wits to solve some crisis being faced by his alter-ego, while those around him suspect nothing.) Over time, instead of treating the family and servants as almost chimeras, with no meaning for him, he finds himself becoming involved. How has the Comte reduced his wife to a shy, self-doubting shadow of her young self? (He finds a photo album showing her as a young beauty.) Why is his sister a God-obsessed, bitter spinster (his word)? Why does his younger brother, who is the de facto manager of the foundry, hate him so much?
We come to know why. His lifestyle and lack of interest has run the foundry into ruin. His wife rightly suspects his affairs, including one with his brother’s wife. In fact, John accidentally confirms the latter by publicly distributing presents bought by the Comte—a slinky negligee that she opens at the dining-table. His mother, once a beauty but now a grotesquely fat, chairbound morphine addict, indulges him to the point of publicly rejoicing in his worst habits. His ten-year-old daughter, lively and bright and clearly besotted by him, is being pushed by Blanche, the God-fearer, into considering entering a convent. It seems the Comte has done nothing to prevent this, having bought her a book based on the life of her current favourite saint.
He’s almost decided to leave—he’s on his way, he tells himself—when chestnuts thrown from a high window reveal this daughter to him for the first time. He is charmed by her, indulges her affection as it comes to him that he has never known anything like it before. Hmm. And then comes the confirmation that this man really is going to do his best to turn things around. Paul, his brother, almost forces him to come to the foundry with him to tell them all about the Paris meeting. Going with the flow, as ever, he pretends it went well, that they can operate for the six months Paul has hoped for. The smiles and celebrations of the workers, the coffee she can’t afford given to him by the wife of a worker rendered permanently unfit for work by molten glass…. He has got to do something to save them. The letter from the Paris company, which he has avoided reading, confirms all deals are off.
What would a timid mouse like him do? Telephone the number on the letter from the big company and tell them he wants to renegotiate? Unlikely. But that’s what he does. Somebody, he then realises, has been listening on the extension…. Who? The faded wife? The daughter? The bitter sister? The mistress made even more bitter by John’s horrified response to her attempts to arouse him? (Is he a virgin? Not at all unlikely.)
It’s time to read on.
We can read it for you wholesale 