A Drink to Yesterday

THE HOUSE ON THE STRAND by Daphne du Maurier. 298 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

One of her best. A fantasy involving late medieval Cornwall and Kilmarth, a house in which Daphne du Maurier lives, the book shrewdly borrows an old device to exploit the current literary craze for communication with the dead. Richard Young, a suggestible publisher, is persuaded by a scientist friend to be guinea pig for his latest discovery: a potion which abruptly evokes the past. One sip puts Young in the company of Roger Kylmerth, an early occupant of Kilmarth, who is immersed in the intricate plottings of the neighboring gentry and even a national struggle between partisans of Edward III and England's regent Isabella of France.

Shuttling between the intriguing past and the insipid present, Richard Young, a priggish fellow, attempts to keep his vulgarian wife ignorant of his new time travel kick but succeeds only in riveting her--and a wary community's--attention upon his strange behavior. Du Maurier's view of both modern and medieval marriage is remarkably waspish, but it is this very connubial bitchiness that keeps the novel from a routine Gothicism and makes it a stylish, contemporary entertainment.

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