( 6 reviews )
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Posted: Mar 1 2008
Sometimes I'm at a loss for words in reviewing Ms. Rendell's books. There are times when I'm blown away by her ingenious plotting as evidenced in The Fatal Inversion. But then I pick up another book such as this - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me - and the best I can come up with to sum up my feelings after finishing it is...ambivalent. I can take it; I can leave it, neither done with passion. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is peopled with the usual suspects - the damaged souls just waiting for Ms. Rendell's development and analysis. When the plot is masterful, I swallow it all up, every bit of aberrant behavior, every twist even at the expense of logic (for is there really logic in the tortured minds of Rendell characters?), and every laborious journey into their pathologies. However, when the plot is mediocre, the book is but a house of cards that comes crashing down at the slightest tremble of the literary hand. Such was my experience with A&E&PM. It began solidly enough. We learn about Minty, our obsessive compulsive protagonist and learn about the characters that populate her everyday world. We also learn of how she's been conned by Jerry/Jock, who as it turns out, has conned other women. (The other reviewers here have done a bang-up job of summarizing the story so there's no need for me to do so.) As if Minty does not have enough of a challenge (bathing and cleaning alone take up a large part of her waking day), we learn that she's also schizophrenic. Fine, I'm still on full-tilt and raring to know what comes of this. What comes of this is more bathing and cleaning (narrated in excruciating detail) interspersed with talkative phantoms whose appearances become more aggressive as the story progressively loses steam. As if aberrant myself (masochistic), I slogged through another hundred pages of stereotyped peripheral characters and subplots to support them, all of which did nothing for the main plot. Plot? What plot? Oh, dear, I'd already forgotten what the plot was all about. Then, of course, there's the contrived and ever so convenient ending. When all was said and done, I didn't know who was more gullible - the women who were conned for being so obtuse in divesting themselves of what little money and/or dignity they have to a sponger, or I for divesting myself of what little time I had for pleasurable reading to a mediocre publication.
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( 2 of 2 found this review helpful ) Posted: Mar 31 2006
Ruth Rendell is one of my favourite authors, and this book proves why. No one can write a psychological thriller like her, and in this book she has written in a character that is obsessive=compulsive and a schizophrenic. Her ability to depict these emotional illnesses in her characters is unparalleled. Her writing skills are unique and spell-binding. In this book we have three women living in different parts of London that don't know each other, but are inescapably bound together by their involvement with a man. The tension builds and builds throughout the book until the explosive ending.
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Feb 17 2006
Rendell is great at creating characters who grab and keep your attention, but she can also bushwhack the reader, sort of. Jerry Leach (or Jock Lewis, or Jeff Leigh, or whatever name he's using this month) is a user of women, moving in with a series of girlfriends and taking their life savings and credit cards. He starts out as the central character by virtue of his leech-like activities but -- surprise -- he becomes a victim himself almost exactly halfway through the book. Thereafter, he appears only as a ghost in the mind of Minty Knox, an obsessive-compulsive shirt-ironer for a London dry cleaner. There's also Michelle and Matthew, the former a sadly obese middle-aged woman, the latter her dangerously anorexic but loving husband. And Zillah, Jerry's featherbrained not-quite-ex-wife, who enters an ill-advised marriage of convenience with a gay conservative MP. And Minty's black neighbors, Laf and Sonovia, who don't realize how much they know. And on and on. Like many of this author's books, if properly handled, this would make a terrific film.
