A lot of how you respond to a book is to do with the expectations you bring to it. Given the author, whose works I often like, I expected this to be good, and moreover good in the ways that are typical of Ruth Rendell and of crime novels. But after about 50 pages, I was starting to wonder, and by the end I was sadly concluding that this is one of the worst in the CWA sequence so far.
The first thing you might expect of a crime novel is a central plot, a narrative focussed on a particular crime, its committal, its consequences, its detection (or, more broadly, a narrative structure generating tension and suspense and thrill). But it’s very hard to say what the plot of this book actually is. It centres around the oddball inhabitants of a sort-of squat (a Vine trope?), and seems to attempt a sort of panoptic insight into their lives and their associations; we follow first one, then another, then a third, as they drift around doing things. Occasionally we divert into following a friend or relative of one of our primary gang. We sometimes go even further from the core: for example, we get a couple of sections of a few pages each focussing on the person who nicked one of the more central character’s handbag, telling us what he did with the money and how he met his deserved sticky end. None of it adds up to anything.
Now admittedly, a few of th0se primary people are more intertwined and more focal than others. The three who come closest to forming a plot are Axel, a terrorist hatching an implausible scheme to bomb the London Underground; Alice, who Axel implausibly seduces as part of his implausible scheme; and Tom, who is implausibly infatuated with Alice and implausibly blind to her seduction. As you may have gathered, this is all very implausibly done, and don’t let me give the impression that this is the narrative engine of the book. There is no narrative engine. The events that do occur are telegraphed well ahead of their happening, just so we don’t get the notion that there’s any attempt being made here to build suspense.
The one thing that comes closest to uniting the various bits of the book is that they’re all connected, more or less, to the London Underground. Some of the cover blurb says that Vine “audaciously makes the Underground the central character”. I suppose if by that you mean “bangs on about it a lot” you’re right. There are many passages in the book reminiscent of that things that happens when you’re in London: you mention where you’re staying, and every Londoner in earshot tries to tell you how you must have got to wherever you are, by which lines, etc. I was going to type one of these passages out to prove it, but the one I picked has 10 mentions of various lines and stations in it, and I just cannot be bothered. You can read it yourself if you want.
It comes to seem like the ambition of the book is something in the vein of Balzac or Zola: a realist portrayal of a section of the populace executed via detailed description of their lives, sustained just by the interest of that description rather than by any real narrative driving it along. Now, that’s a fine enough ambition, but what a novel with those aims is doing in the crime writing awards I don’t know.
Besides, while we might give full marks for ambition, we have to give very few for execution. Rendell utterly fails to deliver her usual acute psychology; as I’ve suggested, nearly all the characters are implausibly motivated, implausibly irrational, and implausibly stupid. The settings, events, and so forth are all equally unconvincing. I’m sadly reminded of that awful Fleming novel: the same sense of someone trying to offer description and implicit comment on something they know nothing about.
To ice this terrible cake, the book is written in weird, stilted prose, like someone trying out English. For example there are lots of constructions of this kind:
“the chocolate bar that is called a Twirl”
“the kind of ice cream that is called a Dracula”
So many it must be deliberate. But to what end? Nobody thinks like this, nobody speaks like this, and it’s an utter mystery to me why anyone would want to write stuff like this. Or, indeed, to read it.