Books: No Sunnybrook Farm

REBECCA—Daphne du Maurier—Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

Daphne du Maurier, daughter of the famous Gerald, whose lively portrait she wrote three years ago, has written five novels. The fifth, Rebecca, is definitely two cuts above Jamaica Inn, the thriller which won her reputation in 1936.

Rebecca is the story of a gawky young girl who marries an attractive man 20 years her elder, becoming the mistress of a great English country house and a victim of the tragedy that overhangs it. A sense of doom built up in the first few pages strikes a reader as a tour de force, brilliant but false. As the story unfolds, the sense of doom is gradually justified.

Very definitely Rebecca belongs not to the realistic but to the romantic tradition of the novel. As such it is not to be compared with Oedipus Rex (although most readers are likely to find it a good deal harder to lay down than Oedipus), but like Oedipus it is basically a horror story, and like Oedipus it unrolls forward and backward simultaneously, each new revelation of the past driving the story forward.

Greater novelists might well admire Rebecca’s craftsmanship. Again & again the reader is led with seeming casualness to the edge of a precipice of suspense. A competent craftsman, Author du Maurier manages to make her readers hold their breaths for 457 pages.