Ruth
Rendell
THE
BRIDESMAID
HER NEW BESTSELLER
Holiday
bestsellers
The Bridesmaid Ruth Rendell, Arrow, £3.99 Devices and Desires P.D. James, Faber and Faber, £6.99 The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber and Faber, £3.99 Reviewed by Jane Wells Armed with a brief (but, needless to say, no budget) from Socialist Outlook to find a clutch of books from the bestseller list worth reviewing and even recommending to readers, I decided on a twopronged strategy.
First, the easy option, Ruth Rendell and P. D. James. I would have read them anyway. They are a guaranteed enjoyable - if not necessarily thought-provoking - read.
Ruth Rendell is a Labour supporter, a feminist and long-time CND member. This rarely makes an obvious impact on her work apart from avoiding some cruder excesses indulged by other writers.
She fits more neatly with the Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers school of women thriller writers than with the new radicals who've been infiltrating the
FEATURES
KAZUO
ISHIGURO
The Remains of the Day mainstream publishers" lists in recent years. Some, like the
American Sara Paretsky, are real storytellers (in her case, in the tradition of Chandler, but without the blonde double-crossing femme fatale as the root of all evil), working in a thoroughly political framework.
Unfortunately many others are disappointing because they're just not good writers. P.D.
James' and Ruth Rendell's popularity can be put down to the fact that they can tell a good story, at the very least.
Their accessibility is due in part to their familiarity. English detective books are known as
"cosies" in the States. The low life is never really that low, characters generally operate within a moral world of received wisdom, if good doesn't win out in the end you at least know who the baddies are, and the bobbies are not just decent, they're even interesting.
Ruth Rendell's more compelling works are those written under the Barbara Vine pen name which detail the psychological build-up to crime, and her thrillers in which the perpetrator's psychology, and not the detection of crime, is the focus.
The Bridesmaid falls into this last category, and is one of the best accounts I can remember reading of a sort of personality and circumstance which has rarely been explored and never makes the headlines in real-life crime reporting. The individual's link with reality is tenuous at best, and their moral frame of reference is not evil or maniacal, but seriously wacky whilst nearly-normal to a superficial glance. Rendell shows how such a fragile grip on life can be nearer than we think to "normality', and just a short step away from crime - and that it can be catching, too.
P.D James is even more of an establishment writer, and it shows. A civil servant with a background in the Foreign Office, NHS and police work, she is now a BBC Govemor. A less prolific writer than Ruth Rendell, her plots are often more complex, and always engrossing-
Another pleasure reading her is spotting the stereotype or piece of gratuitous reactionary commentary. In earlier books revolutionaries in donkey jackets pronounce their programmes in north London pubs, and arrange coded cloak-and-dagger meetings in the British Museum (to what end was never made clear). I suppose the WRP at its height may have indulged in such nonsense, but in P.D. James' imagination they posed a widespread and serious threat to the fabric of society as we know it.
So too did sixties sociology lecturers with long hair. In Devices and Desires there's an anti-nuclear activist who actually receives almost fair treatment. But the reader's main sympathies are directed to a recently redundant head teacher, hounded from her loony left London school for refusing to call a blackboard a chalkboard. And so myths are made, and sustained. For all that I'd still recommend it for some entertaining holiday reading.
My second prong was to branch out and buy some books that I wouldn't normally try. I easily resisted the No. 1 bestseller Ambition, a shopping and sex' novel by Julie Birchill, on the grounds that I didn't want to add to her profits: by all accounts it's awful, and so is she - particularly since she claims some left-wing credentials whilst taking up reactionary postures on everything from Ireland to Iran.
I decided to go for something completely new. Ranked about number fifteen on W. H. Smith's bestseller shelves was Ruling Passions, by Sunday Times columnist (and former wife of famous Labour MP Tony), Susan Crossland. This turned out to be a political saga in the mould of Jeffrey Archer, only it was even worse: 1 should have known from the cover which features a Tory rosette lying tastefully on some silky lingerie. Sex in novels I don't mind but sex combined with politics is only slightly more interesting than sex and shopping.
A heroine called Daisy, given immortal lines like The thing about you, Carl, is your arrogance.
You know you're the brilliant intellectual of the new right. You know you're going to get one of the key posts in Washington. You know you're the greatest artist in the sack. You don't need anyone else to tell you so. Sometimes it makes me feel I'm simply a doll' just didn't do anything for me. So 1 gave up after two chapters, and wouldn't advise you to bother at all.
The Remains of the Day, by Nagasaki-born and now Englandbased author Kazuo Ishiguro, was much better. The novel won him the Booker Prize last year, so I knew that the story centred on a butler at the end of his career and at the end of an era.
Whilst it's ostensibly not about much at all, the story builds up a portrait of a man coming to terms with some of life's Big Questions - what motivates other people, and himself, and confronting the limitations in his own understanding.
It's also funny, and quite romantic. Inter-war politics provide a subtle backdrop to the novel. Whilst its not the ultimate combination of the dialectics of psychology and politics, individual and society. The Remains of the Day is a well written book with plenty of insight to be going on with until a socialist classic makes it into Smith's top ten.