Only one book this time, as it gave me the most visceral reaction I have yet had. A Fatal Inversion won the Gold Dagger in 1987. Barbara Vine, the purported author, is in fact a pen name of Ruth Rendell, whose 1976 winner, A Demon in My View, has already been reviewed, and whose 1986 winner Live Flesh is still on the “to read” list. As Barbara Vine, Rendell also won the 1991 Gold Dagger for King Solomon’s Carpet.
I only learned about the pen name after I finished the book, and at once I said “of course.” A Fatal Inversion is deeply psychological, more about people and their inner workings than crime itself. In A Demon in My View this was quite interesting because the psychopath was one of the killers. This time around, it doesn’t work – or rather, if it does work, who cares?
My problem with the book is its utter lack of potential payoff. Rendell’s strength to write multiple characters is on display again – here, she writes mostly from the points of view of Adam and Rufus, two men who, we come to learn, committed a serious crime ten years ago, the evidence of which is discovered in the book’s opening chapter. As work through the novel and Adam and Rufus recall and deal with the past in their own ways, we see again Ruth’s talent for seeing the same people and events from two perspectives – sometimes just the same, sometimes different, sometimes distorted as if through a funhouse mirror. The little details are expertly revealed, leading us away from the main narratives for a sentence or three before snapping back into place. The whirlwind of supporting cast members is also a cut above. The problem isn’t in the details, it’s in the whole construction of the book, and while I see why some people would give it praise (or even a Gold Dagger) I found it viscerally annoying to read.
Rendell structures the book with an elastic approach to chronology. We start in the “present” (i.e. 1986) but Adam and Rufus, as they are introduced, are continuously rubber-banding between their own daily routine and memories of ten years ago. Moreover, when we are in the present, Rendell has a habit of dropping references that the characters would clearly understand but that mean nothing to the reader. As one example, Adam and Rufus think of what happened as “Ecalpemos” but we know of no such place – it is only one-third of the way through the book that we learn what “Ecalpemos” is and how it maps onto our knowledge of other settings. Or an idle thought about how one characters hadn’t seen another one bleed, “not until she had taken the boy” and then we move on despite having no idea what that means until much later. The purpose, of course, is to make us want to know, to make us turn the page to connect the dots so we have, at last, a consistent internal geography. I admire the intellectual exercise here, but in practice I found it maddening. There are simply too many variables to have to juggle, and by the time they are all revealed…nothing! Imagine solving a jigsaw puzzle by looking only at the observe side of it and piecing all the cardboard colored rears together. At last, when you finish, you flip it over to see what the image looks like pieced together, and finding out it is simply a blank white canvas. That is the payoff to reading this book. When at last all was revealed (as usual, about 15 pages before the end of the book) I realized that…I didn’t care! The inevitable twist was less impactful than it might otherwise have been both because the manner in which it could occur was severely limited, and also because the characters were so fantastically unlikeable. Not a single person in the book came across as likeable, even the few that one could at least feel empathetic for. This is a remarkable achievement, all the more so in that I don’t know to what purpose!
Crime novels and morals have an uncomfortable relationship, in my mind. Being about crime, they are frequently either black and white (the bad guy gets what he deserves) or revel in the grey (is anyone to blame? Is it society’s fault? Was it destiny, tragedy, some series of butterfly effect chain of events that caused it all to go so wrong?). This book is gray without even the grayness, it is simply bleached of color. Rendell touches on entitlement, money, health care, racism, sexism, religion, mental health, family, children, and other topics I’m sure have slipped my mind. She clearly has points of view to get across beyond simply capturing a vivid setting in which to place her characters. And yet it’s hard to walk away feeling impacted by any semiotics because it’s such a dull exercise – watch two unlikeable, mildly successful men meander through their own memories about a morally outrageous episode in their past while they also meander through their morally unimpressive present. Hip hip hooray. There’s no justice in this book, and even the pursuit of justice feels rather uninteresting given we see it only through the paranoid minds of Adam and Rufus, who wonder if the police are on their trail. It seems fairly obvious, at least to me, that they are not. We have objectivity, albeit it for events we view through unreliable lenses, and the pursuit of justice ceases to be a possible path for the novel about three-quarters of the way in. All that’s left is the characters and that’s why this book felt like a complete slog.
If I had picked this up in a bookstore to read, after the first few pages I would have put it back. There’s no visceral thrill of the chase here – which is perfectly fine – but the exercise of oscillating through time as the characters slowly move forward through the narrative is exhausting. A Fatal Inversion is a clever name for the book given this central device and the importance of “Ecalpemos” (“someplace”, inverted – sorry for the spoiler, but don’t read the book, please) in it, but the cleverness itself feels more the central point than anything else. I am beginning to dread the next Rendell book, because while her style is certainly strong and I can see how her books would be quite groundbreaking at the time, the descendants they inspired make their freshness and perspicacity wane quickly.
A final complaint. The last chapter, which gathers up many threads lost earlier in the book and resolves them, annoyed me. It’s totally logical, and even plausible, but I think it’s supposed to serve as a last, definitive moral statement on the impact the crime had on everyone – the sort of clear statement lost elsewhere in the book’s complex chronology that is supposed to provide light by which all the other characters and their outcomes can be better measured. Bleh. Instead of nodding sagely I felt a knot of anger grow in my stomach.
I’ll save the updated rankings for the next review, but I expect that this book will be one of my biggest departures from common wisdom in that it will be near the very bottom of my list, even though A Fatal Inversion was nominated for the 2005 Dagger of Daggers Award to honor the best crime novel of the past 50 years. No, thank you.
smq.world 