Jamaica Inn

Foreword

Jamaica Inn opens with echoes of Dracula: a carriage rattling through a desolate landscape and wild weather to a place where even the locals won’t go, so ferocious is its reputation. Inside rides Mary Yellan, newly orphaned and en route from the tame farmland of the Helford area to the rainswept moors of nineteenth-century Cornwall and the married home of her aunt, a woman once known for her rich curls and girlish laughter. We are in the territory of the gothic novel, but one with an undercurrent of modern sensibility.

Mary’s destination, Jamaica Inn, stands dark and forbidding at the top of the moor. It is the house from hell. At night the sign outside twists in the wind like a human body on a gibbet. Inside, the place reeks of neglect, drink and male violence. The lovely giggling Aunt Patience is now a gaunt, shaky wreck, her spirit destroyed by abuse, and her husband, Joss Merlyn, is a monster: physically overwhelming, lumbering, violent and drunk. By the end of the first day, as the light bleeds away and Mary barricades herself in her miserable little room, a pact has been made with the reader. This is going to be a journey into darkness, and it’s going to deliver both violence and sensation.

It doesn’t take long to find out why the inn and its landlord are so feared. Early on, most readers will have guessed the reason. Cornwall, with its bleak, treacherous coastline and wild weather, was for much of its history a law unto itself. Jamaica Inn may now be a tourist trap reduced to kitsch by the publicity of minor literary fame, but when du Maurier would have first seen it, in the 1920s, it would no doubt have been a more desolate place which, with the right imagination, could easily be transformed into Robert Louis Stevenson territory and the heart of a smuggling ring that not only hides the booty but runs a gang of wreckers who lure the ships onto the rocks to drown their crew and steal their cargo.

There’s no doubt that many of the ingredients of Jamaica Inn—wild men, wild land, dark secrets and violent ends—are close to gothic cliché and would have been even in 1936 when Daphne du Maurier wrote the book. But what makes the novel still vibrant is to see how in the hands of a master storyteller—because that is exactly what du Maurier is—the form can be revitalized and even to some measure reinvented.

The way she does it is twofold: first by sheer force of plotting. Mary, alarmed and demoralized, may have found herself in hell, but she has no option but to stay, held by her loyalty to her aunt and the need to protect her. In the eyes of the community that makes her virtually an outlaw herself. All good thrillers have to isolate their hero if the threat is really going to bite, and even when Mary manages to get herself out of the house, the desolation of the moors only mocks her helplessness, the landscape and the weather as much a force in this book as any of the characters. The only other people she meets are in their own way as bizarre as the inn’s inhabitants. There is her uncle’s younger brother Jem, a horse thief and an adventurer whose attraction keeps her on the wrong side of the law, and the strangely tender mercies of one Francis Davey, the Vicar of Altarnun, a fabulously unnerving character whose soft speech clashes with his bleached albino looks and his heavy whip on the horse’s back.

But for most of the book it is Mary’s battle with Joss Merlyn that keeps you turning the page. As a character he isn’t to everybody’s taste. Du Maurier’s own biographer, Margaret Forster, finds him near to caricature, and it’s true that he is larger than life. But there is also a terrible fascination to him. His brooding figure, craggy looks and wild temper are in their own way all attributes of the romantic hero inverted into violence and self-loathing—a Mr. Rochester without a Jane to redeem him. Before guilt and drink disabled Joss he would have been a charismatic figure. (Du Maurier had lived too long with a glamorous, powerful father—the actor Gerald du Maurier—not to have understood that there is a price to be paid for charisma.) There is something in Joss Merlyn’s torment that smells of damage done as well as inflicted. And it’s here that Jamaica Inn pushes at the boundaries of the romantic genre to suggest how passion between men and women can lead to abuse. Joss’s wife may now be a quivering victim, but at one point she was madly in love with this powerful man, believing she could somehow save him from himself. There is a hint of collusion here, and despite her fear Patience still makes excuses for Joss, trying to deflect his anger in a way that only provokes it further. Du Maurier herself doesn’t excuse him. Admittedly, she gives him a childhood with its own history of violence, and an abused, helpless mother, but she never lets him off the hook. For all his physical strength he is a weak character, and though Mary may be morally and physically repelled by him she is also up for the battle. And a battle it is, from the moment he latches onto her both as his prey, the next woman after his wife that he must break and destroy—and also in some desperate hope that Mary will match him and somehow bring him to redemption.

