|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
How many fictional British murderers would live out their lives untroubled by tiresome police enquiries and how many imaginary corpses would rest uneasily in their shallow, unsanctified graves were it not for the Jack Russell? A couple of corpses in this latest installment of the Wexford series owe their resurrection to a persistent pooch though Rendell does manage to ring a few changes on the venerable cliché. The animal in question is only partly a Jack Russell and she is not about her ordinary canine business, but engaged in the far more lucrative and, for a British dog, unusual, pursuit of truffle-hunting. Still she does, as dogs do, manage to unearth a skeletal hand. The rest of the body is soon exposed and, shortly thereafter, a few yards away yet another skeleton comes to light. Wexford and his team must discover what, if anything, links these two and how they came to die. The investigation that ensues is fairly leisurely. The murders, if such they were, occurred some years in the past and the victims are difficult to identify. Modern forensic tools are of little use in these circumstances, so the investigators must fall back on traditional methods. Led by Wexford, the Kingsmarkham police undertake a series of patient and repeated interviews with the neighbours, few of whom are forthcoming and some of whom are distinctly odd. Thanks both to doggedness and flashes of intuition, the police get there in the end. This is the 21st installment in this series, and keeping it fresh is not easy. Rendell must maintain a continuity in Wexford's character and sensibility, a task that becomes increasingly difficult as Wexford lingers on long past the date he would have been made to retire in the real world. Ian Rankin solved this problem by keeping Rebus in real time, but alas, most of his fans and perhaps even Rankin himself rued the choice when the inevitable happened and Rebus turned 60. Rendell manages a clever compromise – Wexford appears chronologically younger than he ought to be, but responds in ways appropriate to his generation. He may be a bit of a technophobe, but he understands that much has changed, especially in regard to racial and gender relations. He strives earnestly to incorporate these social changes into his own behaviour and on the whole succeeds, if somewhat self-consciously. He'd rather be addressed as "sir," but accepts his young sergeant's calling him "guv," under, he presumes, the influence of television. He accepts it, but he doesn't like it one little bit. Wexford straddles past and present, a decent man with good intentions, but uneasy in a world in which the standards and status that he has spent his life preserving seem increasingly irrelevant and where every unguarded utterance may be subject to reproof by the guardians of political correctness. Rendell strives for a contemporary feel by introducing a sub-plot arising from the presence of a large Somali population in Kingsmarkham. The attempt to forestall the possible genital mutilation of a five-year-old girl is certainly the most suspenseful and perhaps the most affecting element in the book, but it feels grafted on rather than integral to what is, after all, a fairly traditional plot. I should say that I have always been somewhat underwhelmed by the Wexford series. Rendell has written her best work, I feel, either as Barbara Vine or in her standalones, especially that group of novels set largely in north London, which strike me as inventive, contemporary, and far more daring than many credit them as being. Still, readers who have followed Wexford all this way will certainly want to stay with him till the end. He may be in gradual decline, but Rendell's prose is still sharp and precise and her eye for the oddities of human character undiminished.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2007
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
