After a steady diet of Victorian Catholic novelists, I felt a desperate need for...British mysteries.
1. Stephen Booth, The Kill Call: This is the ninth novel in Booth's Cooper-Fry series, set in the imaginary town of Edendale in the real Peak District. While not a historical mystery, the motivation for the novel's murders emerges from a death that takes place in 1968, and the novel moves back and forth between the present-day, third-person narrative and a fictional diary from 1968. But the past impinges on the present in other ways as well, especially for our heroes: Ben Cooper still labors under the legacy of his father, a police officer murdered by thugs; Diane Fry suffers from the "flood of remembered sensations" (277) from her rape several years ago, not to mention her discovery that the case is being reopened. In a sense, the ongoing conflict between Cooper and Fry itself derives from competing attitudes to England's history. Cooper, the farm boy, enjoys what the novel represents as an almost instinctive, organic feeling for those English traditions rooted in the rural landscape. Thus, he respects the cultural significance of fox hunting and has a long-standing fondness for Eyam (which also inspired this novel). By contrast, the resolutely urban and figuratively homeless Fry (she spent her childhood knocking about in the foster care system) feels alienated, at best, from her rural surroundings. If Fry's behavior appears to suggest that the city tramples the "authentic" Englishness of the country, though, this novel (and the others in the series) suggests that the country and the city are united, ironically enough, in their shared violence...and mutual incomprehension.
Although the novels occur in "real time," the characters don't age in tune with the years; thus, while The Kill Call's main action begins in 2009, only a couple of years have passed since the series began. As a result, the series' character development makes snails look like they're breaking the sound barrier. It doesn't help that every time Cooper and Fry near a rapprochement, Booth feels a sudden urge to inject new Tension and Existential Angst into the relationship. This may frustrate some readers (do I sound frustrated?), especially because Booth unfortunately shares Reginald Hill's touch-and-go skill at establishing plots--and this novel's plotting is par for Booth's course. Then again, the novel was a welcome break from Alice Sherwin.
2. Barbara Vine [a.k.a. Ruth Rendell], The Birthday Present: For me, Vine/Rendell (along with Minette Walters) has always epitomized what I call "British glum": dark, mostly pessimistic tales permeated with a grim sense of national decline. The Birthday Present offers "an account of a rise and a fall" (10)--specifically, the rise and fall of Ivor Tesham, an up-and-coming Conservative politician whose adulterous, kinky affair goes spectacularly haywire after Ivor's lover, Hebe, accidentally dies in a car crash during an erotic fake abduction. We hear Ivor's tale through two first-person narrators: Ivor's uxorious brother-in-law Robin, extravagantly and unapologetically boring and bourgeois; and Hebe's alibi Jane Atherton, an unattractive, unemployed, and increasingly unhinged singleton. For both characters, Ivor and his lifestyle exert a simultaneous attraction and repulsion, especially for the outwardly censorious Jane (who is nevertheless aroused by Hebe's fetish gear). Significantly, this is not a crime novel, in the sense that Ivor commits a moral crime against Hebe's husband but no legal crime; instead, the entire plot hinges on Ivor's terror of that modern criminal court, the newspapers. If the abduction itself would have merited a "snide little paragraph," the resulting disaster is worth "a front-page scandal story" (49)--and, of course, would bring about the likely end of Ivor's political career. Moral judgement gives way to the society of (scandalous) spectacle.
In fact, this novel's "Conservatism" offers no alternative to liberalism or any sort of ism; it has no detectable moral content. Ivor's own career in politics doesn't appear to have anything to do with political convictions, and his public moral standing is, as Robin realizes, a projection for the media: "In those days of sleaze, with one Tory after another finding himself in trouble, his name sullied by sexual misbehavior, perjury, or other offenses, Ivor retained his pure image. He was clean and manifestly seen to be clean" (189). Moral "purity" exists solely as it can be captured by the cameras. Robin may seem like the moral counterweight to Ivor and his shenanigans--complete with his disdain for non-vanilla sex--until we register that Robin and his wife Iris never report Ivor to the police. Far from being outside Ivor's plots, Robin and Iris are in them--and are from the beginning, since they let Ivor use their cottage for his illicit encounters with Hebe. Jane Atherton is a far more stereotypical villain, her attempted (and thwarted) blackmail efforts partly the result of sexual jealousy, but her increasingly maniacal narrative voice obscures the fact that she is, in many ways, marginal to the main action, just as she is marginal in the rest of her life. Even the most apparently "moral" characters, like the actor and crusader Aaron Hunter or Ivor's new girlfriend Juliet, swim in this decadent ocean; as another blogger remarks, this novel "is full of dull people all marked by the same breathless greed." Like the characters in W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, nobody exists "outside" the selfishness that Ivor exemplifies.
Rendell takes this theme further when Robin reflects on traditional notions of gentility and Ivor's predicament. According to Robin, Ivor gets himself into trouble because he is "the quintessential English gentleman" and therefore "very afraid of ridicule" (145). Given that Robin's list of the gentleman's qualities, including "an old-fashioned sense of honor" (145), does not exactly match up with Ivor's behavior (as Robin himself has to uneasily admit), it's difficult to know how to take this assessment: at best, it suggests that the gentlemanly ideal hardly offers an adequate solution to modern England's difficulties, especially given the lack of any other solutions on offer. Again, Robin perceives that he too is part of the problem: "It's fear of being a prig, being seen to be a prig, that stops a lot of us taking a moral stand [...] Until well into the twentieth century men at least seemed to have no objection to telling a friend that he was a cad who infringed some unwritten code" (273). If Ivor is a "gentleman," he is a gentleman in a world without the gentleman's necessary opposite, the "cad"--which suggests that without the apparently lost art of masculine self-policing, the gentleman and the cad may well pass for one and the same. And the would-be moral agent quails at the thought of having his public image reduced to "prig." Once more, we are in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, updated for the age of celebrity. All questions of good and evil devolve into competing appearances; even a mediocrity like Robin, who keeps inserting Ivor into historical narratives about proper English behavior, cannot bring himself to risk public derision. Without going into details, it's not at all surprising when Ivor finally takes the "traditional" gentleman's approach to dealing with his lost honor...only for it not to work.
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