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DARK CORNERS
by Ruth Rendell
Doubleday Canada, October 2015
288 pages
$22.95 CAD
ISBN: 0385685858


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Several years ago, Ruth Rendell, then aged 83, announced in the Guardian that she had no intention of retiring. Writing, she said, is "absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write....I'll do it until I die, won't I? If I can. You don't know, but probably." Incapacitated by a stroke early this year, she was not quite able literally to manage it, but she came very close indeed. DARK CORNERS, her final novel, was discovered on a flash drive in her handbag and, according to her editors, represents a finished work, one that only needed to be tidied up in the usual way before publication.

Whatever posthumous work was done on it, DARK CORNERS is authentic Rendell. It is now the final volume in that group of novels that can be called, for lack of a better name, her "London novels." Starting with THE KEYS TO THE STREET (1996), these eleven books all take place largely in one of the nicer parts of London in which to live, north of the river, in an area which has become increasingly pricey in a real estate market that has grotesquely inflated and where a million pounds may represent a down payment, not a final price. The London novels have marked this increasing gentrification over the almost twenty years that Rendell has been writing them and DARK CORNERS focusses squarely on the desperate consequences that can ensue in an area where many want to live and practically no one can afford to.

All of the characters in the book live in or near Maida Vale, and it is only luck that lets them. Carl, who has just published a book that sounds like crime fiction and who is struggling to produce another that doesn't, has inherited a house from his dead father and now hopes to support himself by renting out its top floor. The tenant, Dermot, is in some sort of relationship with Sybil, who lives with her parents in what "no one called council flats anymore - it would have been politically incorrect - but that was what they were." And because they are, Sybil and her mother and father can afford to live in "one of the most prestigious postcodes in London." Another major character, Lizzie Milsom, shares a flat in Kilburn, but finds a way to move to the more desirable Primrose Hill. She grew up in Willesden Green, a London suburb where the escalating property prices are beginning to make themselves known. Her father, now retired, tries to broaden his horizons by riding random bus lines with his new free pass, a hobby that proves unexpectedly dangerous.

Carl's father had a weakness for patent medicines and homeopathic remedies of various sorts. He left a cabinet full of them when he died, and to date Carl has not found the energy to dispose of them. When his friend Stacey, a model and actress, drops by and complains of gaining weight, Carl offers to sell her some of his father's stash, which in this case involves a pill called DNP, a dangerous compound that has caused death when misused. It dangers are unknown to Carl until it is too late and Stacey is found dead in her Primrose Hill flat. It is Lizzie who finds her and who moves in, creepily taking over both the premises and the wardrobe that Lizzie had grown too fat to wear.

Unluckily for Carl, Dermot overheard the drug transaction and uses it to blackmail Carl into letting him remain in the house rent-free. Carl is both a passive creature indeed, and one who imagines he is far more consequential than he actually is. Fearful of the exposure that Dermot threatens, even though he has done nothing illegal, he allows Dermot to stay on and gradually extend his presence into the garden. Dermot is identified with Vinzenzo from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure as the "duke of dark corners," but in his aggressive sanctimony, he has more than a little of Uriah Heep about him. And he is determined to have his way. Little wonder that Carl is driven to acts of utter desperation. The only surprise is that he has the energy to complete them.

DARK CORNERS is a deceptive book in several ways. It appears much less complex than it actually turns out to be and to deal with apparently superficial concerns. But that is the case with all of the London novels, to a greater or lesser extent. What Rendell was acutely aware of is the degree to which the conditions of modern urban existence shape and distort our moral perceptions as they do in DARK CORNERS. Rendell did, I think, believe in existential evil but was fully aware of how the randomness and alienation of city life may foster its growth in an ordinary person. Here Dermot represents the purer form of evil; terrified, self-pitying Carl is one who has, so to speak, evil thrust upon him.

Many readers prefer Rendell's Wexford novels to her psychological thrillers, most of which she published as Barbara Vine. The London books stand somewhere between the two, lacking Wexford's concern with the application of the law, but coupling the sociological detail of that series with the attention to abnormal psychological states of the Vine novels. In a sense, they may in that irritating phrase "transcend the genre," which may account for why they seem somewhat underappreciated. Regardless, I suspect they may in time come to be seen for what they are - a group of novels that grapples with the ways in which character is deformed by the conditions of modern existence. In this, they are both inventive and revealing.

The British edition of this book has on its cover the bleak pronouncement, "Her Final Novel." I wish it were not so, but there it is. Whether Rendell's original choice or an addition by a tactful editor is impossible to say, but the final line of the novel is woefully apposite: "'And now', he said, 'it's all over.'" And so, alas , it is.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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