Category Archives: Barbara Vine

Sunday Salon 2009-01-25: Expectations

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This week hasn’t been a great week of reading, or blogging, or reading of blogs for me. I have been particularly busy at work which has given me far less time than I’d normally spend on these activities but that’s only part of the explanation. I’ve also been struggling with expectations.

I started out the week tackling Barbara Vine’s The Minotaur for an upcoming discussion at 4 Mystery Addicts. You’ll see from my review that I was underwhelmed. I didn’t know anything about the book itself but I did have an expectation that someone of Ruth Rendell’s experience and skill wouldn’t make such clumsy writing mistakes as the ones which littered this book (Vine is a pseudonym of Rendell’s).

I then picked Alex Barclay’s Blood Runs Cold off Mount TBR. I’d heard the book discussed late last year on the BBC Books Podcast and the reviewers made is sound so interesting that I immediately ordered myself a copy. I’m not sure now what the reviewers found so engaging but the book hasn’t exactly kept me up at night. It’s not awful, it’s just not very memorable. I had no trouble putting it down a third of the way through in favour of something else.

The something else is Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. Apart from the fact I want to read the book the reason I chose to do it right now was that I was finding it very difficult to avoid seeing reviews and discussions of it at the blogs and reading groups where I hang out online. The first book in this series was in my top ten books of last year so of course I had some expectations but I wanted to have as few as possible when I read the book. I didn’t want to know what anyone else thought: not the publishers (I hadn’t even read the blurb on the back of my copy), not fellow bloggers, not ‘professional’ reviewers. I wanted to make up my own mind with as few pre-conceived ideas as I could. For me there’s nothing quite so annoying as reading a book that doesn’t measure up to the expectations I have of it and these days it’s hard to come to a book with ‘fresh’ eyes and no expectations. But it’s the best way to read.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through The Girl Who Played With Fire so you’ll have to wait to find out how it measured up on the expectations scale. Luckily it’s a long weekend here in Australia so, with the housework sacrificed in favour of reading (again), I should finish it before heading back to work on Tuesday.

Review: The Minotaur by Barbara Vine

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Title: The Minotaur

Author: Barbara Vine (a.k.a Ruth Rendell)

Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books (2006)

ISBN: 978-0-307-23760-6

Kerstin (pronounced ‘Shashtin’) Kvist is a Swedish nurse hired to care for schizophrenic John Cosway in an English country house. Soon after her arrival it becomes clear there is little for her to do other than accompany the silent Cosway on his walks and ensure he gets his medication. Living in the house are Cosway’s mother and his four adult sisters and, although it is the early 1960′s, the household is reminiscent of the Bennett’s in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the way it is run and the obsession with getting at least one of the women ‘married off’.

Vine/Rendell is a great story teller and here she has weaved a story that, despite not being full of murders or chase scenes, did manage to capture my attention. Told in the first person narrative by Kerstin the tale is an intricate observation of a dysfunctional family and the few outsiders they deal with and is, in its quiet way, absorbing. The characters, though not terribly unique, are interesting enough and I would happily have immersed myself in the goings on at Lydstep Hall with a deal of relish if it weren’t for the fact this is a very poorly written book.

There are some horrendously annoying things here, made all the more difficult to swallow because a writer of Vine’s undoubted talent doesn’t, or didn’t used to, have to resort to them.

Firstly there are the constant, unnecessary reminders within the text that the book is reminiscent of Jane Austen’s England. The story, indeed the writing itself, literally scream Austen-esque. Read the introduction of Mr Dunsford at the start of Chapter 9 and even if your only exposure to Jane Austen has been to see the movie Clueless you’ll get the reference and won’t need to be endlessly reminded with such clumsy methods as the narrator likening herself to Elizabeth Bennett being interrogated by Lady Catherine de Burgh.

Secondly, and even more annoying, are the vague references about big events still to happen. The narrator’s tale is told in the present day reminiscing about the events of her time spent in the Cosway household. It’s not a spoiler to suggest that the most dramatic event of the book takes place towards the end but until that point there are so many “if only I’d known then what was to come” lines that I would cheerfully have thrown the book at a wall if only it wasn’t so heavy. The written equivalent of a movie-maker’s Da Da Dunnnn has always been a bugbear of mine and what it did to this book was remove the last hint or suggestion of suspense.

Without that it was a pretty humdrum story about some people who were insular, isolated and a little odd but not nearly intriguing enough to carry an entire book of awkward prose.

My rating 2/5

Other Reviews

Mystery Ink (they loved it)

Telegraph UK (they didn’t)