By the time the 21st century rolled around, Ruth Rendell, who turned seventy as its dawn, had published forty-six novels and six short story collections over thirty-six years. That is a lot of writing, but the seemingly indefatigable author kept on going, producing another score of crime novels and another short story collection in the fourteen years left to her. There were nine non-series Rendells (the last published posthumously in 2015), six Wexfords and five Barbara Vines. There was also, a few years after her death, yet another short story collection.
Rendell's books continued to garner respectful notices in the 21st century, but gradually some carping from the critics set in, usually having to do with the aging author's failure to keep abreast with the trends of modern life. For example, her series detective inspector Inspector Wexford, who finally retired from the force in his penultimate novel in 2011, continued to grouse about computers way past the point where this was believable. Modern slang and grammar seemed increasingly to bother Rendell and she did tend to go on about "political correctness" (now replaced by "wokeness").
This is okay, up to a point, and perhaps to be expected from an elderly writer (I'm not quite old yet, I like to tell myself, but I can't keep up with youth culture either). One thing a writer can do to try to sidestep the problem is to write about the past and Rendell did some of this, though largely she kept writing about modern-day England, with noticeably slackening authority. But a larger problem, I think, for a crime writer, is when their plotting skill declines. I don't care what some critics say, plotting matters in genre fiction. And looking back at Rendell's later books, a decade after death, I am afraid I think it's fair to say that the author's plotting skill largely left her (or she left it) in the new century.
I enjoyed the nonseries Rendell thriller A Sight for Sore Eyes (1998), though it's a rehash of old themes, and I think Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001), though it's a rehash too and rather discursive, has its points. The Wexfords all are readable, though none of the late ones as mysteries are up to the standard of earlier efforts. Of the five 21st century Vines I only like one of them, The Blood Doctor (2002).
The problem with the later non-Wexford Rendells, aside from a lack of temporal authenticity (this is a problem in the Wexfords too), is that the plotting is not very good and you don't have the Wexford milieu to force the author to provide some sort of actual mystery. Things happen, but the narratives drag and the things that happen are not very exciting or suspenseful or mysterious. The Vines lack the narrative complexity of earlier volumes, while the non-series Rendell thrillers do not thrill. Really it seems as if Rendell largely had lost interest in even trying to thrill the reader.
Books like Portobello (2008), Tigerlily's Orchids (2010). The St. Vita Society (2012), The Girl Next Door (2014) and Dark Corners (2015), seem more like novels of manners about quirky people (to put it mildly) trying to manage in London. There may be a murder at some point, but it's not the author's real interest. I first noticed this when reading her ostensible serial killer novel The Rottweiler (2003), perhaps the least exciting serial killer novel ever written. Maybe Rendell had done murder thrillers so many times she just became bored with it.
And if you like these mild manners novels of sorts, that's fine. But, me, they make me miss the days of The Lake of Darkness (1980) and A Demon in My View (1976) and even One Across, Two Down (1971) and Vanity Dies Hard (1966)--books that were short, to the point and, yes, suspenseful. I think wordage often worked for the Vines, which at their best successfully imitate Victorian sensation novels, but wordage was an enemy of the Rendell thrillers, ultimately overthrowing them. Frankly it finally overthrew the Vines as well.
I abandoned Portobello halfway though and skipped briefly to the end. It has a typical gallery of Rendell's obsessive-compulsives and outright wackos: the guy who sees spirits, the freeloading hooligan determined to get his girl back and, most infamously, the guy desperately addicted to sugar-free sweets. (Yes, I'm talking about the notorious chocorange subplot.)
I managed to finish Tigerlily's Orchids, which I thought was better, but it was still the same type of thing: the alcoholic woman determined to drink herself to death, the guy obsessed with the pretty Asian woman next door, etc. It was like each year Rendell took a kaleidoscope and gave it a little shake, just enough for the familiar bits to settle in a slightly different pattern.
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| There's a drowning in Ladbroke in the Grand Union Canal which takes place in the main portion of The Child's Child Was it murder??? |
After two previous tries I made a determined to attempt the finish The Child's Child, the final Barbara Vine novel, the penultimate book published during her lifetime. When it was published in 2012 one book critic who dared dissent from the usual laudatory review chorus was Claire Black in the Scotsman, who boldly announced: "The Child's Child...just isn't very good. There, I've said it." I'm afraid she's right.
At first it seemed like this might be a real return to form after the flatness of The Minotaur (2005) and real disappointment of The Birthday Present (2008), but, alas, this hope proved fleeting. The novel, over 100,000 words long I believe, interweaves present and past like the best Vines, but unfortunately not effectively. In fact I should allow that there is no real interweaving, there's simply a modern-day framing story, set in 2011, placed around an ostensible unpublished 1951 novel, The Child's Child, which details events, based on real life, from 1929 to 1947. The novella gets two-thirds of the space, with a very brief modern-day coda following.
What it all really feels like is two separate stories, although the modern-day story is rather artificially manipulated to make the three principals in it mimic the pattern set by the three principals in the novel within the novel . Let's get to it, then, shall we?
The framing story is about two siblings, Andrew, age 30, and Grace, age 28. Andrew is a publisher (that's how he comes across The Child's Child) and Grace is a graduate student working on a thesis about unwed mothers in literature. After their grandmother dies, the siblings inherit from her a lovely Victorian house in Hampstead and they go there to live together, dividing the house between them, though it only has one kitchen. Andrew barely exists as a character, besides that he's gay, and Grace makes a rather dull, pro forma narrator. But along comes James Derain, a novelist published by Andrew's firm who also becomes Andrew's new boyfriend. He moves into the house to live with Andrew, which soon becomes a problem.
You see, James is, as Grace rather clinically puts it: "One of those gay men who dislike women, all women. I had never met one before, but I had heard of them. I knew they existed." Well, they certainly exist in this book, anyway. I have never met one either, but perhaps they do exist, just like straight men who hate all women. Grace does on to tell us that such gays "were the antithesis of those whose closest and best friend is a woman and of whom they are often fonder than they are of their current lover."
Whatever James is, he's a real pill though. He's constantly rude to Grace and loves to lecture her about his hero Oscar Wilde, though he sanctimoniously denounces George Sand, whom he thought was a man until Grace corrected him, as dishonest for using a male pen name. To Grace he contemptuously dismisses the cruel historical treatment of unwed mothers as of no account compared with that meted out to gay man through the years. Grace rightly can't stand this prick, in fact I don't see how Andrew could stand him.
Oh, wait, he's one of those fantastically attractive gays, like Tim Cornish in No Night is Too Long. Rendell's straight woman in that book, sounding very much like a straight woman born around 1930, compared Tim to a "young Robert Redford." In this book, Grace, born apparently in 1983, goes several four times better with the Hollywood film star references by telling us that James resembles an amalgamation of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, James Stewart and Gregory Peck. Can someone AI this for me, cause I'm really wondering what such a person would look like. Sounds like The Substance.
I was born in the Sixties and certainly grew up knowing of all of these people (they were all still alive except Gable, who everyone knew anyway from Gone with the Wind and the line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"), but did young people born in the Eighties know them? Grace explains that Andrew has a huge DVD collection of Golden Age films, which I suppose may be plausible, Andrew being a gay man. (Bette Davis will never die among the tribe.) Yet I'm pretty sure Netflix was really hitting its stride by 2011 and DVDs were well on their way to obsolescence. (I still have a bunch myself, but then I was 45 when this book is suppose to take place.)
Despite his apparent hatred for women, however, James, like Tim Cornish, soon goes on bi on us! How does this happen, you may ask? Well, it seems that he and Andrew were out clubbing early in the morning and become witnesses to some neo-Nazi thug types beating to death one of their friends, Bashir al Khalifa, "a handsome young man from somewhere in the Middle East." James, the silly swish, has a nervous breakdown at the thought of testifying at the murder trial and develops writer's block so Grace kindly tries to restore his confidence by having him show her how to use the internet (!!!).
Here I have to quote Claire Black, where in her review she wrote: "No one of Grace's generation ever wonders about the impact of mobile phones on the way we communicate, nor would she ever need to ask about how a search engine works, even as a ruse."
But this apparently brings Grace and James closer together and the next thing they know they are, after having shared a bottle of sherry (Grace happened to have a bottle in the cupboard), passionately "making love" together, a lot like Tim Cornish and Isabel in No Night is Too Long. Soon James is ruminating: "I suppose you could say I'm bisexual."
This struck me as rather implausible, given what we had known about James, but, you see, it' a plot contrivance. Grace gets pregnant from that afternoon of passion and decides to keep the baby. Informed of her indiscretion with James, Andrew pettishly moves out of the house (taking James) and frostily tells Grace: "I can imagine that you, Grace, fixed up a pretty little scenario in which your baby has a daddy and an uncle and looks a lot like all of us. It might be a kind of Design for Living,a twenty-first century one Noel Coward didn't write, but in that comedy there's no infant." Burn! Sounds just like your typical Gen Xer.
Grace sits down to read The Child's Child and sure enough it rather resembles her own situation. The novel is about a fifteen-year-old west country middle-class girl, Maud Goodwin, who gets pregnant in 1929, leading her stodgy chapel parents to threaten her with the workhouse. To the rescue comes her older gay schoolmaster brother, John, who says he will live with her and pretend to be her husband. He plans to devote himself to celibacy, being guilt-stricken about having a working-class gay boyfriend in London, Bertie.
This part of the book is much more interesting than the framing story, the characters from 1929, a year before Rendell herself was born, being far more credibly conveyed. For a while it sustained my interest, but then, a little over halfway through this portion of the book, something happened to one of the principals--I won't say what to whom--and after that my interest slowly deflated, like air out of a tire. And never is the framing story really made to relate to novel within a novel. I couldn't help feeling that Rendell would have been better off just telling the story of Maud-John-Bertie as a linear novel without a frame. That was actually a story that could have used greater development.
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| Come into the garden, Maud Erm, I mean, Maurice! (James Wilby as the title character and Rupert Grant as Scudder in the 1987 gay film Maurice) |
John comes off as a saint, though rather a wet one, but Maud and Bertie are awful, underdeveloped ciphers. People who think Rendell herself was a woman-hater will point to Maud as exhibit number one, but in fact there are several sympathetic women characters in the story. Bertie, a clerk of the 'lowest rank" (basically a chai wallah) is yet another one of Rendell's loutish lower class characters, though beautiful. His and John's tale is certainly no Maurice. Bertie may be a beauty, but he's no Alec Scudder, that's for sure.
One of the awful things about Bertie, apparently, is that in letters he puts circles over his "i's" rather than dots. (Oh, the humanity.) In modern times, one of the fascist thugs girlfriends demands "Where's he gone to?" which Grace primly refers to as "murdering the English language." It's sure a relief to know that Grace's thesis won't have any sentences ending in prepositions. That would bring me down--I mean, down it would bring me.
Still there was material here for a potentially successful book. Alas, as it stands, it's a sadly missed opportunity.
In a 2012 interview Rendell said of her Barbara Vine novels that they "don't have any sort of mystery in them, they don't have any revelations, really. They're just really about people." This is true of late Barbara Vine, yes (as well as late Rendells, actually), but it's not remotely true of earlier Vines, which skillfully withheld revelations and teased readers with suggestions.
It's all an old technique which mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart called "the buried story," skillfully applied. There actually is suspense for about half of the main portion of Child, but then it's allowed to go flat and soften into a mild mainstream novel. Ms Rendell meet Miss Reed.
I do have one poignant last note on this late Rendell novel. I mentioned that in it the grandmother of Grace and Andrew died, leaving them a house. (One parallel between the two stories is that when Maud's grandmother dies, she leaves her five thousand pounds, or over half a million dollars, changing but not changing her life.) Grace states that her grandmother died from a stroke at age 85: "A good age, as they say."
When Rendell was publicizing this novel in late 2012 she was nearly 83 years old. She herself would suffer a stroke a couple of years later in January 2015 and lie incapacitated for several months before passing away in May of 2015. In her newspaper interview she vowed to keep writing ("Octogenarian Author Has No Plans To Stop"), having just completed a new Wexford novel. It would be the last Wexford too.
Of authors Rendell said in 2012: "I think you don't retire unless you are ill." Her health, she declared, was "very good." But so many of her books have stroke victims. Was there a family history? Did she have a presentiment?
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