No sooner had I got home and written the blog last night than I was struck down with a bug, of the stomach variety, and have been in bed ever since but am now feeling a bit better. I had been feeling terribly deprived since I finished Harm Done and remembered I had bought an old Rendell in a charity shop a while back which I thought I had never read. I managed to find it, and this was it, and to my great joy I had not read it before. It dates from 1993 and initially I thought this must be before she started publishing as Barbara Vine, as it is much more in that mode than the Rendell/whodunnit one -- but I see Dark Adapted Eye came out in 1986 so I was wrong. Anyway it is not at all a conventional whodunnit -- there are several murders in the book but never any doubt who did them. There is a certain amount of mystery but that surrounds the background to the extraordinary upbringing of Liza, who is the central character in the book. Aged sixteen, she has been brought up by Eve, her beautiful, if rather strange, mother, with whom she lives in an isolated gatehouse belonging to a huge stately home in a remote valley. The novel begins with Eve telling Liza she must leave home -- the police have been interviewing her and will return for her tomorrow, and Liza must go to London and stay with her mother's friend Heather. She presses £100 into her hand and sends her off. Liza is terrified. She has never been to London, hardly ever even to the next town, has never been on a bus or a train, never been to school or even met anyone of her own age. But, unknown to her mother, she has for the past few months been caught up in a passionate love affair with the beautiful Sean, who was briefly employed as a gardener at the house. She manages to find him and his battered car and caravan, and he happily takes her in. A new life begins, in which they get temporary fruit picking jobs, eat takeaways, and make love a great deal. And Liza begins to tell Sean the story of her life, much of which shocks and amazes him beyond belief. She tells him about Scheherazade and the thousand and one nights of stories, and spins her own story out night after night in much the same way. As she learns about the world she has never known, she finds much to shock and distress her but also much to excite and encourage, and increasingly develops an ambition to develop her own extraordinary intelligence and encyclopedic, if rather limited knowledge. For Liza has read an amazing number of books from the house library, though nothing published since about 1900, can speak perfect French, translate Latin, recognise the works of the great composers and artists, but she cannot do sums and knows nothing of science, let alone how the world actually works. I thought the ending was brilliant, too -- a moment comes when one is almost certain to predict the way things are going to go and the heart sinks.... But this is Ruth Rendell, so you may be in for a surprise.
I really loved this book. It is full of allusions -- to Eve and the garden of Eden, to The Tempest, to Romeo and Juliet (to which Liza turns to try to understand the feelings she develops for Sean). But it is also pure Rendell. What always amazes me about her is the absolute simplicity of her prose, and the way in which she manages to suggest so much with it. There is never any hyperbole, everything is understated, yet she can suggest threat, or evil, more successfully than any writer I have ever read, without ever spelling it out. There are writers out there -- alas, including hugely successful ones -- who would do well to take a leaf from that particular book.