The Doll: Short Stories (VMC) [Paperback]

Short story collections are always really hard to write about. Do you give a little bit away about each tale, follow some of the themes of the collection, or describe the feelings that they give as a whole. Well, I am going to try and do a mixture of the three though without giving any of the stories endings away as the main joy that I found in `The Doll' was the fact that nearly every single story, apart from maybe two, had a really clever twist at the very end or one that slowly dawned on you as you read on (clearly planned by Daphne herself when writing) and to give any of these away would be a crime really.

The themes behind all the thirteen tales in `The Doll' seem to be either about sex, the darker sides of human beings, the pitfalls of love or a mixture of the three. Yet no matter how similar the theme, they are all told from different angles. For example there are two tales of prostitution and yet `Piccadilly' and `Mazie' are both very, very different tales of two women in very different situations only supplying the same service. Does Daphne have sympathy for these characters? Well you would have to read the books to be sure but I did feel in each tale a different sex was attacked in one tale women might be the victim, in another they might be the villain and men get a rough ride too with Daphne pondering `I want to know if men realise when they are insane.'

I admit when Daphne looked at some of the more relationship based tales such as `A Difference in Temperament', a tale of a man and wife unsure of the others affections after years, or `Week-End' and `Nothing Hurts for Long' I was left a little more non plussed, they didn't really speak out to me so much. However you would then get a tale like `East Wind', the devastating opening tale of a seaside village which hosts some foreign sailors when the weather turns and that twisted in a way, or two ways, that I would never have expected and actually shocked me. My mouth was actually agog at the end. There is also the beautifully written `And His Letters Grew Colder' which says all you need to know in the title.

Daphne also shows a comical element in some of the tales, for example in the (slightly too long) `And Now To God The Father' which is a tale of a far too good to be true vicar, which also has a very sad twist and rather perturbing ending, has a certain pompousness about it and pokes fun at the rich. In `Frustration', which shows just how far men will go to have sex with a woman and becomes on of the first farcical tales of Daphne's I have read and had me chuckling along as I read especially as the farce gets more and more ridiculous yet strangely believeable.
It is really when Daphne merges all of these together that you get the best tales. The title story `The Doll', which I would agree is a tale ahead of its time and one that twists a love story with something utterly bizarre but which works well, `Tame Cat' is a chilling mother and daughter tale, `The Limpet' every single persons nightmare, the aforementioned `East Wind' and `The Happy Valley' a ghost tale with shades of early `Rebecca' are all utterly brilliant.

`The Doll' is a collection with an underlying menace and cynicism at its heart, which I think makes for a compelling, occasionally shocking and indeed chilling collection. This may be some of Daphne's earliest work and so in parts is a little unpolished yet to write so well and with such a wryness from the start of her career, with shades of what's to come from her later work, only shows what a wonderful writer she was and the potential that was to come. I could happily now sit and re-read this collection again and again, I feel like that was part of Daphne's intention with her short stories, if you blink you might miss something. The other intention was to draw you in slowly and then get you with a twist and in every tale of this collection, in differing ways, she does just that.

The majority of the short stories in this collection date from very early in du Maurier's career, and while they may, on occasion, lack some of the polish of her later tales they provide a terrific insight into her development as a writer. Most tellingly perhaps the collection proves that those beautiful, sinister twists she was so accomplished at in later life were a gift she had from the very beginning. Similarly the effortlessly elegant prose and the ability to carry a story. Very few writers have ever been quite so good at telling a tale as Daphne du Maurier.

The title story, 'The Doll', is a good example of her ability to twist expectations. The set-up is very simple - an impressionable man becomes besotted with a beautiful and mysterious young violinist - but the conclusion, involving the mechanical doll of the title, is so bizarre, and works so well, that Edgar Allan Poe would have been proud to claim it as one of his own. I can't think of another author who could write about the macabre and the twisted quite so confidently, and carry her readers with her quite so effortlessly. Similarly the tale 'East Wind' in which the inhabitants of a far-flung island find themselves playing unexpected hosts to the crew of a brig sheltering from a storm turns on two totally unexpected, and shockingly violent, events.

One of the other themes that emerges from the collection is how well du Maurier could flitter between her characters; she gives them equal space, and allows her readers to see a narrative from several perspectives. Frequent notions emerge: the impossibility of love lasting; the fickleness of beauty and youth, and the way the old distrust the young, and vice versa. There is also one very clever ghost story, 'The Happy Valley' which is in some ways an early sounding for her most famous novel, 'Rebecca'. Other stand-out stories include 'Tame Cat', in which a daughter unwittingly incurs her mother's wrath, and 'The Limpet' which relates the clinging-horror of a woman's life and career and its terrifying effect on those around her.

It's true that du Maurier went on to write better stories - her later collections such as 'The Breaking Point' and 'The Birds' contain some of the best short stories of the 20th century - but, all the same, there are some real gems here and as an insight into the mind and early years of a great and unique talent, this is a fabulous little collection of quite sinister and very beautiful tales.

I am a big Daphne Du Maurier fan and have read many of her 'classics'(Rebecca, The Loving Spirit, My Cousin Rachel, Jamaica Inn) so I was interested to come across this compilation of short stories (ideal for reading before you go to sleep) and was not disappointed! Du Maurier demonstrates her fantastic ability to write inventive story plots with a twist... I can only compare them to that of Roald Dahl's 'Tales of the Unexpected' (which I also have equally enjoyed reading). I bought this as a Kindle book which was great because I didn't have to wait for it to be delivered by post and there's no P & P. I would definitely recommend this book!