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I heard or read in a Ruth Rendell's interview
that when she is writing as Barbara Vine, she really "becomes" a
different writer. It is remarkable too that writers with an alter ego sometimes
make up characters with a split personality (I am thinking about Richard Bachman/Stephen
King's George Stark/Thad Beaumont in
The Dark Half) like Vine does in
Anna's Book. I don't know if Vine is
Rendell's dark half (or is it the other way round?)... Comparing the novels
in order to notice stylistic or thematic
differences between Rendell and Vine's writings would probably be an
interesting task (one I have no intention to undertake myself
however...). At first sight, it seems that Vine's novels occur over
longer periods of time, the mystery is deeply rooted in the past.
However, the most obvious partition I see in Rendell/Vine's works
is, rather than the alias/real name one, the Wexford vs. non-Wexford
novels.
The Chief Inspector Wexford novels are
traditional (with the Rendell's touch of course) detective stories,
where an investigation is led and a mystery usually solved by
Wexford and his team by the end of the
book. The non-Wexford stories, more ambiguous, present a different
perspective than this of the detective: the story is narrated from
the point of view, not necessarily of the culprit, but of a person
more or less involved in the drama/mystery, whose judgments and
morals are not necessarily irreproachable. (one could argue that
Wexford is unlike his Manichean colleague Inspector Burden a rather
complex individual, but mostly he and Justice share common
interests)
Wexford novels belong to Rendell, the other
kind is shared between Rendell (A Sight for sore Eyes, The
Keys to the Street, The Crocodile Bird, etc.) and Vine (A
Dark-adapted Eye, Anna's Book and the haunting and
terrible The Chimney Sweeper's Boy among others:
see bibliography). Though
Wexford novels are deeply enjoyable, the others have a greater power
over the reader and stay longer in his/her memory...
Anna's Book
(originally published as Asta's Book in the UK: I will call
Anna "Asta" to avoid confusions since the narrator is called Ann!) is constructed in a rather
complex and extremely clever manner. The first narrator, Ann Eastbrook, makes an account of what she has learned throughout the
years about the mystery surrounding the birth of her aunt Swanny
(Swanhild).
Her main source is a series of diaries written between 1905 and 1967
by her grandmother Asta (Anna), a Danish immigrant. After Asta's death, Swanny, who for several years has been trying unsuccessfully to
confront Asta about her
origins, finds and decides to publish
the diaries, once translated from Danish, and does so until her
death, in 1988.
Ann, Swanny's
only heir, will go
on editing the now worldwide famous diaries. When Cary, a
woman
who reemerges from a past she'd rather forget, asks Ann to take a
look at the original diaries, thinking that
Asta might have recorded
something about a gruesome murder that occurred in 1905 close to
where she used to live, Ann realizes that five pages from the diary
are missing, precisely around the date when Swanny was born... What
is the connection, if one exists, between little Swanny and the
murdered woman Lizzie Roper? Who is Swanny in reality? Did Swanny
find out the truth about her birth before her illness (her split
personality) and her death?
In a gripping narration, that takes us back
and forth from 1905 to the early nineties, Ann relates her
hunt for the truth, her research through trial records, into Asta's
diaries and her own childhood memories. With the help from Gordon, a
genealogist, who is her "first cousin once
removed", from Paul, the grandson of Hansine (Asta's maid), and
from Cary,
who works on a television miniseries about the Roper murder, Ann
will progressively uncover, not only the truth about her aunt, but
also about the fate of a child and a
murderer's identity.
Anna's Book is very cleverly crafted,
and the twists-and-turns, as happens too rarely, are plausible. The
ending comes as a surprise, which makes up for the slow
building
of the plot. I would compare this novel to a puzzle in which the
last piece doesn't find its place until the very last page. On
another level, it raises the problematic of the status of fiction and
the definition of truth. As Rendell puts it, Asta (like every other
writer I suppose) is a writer "both of fiction and of non-fiction".
More than a mystery, Anna's Book shows that every fiction is a truth
displaced and rewritten. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy also
raises this problematic, maybe even more effectively.
At the beginning of this review, I compared
Rendell and King because they both use an alias but there is really more in common
between them than the use of an alias, which is only part of a larger
reflection upon the status of fiction and the persona(e) of the
writer.
If you are disappointed like I am by mystery
writers who like to provide spectacular and highly-improbable
twist-and-turns, or who take the reader for someone so clueless
that compared to him Watson is Holmes, then try Rendell. She at
least does not insult the reader's intelligence. Along with a couple
of other writers (those who have read my other mystery reviews know
who I am referring to...) she raises, with her flawless style and
perfectionism, the mystery genre (that is too often mistaken for a
minor genre), to the level of great literature. And in
my opinion, there is no good mystery writer who isn't a
perfectionist...
Rating: 
© Discussing Books,11/04/2002 |
Critiques
