In The Bookcase: Book Review: The House on the Strand

The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier (5 star review)

The House on the Strand

by Daphne du Maurier

352 pages // published in 1969 // tragedy/sci-fi classic lit

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in his scientific research.

When Dick samples Magnus's potion, he finds himself doing the impossible: traveling through time while staying in place, thrown all the way back into Medieval Cornwall. The concoction wear off after several hours, but its effects are intoxicating and Dick cannot resist his newfound powers. As his journeys increase, Dick begins to resent the days he must spend in the modern world, longing ever more fervently to get back into his world of centuries before, and the home of the beautiful Lady Isolda...

A haunting, tragic tale, set in two different centuries separated by the span of hundreds of years.

I found the story to be a combination of classic novels such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (scientific experiments changing a person's being), Frankenstein (the humanity found in being an outsider), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (time-traveling back to the Medieval era). And dare I say it... I think there is a bit of Game of Thrones and Outlander happening too.

So with that whopping combination, what could go wrong? Much, as I'm sure you've figured out by now.

Coming from the author of Rebecca, this sort of plot is not quite what readers may expect from Daphne du Maurier. Yet it holds its candle high for its own uniqueness.

Dick Young has the fairly mundane lifestyle of being husband and father to his family, while holding down his job in a publisher's office in (I'm assuming) the late 1960's. Upon request from a dear friend, he vacations in said friend Magnus's empty house, while promising to act as guinea pig in his friend's research project. The story starts its slow spiral into anticipated tragedy from there.

The experimental concoctions take Dick on an unexpected journey to around the 13th or 14th century. He gets to see the exact same territory of where he stands as it was in those days. Before his eyes, a story is shaping of the people who lived there. He is absorbed by it. The drug and its time-wielding effects become an obsession. To experience it becomes an easier habit than spending time in his normal life with his family. The thrill of the ride is unquenchable. And so, Dick leads a double life, keeping one foot in the present while the other is exploring a world from centuries before. He scours the Cornwall countryside in two different centuries, and furthermore, he scours its history books like a leech who can't take in enough.

"I was one of them, and they did not know it. This, I think, was the essence of what it meant to me. To be bound, yet free; to be alone, yet in their company; to be born in my own time yet living, unknown, in theirs."
- The House on the Strand, Chapter 9

Now, about this Magnus character; he's the one who is creating the drugs that induce the time-traveling experience. To me, he is an enigmatic sort of creature who plays around with fire -- or rather, cult magic. He reminds me much of a Merlin. And where does he get off having such a magnanimus name anyways? Magnus. Hmm. That guy is still shrouded in mystery for me.

Overall, an intriguing, clever plot.

Contains some mild language and hints of mature topics.

Minimum age to read: 15 and up.