Barbara Vine was Ruth Rendell’s pseudonym, under which she published 14 books to go with the 60 odd under the Rendell name. She was never quite clear on why she needed one, and there was probably a mix of pragmatic and artistic reasons, the latter perhaps not totally clear to the artist herself. I’d need to read a lot more to really get a grip on the differences between Vine and Rendell, so I’m not going to bother discussing them, which makes this first paragraph somewhat redundant, but there we go.
Anyway, this novel has two timelines that are unfolded together. In 1976, five young people, three men and two women, spend a long hot summer in a country house that one of them has inherited, treating it as somewhere between an experiment in communal living and a season-long squat party. We know that something bad happens, because 10 years later the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are discovered at the house. The woman is fairly clearly one of the original two. In 1986, we follow the three men as they ruminate on that summer, the bad happening, and their roles in it, and worry about whether they’re going to finally be held to account.
The question of accounting is the main source of tension in the 1980s strand. The main sources in the 1970s strand are the questions of what exactly happened, where the baby came from, and which of the two young women was killed. The tricksy thing here is that the three present-day men know the answers, and we know they know. So to maintain the tension in the 1970s strand, the 1980s strand has to be coy in ways that become slightly strained. Most obviously, the three men can’t be made to refer to the victims by name, even when it would be very natural to do so in speech or thought. There’s a lot of similar talking around the subject and a fair amount of manifest misdirection. It just about works, and it just about pays off, as the climax of the 1970s strand isn’t quite what you expect. Still, one might wonder if the novel could have achieved its ends without bothering to obscure the ending.
I say this because the tension, or mystery, doesn’t seem to be the actual point here. The point seems to be to explore how the three men in the present have been damaged by what they did in the past—they’re all much less than they might have been, and not just in ways that are typical of middle-aged disappointment, but in ways that suggest they’ve already paid their accounts to some degree. I don’t think this is entirely successful; one of them seems to be punished gratuitously, another seems to get off rather lightly. But perhaps there’s an acute observation there about how heavily conscience weighs or doesn’t on certain kinds of mind. We do also get a sight, right at the end, of what became of the other woman, which perhaps is the most mysterious thing for the bulk of the book. It’s an interesting, engaging read, and it does give you something to chew on that’s different from what you get in a rote Rendell.