Review: Trilby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beauty Without Talent
From school with strict cheerless nuns to university, where I came under the severe hand of my tutor, I identified with the eponymous Trilby the moment I opened the pages of George du Maurier’s novel of domination and submission, a book with an undercurrent of eroticism that can only have slipped by the censors by its sly subtlety and incisive examination of the human condition.
Set in the Paris Bohemia of the 1850s, it is in Trilby that we meet Svengali, a name from fiction that has found its way into the language, like quixotic, Scrooge and Catch 22. Svengali is a music teacher and would be impresario with a perfect ear and an eye for the main chance. Trilby O’Ferrall works as a laundress and artists’ model. She is young, pretty and vulnerable. All the men she meets fall in love with her, which forms the body of the book. But when she enters the orbit of Svengali, he becomes obsessed with making her his protégée and a singing star; a Diva.
Although Trilby is tone deaf, she is susceptible to hypnosis, another of Svengali’s dark arts. Under his power, she performs in a trance. They travel across Europe, making their fortune until Svengali has a heart attack during a concert in London and Trilby, as she sings on, is shown to be talentless without the maestro’s influence. Having been acclaimed in high society and lived among the élite, Trilby O’Ferrall returns to her former role in the laundry aware that her only gift is her fading prettiness, the fate of most women.
Written in the 1890s, the writing is sometimes overblown and prosaic; overlook this and the novel remains a delight.
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