The Child’s Child, by Barbara Vine – review

‘I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one,’ Ruth Rendell said to me in 1998. ‘In fact I believe that if I weren’t to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn’t be able to write it at all.’ A Barbara Vine — from the first, A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986) onwards — tends to take a specific period, distinct in mores and cultural tensions, and to concentrate on emotionally charged events, invariably climaxing in violent death, which stand in metaphoric relationship to it. In the body of this latest Vine book — the 192-page narrative actually entitled ‘The Child’s Child’ — all these requirements are amply met.

Opening in 1929, it takes us to London and the West Country in the throes of the Depression, and thence into the war, with its country-wide dispersal of evacuees. When times are both uncertain and tumultuous, so little food for hope is there that paradoxically people turn in on themselves.

The drama of John Goodwin and his younger sister Maud, mostly enacted in a remote Devon village, is convincingly claustrophobic. And how could it be otherwise, when conventional society, starting with their own Bristol-based family, is so narrow in its sympathies, so little inclined (on principle, one fears) to spontaneous generosity?

The Goodwins were far from rich but they were ‘comfortable’. John Goodwin had inherited a bookbinding business from his father and it had always done fairly, if not spectacularly, well. He had married a woman he met at chapel.

She has a dowry large enough for them to buy a handsome-sized house in which to bring up their family.

Theirs is an upholstered but continuously tense Pharisaism, little affection on display and not much in inner reserve either. Their religion, like their politics, is more a matter of following respectable custom than of private conviction.