Rendell/Vine: A writer with two personas
Are you familiar with the woman, the myth, the legend that is Ruth Rendell? If not, your reading life is about to get infinitely richer.
Rendell started her professional life as a newspaper reporter, and while on assignment she skipped the annual meeting of a local tennis club and wrote the story from the chairman’s pre-prepared speech of which she had a copy. After her piece appeared in print, she learned that the chairman had dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of delivering it. She quit before she was fired and turned to writing fiction.
Rendell wrote in four veins: a traditional detective series featuring Inspector Wexford; standalone novels of psychological suspense; several collections of short stories; and fourteen novels under the pen name Barbara Vine. The Vine novels often reveal the crime and the perp in the first chapter and then tease out the “why” of the crime as the book unfolds.
These books are fascinated with long buried secrets that come to the foreground piece by inexorable piece.
My favorite Vine novel was also her first, called “A Dark-Adapted Eye.” This book jumps back and forth in time between the years of WWII and the present. We learn early on that the female protagonist’s aunt Vera was hanged for murder, but we aren’t privy to who Vera killed or why (the television show “Lost” would borrow this conceit years later and not reveal which character was in a casket for the entire season).
Faith Longley, in her early teens, goes to live with her aunts (Vera and Eden) in the English countryside as London is blitzed by the Nazis. Despite her best efforts, Faith struggles to ingratiate herself with them. Her aunts are totally devoted to each other, even to the exclusion of Vera’s own son, whom she shuttles off to boarding school. Some thirty years later, Faith is approached by a journalist, who is researching the case for a book he is writing, and she slowly unravels her version of events as well as a number of family secrets.
To reveal too much more would be criminal, but suffice to say Barbara Vine gives us an alleged poisoning, intimate sins, and unspoken passions (all the good stuff). Oh, and there’s a climax with Vera walking into a child’s nursery with a knife in hand.
Author Val McDermid said, “But most of all this book is about memory. The tricks we play on ourselves, the gaps we create to protect ourselves and the ones we love.”
This is a novel not so much to read, but to luxuriate in. It is a densely-plotted, leisurely paced book with detailed descriptions of nature and character. This is the most twisted tale about the sisterly bond that I know. Read it. You’ll thank me later.
You can borrow “A Dark-Adapted Eye” and many other Vine/Rendell works with your PINES library card.