“My Cousin Rachel,” du Maurier, and Me

A book review for a suspense novel.

This is my third du Maurier book—the others being Rebecca and Jamaica Inn—and it’s my favorite. Let’s get to the summary.

Two bachelor cousins are chilling in Cornwall, bothering no one, puttering around their land, living their best life by all accounts, when a woman barrels into their lives and ruins everything. The end.

Okay. I’ll give you a little more context.

Ambrose, the older cousin, gets sick and he goes south to Italy to heal. Through his letters to Philip, the younger cousin and narrator of the book, we hear about Ambrose meeting and marrying Rachel, a widow. Philip, so closely connected to Ambrose, is shocked by this news and begins to fester ill feelings towards this woman. Then one day he gets some alarming letters from Ambrose. Philip rushes down to Italy and finds Ambrose dead and buried. Devastated and even less inclined to view Rachel in a good light, he returns to England and a short while later, so too does Rachel arrive. Philip agrees to play host for a time, but one thought won’t leave his mind: did Rachel poison Ambrose?

I can’t talk too much about the plot without spoiling it. What I can say is it’s a slow, steady drip of “This is all going to go horribly sideways, isn’t it?” I enjoyed it, but I always heard the plot’s distant thunder, and that’s what makes it a good suspense novel. The other two du Maurier books I mentioned are narrated by women, but I don’t know if this book’s male narrator had anything to do with me liking it the most. The reason being…

I’m not sure I can describe Philip accurately. The book is in first person and it’s a very in-the-weeds narration—I find it hard to separate the man from his mind. Take him away from Rachel and all the issues of his interactions with her, and he seems like a decent man. Distant, obtuse and slightly uncouth, sure, but he will talk with his tenants, he doesn’t belittle his servants, and he seems to be a fine person. Case in point, his reaction to his Christmas present from his workers:

It was a case of pipes. It must have cost them all of a month’s wages. I shook hands with them, and clapped them on the back, and vowed to each that I had been planning to get the very same myself next time I went to Bodmin or to Truro, and they gazed back at me in great delight, so that like an idiot I could have wept to see their pleasure. In truth, I never smoked any pipe but the one Ambrose had given me when I was seventeen, but in the future I must make a point of smoking all of theirs, for fear of disappointing them.

You don’t think that if you’re an inconsiderate person.

But when he’s with Rachel…it was obvious to me when hearing him think trash about her and then watching the lead up to them meeting that he would be completely overcome by her. And yes, he is. It’s an obsession and all the other baggage and poor choices that comes with that. He doesn’t have any experience dealing with women and seeing him be bowled over by feminine qualities is…it’s understandable but also frustrating and bizarrely entertaining. She plays him like a one-stringed banjo at a country hoedown and he falls down dead drunk. I still wanted him to rise above the road of pitfalls but it’s so realistic how he does not do that at all.

“That spoiled boy, I told myself, always writing letters to him, which I may say he would read extracts from, but never show. That boy who has no faults, but all the virtues. That boy who understands him, when I fail. That boy who holds three-quarters of his heart, and all the best of him. While I hold one-third, and all the worst. Oh, Philip…” [Rachel] broke off, and smiled again at me. “Good God,” she said, “you talk of jealousy. A man’s jealousy is like a child’s, fitful and foolish, without depth. A woman’s jealousy is adult, which is very different.”

Rachel is a harder character to judge because we only know what Philip says and he’s not very good at picking up what’s put down. His naïveté really puts the kibosh on truly judging her. BUT…I’m judging her anyway. I don’t trust her and I don’t like her. There are too many times when she is cagey, evasive, reticent, and she seems like one of those people you could know for years, and yet not know. There’s no truth and honesty in what she says; it feels like an act and when she might “drop” her guard it’s as if she does it to reel in the unsuspecting and gullible, like Philip. Everyone on the estate grows to like her and she gives them gifts and visits the sick and revitalizes the house and…I find it very suspicious. Her aura of nefarious manipulation casts doubt on the dependability of whatever virtues she appears to have. I would definitely be the Louise in this story.

