Paul Binding

‘I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one,’ Ruth Rendell said to me in 1998. ‘In fact I believe that if I weren’t to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn’t be able to write it at all.’ A Barbara Vine — from the first, A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986) onwards — tends to take a specific period, distinct in mores and cultural tensions, and to concentrate on emotionally charged events, invariably climaxing in violent death, which stand in metaphoric relationship to it. In the body of this latest Vine book — the 192-page narrative actually entitled ‘The Child’s Child’ — all these requirements are amply met.

‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to meet what this boy really cares about. The school is in Jewel, a small town in south-west Saskatchewan, and Michael, always happier out-of-doors, really did bring in a snake, to display its beauty. Finding it, Parley killed it with his blackboard-pointer. Unfortunately the best Michael can do with the sentence is: ‘He wakt past the fol and pickt up the ded grtre snake.

It is winter 1936. Every weekday morning a group of young people travel by train from Ferrara, their home city, to Bologna where they are studying at the university. Theirs is a six-carriage stopping train, often infuriatingly late because of delays on the line, thus contradicting the famous Fascist boast about improvement of Italian railways. But these youths enjoy their ride, its camaraderie and little rituals. Only one carriage is not third class, and here, they notice, an eminent member of their own community is sitting: Dr Athos Fadigati. To this ENT specialist’s clinic most of them have, during childhood, been taken.

In 1971 looking back over his life, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) declared himself surprised at being referred to as a critic. Certainly his plan when young had been the pursuit of the literary life, ‘but what it envisaged was the career of the novelist. To this intention, criticism, when eventually I began to practise it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation.’ As Adam Kirsch comments, in his timely, incisive, succinct study, this admission was made when Trilling was ‘the most famous and authoritative literary critic in the English-speaking world.

Of the four Prime siblings of the Beacon farm, Frank, the second boy, was, throughout their early lives, ‘almost invisible’. He did everything late, spent most of his time alone, and was a dunce at school, where he bemused teachers and children alike. They never knew what to make of Frank, they said; what went on in Frank’s head was one of the great mysteries. He did little speaking but a great deal of staring out of large green-grey, slightly bulbous eyes. He followed people too … Turn round, and Frank would be there, silent, watching, following. Beware of the individual close to you whom you have never got to know, whose mental life you have written off as ‘mysterious’.

The celebrations and theatre- productions for this centenary year of Ibsen’s death certainly attest to the continuing vitality of his work. At August’s Ibsen conference in Oslo I heard delegates from China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Latvia, Mexico speak both of the plays’ intrinsic fascinations and of their relevance to specific contemporary societies. Likewise scholars and critics of many orientations showed what satisfying harvests, say, Ghosts or The Wild Duck yield when looked at from this or that perspective. What we have lacked, however, has been a full-scale English-language study of the relationship of this impressive oeuvre to the western culture of which it provably is so firm and illustrious a part.

On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless camp duties. ‘Oh, Bobby!’ exclaims his ageing mother as she greets him. ‘My soldier! My big, wonderful soldier!’ A touching tableau, one would think, except that it’s riddled with falsity. Alice Prentice is a self-centred, self-indulgent, attitudinising spendthrift, who will occupy herself during Bobby’s long and endangered absence with plans for him to rescue her from an indigence largely her own fault.

The British, publishers and booksellers regularly tell us, have an antipathy to the short story; they respond unfavourably to even a well-known writer coming up with a collection, and for an emergent one to devote creative energy principally to the medium would be regarded as literary suicide. And this despite determined efforts by certain key literary editors, competition-setters and indeed the South Bank itself to keep the art-form alive. Elsewhere the short story is differently regarded. In the English-speaking world, Ireland, the American South, and, thanks to Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, the Pacific North-West of the US have long exhibited short stories as supreme expressions of their culture’s genius.