"The House on the Strand" is an extraordinary book dealing with a fascinating subject in an intriguing way. Its author Daphne du Maurier takes a fresh approach to time travel, through the use of a drug that sends the user back through time. This drug has apparent addictive qualities, pulling the main character, Dick Young deeper and deeper into a previous world, but as the book proceeds, it is deliberately confused. Is the drug addictive? Or is the addiction his fascination with this world and its people? Perhaps it's a mix of them both as the drug expands his consciousness to the point where all he sees is so vivid and pure he can't help but be attracted to this world. The author, through seamlessly melding two worlds into one, brings the personal crises of the main character Richard Young to the fore of the story.
Are these experiences hallucinatory, a subconscious escape from dissatisfaction with his own marital life? Or has he really travelled back in time? If he has indeed travelled back in time then these experiences match his subconscious and it is a true escape from the life he lives. More and more he grudges the hours spent away from these people of long ago, resentful of the time that must be given to his loving though suspicious wife and to his stepsons, intruders into his secret life. This is carefully written and neutrally written so as not to bias the reader either way, to the wife or to Richard. With immense skill, the tension is kept on both levels and as Dick grows ever more obsessed by his trips into the past, so the reader begins to share his addiction, and to find that past and present become inextricably, perilously mixed.
As he takes successive "trips", though each lasts only a short time, always he is back in the same surroundings. Invisible, inaudible, he finds that he is a kind of alter ago of Roger Kylmerth, steward to Sir Henry Champernoune, lord of the manor of Tywardreath.
