The Parasites is my last book for the 1949 Club.
The Delaney siblings are lying around and messing up their sister’s home, as they do every weekend, when Maria’s husband Charles tells them they are parasites. Although Niall is a successful songwriter and Maria a famous actress, Niall admits that it may be the case. The novel takes us back through incidents of their lives as the three consider whether Charles is right. A clue may be that the narrative sometimes changes from third person to second person plural, as if they were one organism.
Marie, Niall, and Celia are the semi-related children of the Delaneys, their father a famous singer and their mother a famous dancer (referred to solely as Pappy and Mama). The children run wild through hotels, and even though Niall and Celia are more subdued, they are clearly unruly, but at the theater, all three know to sit quietly. Celia plays with her dolls while Maria mimics her mother, and Niall watches the orchestra.
As we follow them, it becomes clear that Maria and Niall lead their lives with no concern for anyone else, except maybe each other, and Celia protects the two of them. In her young womanhood, she neglects her own talents as an artist to take care of Pappy after Mama dies and later do the same for Maria’s children.
Du Maurier herself struggled with some of the issues this novel brings forward. We don’t know what her childhood was like, but since her father was an actor-manager and her mother an actress, it may have been very much like the one depicted for Maria, Niall, and Celia. She lived separately from her husband for years, like Maria does with Charles, and she doesn’t seem to have felt a lot of connection with her children, also like Maria. (There’s a funny/dreadful passage where Maria is left alone for the day to care for her newborn daughter Caroline.) Did Du Maurier write this novel for readers to sympathize with her characters? I don’t think so. We don’t like them very much. To understand them, maybe. Not caring much about the children is also part of the plot of Frenchman’s Creek, a novel that is supposed to be romantic, but in which the heroine just blows off her family for long periods of time. Du Maurier herself admitted that she neglected her family for her writing. I think that in many of her books she has characters demonstrating some of her own traits.
It’s interesting also that there are three children and one of them is a boy. Du Maurier had two sisters, but she also stated that she had a sort of male alter-ego that she used in some of her books, so perhaps she saw herself in Niall.
