The Old Man by Daphne Du Maurier: A twist with a twist!

Reading this story on my inversion table just now seemed to double the peculiarity of the experience. For not only did I jolt out of ANY expectations I may have had of the story’s ending, I also found myself becoming  hypnotised by the tone and rhythm of the tale and falling into some trance like state, in which the tale ‘escaped’ my conventional understanding.

The story begins with an unnamed narrator hooking us into the tale as if we were a curious tourist or visitor to this undisclosed place. The old man of the story seems an aloof figure sharing his life and time with a subservient wife by a lakeside ‘devoted to one another.’And this throwaway phrase holds the key to the story. For what does such devotion mean for their relationship and their relationship with others?

 

And who in life really would risk such devotion?

I am sure that you will not guess the outcome. You may share my own sense of foreboding about the fate of ‘Boy’.  The clumsy family member  and onlooker whose inability to leave the family nest proves horrifyingly fatal.

Yet you cannot- and I dare you- anticipate the full and most arresting climax of the tale.

Is this a tale of murder and family jealousy-seemingly on a seaside Gothic level with a dash of the Borgias and Hemingway? Or have we been reading the story one way because of our conventional contexts and explanations only to find such contexts completely fallacious?

It is not often that the twist remains too ‘twisty’ to tell. I suppose I am reminded in an obtuse way of Henry James’ s famous ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw.

But to tell here would be to fatally interfere with the fatalistic momentum of Du Maurier’s   tale, a tale that escalates into horror and then mouth droppping surprise.

I will not print the ending.

Read it and be surprised!

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