Grasshopper

Coincidences happen.  As an urban legend enthusiast, I depend on that fact when I'm debunking stories that "can't have happened by chance."  As a mystery fan, I have a more complicated relationship with coincidences.  Too few and the novel becomes unrealistically sterile; too many and the coincidences are a crutch.  I thought about the coincidences in Grasshopper because the novel starts with one. Electrician Clodagh Brown goes out on a call and realizes that Mrs. Clarkson, who called her because "C. Brown" was at the top of the phone book listings, is Liv, the semi-fugitive Swedish nanny who was among those with whom Clodagh explored London roofs a dozen years earlier.  Back then Liv was agoraphobic, under the spell of her criminal boyfriend, and pining after Wim who'd started the crew on their roof-walking hobby.  Now she's "respectable" and tries to bribe Clodagh to keep her identity secret.  Clodagh refuses the money, but with some free time (her husband works for a relief charity and is doing field work), she opens up her old journals and writes the narrative of her first year  in London, with the perspective of time.

Clodagh's first meeting with Liv was also coincidental.  At 16, she started climbing the towers that hold electrical wires, and a year later that led to the death of her slightly younger (by a few months) boyfriend.  Depression and social ostracism led to poor A-level scores so her only option was a third-rate polytechnic and a program which did not interest her.  Living in the basement flat of a house owned by her mother's cousin and his wife (the star of an Eastenders style soap), she's isolated and miserable, a claustrophobic and depressed young woman living in what feels like a dank cave.  About to be expelled for non-attendance, she's on her way to a meeting with her advisor when police activity forces her to use the pedestrian tunnel where she has a panic attack and is rescued by Michael Silverman - Silver - the son of her cousin's neighbors and the resident of an attic flat in his parent's usually unoccupied house.

Silver is also about 20, but neither working nor in school.  He inherited money from his grandmother, enough to live on comfortably but not extravagantly, and he's assembled a small group of misfits who live with or drop in on him.  Liv is one of them, brought to Silver by Johnny, she's hiding the secret of the money she stole from her employers and hiding from her apparently reasonable parents.  Johnny is a  criminal (theft and assault), and others (Morna, Niall, Lucy) mainly students who came and went.  The one thing they shared was a love of rooftop exploration.  Led by Wim, they ran around London nearly 100 feet in the air.

That wouldn't be much of a story if they hadn't discovered a fugitive couple in one of the upper floor flats on their regular route.  Alison and Andrew wanted to adopt Jason, but child services decided that the bi-racial boy shouldn't be raised by two white parents so they abducted him.  Silver wants to help them, and Clodagh goes along with the plan.  But Alison and Andrew are not as they appear, and Silver discovers yet another coincidence just a little bit too late.

Ruth Rendell wrote Grasshopper 15 years ago, and that led to another level of analysis.  I'm about the same age as Clodagh, so I kept pulling back to my college years and seeing her story as I would have seen it back then.  Would a teenager obviously suffering from PTSD and depression after seeing her friend get electrocuted then fall to his death have been scolded rather than treated in the late 1980s?  Probably.  How about her parents' reaction to her claustrophobia?  Mine is not as severe as Clodagh's, but I get more eye-rolls than sympathy when I mention how difficult it is to drive through a tunnel under water or when I flinch at anything unexpectedly too close to my face.  She's reflecting at 32 and happy how she was at 20 and coming out of depression.  I kept wondering what Clodagh is like at 47.  It added to my enjoyment of a book that started slow but was definitely worthwhile.

The Child's Child

I'm afraid that The Child's Child will be the last book Ruth Rendell writes under her Barbara Vine pseudonym.  It's not quite as good as The Birthday Present, but Rendell was in peak form for about two-thirds of the novel.  Perhaps it would have joined The Birthday Present and A Dark Adapted Eye among her best if it had been published as a novella.

I say that because The Child's Child feels like a novella with 85 pages of coincidence-laden framework extending the work to novel length.  Ph.D. candidate Grace Easton and her brother Andrew inherited a sprawling house on the outskirts of London from their grandmother.  Instead of selling it and  sharing the proceeds, they decide to divide the house and live together-but-not-together, and it works well until Andrew's partner James Derain moves in.  James's stability, never a sure thing, degerates when the two men witness the gay-bashing death of an acquaintance of theirs, and then a somewhat unbelievable series of events leads to Andrew and James moving out, leaving Grace, pregnant and working on a Ph.D dissertation analyzing the treatment of unwed mothers in 19th Century literature, alone in the suburban mansion.  One night, she reads the manuscript a family friend gave her.

