A Drum Roll of Prose

CASTLE DOR (274 pp.)--Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier--Doubleday ($4.50).

This romantic novel preserves, as if in amber, all the forgotten joys of Victorian fiction. Here again are such stately nouns as provender and ablutions, adverbs like anew and perchance, adjectives like ruinated or commonsensical, once invaluable conjunctives like albeit. There are long majestic strings of rhetorical questions--"But why should sorrow be always creeping in upon joy? Why should it pierce him and find him out in this dear, beautiful place into which he had been wafted so mysteriously?" The plot--a 19th century version of the ancient tale of Tristan and Isolde--is every bit as lurid as the prose. Cryptic strangers turn up at Cornish inns; blackhearted villains display appropriately "bestial" passions; brave young Tristan nearly gets himself killed stopping the runaway horses of Isolde's barouche. Nature obligingly spurs on the action with torrential rains, impenetrable fogs, thunderclaps and lightning bolts.

This engaging period piece was begun by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (pronounced cooch, as in cooch dancer), who once took time off from his voluminous novels, poems and anthologies to complete St. Ives, the novel left unfinished at his death by Robert Louis Stevenson. Author Daphne (Rebecca) du Maurier has performed a similar service for Sir Arthur, who died in 1944 at the age of 80. In her Gothic conclusion, Author du Maurier is inventive enough, but her sentences--round and ripe though they be--lack the sonorous roll of Quiller-Couch's originals. Who but an authentic Victorian master could recreate such Quiller-Couch lines as "This most ancient cirque of Castle Dor, deserted, bramble-grown, was the very nipple of a huge breast in pain, aching for discharge."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.