Du Maurier is alive in this tale

JUSTINE PICARDIE'S "Daphne," which focuses on Daphne du Maurier's life in crisis as she turns 50 and prepares to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary, is an engrossing and absorbing read. And as if her ability to bring to life so convincingly the eponymous heroine were not enough, Picardie's novel touches on several other worlds guaranteed to draw crowds. For who can resist the Brontes (Du Maurier is writing a biography of Charlotte, Anne and Emily's brother Branwell)? Or the Du Maurier legacy (her father, Gerald, was the leading matinee idol of his day; her grandfather, George, was the creator of Svengali in his classic novel "Trilby")? Or Du Maurier's connections to J.M. Barrie's "lost boys" who inspired "Peter Pan" (her first cousins) and the British royal family (her husband is Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Browning, treasurer to Prince Philip)? All this -- and much more -- adds up to a delicious and piquant stew of interlocking worlds and desperate people, told with considerable panache and much psychological insight.

The novel operates on three levels. Du Maurier struggles in 1957 with her husband's nervous breakdown and subsequent retirement from Buckingham Palace after his disastrous affair with a woman she dubs "The Snow Queen." J. Alexander Symington, a seedy, defrocked Bronte curator of dubious reputation and flawed conduct, corresponds with Du Maurier, tempting her with tidbits about Branwell that turn out to be of little value despite the money he manages to extract from her. A half-century later, a young academic obsessed with -- and planning to write about -- Du Maurier studies the novelist as she struggles with her own demons in the form of a distant husband, his forbidding house and his impressive ex-wife.

This situation, of course, replicates -- but without "Rebecca's" sturm und drang -- the situation of Du Maurier's most celebrated novel; and this young woman, like its narrator, lacks a first name as she tells her tale in the first person. Artful as Picardie's homage is, these sections of the book are the novel's weakest. Perhaps she thought that readers needed them as a guide to Daphne's turmoil and Symington's desperate decline, but those parts are so electric in their capacity to attract that the plodding, pallid 21st century players seem superfluous. But no matter: with such a pathetic con man and a multifaceted character like Daphne, both superbly evoked, our cup runneth over.