The Housekeeper

Rose Tremain, The Housekeeper (Chatto & Windus)

There's a sketch in A Bit of Fry & Laurie in which two critics try to outbid each other in how many 'levels' they found in a work under discussion. They could have found plenty in The Housekeeper. It is a novel about a fictional affair Daphne du Maurier didn't have that resulted in her writing Rebecca, which in turn reverses the original story to make the famous book.

The housekeeper is Danni, a Polish Jew, who tells the story not too unreliably of her affair with the writer who spends a summer at Manderville Hall and the echoes of Mrs. Danvers and Manderley are already in place. In its first half, their clandestine love is a paradise of release from their respective roles as highly dependable domestic and unhappily married, successful upper class author but events at a renewal of the Big Bash party that had been a highlight of society life when the Lady of the house had been alive begin a devastating unravelling of their dangerous liaison.

In some ways the Mrs. Danvers character is Miss Adelaide, the daughter due to inherit the hall, who understands none of its tradition and whose selfishness is as sinister and cruel as anything in du Maurier's work. It is at the Big Bash that she inadvertently comes in on Danni and Daphne and stumbles on their secret. But her privileged meanness of spirit is outdone by the way that Daphne drops Danni and reverts to her marriage for the sake of her public reputation. In a book full of convincing writing, the passages in which what had appeared to be sublime love and the satisfying of a desperate need turn into such bleak rejection make one wonder at the human capacity for enthralment.

Danni is telling her story in instalments from her subsequent work as an expert seamstress so it is fitting how many thematic threads are woven into Rose Tremain's work, representing yet another level by which any critic would have to be impressed. One wonders at the daring and ingenuity that make the model for Mrs. Danvers not Danni but Daphne du Maurier herself.

It seems I got lucky, deciding that this was a new novel worth reading when I read so few. It's not very likely I'll read any others this year but I don't rate my chances of finding a better one if I read a cartload. I will have to see what else looks promising in the Tremain back catalogue, never mind seeing what I might have missed in the du Maurier. The Housekeeper compares with anything from the last couple of decades- Mothering Sunday, The Sense of an Ending, The Goldfinch. I don't know if there are still suggestions about that the novel as an art form is finished but it quite clearly isn't.