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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
I’m with you, astrangerhere - I enjoyed both of them too. I think it can be a problem with pretty much any book when we thrash it to death looking at whether it is scientifically possible, or logical or whatever.
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Oh, I don't know. I disagree. I think "thrashing it to death" is an overstatement. I'm not going to alter my good opinion of a book because it meets with objections,
unless it's an obvious flaw that I hadn't seen. I think discussions always increase my understanding of a book, for good or ill.
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Rather than considering how the drug worked, I thought more about the nature of addiction to various things, and the damage this does to the individual and also to his or her family.
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I wasn't at all interested in how the drug worked and have to say that I thought du Maurier's reference to DNA was extremely unfortunate. It's obvious she had no understanding of it (and no reason why she should) and I think she just pulled it out because in the context of when she was writing the book it was a recent discovery, only 15 years earlier. So basically I'm agreeing with you about that!
For me, there's a chicken-and-egg aspect to Dick's addiction. Was he particularly prone to addiction because of his unhappiness with his life and his family or did his addictive tendencies exacerbate this? I though du Maurier altered the perspective of Vita in a telling manner. For most of the book we got Dick's view of her and it wasn't flattering. And yet, she reacted to Dick's violence against her with understanding and her subsequent actions to me showed her a reasonable and even compassionate woman (if still a little controlling). So we got the addict's view and then the family view and nicely done, too.