But the book I just re‑read is also something else much larger and darker: a disturbingly timeless evocation of domestic abuse, binge-drinking, criminality and the mass killing of men, women and children. And it is, of course, all of those things. When, during one of his prolonged drinking bouts, he insists on making Mary listen to a catalogue of his crimes, she discovers that the truth is far more terrifying than anything she could have imagined.īack in 1974, I'm sure I read this novel as an adventure yarn, a tale of smugglers, wreckers and the perilous exploits of a bold, shawl-wrapped heroine on a vast and desolate landscape. But in truth, the belligerent, wife-battering Joss is a cowardly man, haunted by guilty nightmares, especially when in his cups. Though initially appalled, Mary assumes that Joss and the violent, drunken men who frequent Jamaica Inn after dark are merely smugglers.
Joss greets Mary by telling her that if she values her own life, she will turn a blind eye to the mysterious wagons that come and go in the dead of night. Arriving at the isolated, menacing house on the moors, Mary discovers her aunt to be a pale and battered shadow of her former self, living in terror of her seven-foot, wolf-like husband, and his violent rages and drinking binges.
"Mistake" turns out to be an understatement. "That's no place for a girl," the coach driver tells her when he hears where she's headed, insisting she must surely have made some mistake. Mary Yellan, 23, having nursed her widowed mother through a final illness, is rattling across the moors on a foul Cornish night, on her way to a new life with her Aunt Patience and Uncle Joss at Jamaica Inn. The story begins in the old-fashioned way.
More than anything, though, I remembered the sickening twist towards the end of the book – the cold‑sweat moment when you realise that, just like Mary, you've been so busy fighting off the visible baddies that you've let yourself be blind to the real evil, the most dangerous force of all, which has been waiting there quietly all along.
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