|
|
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
09-11-2018, 07:57 AM | #1 | |
o saeclum infacetum
Posts: 20,561
Karma: 224837692
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: New England
Device: H2O, Aura One, PW5
|
October 2018 Discussion • The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier is the October selection for the New Leaf Book Club.
Quote:
Last edited by issybird; 10-15-2018 at 07:10 AM. |
|
10-15-2018, 07:34 AM | #2 |
o saeclum infacetum
Posts: 20,561
Karma: 224837692
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: New England
Device: H2O, Aura One, PW5
|
It's time to talk about The House on the Strand. What did we think of it?
|
Advert | |
|
10-15-2018, 08:52 AM | #3 | |
Snoozing in the sun
Posts: 10,137
Karma: 115423645
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Device: iPad Mini, Kobo Touch
|
I came across an interesting comment about Daphne du Maurier’s writing, which applies very well to this book. It was written by Kate Kellaway and I think appeared in The Guardian.
Quote:
The other general comment I wanted to make now was how vivid I thought all the medieval passages were, and I loved the way the book started by throwing us straight into Dick’s experience without any prior explanation. |
|
10-15-2018, 10:47 AM | #4 |
Grand Sorcerer
Posts: 7,356
Karma: 52612287
Join Date: Oct 2010
Device: Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite, AGPTek Bluetooth Clip
|
Unlike Bookpossum, I wasn't thrilled with the way the book started. I generally like openings in media res, but here there was far too much description of the landscape for my liking--it didn't grab me at all.
Overall, I'm rather wishy-washy about the book. A lot of it seemed vaguely familiar--I may have read it many years ago--and pieces here and there reminded me of other works; I kept thinking of Green Darkness (the parallels of past and present), Brigadoon (dissatisfaction with current life vs. a romanticized past), and even The Haunting of Hill House (the obsessed person's pretense of leaving). I know, I'm a bit weird. I couldn't make myself believe that Magnus's concoction was anything more than a version of LSD and the trips anything more than hallucinations. I wasn't particularly fond of the 14th-century setting at first but eventually became more interested in it. I liked Vita and the boys. Mostly, there was little that stood out for me as especially noteworthy one way or the other. |
10-15-2018, 11:46 AM | #5 |
cacoethes scribendi
Posts: 5,812
Karma: 137770742
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650
|
Well, it's after 2:30am and I should be headed to bed ... but a few brief thoughts.
Well, the theme suggested sci-fi and that's what we got (close enough). I liked the idea much better than the execution. The idea that your mind/awareness might occupy a different time to your body was, I thought, quite fascinating. The drug thing was a bit iffy with regard to an explanation for it, but du Maurier was missing some of the technical possibilities that have since been explored - thinking here of the end of The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, where they follow genetic links into the past; or The Trigger by Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Kube-McDowell, that ends up exploring the information theories behind DNA. Speaking of genetic links. I was expecting an explanation for why both Magnus and Dick should be tied to the same person (Roger) in the past - perhaps that the three were all related. But such an explanation was never made explicit, and I wondered if we were supposed to assume it. I liked Vita and the kids, but felt as if they were kept out of the central story more than was realistic - presumably to stop things getting overly complicated. Dr Powell was a problem. I had expected to discover that he had a connection to Magnus, as that would have explained him much better than the ... what? Is he just a busy-body with convenient qualifications? Far too convenient as he was, whereas there seemed no reason why he should not have had some connection with Magnus. I liked the ending. I didn't find it overly powerful as such, but it was satisfying. |
Advert | |
|
10-15-2018, 01:04 PM | #6 | |
Grand Sorcerer
Posts: 7,356
Karma: 52612287
Join Date: Oct 2010
Device: Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite, AGPTek Bluetooth Clip
|
Quote:
I wondered if Magnus was not necessarily being truthful about his own trips--it seemed that for the most part Dick would report his experiences, and Magnus would say, Wow, same thing happened to me, and enlarge upon it, feed Dick more information, and then Dick's next hallucination would enlarge upon that, etc. Dick had previously spent time in the area, and he might have heard some of the names in discussions with Magnus's parents or neighbors, so the fact that those 14th-century people actually lived wouldn't prove that he wasn't simply hallucinating. Maybe Magnus was experimenting with controlling hallucinations. I suspect my theory is full of holes, but it's what I was thinking as I read. |
|
10-15-2018, 02:34 PM | #7 |
Wizard
Posts: 1,375
Karma: 26915798
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Ireland
Device: Kindle Oasis 3, 4G, iPad Air 2, iPhone IE
|
My audiobook copy finally arrived from the Linrary so I’ll discuss my reactions later on.
|
10-15-2018, 06:33 PM | #8 | |
Snoozing in the sun
Posts: 10,137
Karma: 115423645
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Device: iPad Mini, Kobo Touch
|
Quote:
I agree that the trips are really a nonsense, but I was prepared to suspend disbelief and go along with the story. I don’t demand technical explanations for how something can happen as long as the author makes it work for me. |
|
10-15-2018, 07:46 PM | #9 |
Snoozing in the sun
Posts: 10,137
Karma: 115423645
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Device: iPad Mini, Kobo Touch
|
gmw, I found Dr Powell’s appearances perfectly acceptable. In a small area of the country he was probably the only doctor, or perhaps one of only two or three, to be around.
