Leírás
The widely acclaimed resurrection of the story contained in Daphne du Maurier's masterpiece Rebecca - on the 20th anniversary of Rebecca, the hauntingly beautiful first wife of Maxim de Winter, family friend Colonel Julyan receives an anonymous parcel that contains a black notebook with Rebecca's Tale on the title page. Will it reveal the real truth about her?
Writing the sequel to a well known, much loved novel is a dangerous and rarely successful endeavour. Very occasionally the sequel takes on a life of its own and becomes an outstanding novel in its own right, with little to tether it to the original. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, told the story of the mad first Mrs. Rochester from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It is a wonderful read, utterly independent of Jane Eyre. Sally Beauman fails to achieve anything like this success. She obliterates the mystery and atmosphere of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca by explaining it all away. She even misjudges irony to the extent of opening with 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again', a cheap trick which was also attempted in the sequel to Pride and Prejudice. This time it isn't the mousy second wife of Max de Winter speaking but Colonel Julyan, a minor character in the original and now the first of narrators in Rebecca's Tale. Set twenty years after Rebecca's death and the destruction of Manderlay, Beauman introduces a cast of characters who are sympathisers of the apparently much maligned Rebecca. Colonel Julyan now claims to have been in love with Rebecca and one of the families closest friends. He is beset by guilt for failing to prevent her being buried in the family crypt and for allowing her reputation as a faithless, sadistic, unscrupulous, amoral woman to take root. The whole novel challenges Max de Winter's justification for killing her and reverts to the notion that he was simply insanely jealous and introduces the idea that his class and upbringing destined him never to understand or love the bohemian spirit he married. This attempt to politicise the original text is doomed to failure and the final narrator, Ellie, Colonel Julyan's youngest daughter is given a laughable exit line meant to satisfy both feminist principles and the demands of romantic fiction, predictably fulfilling neither. (Kirkus UK)
Szerző - Sally Beauman