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| Ruth Rendell, The Water's Lovely |
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This Ruth Rendell novel, like others, present us
with a cast of characters with strange particularities or skeleton
in their closets: First of all two sisters, Ismay and Heather, who
share a terrible secret. Twelve years earlier, when they were just
teenagers, their stepfather drowned in the bathroom: only Heather
was in the flat at the time, and when her mother and Ismay came
back, Heather's clothes were wet and her stepfather dead. The
sisters have never talked about it again, their mother became
a schizophrenic after the event, and the secret weighs between them.
When Heather meets Edmund, a young man, Ismay wonders if he should
know about Heather's presumed deed...
Edmund works with Heather, and lives with his mother, a woman who
exercises her power over her son by pretending she is in poor health
and making him feel guilty. Edmund, who just started going out with
Heather, decides to stand up to her, at 35, for the first time in
his life...
Marion Melville is a woman in her early
forties who loves to help old people... Mostly when they are rich
and there is a chance there could be a line dropped for her in their
testaments. She is ashamed of her brother, a beggar who often drops
at her place unexpectedly to empty the fridge and the liquor
bottles. Edmund's mother would like to see her son marry Marion, but
his recent encounter with Heather renders this scheme of hers
unlikely...
As usual, between these and other more minor
characters, tensions mount until the inevitably tragic conclusion.
The reader assists, powerless, to this combination of human acts and
simple coincidences that makes fates collide and alters lives
forever. In The Water's Lovely we wonder if the guilty will
be punished and how, and who really deserves to be punished in the
end. The characters are always surprising and complex, I liked how
Rendell makes us change our minds about the two sisters in the
course of the novel, how one
seems powerful and in control in the beginning, and turns out to be
weaker and less balanced than her sister.
Ruth Rendell always endeavor to make the
climactic ending where the reader doesn't expect it, but here, if
where it came from was truly unexpected, I also find it a little
easy... and a bit anticlimactic. She depended on something completely
unrelated to the plot, which I find regrettable, since she had taken
so much care building such a tight plot. Therefore, The Water's
Lovely won't rank as one of my favorite Rendell's (End
in Tears comes to mind as her best in recent years, although
as an Inspector Weford mystery, it is a classical whodunit, very
unlike other Rendell's or Vine's novels), but it is also not a failure
such as Babes in the Woods,
or even worse, The Rottweiler.
The Water's Lovely is one of Rendell's good novels, far
however from the greatness of such novels as The Keys to the
Street or A Sight for Sore Eyes...
Rating:  
© Discussing Books, 07/30/2007 |
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| Further Readings |
As Ruth Rendell:
Rendell, Ruth (1965) To Fear a Painted Devil
Rendell, Ruth (1965) Vanity Dies Hard
Rendell, Ruth (1971)
One
Across, Two Down
Rendell, Ruth (1974)
The
Face of Trespass
Rendell, Ruth (1976)
A
Demon in my View
Rendell, Ruth (1977) A Judgement in Stone
Rendell, Ruth (1979)
Make
Death Love Me
Rendell, Ruth (1980) The Lake of Darkness
Rendell, Ruth (1982)
Master
of the Moor
Rendell, Ruth (1984)
The
Killing Doll
Rendell, Ruth (1984)
The
Tree of Hands
Rendell, Ruth (1986)
Live Flesh
Rendell, Ruth (1987)
Talking to Strange Men
Rendell, Ruth (1989)
The
Bridesmaid
Rendell, Ruth (1990)
Going Wrong
Rendell, Ruth (1993) The Crocodile Bird
Rendell, Ruth (1996) Blood Lines
Rendell, Ruth (1996)
The
Keys to the Street
Rendell, Ruth (1999)
A
Sight for Sore Eyes
Rendell, Ruth (2002) Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
Rendell,
Ruth (2004) The Rottweiler
Rendell,
Ruth (2005)
Thirteen Steps Down
Rendell,
Ruth (2006) The Water's Lovely
Wexford mysteries:
Rendell, Ruth (1964)
From
Doon with Death
Rendell, Ruth (1967)
A New
Lease of Death
Rendell, Ruth (1967)
Wolf
to the Slaughter
Rendell, Ruth (1969)
The
Best Man to Die
Rendell, Ruth (1970)
A
Guilty Thing Surprised
Rendell, Ruth (1971)
No
More Dying Then
Rendell, Ruth (1972)
Murder
Being Once Done
Rendell, Ruth (1973)
Some
Lie and Some Die
Rendell, Ruth (1975)
Shake
Hands Forever
Rendell, Ruth (1978) A Sleeping Life
Rendell, Ruth (1981) Death Notes
Rendell, Ruth (1983)
Speaker of Mandarin
Rendell, Ruth (1985)
An
Unkindness of Ravens
Rendell, Ruth (1988)
The
Veiled One
Rendell, Ruth (1992)
Kissing the Gunner's Daughter
Rendell, Ruth (1995)
Simisola
Rendell, Ruth (1997)
Road Rage
Rendell, Ruth (1999) Harm Done
Rendell,
Ruth (2003) The Babes in the Wood
Rendell,
Ruth (2005)
End in Tears
Rendell,
Ruth (2007) Not in the Flesh
As Barbara Vine:
Vine, Barbara (1986) A Dark Adapted Eye
Vine, Barbara (1987)
A Fatal Inversion
Vine, Barbara (1988)
The House of Stairs
Vine, Barbara (1990) Gallowglass
Vine, Barbara (1991)
King Solomon's Carpet
Vine, Barbara (1993) Anna's Book
Vine, Barbara (1994)
No Night is Too Long
Vine, Barbara (1996) The Brimstone Wedding
Vine, Barbara (1998) The Chimney Sweeper's
Boy
Vine, Barbara (2000)
Grasshopper
Vine, Barbara (2002) The Blood Doctor
Vine, Barbara (2005) The Minotaur
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