The Rendezvous and Other Stories is a an uneven collection of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, some of which come from early in her career, before her novels. While the quality of the stories wavers, as a whole they do illustrate her approach of putting very ordinary, even uninteresting people into extremely unsettling situations (not unlike the narrator of Rebecca).
When the stories are good, they’re quite good, like No Motive, The Rendezvous, and Split Second. Sometimes, however, they seem self-indulgent: an excuse to vent in a roundabout way, as with Angels and Archangels. (That one is a satire of organized religion and its hypocrisy.)
On the other hand, sometimes she does take that satire the extra step to make a quick and revelatory character sketch, as with The Rendezvous, a story that strips away the main character’s pomposity, almost a clinical evisceration, and makes for a moving conclusion.
While I enjoyed some of the stories a lot, I found others nothing less than blah.
My two favourites have to be No Motive and Adieu Sagesse. The latter is what I call a wishful thinking kind of story: It satirizes the pretensions and hypocrisy of a small, inconsequential town. Its main character is a man everyone considers horribly dull, so much so people go out of their way to avoid him. No one truly knows Richard Ferguson and what he thinks and feels.
He and another of the story’s characters share something in common: a dream of getting away from the tedious, self-important place. The story allows them to do so as they sail away in a boat, unknown, not understood, and not caring a damn.
The other story, No Motive, is about a woman who commits suicide—out of the blue. Du Maurier’s short stories don’t always have great openings, but this one does: the best of the collection. It’s cool, distant, and casual.
“Mary Farren went into the gun room one morning at about half-past eleven, took her husband’s revolver and loaded it, then shot herself.”
No one knows why she does this; there is ‘no motive.’ It is very out of character—the opposite of the woman they’ve known. The husband hires a detective to look into his wife’s death because he wants to understand why she would have done this. The detective does so and his investigation is the story. He uncovers a life that has been kept hidden, one of ignorance and unfeeling abuse.
It’s a heartbreaking one; a story about how little we really know about one another, even those we think we know. It’s also about our secret lives, which we sometimes have hidden even from ourselves.
On the whole, however, I would say The Rendezvous and Other Stories is not a book to start with if you’re unfamiliar with du Maurier’s work. It’s one for those already with familiar her, be it through her novels (where she is at her best) or one of her other short story collections.
List of the Stories:
- No Motive
- Panic
- The Supreme Artist
- Adieu Sagesse
- Fairy Tale
- The Rendezvous
- La Sainte-Vierge
- Leading Lady
- Escort
- The Lover
- The Closing Door
- Indiscretion
- Angels and Archangels
- Split Second
December 17, 2017