Tag Archives: Barbara Vine

The Child’s Child by Barbara Vine

Posted on by
Reply

Synopsis:
While working on her PhD thesis on unmarried mothers in British literature, a young woman finds disturbing parallels between a violent work of fiction from the mid-20th century and her own life living with her gay brother.

Review:
Everything I love about Barbara Vine is present in The Child’s Child: a haunting atmosphere, complicated characters, and a sense of urgency to the storytelling that has nothing to do with a jam-packed plot.

The book opens with Grace, a PhD candidate living a peaceful life with her gay brother Andrew, until her brother invites his boyfriend to move in with them. Grace and James don’t get along, and he’s especially scornful of her thesis work exposing the plight of the unwed mother in English history. He says that the unwed mothers suffered nowhere near as badly as gay men were, and won’t hear anything to the contrary. Things get worse when Andrew and James witness the fatal beating of a friend upon exiting a gay club.

Grace decides to take a break from her thesis to read an unpublished manuscript called “The Child’s Child,” written by an ancestor of James’s who had published many critically acclaimed works. Because this book touched openly on homosexuality, it was never even considered for publication. Grace has been asked to read it to see if it could be published now. The story is that of Maud, a young women who falls pregnant at the age of 15 in WWII England. Her secretly gay older brother steps in with an unorthodox plan to save her, but that plan becomes the undoing of both of them and has repercussions for everyone around them.

The book-within-a-book is especially enthralling because it feels like Vine is channeling Patricia Highsmith, writing the book that Highsmith, herself a lesbian, could never have written in her own day. It’s so dark and tricky and hermetic and Vine does it exceptionally well. I was less satisfied by the framing story, which felt unfinished when the book was ended. So it’s not my favorite book by Vine, but I enjoyed it immensely.

No Night Is Too Long by Barbara Vine

Posted on by
Reply

Synopsis:
A love affair turns murderous during a voyage among desolate Arctic islands.

Review:
No Night Is Too Long was not my favorite Barbara Vine. While I found the central murder to be wonderfully original, I didn’t care for the characters and felt like some of the plot was a bit too contrived. The book appears to be out of print, so someone will get a lucky treat at my local thrift store this week!

The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine

Posted on by
Reply

Synopsis:
While researching a biography on the life of his ancestor, a hereditary peer in the House of Lords on the verge of losing his privileges thanks to a new bill faces his own family demons and uncovers the dark secrets of his heritage.

Review:
The Blood Doctor was not quite as dark or titillating as some of Barbara Vine’s other books. It doesn’t use crime as the engine for the mystery; rather, the story is fueled by the current Lord Martin Nanther’s obsession with his illustrious forebear, a doctor specializing in hemophilia who consulted Queen Victoria. It shouldn’t work half as well as it does, just reading about the writing of a fictional biography, but as usual Vine’s mastery of character construction kept me riveted.

She amplifies the story by giving Lord Nanther two additional storylines that intersect with his research into Dr. Henry Nanther. The first is his position as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords, which is voting to abolish hereditary peerages. Basically, that means that anyone who inherited his or her title would no longer be eligible to be a part of the government. You’d have to be voted in or appointed. Despite the fact that Martin will lose the work he loves, he, like most of his fellow peers, votes for his own obsolescence. One of his friends calls it the “twilight of the Gods” and Vine ably conjures the melancholy associated with that turn of phrase.

The second concerns Martin’s second wife Jude, who has suffered from multiple miscarriages. Martin’s ambivalence over having a second child (he has a son from his first wife) alienates him from Jude even as he struggles to keep his feelings a secret from her. I particularly loved the layers that this storyline lent to his research into Dr. Henry Nanther.

The Birthday Present by Barbara Vine

Posted on by
Reply

Synopsis:
An MP arranges a kinky, consensual abduction for his mistress, but when a chance car accident takes her life, he chooses to keep silent, with devastating results.

Review:
Everything is connected–except when it isn’t. In The Birthday Present, Barbara Vine follows a scandal-that-wasn’t over the course of four years to show how a secret poisons everyone it touches, and how unrelated events can become part of a story because they appear to fit.

