Boo?

Last time, I wrote about the ambiguity of certain elements in Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, and I’d like to continue—especially since we’re dealing with scary scenes, and it’s a week closer to Halloween!

I gave away the ending last time, so there’s no use pretending I didn’t. John, the narrator, pursues a figure he thinks is a child in peril who turns out to be an adult murderer (a dwarf) who kills John. The last thing he remembers is the vision he had of his wife Laura returning to Venice in the company of the two psychic sisters who had foreseen he was in danger. At the end, he understands the vision’s meaning: Laura is returning to his funeral, accompanied by the sisters. And in the reality of the story, it is a vision—a paranormal thing indeed.

By the way, best B, if the narrator dies at the end, who is, in retrospect, telling the story? Hmm? (I detect the implied author lurking).

When John “sees” Laura returning to Venice, he does what the reader does and tries to make sense of it. “What the hell had happened? There must have been a holdup with the charter flight and it had never taken off, but in that case why had Laura not telephoned…? And what were those damned sisters doing?…He could think of no explanation.” John then seeks this explanation, interrogating hotel and restaurant managers and finally going to the police. Laura is nowhere to be found.

It seems here, in contrast to the initial incident of the sisters telling Laura her dead daughter is present, there is less ambiguity. John’s vision is pretty straightforward and there is nothing overtly supernatural about it in the moment. John sees his wife with the two sisters—she does not see him and seems oblivious. It is really as it would be if someone were seen at a distance—a real person, not a vision. And John’s reaction is, again, quite logical. There is nothing so far to make the reader think there is anything “spooky.”

However, John takes a call from England regarding his son and is shaken when Laura gets on the line:

“’Darling? Darling, are you there?’

He could not answer. He felt the hand holding the receiver go clammy cold with sweat. ‘I’m here,’ he whispered.

…

‘I thought,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought I saw you in a vaporetto with those two sisters.’

…

‘How could you have seen me with the sisters?’ she said. ‘You know I’d gone to the airport. Really, darling, you are an idiot.’”

After this call, John drinks heavily.

We the readers (through John) are presented with a logically impossible situation (a person being in two places at once) but so far, are not encouraged to view this as a supernatural phenomenon. Our puzzlement is mediated by John’s growing unease, and this begins to suggest something spooky.

After he realizes he’s falsely accused the pair of sisters of wrongdoing, John apologizes.

The blind sister tells him: “You saw us,” she said, “and your wife too. But not today. You saw us in the future.”

However, she is characterized by the other sister as tired and frail. The other sister fears her sister might go into a trance and need days to recover. Again, as we saw last time, the person who presents “spooky” material in this story is marked as unreliable and compromised, calling the accuracy of what they say into question.

When John and the sisters reach the sisters’ hotel, the blind one takes John’s hand. “’The child,’ she said, speaking in an odd staccato voice, ‘The child…I can see the child…’ and then to his dismay, a bead of froth appeared at the corner of her mouth, her head jerked back, and she half-collapsed in her sister’s arms.”

Here, John’s death at the hands of the dwarf is foreshadowed although the first-time reader doesn’t realize it. It may seem as if the old woman is referring to John’s daughter.

John leaves the sisters, appalled at the blind sister’s collapse. He quickly becomes lost but then spots the “child” he’d seen earlier. “It was the same little girl with the pixie-hood who had leapt between the tethered boats the preceding night.” He pursues her, thinking she is in danger and that he will rescue her. Of course, this desire to save ties in well with his feelings of grief over the death of his own daughter. He pursues the “child” into a building, but at the last moment, the “child” throws back her hood, revealing that she is a maniacal dwarf who pulls a knife just as the police close in. She throws it at John, catching him in the neck, and dying, he realizes the meaning of his vision of Laura.

By the way, this is a 1970 story and sadly, doesn’t present dwarves in a very positive light. My apologies.

‘Kay.

So despite all my cautions, there is genuine spookiness here. John has a premonition of his death but doesn’t realize it. Despite all the ambiguity over the reliability of the blind sister, she ultimately is shown to be correct in her fears for John. John, who throughout the story, is presented as a sturdy champion of reason, ignores a warning because his rationality won’t allow him to believe in visions and “spookiness.”

Is Don’t Look Now “spooky?” Tragically ironic is more like it. The character of the killer-dwarf is arguably frightening because it is relentlessly one-dimensional. We do not know why the dwarf kills John, and it is doubly unsettling because the character is first presented as a child in peril—a sympathetic character if there ever was one. One-dimensional characters are inherently frightening because the reader is not privy to their internal life.

Till next time when we will embark on a new venture. A new fictional world, my friends.

Till then.

#DontLookNow #DaphneDuMaurier #AlanBray