Sally Beauman: Rebecca's Tale

By ELSPETH SANDYS*

In recent years a number of novels beloved of the reading public have spawned sequels and/or prequels (Susan Hill's Mrs De Winter, Emma Tennant's Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice). I have never felt the slightest desire to read these books, preferring to stay with the mystery created by the original author. If the writer leaves some things unexplained it's because she wanted to allow the reader imaginative space. A story exists in that interaction, different with every reading, of writer and reader.

Despite these objections, I couldn't put down Sally Beauman's sequel/prequel to Daphne du Maurier's haunting novel Rebecca. This was partly due to the hold Cornwall has always had on my imagination, but also because of the vividness of Beauman's prose.

Rebecca's Tale covers the years before and after the original story, with the present set at 1951. Beauman conjures up the drabness of postwar London as expertly as she does the unstable cliffs, freezing cottages, and wild beaches of southern Cornwall. Her characters, especially the crazed and visibly disintegrating Mrs Danvers and the curmudgeonly old Colonel Julyan, are also wonderfully realised, as is Rebecca, for all that she remains an enigma.

At 627 pages, one would assume Rebecca's Tale was going to tie up all du Maurier's loose ends and pin down the guilt or innocence of Maxim de Winter and the true character of the mysterious Rebecca. But the book creates as many mysteries as it solves. Did Rebecca have an incestuous relationship with her father? Did Maxim suspect his wife was in fact his first cousin? How much of Rebecca's tale, as told in her notebooks, is true?

If the novel was written only to entertain then it succeeds admirably. But Beauman is too good a writer to be satisfied with that limited objective, and by book's end I wondered why the novel had been written at all.

It ends on a note of feminist optimism. Ellie, Colonel Julyan's daughter, turns her back on marriage to resume her studies in Cambridge. It's an odd ending for such a romantic novel. Having allowed myself to be seduced (once again) by Cornwall and its ghosts, I wanted something more suitably gothic. I suspect the conclusion says more about Sally Beauman than it does about Rebecca.

Penguin

$22.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.