The Child's Child couldn't be published when it was written in the 1950s.  Martin Greenwell based Maud Goodwin on a neighbor, a woman who'd gotten pregnant at 15 and who also happened to be James Derwin's great-grandmother.  Maude's brother John, who was gay at a time when it was illegal, "saved" Maude by moving away with her and pretending to be her husband.  One evening, John explained to Maude why he so willingly moved away with her, but she was a puritan-leaning as the family they'd left.  Long before John disappeared, Maude retreated into a icy shell, proud and protective of her daughter. There's not much of a mystery - we know John's fate, even if the police take several months to figure it out - but Rendell wrote a compelling story about a woman who trapped herself in a facade of respectability.  While I found the modern-day section of The Child's Child enjoyable, it really didn't add anything to the book.

A Dark Adapted Eye

Warning - Spoilers

I still don't know who is Jamie's mother, and neither does his cousin Faith. I've read A Dark Adapted Eye at least five times, and I've seen the miniseries, and every time I lean towards a solution, some piece of evidence pulls me back.

Vera Hillyard killed her sister Eden in a fight over the child to whom both claimed to have given birth. Decades after Vera's execution, a writer approaches the women's niece for help in untangling the mystery. Vera's son Francis has disavowed his family, and their older half-sister and respective husbands were not present for most of the important events, so the only reliable witness is their niece Faith Severn. As a young teenager, Faith escaped the London Blitz by living with her aunts, an intruder in a suffocating mutual-admiration society. Brittle, housekeeper-extraordinaire Vera had devoted her life to her much-younger sister, shipping her son off to boarding school and living apart from her officer husband when Eden was orphaned at age 14. By 1939, Eden had grown into a beautiful and outwardly sweet young woman - the ideal of femininity according to her sister, and an ideal which Faith could never hope to achieve.

Eden joined the WRENs, leaving Vera (who was only in her late 30s) lonely and wishing for another child (the son she'd abandoned a decade earlier had become - or perhaps always was - a manipulator who found joy in psychologically torturing his mother), so no one was surprised when Vera announced her pregnancy. Jamie, however, was born 10 months after Vera's husband shipped out, thus casting doubt on his paternity. Three years later, Eden married a wealthy man and after an ectopic pregnancy left her infertile, she temporarily takes custody of Jamie from an ailing Vera.

This is where things get hazy. Faith, by this time, is a Cambridge student and receives much of her information second hand or in bits and pieces to be assembled later. Her narrative is full of "I heard" and "I think" but the gist of it is that Eden refused to return Jamie to Vera because she claimed to be his mother. More than 30 years later, Faith still doesn't know which woman was telling the truth. Was Jamie the result of an affair or of a rare (but not impossible) 45 week pregnancy? Or did Eden leave the WRENs more than a year before the war ended (Faith saw her aunt in mufti when Eden was allegedly still in the service) because she was pregnant, and then gave her son to Vera to raise? This time around, I thought Eden was Jamie's mother...until I didn't. And then I did.

The Birthday Present

A first person narrator is almost by definition an unreliable character. He or she will always be unaware of some necessary information. The Birthday Present includes two unreliable first person narrators. Rob Delgado, the main narrator, knows he's missing information and is particularly careful to point out what parts of his brother-in-law's life are known and what parts are speculation. The other narrator Jane Atherton the Alibi Lady, is losing her grip on reality.

Rising politician Ivor Tresham meets Hebe Furnal at a fundraiser for a charity her husband manages. They begin a brief affair which ends with her death in a car accident during a faked kidnapping - the titular 'birthday present' being an evening of 'adventure sex.' After an initial media frenzy focused on Hebe's husband, the press and the police decide that the real target of the kidnapping was a millionaire's wife who they hound into a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, Joe and Iris Delgado observe while her brother tries to find out who knows that he was the mastermind behind the kidnapping.

Over the next three years, Ivor gradually becomes involved with the kidnapping survivors. A combination of guilt and fear leads him to track down Dermot Lynch, who survived the accident with severe brain injuries, and Juliet Case, the ex-girlfriend of Lloyd Freeman who died in the accident. Juliet's motivation for her affair with Ivor seems clear, but it's not - we see only what Joe Delgado sees and the depths of her feelings remain obscure until the climax. Similarly, we never truly know what Dermot Lynch's mother and brother know or believe, or whether Ivor's fear of blackmail is real or imagined.