The story is told mostly by Rob, brother-in-law to Ivor Tesham, a rising luminary in British politics with a penchant for trashy women. He decides to gift his latest lover, one Hebe Furnal, with a special birthday present. He’ll have her abducted off the street and taken to him, in an elaborate rape fantasy that was entirely consensual. He hired an actor to do the abduction, and his mechanic to drive the van, and got Rob and his wife Iris–Ivor’s sister–to allow him the use of their home for the actual consummation. On the way, the van is hit by another car, and Hebe and the actor are killed. The mechanic is gravely injured and left with no memory of the accident. The police assume that Hebe was picked up by mistake, and Ivor says nothing to tell them that the actor and the mechanic were hired by him. Life goes on… but Hebe’s death has echoes that just won’t quit.

Interspersed in Rob’s account are diary entries by Jane Atherton, Hebe’s best friend and alibi to Hebe’s husband the night of the birthday present. She becomes obsessed with both Ivor Tesham and Hebe’s husband, and gradually grows unhinged.

Both stories are riveting and suspenseful despite the lack of a mystery. I listened to this on audiobook and highly recommend the two narrators, who gave splendid performances.

The Likeness by Tana French

Posted on by
3

Synopsis:
When a detective goes undercover to impersonate a murder victim sharing her face, she finds the family she’s always dreamed of and risks blowing everything.

Review:
I was a big fan of Tana French’s In the Woods, so I leapt at the chance to read The Likeness, her followup featuring several of the same characters.

Former detective Cassie Maddox is stuck in Domestic Violence after being forced off the Murder squad due to her role in the catastrophe outlined within In the Woods. A routine murder investigation turns very, very weird when it turns out that the victim, Lexie Madison, looks exactly like Cassie, and is using an identity created by Cassie back when she was working as an undercover agent. Her former boss in the undercover unit decides to send Cassie back to the home she shared with four housemates and see if she can ferret out the murderer by pretending to be Lexie.

The roommates, who think that Lexie was in a coma, are Bright Young Things, living a hermetically sealed, intellectually and aesthetically stimulating life inside Daniel’s family’s estate home. They’re the kind of glittering coterie that has appeared in books like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Danny Boyle’s excellent film Shallow Grave. Cassie is instantly seduced–both by the closeness she finds among the housemates, and by Lexie herself, whose bright exterior masked a rabbit’s warren of dark secrets.

The Likeness was a riveting read. I found myself stealing every available minute for it–dishes piling up, bathroom growing fuzzier by the minute, with Superfast Toddler mercifully cooperating by giving me some very long naps. I was as much in suspense over Cassie’s impending breakdown as I was with the identity of the murderer. French previously limned Cassie’s friendship with former partner Rob in such heartrending detail that I felt like their chaos was happening to me. Here, she builds a web of friendship that conjures up what my friend Megan calls pre-nostalgia–where you anticipate feeling nostalgic while something is unfolding, where the ache is part of the pleasure. More than just bittersweet, pre-nostalgia is self-inflicted yet inevitable. Just like Lexie’s death.

Oh, and The Likeness features an outstandingly poignant last paragraph that will mean nothing unless you read the whole book first. Don’t spoil it for yourself!

Favorite Author Meme

Posted on by
1

Heather at Errant Dreams came up with a wonderful meme–enjoy & consider yourself tagged!

* Answer the questions as you see fit. Although they’re all phrased to ask about a singular author, feel free to respond with multiples, or even a list.
* Where possible & convenient (you don’t have to go as crazy as I did!), include a link here or there to an author’s website, your review of one of their books, or a review that inspired you to try the author(s), so your readers can get more information on anyone that sounds interesting.
* Tag five people and drop by their blogs to let them know you tagged them, or open-tag your readers.
* It would be nice if you included a link back to your tagger.

1. Who’s your all-time favorite author, and why?

I think I would have to say CS Lewis. I’ve read all of his books, many of them several times. I’ve read the Narnia Chronicles at least a dozen times, and books like The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters have meant a lot to me at certain times in my life.

