Play It Again
[In the following review, Hughes laments the specter of "literary ventriloquism" that hangs over Mrs. de Winter, likening its demerits to Emma Tennant's Pemberley, a sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.]
Pemberley [by Emma Tennant] and Mrs de Winter comprise codas to two of English literature's most loved and enduring texts. Thus Pemberley tells the story of what-happened-next to Elizabeth Bennett, Mr Darcy and the rest of the cast of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Mrs de Winter, meanwhile, fast-forwards to a point ten years beyond the end of Daphne de Maurier's Rebecca to discover the fate of Mrs Danvers, Maxim de Winter and, of course, the nameless narrator.
Both texts, significantly, concern the non-appearance of heirs. Elizabeth Bennett has been married a full year, and while her sisters Jane and Lydia have produced the required sons. Eliza herself remains embarrassingly unencumbered. Likewise, the second Mrs de Winter, at 34, has begun to give up hope of materialising the tribe of robust, playful boys who already live inside her head.
In their concentration on the non-appearance of the next generation, both texts draw attention to the lack of closure in the original novels. While Pride and Prejudice appeared to offer the classic marriage plot of high-realist fiction, it also offered a teasing commentary upon it, refusing to tie up the ends as neatly as Mrs Bennett—and the reader—desired. In Pemberley, Emma Tennant reminds us that the finicky courtship rituals, the dancing and the walks in the park have a deadly serious end: the safe handing over of property from one generation to the next through a male heir. Only with Elizabeth pregnant can the story be said to be over.
In the same way, Susan Hill returns to de Maurier's Rebecca [in Mrs de Winter] and worries away at the little tags and tears in the concluding chapter. Far from wrapping things up nicely, de Maurier's resolution is morally—and novelistically—untenable. Hill's task is to work out the moral plot of Rebecca to its final conclusion. Not until Maxim de Winter has paid for the murder of his first wife with his own life can the ghost of Rebecca be laid to rest.
Both Tennant's and Hill's novels are tacked seamlessly on to their predecessors. The reproduction of tone and character is faultless. True, Tennant allows herself to peer into Elizabeth and Darcy's bedroom in a manner which would have been impossible for Jane Austen, but she does it with such grace that her gentle voyeurism seems to extend rather than intrude upon our understanding of the original.
Hill's achievement, by contrast, is more laboured. While Tennant can simply bring all her characters to Pemberley (Darcy's country seat) for an extended Christmas holiday, Hill has to work hard to get Mrs Danvers from Cornwall to Gloucestershire and to produce a chance meeting in Venice between the de Winters and a still grizzling Mrs Van Hopper. Resorting to contrivance and coincidence as de Maurier never had to, Hill's narrative fails to find the urgent drive of its predecessor.
Logical and accomplished though Pemberley and Mrs de Winter may both be, the question remains as to why two such prominent talents as Hill and Tennant should be engaged on what, when it comes down to it, is nothing more than literary ventriloquism. For despite all the fancy arguments about intertextuality and knowing pastiche, the fact is that writing sequels to fabulous best-sellers represents a commercial and artistic safe bet.
Just as Hollywood now ransacks 1960s television series to turn tested formulas into big box office, so novelists seem to look to yesterday's smash hits to guarantee at least a modest success. In Pemberley, for instance, Tennant has no need to worry about those slow and difficult opening chapters where characters have to be introduced and relationships explained. She can plunge straight into the thick of the action, sure that she is neither boring nor confusing her readers.
In this world of endless literary recycling there is no reason why the characters from Pride and Prejudice and Rebecca could not be given their own fanzine and sent on a series of endless adventures. The corollary of low-risk writing is, after all, low-risk reading. Where once upon a time the postmodernist reader was an alert creature, ever on the look out for subtle nods at other texts, these days he or she is more likely to be a lazy sentimentalist, happy to reread old favourites.
Yet there is always the possibility that out of such deadness might come renewal. In this case, the ceremonial sealing-off of two such open texts as Pride and Prejudice and Rebecca could just represent the point at which the contemporary novel's obsession with the burden of its own past is laid to rest, leaving the way for something new to happen.
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