Vine intersperses Jane Atherton's diary entries with Delgado's straight narrative. Hebe was Jane's best friend, or rather only friend. She's a lonely, rather mousy woman who was born to be used, first by Hebe and later by Hebe's husband Gerry, in part because she lets herself be used. She drifts through life with a sense of self pity and a bit of self-sabotage, and although she never crosses paths with Ivor, her actions indirectly set up Ivor's final act.

The car crash which was the ultimate end of the 'birthday present' is a good metaphor for the book - it's sort of like watching a slow-motion car crash. The events unfold slowly over 4 years, against the backdrop of the Conservative Party's gradual fall from power and a movement against tabloid sleaze. Ivor's fate was totally unexpected, but completely supported by what went before. I've read most of the books Ruth Rendell has written under the name Barbra Vine, and I'd rank this one second, directly and barely below A Dark Adapted Eye.

The Minotaur

Barbara Vine's mysteries aren't so much 'whodunnit' as 'whydunnit' - she usually frames her books as a present-day retelling of a past event, focusing more on how her characters interact than the actual events.  The Minotaur follows that pattern.  Cartoonist Kirsten Kvist is on vacation in Riva when she sees Ella Costway, a member of the family with which she lived when she first came to England from Sweden.  

As a university student in late 1960s Sweden, Kirsten fell in love with an English student and earned a nursing credential so she could follow him back to England.  He helped her find a job as a nurse/companion to John Cosway, a mathematical genius diagnosed with schizophrenia and living in the family home with his domineering mother and three downtrodden sisters.  It doesn't take long for us to realize that John is not schizophrenic but autistic, and that he's been drugged into a near trance, but the book isn't really about John.  It's about his sisters - resigned housewife-without-being-a-wife Ida, 40ish spinsters Winnifred and Ella, and wealthy widow Zorah who on her periodic visits is the only person who treats John as a sentient being.  During Kirsten's year with the Cosways, Winnifred becomes engaged to the local curate and Ella begins an affair with a loutish artist who's moved into the village.  It's a novel of small things which have major outcomes, and one in which the central events just couldn't happen in today's world of cell phones and internet research.  Miss Marple would enjoy The Minotaur - it's a book for students of human nature.

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

I've read none of the books Ruth Rendell has written under her own name.  She's one of the modern masters, but there are only so many books I can read and her Inspector Wexler mysteries haven't made it on to my shelf.  I have read several of the psychological thrillers she has written as Barbara Vine, but I've also put two of them down after a few chapters.  Gallowglass never grabbed me,  but A Dark Adapted Eye is a near perfect mystery and I couldn't put down The Blood Doctor.  Her 1998 novel The Chimney Sweeper's Boy falls in between the poles - I enjoyed it, but it's not a classic.

Gerald Candless is a famous author in failing health.  At one time he was charming and well-reviewed, but he's become a shadow of himself; his latest novels have been released with little notice and he seems to get most of his pleasure from being rude to the younger writers who make the pilgrimage to his Devon home.  Gerald dies the night after one of these hazing luncheons, and his publisher asks his daughters to write a memoir of their beloved father.  Hope, a successful attorney, is too distraught to even attempt to write about her father so Sarah, a university lecturer, takes on the task.  She soon learns that the real Gerald Candless died as a child and her father assumed his name and identity when he began writing his unacknowledgedly autobiographic novels.

While Sarah tries to unravel her father's true identity, Vine tells the parallel story of Candless's widow, Ursula.  Forty years earlier, Ursula was a sheltered young woman, the youngest child by a decade of a comfortably affluent family.  What she didn't realize, but the reader can easily see, is that Candless was deeply closeted and married both for the public image and to have children.  His daughters were the center of his life, and after their birth, Ursula's only use to him was as material for a novel.  Vine mixes memories of the Candlesses' unhappy marriage with fragments of Gerald Candless's works and the slow development of Ursula's new relationship with a 60ish bookseller.  

I enjoyed The Chimney Sweeper's Boy but I was never surprised by it, and that's what separates it from Vine's better works.  Her best books leave the main mystery open ended, but each passage from Gerald's novels gives just a little too much information for the final chapter to be a surprise.