By GEORGE DU MAURIER (James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co.; 1891)
A 19th Century classic (of sorts) that served as a direct forerunner to fantasy narratives ranging from THE STAR ROVER to SOMEWHERE IN TIME (in addition to a 1917 PETER IBBETSON play and a famous 1935 film adaptation). As narrated by the title character, PETER IBBETSON is the improbable tale of a young man deeply in love with Mary, a ravishing duchess he’s known since childhood. The two learn to practice “dreaming true,” a nightly activity that transports these lovebirds to various locations in the form of ghosts and allows for time travel.
Unfortunately, it takes until well past this 400-plus page book’s halfway point for the lucid dreaming to occur. The early passages are taken up with an extended character sketch detailing Ibbetson’s lonely soul and background as a “p’tit Anglais” raised in France. His recollections are accompanied by a veritable catalogue of likes, dislikes and formative influences, complete with lengthy passages of untranslated French that are every bit as scintillating as they sound.
There is some dramatic justification for this indulgent preamble, as Ibbetson’s background figures heavily in the remainder of the tale, but it makes for an extremely uninvigorating and frankly dull narrative. The narrator warns of this, admitting his story is “so uninteresting, even to myself, that I will hurry through it as fast as I can,” which, it turns out, isn’t very fast at all. George du Maurier (grandfather of Daphne) was an enormously resourceful and ingenious writer (as proven with the classic TRILBY), but he was evidently quite besotted with the sound of his own voice.
Again, though, once the book gets going it’s a grabber. The particulars of dreaming true, described with great detail and conviction, are voluminously laid out with even more cataloguing (the author likes making lists), but paired with narrative developments that are far more dramatically robust than those of the earlier portions. Ibbetson gets incarcerated for killing his uncle but finds a lifeline in his dreams, which transport him outside the prison walls and into the arms of his beloved. But, of course, his bliss isn’t fated to last, as one half of this star-crossed couple isn’t long for this world.
This is old school fantasy fiction at its most archaic. It’s fecund and fascinating, certainly, but requires a great deal of backward projection, and patience, on the part of the reader.