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Stuart Font might appear on the surface to be a fortunate young man. He is extraordinarily good looking, reasonably well-educated, and, for the moment, fairly well-off, having recently inherited enough money to enable him to buy a flat and quit his job to take a belated "gap year." But the key here is the word surface, since that's pretty much all there is to poor Stuart. He is appallingly dim, transfixed by his own beauty, and hopelessly spineless in the face of a determined lover who is bent on continuing their affair even after her husband threatens to kill or (worse) disfigure Stuart if he carries on. Stuart is singularly lacking in friends or even social skills, so when he decides to throw a flat-warming party, he simply invites all his neighbours, even though he has to look up their names on the bell pushes. And a motley crew they are - Olwen, a woman who has decided to fulfil a life's ambition and simply drink herself to death now that she has retired; three girls, students and flatmates, one of whom is engaged to an Arab prince; a young doctor who has never practised medicine and who supports himself by writing a dubious medical column for a daily, the contents of which he can't be bothered to research; two ageing hippies, reacquainted by the chance of having purchased flats in the same building. Also invited is Duncan, who lives across the road in one of a pair of semi-detached houses. The other is occupied by a secretive group of Asians, one of whom is the utterly beautiful Tigerlily, as Duncan calls her. It is she with whom Stuart will fall obsessively in love, wholly on the strength of her appearance. Also invited to the party are the repellant caretaker, Wally Scurlock and his wife Richenda. (Rendell does have a Dickensian flair for names.) Also in attendance are Claudia, Stuart's lover, whom he reluctantly invited, and Freddy, her husband, whom he certainly did not ask. Unsurprisingly, the party does not prove a happy occasion, but Rendell has moved this odd and unconnected group of residents of an undistinguished suburb in a London that has lost its gleam thanks to the economic collapse into a brief community of neighbours. This is a trick that Rendell has performed in several of her London novels. She solves the problem of how to approach the urban scene by recognizing that in the modern city everyone save tabloid celebrities is fundamentally anonymous. Thus she abandons the protagonist altogether and suggests that plot itself is essentially old-fashioned. There is a sequence of events which from one point of view may appear inevitable, but from another, merely random. Rendell is still writing crime fiction however, though lovers of the more classic sort of mystery may doubt it. The first body in this book only shows up three-quarters of the way through. There is no detective, amateur or professional. Duncan, a quintessential curtain-twitcher, may appear the fill the role, but he misconstrues everything he sees. Crime is, nevertheless, what TIGERLILY'S ORCHIDS is about. Crime is, after all, what a lot of the characters have in common. Some of it is petty - dipping into an old woman's bank account for a few pounds, charging outrageous sums to run the errands she cannot manage any longer - some very serious indeed, like child pornography, drugs, and even murder. I was reminded of Dickensian London once again, where the well-to-do lived almost oblivious to the circumstances of the majority, many of whom turned to crime out of necessity. But Rendell's characters are educated, own their own flats, live in gentrified north London, and drink more white wine than they do gin. Nevertheless, they slip quite easily into crime. What also unites these characters is that they are all, to a greater or lesser degree, fantasists. Stuart believes his beauty and his money will last for life. Molly imagines that Stuart will eventually see past her physical unattractiveness to her warm domestic heart. Wally Scurlock is sure the child porn he loves harms no one and that the little girls he peeps at from the shrubbery are none the wiser. Olwen imagines that she can easily drink herself to death, not comprehending that it is a slow and painful way to go. Even essentially blameless Duncan views the world around him in the terms of a novelette, and gets everything completely wrong, ultimately putting himself in danger. At the end of the novel, with the force that briefly brought all of these characters into some sort of relationship now absent, they fly off in all directions, apparently never looking back or trying to draw any lesson whatever from what has occurred. Through it all, Rendell maintains coolly distant, allowing the reader to draw her own conclusions about the state of play in recessionary London. Though she has passed her eightieth birthday, Rendell remains a sharp, ironic observer of the contemporary urban scene. Although some readers will always prefer Kingsmarkham to London and the more conventional police procedural to her edgy, uncomfortable urban novels, I am convinced that the city novels comprise the body of work for which she will be remembered. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2011
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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