2 Novels by Barbara Vine
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4.4 MB
Overview: Rendell created a third strand of writing with the publication of A Dark Adapted Eye under her pseudonym Barbara Vine in 1986. Books such as King Solomon’s Carpet, A Fatal Inversion and Anna’s Book (original UK title Asta’s Book) inhabit the same territory as her psychological crime novels while they further develop themes of family misunderstandings and the side effects of secrets kept and crimes done.
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
King Solomon’s Carpet
King Solomon’s magic carpet is the London Underground, running past the disused old school building that houses the most ill-assorted covey that Vine (Ruth Rendell) has brought together since A Fatal Inversion for this updating of Conrad’s novel of terrorist conspiracy, The Secret Agent.
Tom Murray is a promising musician reduced to illegal busking in Underground stations and a sad little love affair with his accompanist Alice, who left her husband and newborn baby, taking only her violin. Together with Jasper Darne, another dropout from his family who likes to ride on the tops of Underground carriages, and Jed Lowrie, a Safeguard volunteer who’s left behind his own family to live for his hunting hawk Abelard, they live in a failed schoolhouse–whose bell tolled for the only time in memory when the headmaster hanged himself from its rope.
The school’s owned by the old man’s grandson, Jarv Stringer, who now passes the time by writing a book on the Underground and taking in waifs and strays while his aunt Cecilia Darne, Jasper’s grandmother, quietly declines around the corner under the variously watchful eyes of her relatives and her longtime companion Daphne Bleech-Palmer. The apple of discord in this extended, dysfunctional family is sinister Axel Jonas, who rides the trains with a dancing bear, actually a man named Ivan, until Jasper one day leads him to Jarvis’s, where he takes up residence, seduces Alice, and begins to gather details about the operation of the Underground in preparation for a cataclysmic bombing.
Grasshopper
“They have sent me here because of what happened on the pylon.”
When Clodagh Brown writes these words at the age of nineteen, she believes that she is leaving behind the traumatic events of her youth. But Clodagh soon learns that you can never entirely escape your past.
In the aftermath of the incident on the pylon–one of the great electrified structures that dot the English countryside like so many gargantuan grasshoppers–Clodagh goes off to university, moves into a basement flat arranged by her unsympathetic family, and finds freedom trekking across London’s rooftops with a gang of neighborhood misfits. As she begins a thrilling relationship with a fellow climber, however, both Clodagh and the reader are haunted by the memory of the pylon and of the terrible thing that happened there–and by the eerie sense that another tragedy is just a footfall away.
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