The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell (Hutchinson, £18.99)
Ruth Rendell’s first book, From Doon with Death, was published in 1964. The Essex girl can hardly have imagined that her literary career would take her — deservedly — all the way to the House of Lords. Fifty years on, Baroness Rendell of Babergh has returned to her native county to dig beneath the surface of leafy Loughton, where a biscuit tin containing two severed hands is unearthed.
Whodunit is revealed in the first chapter. John Winwood is a typical Rendell monster, very good-looking but only motivated by money. It is 1944, England is at war, and the world does not miss his adulterous wife and her lover.
The novel is more concerned with the effects of time than crime. Seventy years later, the children who played in the tunnels where the tin is found are suffering “the penalties of growing old”. “Penalties” not “perils”. Rendell brings a new meaning to survivor guilt.
The loss of looks, failing faculties and approaching death are just some of the bugbears that have to be faced by George, Stanley, Norman, Alan, Rosemary, Daphne and Michael, the folks who are over the hill. The discovery of the mouldy mitts reunites them with near-fatal results.
Alan, setting eyes on the glamorous Daphne once again, leaves his wife Rosemary for his childhood sweetheart, who is now a rich widow living in St John’s Wood. Rosemary’s reaction is both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Michael, the murderer’s neglected son, is in many ways another of his victims. In a nod to Chekhov, he has never forgotten the lady with a little dog who showed him kindness on a train. His father, nearing his 100th birthday in luxurious sheltered accommodation, has lost none of his venom: “I never liked you. I never liked your mother either.” He has a copy of Dürer’s praying hands in his rooms.
Rendell pays as much attention to language as she does to character. Words age you just as much as wrinkles. She points out how younger people ask “What’s wrong?” rather than “What’s the matter?”, say “nine forty” rather than “twenty to ten” and call “Zimmer frames” “walkers”. She is the peer of Kingsley Amis and Muriel Spark. The Girl Next Door is as great a novel as Stanley and the Women or Memento Mori.
Rosemary’s “moralistic attitude” — she still talks of “living in sin” — alienates her husband. However, Alan is not the only sinner to get what he deserves.
This is what makes the novel such a joy to read. Rendell’s novels, for all their aberrations, establish a sense of order that is deeply satisfying. At heart she will always be an ethics girl.
Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16.29, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p
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