Book of the Fortnight, no. ?

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...

Got it yet?

I'll give you another clue: Mrs Danvers.

For many, the title of this book will have been evident from the first line alone; the opening sentence of Rebecca must be one of the most recognisable in the history of English literature, bested, perhaps, only by "Reader, I married him" and "It is a truth universally accepted that a single man, being in possession of a fortune, must be in want of a wife" (name those books!). Somehow, this sentence has succeeded in permeating the national consciousness in a way that few other have. The character of Mrs Danvers, too, is instantly recognisable. Actual contemporary situations, too, are compared to that of the second Mrs De Winter living under the psychological shadow of Rebecca. And yet, many have never read the book; until last week, I was one of them.

I have a slight issue with so-called classic books. The way their reputation precedes them is, at times, forbidding; it takes a certain amount of courage, or persuasion, to tackle one. At university, I took three different modules just to make myself read certain things, most of which I enjoyed when I got to them. Reading the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid for Classical Literature 1A, for example, broke the mystique surrounding ancient literature and gave me the nerve to pick up Ovid's Metamorphoses, which I read in ten-minute chunks on trams around Grenoble, a treatment it lent itself particularly well to. Intellectual History made me read Plato and Cicero and Aristotle, St Augustine and Thomas More. I enjoyed that somewhat less, possibly because of the way the course was structured- City of God in one week, anyone? No, thought not.

I am a great believer in public libraries, but it's easy to borrow a book. Once you get it home, though, there's no pressure to read it. And so, just after Christmas, I bought a copy of Rebecca as part of a three-for-two offer at Waterstones. If I've bought it, you see, I have to read it, otherwise it would be a great waste. Yes, you see, it's that self-guilt-tripping thing again. It works, though, you know.

Anyway, I'm very glad I did. Rebecca is a truly wonderful book; in spite of its gothic novellish tendencies, it stays just the right side of melodrama and remains firmly within the bounds of reality. There are no ghosts, and Mrs Danvers is not a monster, at least not in the Frankenstein sense of the word; the nameless Mrs De Winter is terrorised by a falsified idea based on a misunderstanding, not by ghouls and spectres. The reader, looking in from the outside, sees Mrs De Winter fall into a psychological trap from which she cannot escape, caused not by explicit lies but by concealed truths, helped along by the peculiar behaviour of a clearly psychotic housekeeper. Rebecca is in some respects a very modern book, ahead of its time. Du Maurier's decision not to name the second Mrs De Winter is a very clever plot device; at the beginning of the book her reasons for doing this are not clear, but by the end, it is difficult to imagine what the heroine could have been called without the book losing something.

Off back to the cupboard now to check for skeletons and psychotic housekeepers.