THE WHITE HARE: Cornish mysticism meets post-war pragmatism

THE WHITE HARE is a moving, powerful tale of love, loss, betrayal, treasure, and ultimately joy.

The novel opens on a textured, vivid, atmospheric beach scene. The rich language draws the mind's eye from the macro--literally the birdseye view--down to the micro: sand flies buzzing over the seaweed and the small gray green crab that skittles out of a rock pool. This opening is beautiful and terrible and immersive, and would almost certainly be so even without the body marking time by the withdrawal of the tide, baring its' frail limbs to the rising sun.

The language is often lyrical, never stalling the story’s forward motion, with secrets small and large advancing and receding in a dance worthy of the Grand Dame of 1950s women's suspense. That Mila is reading--or trying to, when the book doesn’t wander off between night and dawn--the famous Cornish novel ‘Jamaica Inn,’ is an overt homage to Dame Daphne DuMaurier as well as to the tangible and mystical mists that seep around Cornish moors and tors.

 

 Rooted in postwar Britain’s social and familial turmoil, The White Hare follows Mila, her daughter, and her mother as they reckon with rebuilding their shattered lives in a near-derelict seaside home at White Cove, whose long-habituated ghosts embrace the torments carried in each woman’s inner baggage. Items wander room to room, the child sees deeper than she should, and soon the very roof that shelters them seems almost as menacing as the wild winds and shadowy, ancient hollow ways that course and cut their isolated valley.

The valley's neighbours mutter of curses and avert their eyes, all but a pair of women in a vine-laden cottage who would surely be labeled witches in any other era. And then there is the mysterious handyman, appearing and vanishing like an unquiet spirit.

As matters long buried surge to the surface during a torrential New Years' Eve, will they all live to see the dawn? And will sunlight disinfect the old sins or release yet greater evil upon the women of White Cove?

If Daphne DuMaurier set out to write an early Mary Stewart romantic suspense novel with guidance from Celtic goddesses and saints, the result would be this spellbinding and suspenseful tale whose textured language flows like foam on the tide and illuminates great truths like moonlight through gossamer mists.

Highly Recommended

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