Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, is the author of 12 novels which deal with extremely aberrant behaviour treated on the easiest and most companionable terms. There is no doubting that the author herself is on the side of the sane, the balanced, and the well-behaved: this is apparent in the clarity of her sentences, which proceed without flagging from the outset of a complex narrative to its eventual resolution. Her astonishing productivity is another matter altogether. This is not so much devotion to the task as obedience to an impulse with which she is on enviably relaxed terms.
She is in many ways qualified to be our foremost woman writer. Her peculiar virtue, apart from her lucidity, is her ability to create alarming but familiar characters and situations: streets are itemised, habits well established, dilemmas revealed as unexceptional. Nobody is mad, but nobody is quite sane. As Ruth Rendell she has established Chief Inspector Wexford as the possessor of a well-regulated mind; as Barbara Vine she knows that such people are rare and lets her gaze linger on the marginal and the marginalised, on the excluded and the infinitesimally deluded, all of whom are so recognisable that we are almost — almost — in collusion with them. Such characters are of necessity lonely, and in Barbara Vine’s hands we allow ourselves to believe that we are immune from their fantasies. So confident is her manner of dealing with these characters that our paradoxical reaction is one of ease and comfort. A new Ruth Rendell or Barbara Vine is such a natural occurrence that the regularity with which they appear is accepted as almost commonplace. Trollope wrote like this, without betraying his gifts in any way. Ruth Rendell does the same.
This is not to say that the books do not vary. Some are more successful than others; some, like Grasshopper or The Blood Doctor strain credulity a little too far: names verge on the fantastical, neighbourhoods are too specific. Perhaps the best — A Dark-Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion — belong to a high period which must inevitably pass. Yet the virtues of such unassuming prose are apparent in all her books, and make storytelling rather than professional writing her true calling. I have read most of the Rendells and all of the Vines since first encountering one of her titles in a remote bookshop, quite by chance, many years ago. Her latest offering shows that she has no intention of taking a break, although Minotaur is perhaps the strangest of her books, and the barest.
Swedish Kirsten Kvist goes as an au pair to the Cosway family in Essex, nominally to look after John Cosway, who is perhaps brain-damaged, or schizophrenic, or suffering from the effects of ‘emotional shock’. The household consists of four daughters, three at home and one in London, and their adamantine mother who appears not to care for any of them, least of all her son, to whom she administers a sleeping pill every night and some additional substance during the day. The era is the Sixties, but time seems frozen: only John’s barbiturates and Largactil are of the period. John is in fact autistic, but such a diagnosis would have been unlikely at the time, although now it is almost unavoidable. Equally unlikely are the girls, so-called, although they are in their late thirties. Even odder is the library shaped like a maze and filled with first editions.
The reason why John is force-fed inappropriate drugs is simple: he is the owner of the house and his mother and sisters merely lodgers. It is in their interest, and indeed that of the doctor who supplies the drugs and who is the lover of Mrs Cosway to keep him mute and docile. Readers may understand this a little too readily, but they will be lulled into acquiescence by the story, which is perhaps lacking in tension. It also abounds in clichés: the artist who has rented a house in the village is a Byronic seducer, the depressed eldest daughter wears shapeless cardigans, the rector lacks all insight into human complexity, and the doctor is complaisant. Indeed everyone is complaisant, or ignorant, or incurious, and it is left to plucky Kirsten to connect effect with cause.
In comparison with the earlier novels this is puzzling. It is also perfunctory, the details, even the title, added on rather than intrinsic. The monstrous family, all the more monstrous for being apparently isolated, is unconvincing, as are the fates of the unlikeable characters. Perhaps I have misread what is simply an exercise in Gothick, but I missed the usual urban setting and a level of sophistication normally to be found in this author’s male deviants. Her women, in Minotaur at least, are tiresome rather than troubling. It is an oddly unsituated novel, and I found it uncomfortable. My loyalty to the author, however, remains uncompromised.
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