2. Who was your first favorite author, and why? Do you still consider him or her among your favorites?

The first author I remember being obsessed with–as in, I’ve got to read everything by this person–was John Bellairs. He wrote gothic stories for kids illustrated by Edward Gorey that were imaginative and just scary enough, and the first one I read was The House with a Clock in its Walls. I’m saving a few for Superfast Baby when she’s old enough. I had read multiple books by other authors, but I was more into the series, than the author, as with the All of a Kind Family books.

3. Who’s the most recent addition to your list of favorite authors, and why?

Robin Hobb, without question. She’s a superlative storyteller and I just lost myself in love starting with Assassin’s Apprentice. I’d also add Leo Tolstoy and Jhumpa Lahiri to the list, having read both of them for the first time in 2007.

4. If someone asked you who your favorite authors were right now, which authors would first pop out of your mouth? Are there any you’d add on a moment of further reflection?

Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, Stephen King, Madeleine L’Engle, CS Lewis, Robin Hobb, George RR Martin, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Dickens, Kathleen Norris, Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Dan Allender, Edith Wharton, Jhumpa Lahiri.

Nothing really to add on further reflection. I spend a lot of time thinking about my favorite authors!

The Alphabet Meme

Posted on by
6

Picked this meme up from Melanie, in honor of two YA books I read for work this weekend.

The goal of this is to list favourite authors according to last name (with a representative fave book as well).

Atwood, Margaret — Cat’s Eye
Bronte, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Card, Orson Scott — Ender’s Game
Dragonwagon, Crescent — The Year It Rained (with Paul Zindel)
Eager, Edward — Half Magic
Forster, EM — Howard’s End
Gibson, William — Neuromancer
Hobb, Robin — Ship of Magic
Ishiguro, Kazuo — And Never Let Me Go
Jackson, Shirley — Hangsaman
King, Stephen — The Gunslinger
Lewis, CS — Till We Have Faces
Martin, George RR — Game of Thrones
Novik, Naomi — His Majesty’s Dragon
Oates, Joyce Carol — Blonde
Percy, Walker — The Last Gentleman
Queenan, Joe — If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble
Rendell, Ruth — Judgment in Stone
Smith, Wesley — Culture of Death
Tolkien, JRR — The Return of the King
Undset, Sigrid — Kristin Lavransdatter
Vine, Barbara — A Dark-Adapted Eye
Wharton, Edith — Twilight Sleep
X — I’ll read the next book someone recommends by an author whose last name starts with X.
Yancey, Phillip — Where is God When It Hurts?
Zarr, Sara — Story of a Girl

The Minotaur by Barbara Vine

Posted on by
1

Synopsis:
Hired to be an au pair to a schizophrenic man, a Swedish girl watches as interfamilial tensions come to a boiling point, with deadly results.

Review:
Barbara Vine (the alter ego of best-selling crime novelist Ruth Rendell) has carved out a niche as deft portrayer of tightly interwoven groups of people who are all set to go poof! in spectacular and surprising ways. The Minotaur concerns a family that revolves itself around the supposed schizophrenia of the only son and heir to the family fortune. His four sisters are dowdy spinsters, save the youngest who has her own fortune and therefore the ability to come and go as she pleases. Kerstin, the narrator, is a young Swedish woman hired to care for John, but she ends up functioning as a witness as John takes a stand towards autonomy that causes the deterioration of the family. Continue reading →

A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine

Posted on by
2

Synopsis:
A long ago summer idyll at a manor-turned-commune ended in tragedy, and the recent discovery of the bones of a woman and a baby threaten the secrets carefully guarded by the young man who inherited the home.

Review:
It may be a lesser Barbara Vine, but A Fatal Inversion is still an above average read. Continue reading →

The Books of My Life

Posted on by
10

Here’s another meme (HT Poodlerat) that’s been going around that I’m finally able to do. Last night’s book read was an incredibly tedious memoir. Thanks for sharing!

A book that made you cry: A book that seems to make a lot of my lists: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

A book that scared you: Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin. It’s five accounts of supposedly true possession and exorcism accounts, and it scared me so bad that I read it twice then gave it away in case I was tempted to read it a third time. Continue reading →