SALON

Friday, Mar 6, 2009 11:44 AM UTC

“The Birthday Present”

This dark literary thriller -- written under Ruth Rendell's pen name -- masterfully folds adultery, kidnapping and lies into a tale of psychological suspense.

By

Topics: Must Read, Our Picks, Books, Thrillers, Mysteries,

Barbara Vine’s new novel, “The Birthday Present,” is a tale of two monsters — monsters of the entirely human and not especially exotic variety, that is. One is Ivor Tesham, a young, rich and handsome Tory M.P. who, in 199o, arranges the pretend kidnapping of his married mistress, Hebe, as a sex game. The other is Jane Atherton, Hebe’s drab and resentful school friend, who has been providing the adulterous wife with alibis for the evenings she spends with Ivor. The “kidnapping” results in a fatal accident on a London street, leading in turn to two crucial choices. Neither Ivor nor Jane, apparently the only ones left who know what Hebe was doing handcuffed in the back of a van, come forward with that knowledge. Each is motivated by pure selfishness, and a terrible machinery of chance and fate is set into motion.

Barbara Vine is a pen name used by the crime novelist Ruth Rendell, ostensibly for stories of psychological suspense rather than the police procedurals of the Inspector Wexford series, though this distinction is not strictly observed. Rendell’s detective fiction has its moments, but seldom transcends its genre. However, her less conventional novels deploy a sardonic moral calculus reminiscent of a certain dark vein in British literary fiction. If Rendell/Vine’s suspense novels seem unlikely to please mystery buffs (there isn’t a real crime in “The Birthday Present” until the end), the association with straightforward whodunits leads them to be overlooked by admirers of Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwan or Muriel Spark, which is a shame. There’s a steeliness to Rendell that even Camus or Pinter would be hard put to equal.

“The Birthday Present” hinges on questions of culpability and expedience. Ivor never tells the police the truth about his affair with Hebe because, he reasons, he’d be crucified by the gutter press. Besides, who, really, is harmed by the assumption that the kidnapping was for real? (Someone is harmed, it eventually turns out, but not anyone Ivor knows.) Isn’t Hebe’s widower better off idealizing his dead wife than discovering the kinky shenanigans she got up to with another man?

Ivor’s shirking is all too understandable, an exaggerated version of the garden-variety ethical wriggling most people indulge in from time to time, and a tacit critique of the Thatcher government in which Ivor thrives. His side of the story is narrated by his brother-in-law, Robert, who disapproves of the affair, sort of, but not enough to make a fuss about it. Under the influence of Ivor’s “charm, and that sort of dashing reckless quality he had,” Robert agrees to let the couple use his house for the naughty tryst intended to follow the mock kidnapping, Hebe’s “birthday present.” Looking back, he notes that he didn’t hesitate to grant the favor: “I didn’t say to myself, this is a married woman living with her husband that you’re encouraging Ivor to sleep with. By lending him your house you’re facilitating an illicit love affair. Of course I didn’t. … One never does say things like that. I didn’t even think them.”

Jane’s version of events comes in the form of her diary, and she is all too aware of the leeway afforded to someone powerful, good-looking and charming like Ivor because she’s never enjoyed it herself. Jane is the sort of character that a softer-hearted storyteller would make sympathetic: the mousy pal perpetually overshadowed by beautiful, blond Hebe but hoping against hope that she’ll get the guy in the end. Instead, Vine makes her into an unusual villain and a magnificently persuasive creation. We all know people like Jane, chewing up their own insides with bitterness and resentment, obsessed with the absence of love in their lives and completely deluded about their incapacity to give it. Yet seldom is the inner life of someone like this so fully — almost lovingly — rendered. It ought to be repellent, and often enough it is, but since there’s a little Jane in all of us, it’s also strangely bracing, a kind of spiritual exfoliant.

Another trademark of this type of Rendell/Vine novel is the bird’s-eye view afforded the reader, who can observe the full unfolding of the chain of events while the characters themselves only glimpse it in fragments. It is easy to misread the workings of fate when you can’t see the whole picture. Ivor and Jane are both unlucky and self-damning, their misdeeds initially minor but in the end decisive. Robert remarks that the whole affair makes him think about “the unforeseen and how we walk all the time on that thin crust that covers terrible abysses. Things might so easily have been different from what they are if a word spoken or a word withheld hadn’t changed them.” Yet that word spoken or withheld is perhaps a truer manifestation of our selves than our grand gestures and major bids. For Ivor and Jane, character is destiny, and heaven help them both.

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • A missing poster hangs on a tree outside the Cleveland home of Amanda Berry Wednesday. Berry and two other women, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, made a daring escape this week after being held captive for more than a decade.
    Credit: AP/Tony Dejak

  • Elvis Rafael Rodriguez and Emir Yasser Yeje offer their best impression of  Eric B. & Rakim. On Thursday, New York prosecutors identified the pair as members of an international gang that robbed $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking into a database of prepaid debit cards and draining ATM machines around the world.
    Credit: AP

  • New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie walks to a podium during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Technology Enhanced Accelerated Learning Center at Essex County Newark Tech in Newark, N.J., Tuesday. Christie made less flattering headlines this week after undergoing a secret stomach surgery to curb his weight.
    Credit: AP/Julio Cortez

  • Workers stand outside the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday after a fire broke out in its 11-story building. Eight people were killed in the blaze.
    Credit: AP/Ismail Ferdous

  • Workers rescue a woman trapped for 17 days in the rubble of a garment factory building in Saver, Bangladesh, Friday. The building's collapse was the worst industrial disaster in the country's history, killing more than 1,000 people.
    Credit: AP

  • Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gives his victory speech Tuesday in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., after winning back his old congressional seat in the state's first district.
    Credit: AP/Rainier Ehrhardt

  • Jodi Arias reacts in Maricopa Country Superior Court Wednesday after being found guilty of first-degree murder in the gruesome killing of her one-time boyfriend, Travis Alexander. Arias has subsequently said she wants the death penalty, claiming she'd "prefer to die sooner than later."
    Credit: AP/The Arizona Republic/Rob Schumacher

  • Ariel Castro stands for his mug shot Thursday at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, where he is being held on $8 million bail. The former bus driver is accused of imprisoning three young women and beating them repeatedly over a period of 10 years.
    Credit: AP/Cuyahoga County

  • Charles Ramsey addresses the media Monday after helping rescue three women held captive in Cleveland for more than a decade. Ramsey's hero portraiture has been complicated by revelations of his own domestic violence record.
    Credit: AP/The Plain Dealer/Scott Shaw

  • Michael B. Donley, Secretary of the Air Force, testifies during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday. The military branch was rocked this week after its chief sexual assault prevention officer was charged with sexual battery.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations