Return within Thirty Days: The Birthday Present (2008), by Barbara Vine

Ruth Rendell published 14 Barbara Vine novels over nearly three decades between 1986 and 2014.  As perhaps can be expected with a highly prolific writer--in addition to the 14 Vines she published 52 novels under her own name, as well as seemingly countless pieces of short fiction--the Vines afforded diminishing yields of poisoned fruit over time.  Rendell banged out the first three Vine novels--A Dark Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion and The House of Stairs--in just three years between 1986 and 1988.  She was then at the height of her powers and it shows in this terrific trio.  Afterward, however, there was a perceptible overall decline in the books that grew steeper over time.

There was, to be sure, Asta's Book (1993), perhaps the best novel in the series and the best book Rendell ever wrote, and the moving, melancholy The Brimstone Wedding (1995), and even The Blood Doctor (2002), one which I know a lot of people hate but I rather admire.  After The Blood Doctor there came three last Vines: The Minotaur (2005), The Birthday Present (2008) and The Child's Child, the latter of which was published only about two years before the author's tragically crippling and soon-to-be fatal stroke (which occurred about a decade and one week ago).  

None of the books in this farewell trio, regretfully, are very good.  (Disclaimer: I've never actually finished The Child's Child.)  I remember reading The Minotaur a few years after it was published and being surprised how banal it was.  It was supposed to be a Gothic thriller and was really nothing of the sort.  The best Vines are celebrated for their dense but dexterous narratives, which move teasingly and tantalizingly back and forth in time, navigating treacherously shifting viewpoints and perspectives. Far less of that skill was present in The Minotaur, which mostly seemed a wearisome slog over a flat and dreary plain.  

The same is true, only more so, of the penultimate Vine, The Birthday Present, over 100,000 words of tedium, by and large.  It's not terrible like late Christie or Carr is terrible, just rather a bore.  And, in the end, that's worst thing you can say about a thriller.

Red Shoe Diaries
I have a feeling we aren't
in Kansas anymore.

The Birthday Present is one of those books which is all premise no plot.  This is the one about a Tory politician in the late-Thatcher/Major era (1990-97), Ivor Tesham, who fears being implicated in a sex scandal when his mistress Hebe--that's Hee-bee as in heebie-jeebies--Furnval is killed in a car accident during an "adventure sex" scenario which the two pretty pervs concocted for her birthday.  

Hebe was to be "kidnapped" by two men, blindfolded, handcuffed and gagged, carried to a house and dumped on the bed for Ivor's (and apparently her own) carnal pleasure.  All well and good, at least if you're a kinkster, but as mentioned there's a deadly car accident along the way and Hebe is killed along with one of her "kidnappers," while the other is hospitalized in a coma.  What will happen now to Ivor and his political career?!  

Well, not much, really, in the event.  The whole thing just seems to drag interminably.  It sounds exciting, adventure sex, bondage and all that, but it's really a damp squib.  Rendell is far too decorous--dare I say genteel and ladylike--to write about this sort of thing with real conviction.  It's like Agatha Christie writing about SM Clubs.  

For example, Rendell repeatedly says that in the kidnap car Hebe had a gag in her mouth and it's indicated that Ivor got this "gag" at a sex shop but then it's stated that Hebe had a scarf wrapped around her mouth.  Well, that's not the same thing, is it?  You wouldn't be buying a scarf at a sex shop.  Hebe's gal pal Jane Atherton (see below) is reluctantly titillated by a "dog collar" from Hebe's kink bag, but that's about as far as Rendell dares go with this.  (She also mentions the word "dildoes" once and she has Ivor say "fuck" about four or five times.)  

I wonder whether Rendell ever saw the infamous "gimp scene" in Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction, which came out around the time of the events detailed in Rendell's novel?  I'm guessing not, her grip on popular culture started noticeably to slacken from the 1990s onward.  Still The Birthday Present anticipated the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which mainstreamed bondage for the Oprah set, by three years, so perhaps it seemed more venturesome at the time.    

It's no gag
(Bruce Willis in 1994's Pulp Fiction)
Rendell gets mildly kinky
in The Birthday Present

On the whole though Rendell seems more interested in exploring some of her favorite pet peeves with modernity, like people who address one familiarly by one's first name or, worse yet, by a diminutive.  There's an "uppish" window cleaner who does this who reads like a reincarnation of a character from a much earlier and better Rendell novel, The Lake of Darkness.  I don't care how many times Rendell proclaimed she was a socialist; I have my doubts and I stick to them with each read.  

It doesn't help that neither pervy Ivor, nor his dull sister, nor his even duller brother-in-law, who tells a good chunk of the tale, are remotely interesting characters. I'm afraid I just couldn't have cared less what happened to Ivor in this book.  

To pad things out and lend some interest to the narrative, Rendell introduces a friend of Hebe's, Jane Atherton, known as the "alibi woman," because Hebe used her to cover up her affair with Ivor from her doting husband.  By far the most interesting chapters in the book come in the form of extracts from Jane's diary from the time.  (The brother-in-law's portions of the novel are told retrospectively from the present day, i.e., about 2008.)  

Even the Jane portions lift the book only slightly, however.  The Hebe-Jane relationship was potentially interesting, being the classic Hot Girl-Plain Girl relationship (Plain Jane?) you often see in real life, where a hot girl likes to hang around a plain girl to shine even brighter against her dull background.  There was a pair of girls I knew in high school who were just like this.  Years later I met the plain girl again and I didn't even recognize here--she had utterly transformed herself into a hot girl who looked a lot like her old hot girl gal pal!  Now there's an interesting story.  But Hebe dies so early in the book, there's no exploration of this dynamic.

Although I've only ever seen one other review of Rendell's novel ever comment on this, it seems to me blatantly obvious that the Jane Atherton character was inspired by Barbara Covett in English mainstream author Zoe Heller's much-praised 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, which was made into a superb Oscar-nominated film in 2006, merely two years before the publication of The Birthday Present.  You almost feel like Rendell must have seen this film and begun writing this novel the very next day, the impression is so strong.  

Scandal tells about the bizarre codependent relationship that develops between two women teachers, an older spinster type (Barbara) who narrates the novel and a younger married woman, Sheba Hart, who is having a torrid, ill-advised affair with one of her students.  In The Birthday Present Jane is much younger than Barbara, in fact about the same age as Hebe, but she is very similar to Barbara, a lonely spinsterish type with a soured attitude to life, while Hebe is very similar to Sheba--How similar are their names!--in the sense of being an attractive woman married to a dull husband who is engaged in risky sex with another man (or boy, really, in Sheba's case).  

Gone Girls
Sheba (Cate Blanchett) and Barbara (Judi Dench) throw down in
the superb, Oscar-nominated 2006 film Notes on a Scandal

Unfortunately, however, Jane is a dreary wet blanket mostly lacking Barbara's quirky character and sardonic narration.  Part of the perverse "fun" of Scandal is seeing Barbara taking control of events and gradually becoming the dominant partner in the relationship.  Jane, on the other hand, remains an embittered loser in life to the end.  Still, her story provides the novel with what narrative drive it has.  

The biggest problem here is that The Birthday Present feels like a Ruth Rendell non-series psychological novel masquerading as a Barbara Vine.  One could easily reimagine Present, retrospectively set in the 1990, as a Rendell actually published in the 1990s.  Shorn of 20,000 or so words and narrated in the present by Jane, this might actually have been a thrilling thriller.  As it is this "present" is one which most readers likely will want to return to the store within thirty days.  Save the receipt!