After the death of her mother, twenty three year old Mary Yellan has little choice but to sell off her family’s farm and move in with her sole living relative, Aunt Patience. Mary hasn’t seen her aunt in years and thus has no idea what to expect when she travels to the remote Jamaica Inn, buried deep in the Cornwall Countryside. The coach driver who takes her there tells her the Inn has a bad reputation, but won’t say much more, though Mary soon understands why as she meets her uncle, the innkeeper, a brute named Joss Merlyn. Mary soon discovers that all is not well at Jamaica inn, and desperately seeks to find a way to extricate her aunt from the situation.
I resisted reading Rebecca for a long time, and I shouldn’t have; it’s one of my favourite books. I went into this one with high expectations, although I knew this probably wouldn’t be as good, and I was still somewhat let down by the experience.
There were a few parts that I liked. Mary is a plucky heroine; she’s not perfect, she makes mistakes, but she has gumption. She stands up to her uncle the best she can, but she’s caught between a rock and a hard place out in the vast, empty countryside. The characters are evocative, if not entirely realistic; I’m somewhat surprised the author didn’t see fit to give Joss actual horns and cloven hooves. And though I suspected the twist at the end for a long time, I spent a lot of the novel second-guessing myself.
Having said that, it feels like the author had a flimsy plot idea and tried to flesh it out with a lot of descriptive writing. I liked the way she described the desolate countryside, but one can only take so much adjectives describing bogs and moors, particularly when the main descriptor is ‘empty’ and ‘vast’. Aunt Patience’s entire description can be summed up as ‘nervous doormat’ and she hardly seems worth saving. Mary, as a heroine, has the somewhat unrealistic tendency to come to her senses whenever the plot needs it. But most of all, it was just rather predictable. I picked out the bad guy the instant I met him, and the ending itself is entirely unsurprising too. It’s also one of those novels that feels longer than it really is.
I didn’t hate reading this, but I wouldn’t recommend it anytime soon either.
