He makes a couple of references to Jung and the collective unconscious but it does not feel like he really figured out the mechanics or the implications. I think Dudgeon is rather shaky here on whether the nature of hypnotism is demonic or beneficial or both. Although the excesses of hypnotism and quite likely opium ruined his health, they also gave him a sort of transcendental insight into the 'world of imagination' which Dudgeon keeps referring to as the du Maurier family secret which was passed down along the family tree in some more or less supernatural manner either to Sylvia and her sons or else to Daphne the daughter of Gerald. He claims that George du Maurier while a poor art student in Paris dabbled successfully in hypnotism and brought the fad with him to England where he possibly practiced it on his own daughter Sylvia among others. The claims Piers Dudgeon makes in this book are so unorthodox that he never actually gets around to summarising them explicitly and concisely, for the very good reason that they would sound so bizarre as to limit the book's readership to the highly eccentric and the extremely open-minded. The final pages, on Daphne's later years, are virtually an acid trip of incomprehensibility. And he's very good on the darkness and morbidity that underlie much of Barrie's writing, on the creepiness of his 'sentimentality,' and on the grisly unhealthiness of his relationship with the Davies boys.īut beyond *that* the book's methodology is extraordinarily suspect: Dudgeon makes remarkable leaps to remarkable conclusions with the flimsiest of evidence, including whether or not certain of his characters ever met in their entire lives he presents quoted fiction as if it is utterly undisguised nonfiction and.well, from that point he can pretty much do whatever he wants, and does.Īnd once the author drops even the faintest notion of objectivity and makes his personal 'I' the loudest voice in the room, the book turns into a free-for-all between sense and lunacy.

Barrie manipulated his way into the Davies family, alienated Sylvia, the mother of the famous/notorious boys, from her husband, Arthur, and then, after both parents died, appropriated the boys despite their mother's actual intentions.īeyond that, he even has some interesting points to make, that seem to be reality-based, about Barrie's methods of, more or less, mind control, and how that related to the Du Maurier family (including George, the author of Trilby and thus creator of Svengali Sylvia, his daughter Gerald, his son, an actor whose life was inextricably linked with Barrie's and of course Daphne, the author of Rebecca). I've never been more captivated by a book I respected less and less as I read each page.ĭudgeon starts with a valid premise, and one that he is not of course the first to write about: that J.

Peter pan jm barrie book