The House on the Strand

The House on the Strand Review

The House on the Strand — published in 1969, near the end of Daphne du Maurier’s career — is her most formally inventive novel and arguably her most psychologically acute. Du Maurier was sixty-one when she wrote it, and the novel has the qualities of late work: a willingness to experiment with form, a directness about its themes, and a melancholy that is not merely atmospheric but philosophically considered. It is not as well known as Rebecca, but it is in some respects a more interesting novel.

Dick Young, a London publisher between jobs, is staying at the Cornish home of his friend Magnus Lane, a biochemist who has been experimenting with a drug that allows its users to travel back in time. The time travel is one-way: Dick’s consciousness is projected into fourteenth-century Cornwall, where he can see and hear the people of that era but cannot interact with them. He watches a particular group of people — focused especially on Isolda, wife of a local lord — across a series of visits that begin as curiosity and become, with increasing speed, an obsession that starts to damage his relationships with his wife and children, his sense of his own present life, and eventually his physical health.

The novel works as science fiction in the sense that it takes its premise seriously and follows its consequences with consistency. But its real subject is the psychology of historical obsession — the particular pleasure of watching a world where the outcomes are already determined, where the uncertainty of living has been replaced by the clarity of the known past. Dick knows these fourteenth-century people cannot save themselves from what is coming; he watches their lives play out with the detachment of a god and the involvement of a voyeur. This combination is rendered with uncomfortable precision: the reader understands the appeal and is made to feel its costs simultaneously.

What gives the novel its late-career depth is the way du Maurier frames Dick’s obsession against his relationships with his wife and stepchildren. His contemporary life is presented as grey and compromised against the vivid aliveness of the past — but du Maurier is clear that this is Dick’s perception, not an objective fact. The fourteenth century is beautiful to him because it has no demands on him; the present is grey because it requires him to be present in ways he has chosen to avoid. The novel’s ending, in which the costs of this refusal accumulate to their logical conclusion, is among the most honest treatments of escapism in mid-twentieth-century fiction.

The Drug as Literary Device

The time-travel drug in The House on the Strand is handled with a rigour unusual for du Maurier, who was primarily an atmospheric novelist rather than a systematic one. The drug’s rules are consistent: Dick’s consciousness travels but his body remains in the present; he can see and hear the fourteenth-century world but not touch it or be perceived by it; and crucially, any physical disturbance to his present-day body while he is under the drug’s influence produces dangerous dislocation — he has been found unconscious in the middle of roads, having walked unseeing into them while his mind was in the past.

This last detail is the novel’s central danger, and du Maurier uses it to structure the novel’s escalation. Each trip becomes longer and the recovery more costly. Dick’s wife grows increasingly alarmed; his stepchildren are bewildered; his relationship to his present life becomes thinner and less real as his investment in the fourteenth century deepens. The drug’s physical costs are the novel’s clearest statement of its theme: the past is not a neutral resource to be visited and returned from; it is a place that can swallow the visitor.

Isolda and the Limits of Voyeurism

The fourteenth-century figure that Dick becomes obsessed with — Isolda, wife of Otto Bodrugan — is rendered with du Maurier’s characteristic atmospheric authority. She is beautiful, unhappily married, moving through a world of political and domestic constraint with a dignity that Dick finds compelling. He watches her across multiple visits, learns the details of her situation, develops what feels to him like intimacy but is structurally pure voyeurism: he knows her, she cannot know him.

This asymmetry is the novel’s most interesting ethical element. Dick’s relationship to Isolda is the ideal relationship of the obsessive to their object: all the intimacy of knowledge with none of the demands of presence. She cannot disappoint him, challenge him, or require anything of him. The contrast with his wife, who makes precisely these demands, is the novel’s quiet argument. Du Maurier published The House on the Strand in 1969, near the end of her career, and its psychological acuity feels like the fruit of a lifetime’s observation of how people use the past to avoid the present.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Du Maurier’s most formally innovative novel uses a science-fiction premise to explore obsession with the past at its most literal and most self-destructive — a meditation on what it means to be more alive in a world that no longer exists than in the one that does.

A Drug, and Another Century

The House on the Strand (1969) gives Dick Young a hallucinogenic compound that flings his consciousness back into fourteenth-century Cornwall, where he becomes a helpless spectator to a medieval drama he cannot touch or change. Increasingly addicted to the past, he neglects the present until the two timelines collide; du Maurier turns the time-travel premise into a sustained allegory of addiction’s pull.