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Review

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Parent Issue
Month
March
Year
1998
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
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Agenda Publications
OCR Text

THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER'S BOY

By Barbara Vine

Harmony Books

352 pages.

$24

By Jamie Agnew

Owner of Aunt Agatha's Book Store

A Barbara Vine book is like a tea bag - you dip it in the hot water of your consciousness and at first nothing really dramatic happens, but then, slowly, things get darker and darker, until finally you have quite a powerful brew, a cup of murder and shame that can keep you up at night. Barbara Vine is the name Ruth Rendell uses to differentiate her gothic and interior novels from her more straightforward Inspector Wexford police procedurals, and Vine/Rendell's latest effort, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, is one of her best, which means it is also among the best books anybody's recently written.

As the story opens, we meet the eminent English novelist Gerald Candless as he rather obnoxiously torments a lesser English novelist, Titus Romney, with the enthusiastic participation of his devoted adult daughters, Sarah and Hope, and the indifference of his much less devoted wife, Ursula. When Titus leaves, Gerald mysteriously hands him his latest manuscript and asks him to mail it back in a short time. While walking Titus back to his hotel Gerald sees someone or something that shakes him with recognition, some kind of ghost. Then, returning to his house to rest before his heart surgery scheduled for the next day, Gerald Candless, the major figure in the novel, dies of natural causes at the end of the first chapter.

The rest of the book traces the effect of his death on those around him, especially Ursula, whose life has been almost totally consumed by a man who was to her a monster, and Sarah, whose attempt to write a memoir of the father she idealized leads her to realize that he was not the man she thought he was, or even the Gerald Candless he claimed to be. Her discovery of his true identity, and her mother's rediscovery of her own, provide the mainsprings of action in the plot, which proceeds hypnotically, effortlessly shifting from the present to the past, allowing Vine/Rendell's cold, sharp writing to provide big truths and small perceptions about England, snobbery and the class system, sexuality, human nature and, of course, writing itself.

As she pieces together the meager clues that her father's mask of self-created identity provides, Sarah's ratiocination, like Oedipus's, rushes toward an awful, primal truth that threatens many lives. Vine/Rendell's rich, unsentimental and knowing prose painstakingly traces her discoveries, the sly measured unfolding as riveting as any action-packed thriller, the last page as shocking as any potboiler. In the end, the great novelist Gerald Candless's life of fictions allows his wife and daughters to see the world in front of them more clearly, to temper their love and contempt with compassion, and, fortunately for the reader, there's a great novelist here, in our own "real" world, who can provide us with the same insight.

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