Ruth
Rendell’s The Girl next door.
Ruth
Rendell enjoys such a solid reputation that one hesitates to write a critical
review of her novels. Yet, for The Girl
next Door at least, I dare shout that the queen is naked.
There
are many good things in that story. The plot is promising, but then loses its
strength through a very long crossing of the desert. After a while, we don’t
really care whose hands were found in a biscuit box. The
Girl next door is supposed to be a crime/detective story, yet detectives
appear in less than twenty pages out of 350 !
Ruth
Rendell is very good at snippets and cameos : astute and vivid observations of
human oddities. These short passages are indeed a delight.
However,
the reader soon gets lost in a labyrinth of irrelevant and uninteresting
episodes. We start with four children (makes you wonder where the dog is) who
play in a tunnel. None of them are described properly, be it through their
physical appearances or their clothes. Sixty years later, they all have had
wives, husbands, children and grandchildren, and we, the readers, are supposed
to remember who’s who in this teeming lot. Some names appear, then disappear
only to reappear some thirty pages later, and we think : “Who the hell is that
?”
I
want to end on a positive note. Within the plot, we find an interesting subplot
concerning three characters : Alan, Rosemary and Daphne. Alan marries Rosemary,
while being secretly in love with Daphne. Finally, at the ripe old age of 70,
he leaves Rosemary and goes to live with Daphne. Throughout her married life,
Rosemary has acted as a very boring wife, interested only in sewing and dress
making. However, we come to realise that Alan is, in fact, even more boring
than Rosemary. When he finds out that Daphne, at the age of 12, was engaged in
a strictly manual-oral sexual relationship with a 40-year old man (no risk of
pregnancy) he is deeply shocked. But when Daphne specifies that she thoroughly enjoyed it, and would actively seek the company of that man, Alan can’t stand
it anymore. He leaves Daphne and wants to go back to Rosemary who, meanwhile,
has found her feet and learned to enjoy life. Predictably, she throws him out. End
result : loneliness in a studio flat for boring old Alan.
That
entertaining sub story could have been the plot of a fully-fledged novel. Too
bad it was lost in the endless digressions of an otherwise weakish detective
story.
