Ruth Rendell and the Daily Blague
Little did I know, last Thursday night, that the photographer at Partners & Crimes was from the Times, or that reporter Dinitia Smith was presumably amongst us as we spent a pleasant hour with Ruth Rendell. I can assure you that the photographs accompanying her write-up are accurate. But I'll point out that the last one, showing the Baroness hard at work autographing, was taken at the very beginning of this part of the evening. The author was not nearly so spry by the time I got to her.
I have to learn how to write about Ruth Rendell. I used to think vaguely about a dedicated page, with a few paragraphs about whichever novel I'd just read. (Ruth Rendell averages three books every two years, and has been at it since 1964.) But what would those paragraphs contain? Little reviews? What on earth would be the point of that? Surely not to give away the story. And while I like some Rendells better than others (and all the earlier Vines quite a lot), it has to be stated that their quality is consistently good. One needn't (so far) to worry that the writer is slipping. One does not buy the latest Ruth Rendell in hopes that it will read like PD James or Ian Rankin or Val McDermid. Or Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguro. Well, I don't. I expect to get a Ruth Rendell, and the Baroness always delivers. I suppose that most of her fans feel likewise.
Does that mean that the books are fungible? Certainly not. Like any narrative artist, Ms Rendell has her obsessions, but they are big obsessions, ripe with possibility. Certain figures recur. Mix Cellini, in Thirteen Steps Down, recalls (to me) the young man in A Sight for Sore Eyes, and I could argue that they are similar constructions. But the interest would be in their differences, and in the varying contrivances that their undereducated minds take up. (Come to think of it, neither is so much "undereducated" as "insufficiently intelligent." Equipped for ordinary life, they fumble when they think big.) Similarly, the past has a heavy hand in Ms Rendell's universe. Bad things that happened long ago "come back" to dent the present. Eventually, I'd like to write an essay about her work as a whole. But am I going to reread it? Some of it I have reread, and with great pleasure. But the summing-up seems rather too academic an undertaking. I'm not working on a thesis, after all.
So what do I do with Ruth Rendell? How do I write about her on my blog?
I write about her on my blog. Instead of writing about her books, I write about reading her books. How about that? I've avoided the "what I'm reading now" sort of blog entry because the ones that I see rarely get beyond a list of titles followed by a train of empty adjectives: "interesting," "great," not what I expected," "SUPER!!!" I doubt that the authors of such entries have any idea of how vacant they are, how depressing, really - for what is the point of reading a book if you don't have something distinctive to say. It doesn't have to be lengthy or complex. One can mention the vivid natural descriptions, or the the funny way a character worries about everything, or the hot love scenes. One can write about being reminded of a trip taken long ago, or an old lover. One can observe that reading about Paris is the next-best thing to being there. There are many, many things that one can say about the most ordinary book - and one need say only one of them.
In fact, I am not going to wait until the next Ruth Rendell to try weaving my reading into the writing of my blog entries. Ninety percent of my waking ife is spent doing one thing or the other, it seems.
Each Ruth Rendell novel is a treat, but if you're looking for "where to start," my answer is: One Across, Two Down (1971; Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1999), A Sleeping Life (1978; Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2000, and A Dark-Adapted Eye (Plume, 1993). I recommend these because they're all available. The first is a "plain" Ruth Rendell that demonstrates her grasp of the desperately outclasses male mind in distress. It will introduce you to Ms Rendell's atmospheric pace, which makes murder, when it eventually occurs, all the more horrific to the perpetrator. The second belongs to her series of "Inspector Wexford" procedurals; Inspector Wexford is a distant cousin (literature-wise) of Inspector Morse. The Wexfords are good for crime junkies who rely on the ground rules to tell them where they're going; in the "plain" Ruth Rendells and in the Barbara Vines, there are no ground rules at all, and it is not unsual for the officers of justice to play a notional part in the proceedings. Finally, A Dark-Adapted eye, the second of Ms Rendell's Barbara Vine novels, plunges deep into the terror of unintended consequences. When it comes to logging the slip of innocent, pleasant people into very dark crime, inch by awful inch, Ruth Rendell is unsurpassed.
Comments
Despite the fact that you have read far more of Rendell's novels than I, I must disagree with your recommendations, only because my introduction to Ruth Rendell (a/k/a Barbara Vine) came via three different books (all recommended by you): The House of Stairs and King Solomon's Carpet (both written under Rendell's pseudonym, Barbara Vine) and A Sight For Sore Eyes. As I recall, I bought all three novels at Hatchards on Piccadilly the day we went shopping together (but all are available in the US via amazon.com). I would highly recommend all of them, although The House of Stairs is my favorite.
Posted by: jkm | October 6, 2005 12:49 AM