There is an extraordinary scene halfway through the book—in its way much more frightening than the real thing, which comes later—when Joss emerges from a drinking bout to accost Mary in the kitchen. Crazed by waking nightmares, he offers up a lacerating confession about the ships he has lured onto the rocks and the survivors he has bludgeoned to death in the roaring surf, their faces coming back to haunt him. His terror at that moment is much greater than Mary’s, but it is her sentence to be the helpless listener. It is worth knowing as you read this scene that du Maurier’s own husband, the affable, charming, good-looking Frederick Browning, had been a war hero; one of the things that marked the early years of their marriage was the way he would wake at night screaming, and she would have to try and comfort him. Some of du Maurier’s own helpless horror is in Mary as she watches, repelled and overwhelmed by her uncle’s raving confessions.

This painful realism of the relationship between men and women also underpins Mary’s growing attraction to her uncle’s brother, Jem. There is a quiet cynicism to du Maurier’s description of their courtship. Mary knows that Jem will probably bring her as much pain as happiness, but she accepts it as part of how the world works. She has watched it unfold too many times around her to be fooled: seen how a teasing courtship down sun-drenched lanes will be replaced by the mundanity and exhaustion of married life, the man “calling sharply that his supper was burned, not fit for a dog, while the girl snapped back at him from the bedroom overhead, her figure sagging and her curls gone, pacing backward and forward with a bundle in her arms that mewed like a cat and would not sleep.” Du Maurier had had her first child just a few years before she wrote this novel and while the nanny had done more caring than she ever did (the one time she was left with the baby it screamed its head off), there is a taste of experience to the vision. For a book which at one level is a romantic adventure story, Jamaica Inn is full of decidedly unromantic thoughts.

The novel doesn’t dwell on them though. It’s too busy winching the story ever tighter. Once you get past the second chapter it’s almost impossible to read Jamaica Inn slowly. It is the burden of thriller writers to have the reader tell them admiringly how fast they read your books. “I couldn’t put it down” is both the greatest compliment and the cruelest cut of all, since it almost certainly means that a reader’s greed to get to the end of the book will have made them careless with some of the best writing on the way. It’s a trade-off thriller writers have to accept. But du Maurier never set out to write literary fiction. Her style is intelligent and fluid, sufficient unto the cause of telling the story. But then it wasn’t her style that made her famous. That’s not why she is still being reprinted when a hundred other writers of her age are footnotes in fiction. And while she has dated in certain respects—her dialogue can sometimes feel a little stilted and there are perhaps one too many dark nights and haunted moors for modern taste—almost seventy years have in no way dimmed her capacity to hook the reader like a fish and angle them in through the rising waters of the plot. There is virtually no spare action here. It would be invidious to give away the last twist, and while there will be those who see it coming, foresight doesn’t rob it of its elegant baroque menace, with more than a touch of the Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling relationship thrown into the dark mix. Mary Yellan sups with many devils in this book and by the end there is not even a long spoon between them.

In the end—well, in the end the book resolves itself as any good gothic adventure should, by bringing the reader out of darkness into at least a semblance of light. Mary Yellan survives. But even though the writer doesn’t say it directly, you can be sure Mary will not sleep well at night. That is the price you pay for winning such battles. The good triumph but, like du Maurier’s husband, they remain damaged by the fight. For all of her privileged middle-class upbringing, by the time Daphne du Maurier wrote Jamaica Inn at the comparatively young age of 29, she too, already had something of darkness about her. She was, in fact, well on her way to Rebecca.

Sarah Dunant

2003