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Rebecca redux

This is fan fiction of a higher order.

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From the pen of Veena S. Rao, a retired IAS officer best known for her extensive work in combating malnutrition, emerges Charlotte's End, a novel inspired by Daphne Du Maurier's perennially popular literary potboiler, Rebecca. Published between soft covers, Rao's novel is a high grade of the so-called 'fan fiction', in which authors rewrite their favourite novels.

As she writes in her 'Acknowledgements', "Indian writers of my age and background have normally been influenced by the world of British literary fiction with which we grew up and the real world of India in which we lived... in this work of fiction, I am reflecting the former." Rao is clearly steeped in this sort of fiction-historical fiction lightly tinged with Gothic romance. As in Rebecca, in Rao's novel a dead woman casts a pall over a marriage between a young woman, the unnamed narrator, and her much older husband. The setting is World War II and Rao works hard to evoke an accurate sense of the period. "We decided to bid farewell to drole de guerre Paris," the narrator reports, "with a last lark at Hotel de Ville.... I felt free and I felt secure when the silence was resounding violently from the Maginot Line, and the seas were ablaze with bombs." Rao, confronted with misery and distress in her professional work, chooses happiness for her characters. Charlotte's End will appeal to those who seek comfort and reassurance from fiction.

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