I think his role was somewhat like the person who comes in to return chaos to some semblance of order, as in a Shakespearean tragedy, or more recently, the police officer in the film Fargo - which I found quite Shakespearean in fact. |
10-15-2018, 10:15 PM | #10 | |||
cacoethes scribendi
Posts: 5,812
Karma: 137770742
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650
|
Quote:
Quote:
An alternative explanation for "why Roger" might be in the contents of the drug itself. The regular references to the monkey's head etc. made me wonder if it was really a monkey; might the drug have contained some human elements and perhaps those came from a descendent of Roger. (I'm not claiming this makes it any more credible scientifically, just looking for something that might have worked in the story.) I also find it funny that the trips didn't seem so much like nonsense to me, certainly not while I was reading. And even in retrospect I can imagine someone putting on a Virtual Reality helmet and stumbling around the the countryside experiencing a different story to an external observer. (The drug may have been an imperfect way to achieve this effect, but I am interested in the idea that the effect - now - could be quite real. I think this made me more accepting of the drug as the magic wand needed to explore the idea.) Quote:
It is possible to suppose that there was indeed a connection between Magnus and Dr Powell, but for some reason Powell chose not to reveal it to Dick (just because Dick is lousy at keeping secrets doesn't mean everyone else it - eg: Willis). Last edited by gmw; 10-15-2018 at 10:18 PM. |
|||
10-16-2018, 07:08 AM | #11 | |
Professor of Law
Posts: 3,667
Karma: 66000002
Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: Chapel Hill, NC
Device: Kobo Elipsa, Kobo Libra H20, Kobo Aura One, KoboMini
|
I have skimmed the comments above, and agree with many of them. So I will just jump in and address something no one else has.
One of the first notes I made about the book was in reference to the casual homophobia of the time. Vita comments about the gay Magnus: Quote:
Which does lead me to my next point - wow, did I hate Vita. She was the sort of grasping, materialistic, alcoholic (though everyone in the book seemed to be to some extent) American in every bad sense of the word. It was very easy to see how Dick could prefer a psychedelic drug to his own wife, though it was hard to imagine why he had married her in the first place. The second thing I wrote down was how much like Connie Willis' Doomsday Book this felt to me. Mind you, I know that Willis' book involved a woman actually having to live through the Black Death and that real time travel was involved. But the sense of attachment to these other people and times felt similar to me. The comparison is a compliment to both tales. |
|
10-16-2018, 07:31 AM | #12 |
Snoozing in the sun
Posts: 10,137
Karma: 115423645
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Device: iPad Mini, Kobo Touch
|
The thing that got me about Vita was the way she moved all the furniture around in Magnus’s house. I thought that was quite astonishingly rude. And I agree, that was a vile thing to say about Magnus. I read it as another aspect of Vita’s character, rather than a reflection of du Maurier’s attitudes.
She and Dick do seem to be a complete mismatch. But then is Dick to be believed about all this? We only have his version of the relationship. |
10-16-2018, 10:12 AM | #13 |
Grand Sorcerer
Posts: 7,356
Karma: 52612287
Join Date: Oct 2010
Device: Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite, AGPTek Bluetooth Clip
|
Hmm. I liked Vita, maybe because I disliked Dick and we saw her through his biased viewpoint. She seemed fairly typical for the time; her "crime" seemed to be wanting her husband to stop wallowing in indecision. She was bossy, sure, but someone had to be.
Any homophobia pretty much went over my head. I did think that the main reason Dick married Vita was to "prove" he wasn't gay. |
10-16-2018, 11:19 AM | #14 |
cacoethes scribendi
Posts: 5,812
Karma: 137770742
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Australia
Device: Kobo Aura One & H2Ov2, Sony PRS-650
|
Hmm... it's so easy to say something and realise later how misleading it can be. I did like Vita and boys as characters in the book - in that I thought they were good/effective characters, and could have been even better if given a bit more leg room. However I am much more ambivalent about Vita as a person.
I can see why she was bossy, she felt as if she needed to be. It's possible this had a negative effect - making Dick even more ineffectual - but that isn't likely to change way Vita behaves. That she expressed some homophobia is not unrealistic, and perhaps has secondary causes in this case. She probably is quite jealous of the relationship between Magnus and Dick, it is easy to see this extending into homophobia however she may have felt originally. I can see the furniture rearrangement as being another way in which Vita tries to exert her possession of Dick by taking control of his surroundings. ... So I find her quite understandable, and someone that I even came to feel considerable sympathy for - none of which means I would have chosen to marry her. I am not inclined to think that Dick felt he had anything to prove as regards his heterosexuality; he and Magnus had been close friends since childhood, and had there been anything sexual in it I think it would have expressed itself by now. No, I felt as if the friendship was what it appeared - which still didn't make it easy for Vita to accept. I think that by the time we (the readers) appear on the scene, Dick is already out-of-sorts. He's made his first trip, he's feeling pressure about the New York job offer etc.. So by the time we meet him he's already disrupted and this is what I use to explain why his relationship with Vita seems a mismatch. We see a few glimpses of how things may have been before, but for the most part he is too distracted by the time we arrive to be much use to anyone. |
10-16-2018, 12:28 PM | #15 |
Grand Sorcerer
Posts: 7,356
Karma: 52612287
Join Date: Oct 2010
Device: Kindle Fire, Kindle Paperwhite, AGPTek Bluetooth Clip
|
Why the odd names for the two primary people in Dick's life: Magnus (great) and Vita (life)? Any thoughts?
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
New Leaf May 2018 Discussion • The Radium Girls by Kate Moore | issybird | Book Clubs | 141 | 03-09-2019 03:43 PM |
New Leaf September 2018 Discussion • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro | issybird | Book Clubs | 163 | 10-18-2018 03:26 PM |
MobileRead October 2015 Discussion: Kidnapped (spoilers) | WT Sharpe | Book Clubs | 21 | 10-25-2015 05:25 PM |
MobileRead October 2014 Discussion: The Man Who Would Be King (spoilers) | WT Sharpe | Book Clubs | 7 | 11-01-2014 12:04 PM |
Daphne du Maurier: which one should I start with? | Loosheesh | Reading Recommendations | 16 | 10-14-2014 01:09 AM |