Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
This arrests us within the narrator’s trapped psychological time-line. We are in a world of haunting recurrence. Dreams secrete messages that require careful unlocking. We are invited into a world of hidden codes, lost desires. ‘Manderley’ impresses as it sounds both mythic and real. This conflation between the world of unconscious urgings and conscious acknowledgement excites and entices us to read on.
We are compelled by the narratorial voice speaking of a compulsion we do not understand.But then do we doubt their authority too? For they are under the spell of recurrence. They go back because they cannot resist the riddle of the past. The intimacy of ‘last night’ reaches bathetic climax with the word ‘again’ . This is unfinished business. It has the perfect rhythm of remembrance. The past is only ever finished, never finished with.
Fabulous.