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A review by wyemu
The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier
4.0
I'd picked this book up many years previously, read the first page or two, and then put it down as I didn't think I was in the right mood for it. Something about it at that time made me feel it would be boring in comparison to the others by du Maurier which I had been racing through recently. This feeling persisted for many years and I just couldn't bring myself to try again, convinced for some unknown reason that I wouldn't be able to get into it, that it would ne a drag to get through.
I can't believe how wrong I was. The first 2 sections flew by reading about Janet and then onto her most loved child. To be honest, their relationship seemed a little weird at times, more like how lovers would interact rather than mother and son, which is not to say that anything creepy like that happened, they just had this super close bond as the "loving spirit" connected them. That and their love of adventure and the sea. Moving onto the next 2 generations of the Coombe family, I did lose interest slightly in comparison to the first. However, this didn't last long and I was quickly able to re-engage with the new characters being focussed on. Maybe it was because the action moved to London for some time with Christopher when he abandoned ship, realising that a life at sea was not for him the way it was for his father and grandmother. Things picked up again when he moved his family back to Plyn, perhaps du Maurier deliberately adapted her style to make Plyn and the action there more enjoyable than in other places. Certainly the suffocating lifestyle living in his mother-in-laws house was clear, more so when the narrative is taken over by his daughter, forced to return to London as a young child.
I don't want to say too much more in case I give away some of the story but I appreciated the balance of male and female protagonists, the spirited nature of them despite the rules of social etiquette at the time, and the fact that some of the harm done to Christopher and his father is undone by Christopher's daughter in the end.
Reading this book has reignited my enjoyment for du Maurier's writing and I look forward to reading the others on my shelf I have not yet read by her.
I can't believe how wrong I was. The first 2 sections flew by reading about Janet and then onto her most loved child. To be honest, their relationship seemed a little weird at times, more like how lovers would interact rather than mother and son, which is not to say that anything creepy like that happened, they just had this super close bond as the "loving spirit" connected them. That and their love of adventure and the sea. Moving onto the next 2 generations of the Coombe family, I did lose interest slightly in comparison to the first. However, this didn't last long and I was quickly able to re-engage with the new characters being focussed on. Maybe it was because the action moved to London for some time with Christopher when he abandoned ship, realising that a life at sea was not for him the way it was for his father and grandmother. Things picked up again when he moved his family back to Plyn, perhaps du Maurier deliberately adapted her style to make Plyn and the action there more enjoyable than in other places. Certainly the suffocating lifestyle living in his mother-in-laws house was clear, more so when the narrative is taken over by his daughter, forced to return to London as a young child.
I don't want to say too much more in case I give away some of the story but I appreciated the balance of male and female protagonists, the spirited nature of them despite the rules of social etiquette at the time, and the fact that some of the harm done to Christopher and his father is undone by Christopher's daughter in the end.
Reading this book has reignited my enjoyment for du Maurier's writing and I look forward to reading the others on my shelf I have not yet read by her.