Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

At first she felt sick, deadly sick; she had lain on her bed that night, praying for the mercy of sleep, and it had been denied her.  There were faces in the darkness that she had not known; the worn and weary faces of drowned people.  There was a child with broken wrists; and a woman whose long wet hair clung to her face; and the screaming, frightened faces of men who had never learned how to swim.  Sometimes it seemed to her that her own mother and father were amongst them; they looked up at her with wide eyes and pallid lips, and they stretched out their hands.  Perhaps this was what Aunt Patience suffered, alone in her room at night; the faces came to her too, and pleaded, and she pushed them away.

Mary Yellan is used to independence, tending the farm with her ailing mother.  But when her mother dies she's forced to go live with her mother's sister, her Aunt Patience, and Patience's husband Joss Merlyn, the keeper of Jamaica Inn on the wild Cornish coast.  Patience, whose name means "suffering," etymologically speaking, is a shell of her former self, constantly frightened and pale; Joss is a hard-drinking lout who insults and threatens.  The inn seems to never have customers, except on Saturday nights, when the barroom is full of criminal types, and when Mary, up in her room, hears the turning of wagons in the lane below.  Joss, she discovers quickly, is the leader of a ring of smugglers.

Yet, that doesn't account for why the coachman, in the novel's opening scene, tries to dissuade her from going to Jamaica Inn.  Or why her aunt tells her tremblingly that "evil things" happen there.  Smuggling is illegal, but is it evil?  No, the truth is much worse: Mary discovers that Joss and his band are not just smugglers but wreckers, who draw ships on to the rocky Cornwall coast with a false light, murdering the survivors and looting the ship.  "But when I'm drunk," Joss, who is always drunk, tells her, "I see them in my dreams; I see their white-green faces staring at me, with their eyes eaten by fish; and some of them are torn, with the flesh hanging on their bones in ribbons, and some of them have seaweed in their hair..."  The scene where a drunken Joss kidnaps Mary and forces her to witness a ship-wrecking is one of the novel's most horrifying scenes.  Mary, headstrong as ever, is determined to bring justice to Joss and save her aunt, but not before falling unexpectedly in love with Joss' brother, a no-account horsethief named Jem.

Joss is villain enough for the novel: crude, outrageous, caught in a cycle of guilt and violence that he knows will be his own undoing.  But the best thing about Jamaica Inn is that it has another villain hidden behind him, one who is infinitely more unusual and interesting.  The twist itself--both that Joss is working for someone else and who that someone else is--is telegraphed pretty early, but the way that du Maurier describes the novel's "Big Bad" is so tremendous I don't want to give anything away.  But I will say this: the novel becomes, in its final moments, a sort of spooky love letter to the ancient Cornish coast that was du Maurier's home, with its murdering rocks and remnant pagan spirit.  Cornwall, as she describes it, is a place older than Christianity, and the evil that drives ships to their doom may be much older also.  It reminded me of a great horror film, like an Ari Aster movie, or the weird incongruous mysticism of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

I have so much respect for novels, like J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves, that switch gears suddenly and become a different novel entirely.  That's a hard trick to pull off.  It's all the more interesting to see it happen in Jamaica Inn because the novel presents as a well-crafted but typical slice of Gothic fiction, something out of the tradition of Ann Radcliffe, and then pulls the curtain away to reveal itself as something much weirder.  I have no idea what du Maurier's relationship to the critics of her day was, but it seems almost like she's playing around with her own reputation as a genre writer.  Whether that's true or not, Jamaica Inn is really something.