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suyashi29 's review for:
The Breakthrough
by Daphne du Maurier
The Breakthrough by Daphne du Maurier
If anyone knows how to pull you into a completely different atmospheric setting, it's Daphne du Maurier. The Breakthrough is set in a bleaky English county called Suffolk. The narrator, Stephen Saunders, on a request from his chief, arrives in Suffolk on a rainy day to assist a dear friend of his chief, Mac. Funnily enough, I witnessed a case of pathetic fallacy while reading this story, where my own journey mirrored the narrator's. Both of us arrived at our destination with dampened spirits, dissatisfied with everything lay before us.
The narrator, upon meeting Mac, is completely pulled into his experiments, something he had not bargained, but something that could get the human race closer to achieving immortality. It is interesting how Maurier merges the spiritual with the scientific trying to prove how energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Mac attempts to tap into this potent energy, long after we are gone. However, Maurier, through the narrative argues that if energy survives, so does our soul and what it desires. The story reminded me of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley with its deliberation upon how emotional connections can outlast even the most progressive developments of science, and how imperative it is to own up your own actions and the consequences they entail. At the heart of the book lies the grief of losing someone and how much one craves, consciously or unconsciously to know what happens to the love and connections we inexplicably feel for those who no longer live amongst us.
If anyone knows how to pull you into a completely different atmospheric setting, it's Daphne du Maurier. The Breakthrough is set in a bleaky English county called Suffolk. The narrator, Stephen Saunders, on a request from his chief, arrives in Suffolk on a rainy day to assist a dear friend of his chief, Mac. Funnily enough, I witnessed a case of pathetic fallacy while reading this story, where my own journey mirrored the narrator's. Both of us arrived at our destination with dampened spirits, dissatisfied with everything lay before us.
The narrator, upon meeting Mac, is completely pulled into his experiments, something he had not bargained, but something that could get the human race closer to achieving immortality. It is interesting how Maurier merges the spiritual with the scientific trying to prove how energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Mac attempts to tap into this potent energy, long after we are gone. However, Maurier, through the narrative argues that if energy survives, so does our soul and what it desires. The story reminded me of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley with its deliberation upon how emotional connections can outlast even the most progressive developments of science, and how imperative it is to own up your own actions and the consequences they entail. At the heart of the book lies the grief of losing someone and how much one craves, consciously or unconsciously to know what happens to the love and connections we inexplicably feel for those who no longer live amongst us.