Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : V : Vine, Barbara

Shop Categories

...V

The Birthday Present

Barbara Vine

Those who feel that Ruth Rendell's best writing is done under her Barbara Vine nom-de-plume (and there are many who do) will need little persuasion to pick up The Birthday Present. But the fact that this is something of a departure for the author -- under either of her names -- may give them pause.
Margaret Thatcher's days as prime minister are over, and the John Major era of the Conservative party is about to begin. The media is full of tales of sleaze and corruption, and it is not a good time to be a Tory Member of Parliament. However, Ivor Tesham is sanguine: money is no object to him; he is charismatic and attractive, and he is in the middle of a passionate affair. The fly in the ointment is the fact that this is an adulterous relationship: not a happy state of affairs when PM John Major has made 'Back to Basics' morality and 'Victorian Values' the new yardsticks for his variously philandering and kickback-taking MPs. Ivor and his lover -- the beautiful Hebe Furnal -- share a particular erotic predilection; a taste for bondage and the more risky extremes of sexuality. Ivor arranges for a mock kidnapping in line with the couple's games, but, needless to say (this is a Barbara Vine novel, after all), things quickly go pear-shaped, and Igor find that everything he holds dear is about to be stripped away from him.
As this synopsis suggests, Rendell is moving into even more incendiary territory than she has traversed before, and the political element makes the experiment even more piquant. Those who know Rendell's association with the Labour Party (she is a working peer) might assume that a novel which rekindles all the sleaze of the last Tory government (particularly when the latest incarnation of the party is riding high in the polls) is a political act, but Rendell/Vine is far too sophisticated a writer to fall into that trap. In fact, this is one of the most ingenious and disturbing books. As often before with her, the stake for the central character could not be higher and it is impossible not to be drawn into the plight of the beleaguered Ivor (not for the first time, we are reminded of the author's distinguished American predecessor Patricia Highsmith). The Birthday Present,disturbing as it is, will sit happily on your shelves alongside all the other Barbara Vine titles -- and if you don't possess them, why not? --Barry Forshaw
A Dark-adapted Eye

Barbara Vine
Asta's Book

Barbara Vine
The Brimstone Wedding

Barbara Vine
King Solomon's Carpet

Barbara Vine
The Minotaur

Barbara Vine
No Night Is Too Long

Barbara Vine
The Blood Doctor

Barbara Vine

In The Blood Doctor, as in others of the books she has written as Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell stretches the boundaries of what we mean when we describe a book as a psychological thriller. Nanther is a biographer who is in crisis in most areas of his life--he has run out of inspiration, his other "job" as a hereditary peer is in the course of being voted out of existence and his relationship with his second wife is threatened by the difficulties she is experiencing in bringing a child to term. He throws himself into a study of his great-grandfather Henry--a doctor ennobled by Queen Victoria for his work on the haemophilia which dogged her descendants--and finds something not quite right. Henry was not just a repressed Victorian--there was something about his ruthless jilting of mistresses and fiancées which implies something a lot more peculiar and Nanther sets out to work out what it was. This novel is acute on the intellectual pleasures of historical research including the guilty prurience of working out dead people's secrets; it is also genuinely insightful in its portrait of Nanther, a man who thinks he is a worse and more useless man than he is, and finds out from Henry what real human evil might be. --Roz Kaveney
A Fatal Inversion

Barbara Vine
The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

Barbara Vine
The House of Stairs

Barbara Vine
Gallowglass

Barbara Vine
Grasshopper

Barbara Vine

Grasshopper is the tale of Clodagh's recovery from the death of her best friend and liberation from the guilt her parents have imposed on her for the pylon-climbing that led to it; it is also the tale of new mistakes, and their disastrous consequences. In the London of the late 80s, Clodagh finds her own level--and it is way above the streets, with a roof-jaunting group of disaffected young people, each with a trauma of their own. For Swedish Liv, it is the nightmare of au-pairing; for Silver, it was abduction as a small boy; for the sinister young thug Jimmy, it was sexual abuse on a massive scale. When they graduate from merely clambering around to trying to do good, and help a couple on the run from the social services with a foster child, that is when the trouble starts... The audiobook adaptation is taut and passionate; Frances Barber's range of voices and characterisations adds immediacy to the strong characterisation and never becomes a mere series of comic impersonations, she retains a sense of this story's urgency even in the chunks of back-story that punctuate the main action. Duration: 5 hours--Roz Kaveney
King Solomon's Carpet

Barbara Vine
Three Novels: "Dark-adapted Eye", "Fatal Inversion" and "House of Stairs"

Barbara Vine
A Dark-adapted Eye

Barbara Vine
No Night Is Too Long

Barbara Vine
The Minotaur: A Novel

Barbara Vine
The Chimney Sweeper's Boy (Penguin Celebrations)

Barbara Vine
House of Stairs

Barbara Vine