What we thought: Spending a week near Falmouth, and enjoying the numerous nooks and creeks of the Helford river and the Lizard peninsular inspired me to download the audio version of Du Maurier’s famous novel.
Perhaps it was enhanced by being in the area, but I found the atmosphere and setting of the novel one of my favourite points. The description of the river, the bird life and stormy seas were as accurate today as back in the times when pirates roamed the woods and threatened the locals.
The plot itself also engaged me. Lady Donna St Colomb swaps a life in London that has become shallow and pointless, and buries herself away in her husband’s ancestral Cornish estate, Navron. Here she chooses life as a hermit, burying herself in nature and enjoying raising her children in a beautiful, natural environment. Her heady days of London seem a million miles ago and adventure is the last thing on her mind.
But when she stumbles across a pirate ship hidden in a creek on the estate, she becomes embroiled in the biggest adventure of her life. With her heart and brain set on two different roads, when her husband arrives from London to see her, she has to make some serious choices about where the rest of her life will take her. Which will win – head or heart?
The style of the writing, both in pace and style and POV, are very different to modern day novels but this only adds to the enjoyment of this wonderful classic. There is is still enough page-turning drama to keep the reader hooked right to the conclusion, but with a more sedate and delicate style than I am used to. Du Maurier’s writing is effortless, and the characters are perfectly drawn in both style and dialogue.
I’m already planning to try another novel by the author – and may well have to take another journey to Cornwall to accompany it!
You’ll enjoy this if you like: Jane Austen, Catherine Cookson, Barbara Taylor Bradford.
Avoid if you don’t like: Cornwall and pirates.
Ideal accompaniments: Cornish clotted cream and strawberry jam with scones.
Genre: Literary Fiction.
Available on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment