A review by julian12
Rule Britannia by Daphne du Maurier

5.0

Daphne Du Maurier’s Rule Britannia was playful and sinister at the same time. The shifting tone made it compelling and unsettling. Emma and her grandmother Mad live in a Cornish outpost with Mad’s dresser who is now a cook (Mad is a retired thespian of some renown) – in addition, there are Mad’s adopted boys – maladjusted versions of the boys from Peter Pan or perhaps Lord of the Flies. Their world is thrown into disarray by a United States/UK merger – or is it an invasion? Strangely prophetic, this was Du Maurier’s last book but shows no waning of her powers as a storyteller. The world in this book has gone awry with our complacent First World lives in terrifying abeyance – it brings to mind our current eerie predicament with COVID and recalls in its tone Du Maurier’s famous story The Birds. There is nothing smug or self-righteous in Du Maurier’s writing ; she constantly disarms us and provokes questions that have never gone away since the 1970s when this very original and at times scabrous and pleasingly amoral black comedy first saw the light of day.