Louise is the daughter of Philip’s godfather and his longtime friend. She never fully likes Rachel and she lets her doubts be made known to Philip, which causes a rift in their bond. She kinda falls into the background of the story for most of it, but she’s there at parties and she sees Rachel from an uninterrupted vantage. It’s almost a running gag that Louise and Philip are going to get married and I think she would like that and she’d be good for him. But of course Philip is oblivious and dismissive of the possibility. That brushing off might make Louise’s dislike for Rachel appear as jealousy or pettiness, but she doesn’t strike me as that kind of girl; I think she sees through Rachel.

“How simple it must be for a woman of the world, like [Rachel], to twist a young man like yourself around her finger,” said Louise.

The rest of the characters, as in du Maurier’s other books, are all real. No matter how small their role, I see them as a fully-fledged person, even a random tenant Philip talks with for about a page. That’s something I can’t say about a lot of authors. Many times the side characters are relegated to stereotypes or empty boxes, but here I have walked into a living world.

And speaking of the world…I love her descriptions. She wrote with all the senses and everything feels textured, alive and suffused with history and memories. I watched Poldark so I have an idea of what Cornwall looks like, but this version is more, I dunno, worn and familiar, like a coat you’ve had for a long time. It’s not only the landscape that is vivid; it’s the architecture and the emotions. I may not like the people she wrote about, but there’s no doubt she was a great writer.

The bells ceased and died away, yet the echo seemed to sound still in my ears, solemn, sonorous, tolling not for my mission, insignificant and small, nor for the lives of the people in the streets, but for the souls of men and women long since dead, and for eternity.

I don’t know what stuff her gowns were made of, whether of stiff silk, or satin, or brocade, but they seemed to sweep the floor, and lift, and sweep again; and whether it was the gown itself that floated, or she wearing it and moving forward with such grace, but the library, that had seemed dark and austere before she entered, would be suddenly alive.

If Ambrose had known little about women, I knew less. That warmth so unexpected, catching a man unaware and lifting him to rapture, then swiftly, for no reason, the changing mood, casting him back where he had stood before. What trail of thought, confused and indirect, drove through those minds of theirs, to cloud their judgment? What waves of impulse swept about their being, moving them to anger and withdrawal, or else to sudden generosity? We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.

The eyes themselves had a haunted look about them, as though some shadow stood close to his shoulder and he feared to look behind.

One curious thing about the tone of this story is that it’s almost a really good second-chance romance. It’s like how you can have the same movie montage and the interpretation of the scenes changes depending on what music is playing. So if all negative mentions of money and the idea of poisoning were removed, this has all the makings of a Hallmark romance, except much better.

In the edition I read, there is a foreword and the final paragraph declares this book to be “the most overtly feminist of her books, yet it is rarely perceived as such.” I am so sick of every classic that has a prominent female character being branded as feminist, whether or not it actually is. The foreword writer also throws out expected phrases like how Philip is “willingly imprisoned by the reactionary, chauvinistic, anti-intellectual and misogynistic beliefs,” and “the unbalanced suspicion and disregard for women […] poisons a society. It is this poison that is the central concern of du Maurier’s novel.” Here’s an idea: maybe some people are unlikable and, weirdly enough, “tHe PaTRiArCHy” has nothing to do with it. Sometimes it’s okay to view a classic as simply a book and I intend to do just that.

So if you like du Maurier’s other books, or you like suspenseful, twisty, moody stories with characters you probably won’t like but will enjoy watching suffer, blunder and possibly murder, I recommend this book.

And whatever you do, do not watch the 2017 adaptation.

I still held Ambrose’s hat in my left hand, and as I stood there in the great cathedral, dwarfed into insignificance, a stranger in that city of cold beauty and spilled blood, seeing the priest’s obeisance to the altar, hearing his lips intone words, centuries old and solemn, that I could not understand, I realized suddenly and sharply the full measure of my loss. Ambrose was dead. I would never see him again. He was gone from me forever. Never more that smile, that chuckle, those hands upon my shoulder. Never more his strength, his understanding. Never more that known figure, honored and loved, hunched in his library chair, or standing, leaning on his stick, looking down towards the sea. I thought of the bare room where he had died, in the villa Sangalletti, and of the madonna in her niche; and something told me that when he went he was not part of that room, or of that house, or of this country, but that his spirit went back where it belonged, to be among his own hills and his own woods, in the garden that he loved, within sound of the sea.

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