Book Review: My Cousin Rachel confirms that Daphne du Maurier (1907-89) is an irresistible storyteller with a Gothic sense of menace, maintaining a constant level of tension and suspense throughout the novel. She constructs a plot with an architectural level of complexity built of ambiguity and obscurity combined with a damaged and unreliable narrator. She toys with the reader, inserting twists and turns and introducing new evidence that changes perceptions between pages. Du Maurier actually gives enough clues to reach a single, consistent resolution of the several questions posed by the story, but leaves enough red herrings to support and contort any individual conclusions. She makes My Cousin Rachel a sort of Rorschach test for readers, based in large part on their preconceptions about relations between the sexes (a central theme), astonishingly still relevant today. Du Maurier makes the character of Rachel believably charming and attractive, complex, well-rounded, and understandable. The character of Philip is occasionally too obtuse to be credible, but is perhaps explicable by his odd childhood. For those who've read du Maurier's most famous work, this is that novel written inside out, though wordier and slower. My Cousin Rachel reaches a disturbing conclusion, creating yet more moral ambiguities to ponder. [4★]
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