Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 145169489X, Hardcover)
From “unequivocally the most brilliant mystery writer of our time” (Patricia Cornwell), a new novel from Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, about a brother and sister involved with the same man in contemporary London. When their grandmother dies, Grace and Andrew Easton inherit her sprawling, book-filled London home, Dinmont House. Rather than sell it, the adult siblings move in together, splitting the numerous bedrooms and studies. The arrangement is unusual, but ideal for the affectionate pair—until the day Andrew brings home a new boyfriend. A devilishly handsome novelist, James Derain resembles Cary Grant, but his strident comments about Grace’s doctoral thesis soon puncture the house’s idyllic atmosphere. When he and Andrew witness their friend’s murder outside a London nightclub, James begins to unravel, and what happens next will change the lives of everyone in the house.
Just as turmoil sets in at Dinmont House, Grace escapes into reading a manuscript—a long-lost novel from 1951 called The Child’s Child—never published, due to its frank depictions of an unwed mother and a homosexual relationship. The book is the story of two siblings born a few years after World War One. This brother and sister, John and Maud, mirror the present-day Andrew and Grace: a homosexual brother and a sister carrying an illegitimate child. Acts of violence and sex will reverberate through their stories.
The Child’s Child is an ingenious novel-within-a-novel about family, betrayal, and disgrace. A master of psychological suspense, Ruth Rendell, writing as Barbara Vine, takes us where violence and social taboos collide. She shows how society’s treatment of those it once considered undesirable has changed—and how sometimes it hasn’t.
(retrieved from Amazon Sat, 28 Jul 2012 08:43:15 -0400)
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(3.32)
Wikipedia in English
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Consequently, I approached this new novel eagerly, since it, too, integrates the manuscript of an unpublished novella ("The Child's Child") written by an ancestor into its present-day story. But that's where the similarities between the two books end. While the "Child's Child" novella at the novel's core is compelling, the present-day story really isn't. And the connections between the two, while potentially intriguing, aren't really mined very deeply. The present-day plot functions solely as a frame story for the "Child's Child."
The novella starts out strongly, with Rendell's classic hints of menace and doom, but very little of this actually manifests itself. Maybe that's part of the point, that all the truly bad things that *could* have happened to the main character, Maud, never actually do...that the crimes she feels have been committed against her are nothing compared to all the additional mayhem that might have visited her over the years. But what, then, is the connection between Maud's story and that of Grace, our present-day narrator, other than the fact that Grace is equally clueless?
There's also a lot of *telling* rather than showing throughout both parts of the novel. Huge emotions, entire relationships, and virtually all of WW II are related to us in brief exposition, not through dialogue or description, and what's especially odd is that the novella starts out with a lot of dialogue and description, rendered with Rendell's more characteristic deep psychological insight. But that approach seems to get abandoned at a certain point (after the character of John makes his exit), and the sketchiness and broad strokes come in.
Maybe I'm missing something, maybe this is part of the "mystery"...but in general, I found this to be the weakest Rendell/Vine book I've ever read. If you're intrigued by the story-in-a-story structure premise, I urge you to go straight to _Anna's Book_ for a far, far better example of how brilliantly Rendell can pull disparate stories and historical moments together. (