A Son of the Rock

In Four Great Cornish Novels, Gollancz, 1984, 185 p.  (First published in 1936.)

In its set-up this could almost be a children’s story. Protagonist Mary Yellan’s mother has died after seventeen years of widowhood stoically looking after both Mary and the family farm at Helford. With no parents Mary might be footloose and fancy free – as the protagonists of children’s stories tend to be – but her mother’s dying wish was for Mary to go to live with her Aunt Patience at Jamaica Inn. Her sojourn there makes for a deep, dark experience.

The foreboding starts with the driver of the coach taking her there warning of the inn’s ill reputation. She immediately finds Patience’s husband Joss Merlyn to be a boorish, overbearing drunkard and the Inn itself an inhospitable place, taking as it does no customers and having no visitors except those occasional ones Jess warns Mary not to pay any attention to, indeed to hide away from. Not so much “Watch the wall my darling” as cover your face. Mary wants to flee back to Helford and only her concern for Aunt Patience persuades her to stay.

Gradually, during which time Mary explores the countryside around, Jess’s true malevolence manifests itself through drunken confessions – not just a smuggler but a wrecker and murderer to boot.

du Maurier obviously had a love and an eye for the Cornish landscape, which is described in generous, admiring terms. These passages reminded me of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, especially when Mary got lost on the moors and was rescued by a clergyman, (here the vicar of Auchtarnun, Mr Davey.) du Maurier’s affection for that work is usually noted in relation to her later novel, Rebecca, a more obvious reworking of Jane Eyre, but the writing in Rebecca does not carry the same visual stimulus.

There is a coyness to Mary’s interactions with Jess’s brother Jem, and a scarcely believable reticence to the way in which she is treated by Jess’s smuggling associates; but the book was first published in the 1930s – which does make it a little surprising that the villain of the piece (who in truth from his first appearance was not difficult to decipher as such) tells Mary that he found “Christianity to be built upon hatred, and jealousy, and greed …. while the old pagan barbarism was naked and clean.”

Notwithstanding my observations on du Maurier’s treatment of landscape above there were times when I found the novel – for a so-called classic – to be a touch overwritten.

Pedant’s corner:- the text repeatedly refers to Jamaica Inn’s tall chimneys. The illustration at the story’s start has small chimneys. Otherwise; “when the first cock crew” (crowed,) waggons (many times. I know it’s an acceptable alternative but since the first time I saw the word it was spelled ‘wagons’ I have always persisted in the belief it should have only one ‘g’,) “‘for my husband sake’” (husband’s sake,) to-morrow (nowadays unhyphenated,) havered (not used in the Scottish sense of talking nonsense but more like ‘tarried’.)