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Portobello, the latest bit London to become the focus of Ruth Rendell's close attention, is an area of very strong character. The Portobello Road, with its trendy, artsy, or just tacky stalls, offers something for pretty much anyone, while the surrounding neighbourhoods, though continually being gentrified, still exhibit that decidedly urban mix of comfortable upper middle class and a whiff of Portobello's historic raffishness. One of its residents, Eugene Wren, a fifty-year-old art dealer, finds a sum of money outside his charming house in Chepstow Villas. Rather than handing it in to the local police, he posts a note inviting whoever has lost a sum of "between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds" to come forward to claim the money. He reckons that only the genuine claimant will be able to name the exact amount and so it proves. Unsurprisingly, however, a pretender does show up first, Lance, a feckless young man who is the grandson of a now-reformed burglar, and who takes a profound interest in what lies behind the brightly painted doors of Chepstow Villas. The man whose cash it is, Joel Rosenman, does not come calling. Rather he rings to say that he is in hospital following a heart attack and asks that a cheque be sent. Instead, Eugene's fiancée, Ella, a GP, volunteers to deliver the money. Joel, whose recent brush with death has destabilized what was never a very robust mental state, becomes fixated on Ella and demands to be taken on as a private patient. Thus a simple if perhaps naive announcement acts to bring together a group of distinctly odd characters who will impinge on each other's lives in unsettling ways. Crimes will be committed, some of them violent, but it is less the criminal than the psychological and, I suppose, the sociological, that interests Rendell here. What happens in a relatively restricted area that comprises such extremes as Notting Hill media stars, solid middle-class householders, and Lance's grandfather, who still has a toilet in the garden? How is someone like Lance, who can barely read and seldom has even bus fare, understand what he sees in Chepstow Villas? All of the characters, whatever their social status, are narrowed and confined by their particular obsessions. Eugene's is a addictive personality, though he is addicted to a substance trivial beyond belief. Lance is fixated on the mother of his child, Joel on his vision of heaven (or was it hell?), Lance's grandad on his new evangelical religion, and even Ella, mild and reasonable though she appears compared to the rest of them, is curiously diminished by the appeals of patients in need. It is my firm conviction that no one writing today does a better job of revealing the nature of modern city life than Ruth Rendell in her London novels. PORTOBELLO, only marginally a crime novel, is perhaps the strongest of the set to date. Here the district is the main character and what happens to the characters who live there, unexpected though it may be, is perhaps only possible in such a setting as that and at such a time as now.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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