Say the name 'Ruth Rendell' and most people will beam back at you in full recognition of one of Britain's finest crime/thriller writers - 'Wexford', 'who-dunnits' and 'sinister murders with a psychological tang' all associations lighting up at the thought of her name. Say the name 'Barbara Vine' and the reaction will probably be the opposite - bewilderment and ignorance. How peculiar then that Rendell chooses to slip off her name under which she has had such great success and adopt the Vine pseudonym. "Ay, there's the rub", perhaps she wants to re-test herself, not have her work living, existing off the reputation of the author, but have it prove itself in its own right, stand out from the rest, without the strength of the name 'Rendell' behind it. A rebirth then, if you like, albeit a non-permanent one, to perhaps shed her successful Rendell skin and throw the gauntlet down to herself under the veil of Vine.
And so the topic of rebirth has brought us very neatly up the garden path and to the front door of her novel 'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy', a tale of a man assuming a new identity for mysterious reasons, that struggles in all honesty to fit itself into any genre. To brand it a 'thriller' would be misleading, as it feels to be a calculated move away from the machete-wielding, blood-thirsty conspiracy hunts that have shot to popularity, thanks to Dan Brown and the like. Instead it's a pursuit to discover the real identity of the recently dead novelist Gerald Candless with lashings of the psychological. One of the reasons for this difficulty in categorising this novel is because the two characters who it follows in equal measure - the widow of Candless, Ursula and a daughter, Sarah - have completely different stories going in different directions, although ultimately both are just trying to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of his death. Yet this is a story much darker than the average mourning process that we've all undergone at some point - it's a tale born out of division and isolation within a family and frankly, out-and-out psychological torture.
Ursula is the unfortunate victim of this emotional battering. What we're left with is a reflective, introspective but intelligent middle-aged woman who proceeds to nurture her last embers of confidence in her new found freedom. She becomes rejuvenated, more confident and independent again and so it's quite interesting to see someone reborn at a stage in life that is so often associated with monotony and depression. This story is as much about her adjustment to life without a tyrant as it is about the tyrant himself.
At the other end of the spectrum we have Sarah, who, along with her spoilt and petulant sister Hope, both worships and is worshipped by Gerald and upon his death sets out to write a memoir of his life. However, what would appear to be a straightforward task of penning an account of life with the perfect father doesn't just bring a few skeletons out of the wardrobe, but an entire cemetery's worth.
Vine gets this narrative combination spot on. While Ursula is tenderly peeling back layers of the past, each time unleashing some uncomfortable memory of utter emotional mutilation at the hands of Candless, Sarah's hunt is told with more dynamism as she chases information about the father she so unquestionably adored, yet hardly knew. The two stories of the protagonists foil each other nicely and are subtly drawn closer to each other as the novel trots along and the legacy and secrets of Candless are gradually unravelled.
I cannot emphasise enough how unsettling the relationship is between father and daughters. You'll struggle to find a better piece of literary evidence to support Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex. This story is brimming with unnatural relationships and this is just one of many that suspend the reader in a hybrid of disbelief and disgust.
So is this story just concerned with dysfunctional relationships within a family? To put it so bluntly and simply is slightly derisory to Vine's novel, as it's a well constructed and well written tale, if not somewhat lacking an explosive, unpredictable twist. However, I felt that it was more about the journey than the destination - how the death of one man can effect two people of one family in such differing ways is a topic that Vine makes interesting to explore. I couldn't help but feel as well that she was having a play with a genre with which she is so familiar and that by creating this brooding beast Candless, she was posing the question of which is a more effective option: the typical, short, fast-paced, high tempo chase from the ex-KGB assassin or this, this long desperate crawl to escape a dead man and his looming legacy.
If you're seeking an edge-of-the-seat thrill, don't pick this book. There's no adrenaline pumping action in here, just the uneasy unveiling of family secrets - the real crux of the tale lies with what it's like to live, wittingly or unwittingly, in the clutches of a monster, an experience that Vine portrays superbly.
Richard Caldecourt
An interesting account of the novel, Richard. I don't object in principle to a review being written in a 'perky' style; but I have to say I found your style here a little grating: 'beam back at you' and so on. And many of these sentences just aren't very well disciplined:
ReplyDelete""Ay, there's the rub", perhaps she wants to re-test herself, not have her work living, existing off the reputation of the author, but have it prove itself in its own right, stand out from the rest, without the strength of the name 'Rendell' behind it."
This is sprawling and not entirely clear.
"[the book will] suspend the reader in a hybrid of disbelief and disgust"
I'm honestly not sure what this means.
A couple of other points: I wonder if you overplay the obscurity of 'Barbara Vine' (a very popular writer by all accounts), and there's a certain slapdashness in your dispraise: Dan Brown may be rubbish, but he doesn't write 'machete-wielding, blood-thirsty' novels of violence, as you imply here. That said, there's certainly verve and engagement here, and some interesting points. I'd have liked to have seen more evidence from the text itself to support you assertions.