Unreliable narrators: Rebecca
By Flynn Berry
My novel, Under the Harrow, is
about a woman, Nora, investigating her sister’s murder. As the police inquiry
unravels, Nora becomes obsessive and reckless. Some of my favorite books have
unreliable narrators, who are duplicitous, volatile, and thrilling.
The unnamed narrator in Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier seems complicit in the mystery at the center of the
book—the death of the first wife. Rebecca drowned in a sailing accident; her
husband identified the body; he remarried. After the wedding, our narrator
moves to Manderley, a Cornish estate. Rebecca is still everywhere in the house:
her favorite flowers fill the rooms, and her stationery is still in the desk.
Her bedroom has been left intact: “Those were her brushes on the
dressing-table, that was her dressing gown and slippers laid out upon the
chair.”
What electrifies the book is the narrator’s
pathological jealousy of the absent first wife. Her fascination with Rebecca,
and the sailing accident that caused her death, seems somehow guilty. “It must
be cold sailing out there in the bay,” she thinks, “beyond the beacon away on
the headland.”
About Flynn Berry
Flynn Berry is a graduate of the Michener Center and has
been awarded a Yaddo residency. She
graduated from Brown University. Under the Harrow is her first novel.
When Nora takes the train from London to
visit her sister in the countryside, she expects to find her waiting at the
station, or at home cooking dinner. But when she walks into Rachel's familiar
house, what she finds is entirely different: her sister has been the victim of
a brutal murder.
Stunned and adrift, Nora finds she can't
return to her former life. An unsolved assault in the past has shaken her faith
in the police, and she can't trust them to find her sister's killer. Haunted by
the murder and the secrets that surround it, Nora is under the harrow:
distressed and in danger. As Nora's fear turns to obsession, she becomes as
unrecognizable as the sister her investigation uncovers.
Read my review here.
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