Marnie by Winston Graham for the #1961Club

Source: Own shelves.

1961 is the year for this month’s bi-annual reading club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, and looking through the wiki page for 1961 in LIterature, I saw that there was tons of SF on the list that I had read when much younger (L Sprague de Camp, Harry Harrison and Robert Heinlein amongst them) plus Fleming’s Thunderball, and I’ve already covered several other novels from that year on my blog:

• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• Call for the Dead by John Le Carré
• The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett

Of those books I’ve not read, Marnie immediately stood out, as I already owned a copy and had meant to read it for simply ages. Winston Graham is, of course, famous for the Poldark novels, but he was much more than that as the ‘Five Fascinating Facts‘ I compiled for Shiny New Books, when the most recent TV adaptation aired and the books were reissued on him, will attest. Fact No 3 concerned the film adaptation of Marnie, reproduced below.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 movie, with a script by Evan Hunter, starring Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren in the title role, and Sean Connery as the man who takes her on, there is a controversial rape scene in the novel, which screen-writer Evan Hunter had problems with. In his book Me and Hitch, Hunter tells how Hitchcock visualised it:

Hitch held up his hands the way directors do when they’re framing a shot. Palms out, fingers together, thumbs extended and touching to form a perfect square. Moving his hands toward my face, like a camera coming in for a close shot, he said, “Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face.“

OK – I’ll come back to that and the film… but first to the book.

We know that Marnie is a con artist right from the start. She is clearing out her rooms, leaving no trace behind.

I always reminded myself of the coat I’d left behind in Newcastle last year. Remembering that kept me on the alert; your eyes get to see something as part of the background and then you’ve left something behind and that’s too bad because you can’t come back for it. […]

Names are important. They have to be neither too ordinary nor too queer, just a name, like a face, that’ll go along with the crowd. And I’d found from experience that the Christian name had to be like my own, which is Margaret – or usually Marnie – because otherwise I might not answer to it when called, and that can be awkward.

Having abandoned her old persona’s belongings at the left luggage, Marnie goes home to Torquay, to visit her mother, who shares her house with a friend, Lucy. Her mother is quite brittle, criticises Marnie’s blonde hair, but loves the fur wrap Marnie brings her, hoping that her boss Mr Pemberton is still treating her right. He doesn’t exist, of course, but is convenient to explain the money twenty-three-year-old Marnie is able to send home. Ere long Marnie will take the train back to Cirencester, where the real love of her life is stabled. Yes, it’s a horse, Forio, who is quite important to the story. Then back to London where she becomes Mrs Mary Taylor, a young widow, looking for a bookkeeping and secretarial job, which she finds at Rutland & Co, a printers in Barnet, where she talks her way into a job despite not having more than cursory references, and it is there she meets Mark Rutland.

It’s a family firm, the board comprises old Mr Holbrook, a grandson of the founder, and his son Terry, Mark Rutland, a thirtieish recent widower, and their cousin Mr Newton-Smith. Rutland who’d taken over from his father had been married to Estelle and archaeologist who got ill and died, he keeps to himself largely, but is active in driving the company forwards in this post-war era. Marnie is assigned to assist the cashier Miss Clabon, and keenly observes everything. She makes a friend of Doreen who gives her all the gossip, and urges her to go to the annual company dinner dance, where she comes under the gaze of Terry, who invites her along with a few others to go back to his for more drinks and poker. Marnie has to overcome her dislike of gambling – coming out £22 better off, but has to suffer the wandering hands of Terry – who it is clear recognises a fellow outsider, but doesn’t push it.

It’s when she has to deliver some papers to Mark at his home, that things begin to hot up. There’s a thunderstorm and she is terrified. He naturally comforts her, and there is a something between them. They will soon go on some dates, including to the races at Newbury where she refuses to bet, but knows all the form for Mark to win.

Meanwhile, she makes herself indispensable at work, and when Miss Clabon books a holiday, Marnie persuades her boss that she can do the payroll on her own. She has it all planned down to the last detail. But, hadn’t planned on being caught by Mark, who catches up with her in Cirencester at the stables. He’d discovered the missing money before the payroll went out, replaced it with his own, and tracked her down via a comment she’d made about a horse at the races. He has an ultimatum to deliver – marry him and he won’t go to the police.

It’s on their honeymoon in the Balearics that the controversial scene alluded to happens. At first he tries it on and she recoils; he doesn’t understand but doesn’t push it. But later he’ll take it further.

Back from their honeymoon they settle into a strange life. Separate beds, playing psychological mind games with each other, keeping up appearances. Mark insists that Marnie starts to see a psychiatrist, in return he’ll have Forio brought to be stabled at their home. He is very much in charge. The psychological games continue, then someone recognises her from another of her lives and of course things begin to unravel.

In between, we get snatches of Marnie’s childhood, but we don’t find out what really happened to her parents and how it affected Marnie until the climax of the novel. The suspense of whether, or rather when, this precarious house of cards will come tumbling down builds throughout.

Graham’s Marnie is finely drawn, aloof, very self-sufficient, but she has her vulnerabilities and obviously is afraid to let anyone get close to her. Mark, who starts off as grieving husband, but then makes himself complicit in her crimes and becomes over-dominant through it, ensuring our sympathies remain with Marnie, thief that she is.

The film, although relocating to the USA, follows the broad story of Marnie and Mark. However, it does entirely dispense with both Terry and the psychiatrist, combining the latter into Mark’s character, making him an amateur shrink! Terry is replaced by Mark’s cousin Lil, who is secretly in love with him. We never get an explanation for Connery’s Scottishness, his accent is very clipped indeed and his character isn’t so different to that of Bond! Tippi Hedren is the ice maiden personified, except when there’s thunder and lightning or she sees ‘red’, literally – the screen goes red for a frame or two whenever there’s blood, or a drop of red ink etc, always with a suitable Bernard Hermann musical notation.

Of course the plots of novel and film are contrived; there’s a bit of a Highsmith type feel to things and you can see why Hitchcock was interested. There was one occurrence of an idiom that would offend today, but it was written in a different era. Marnie is a real page-turner, and a great choice for the 1961 club.

Marnie (1961) – Pan paperback, 391 pages. BUY at Waterstones or Amazon via my affiliate links.