The Edge Online - Reviews: Barbara Vine

No Night Is Too Long
Barbara Vine
Penguin paperback, 336 pages
Published July 1995
ISBN 0140250409
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)

There are plenty of male writers currently bashing the keys in British crime, some (Colin Dexter) very successfully, but it’s a genre dominated by women. Three names, two people: despite her recent (valid) trouble with the splatterpunks, PD James; and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. No bones are made, Rendell and Vine are one and the same, two sides of a very prolific coin. And if the former is crime (she has a series detective, of course), then when Rendell dons her Barbara Vine hat the resulting, powerfully slow novels are best described as obsessive psychodrama. They are also, by some considerable distance, the better books.

A former creative writing student, Tim Cornish pens (most) of this in the form of a confession. Something terrible has happened to his lover, the magnetic, older Ivo, on an educational cruise in the rain-lashed wastes of Alaska. Shortly before, Tim had begun a brief, torrid affair with Isabel, the Seattle woman he met while his lover was away teaching aboard ship. Convinced he’s in love, Tim is driven to desperate ends by jealousy, selfishness and lack of money. Now, with neither Isabel nor Ivo, he sits in his Suffolk family home drifting from day to day, anxiously awaiting the mysterious letters that keep coming from the States with their grim detailing of castaway existence.

No Night Is Too Long is a long book without so many pages. The atmosphere is grey, foetid, resigned. The weather seems to close in, the sea (this book is very much about the sea) pummelled and torn by wind and rain. Vine belies any preconceived notion of genre, the writing beautifully sculpted, the language double-quilted. It’s certainly a slow book, spending most of its first three-quarters establishing its pay-off. Vine can be uneasy, even difficult, but as the final page turns, leaves the reader with a real sense of accomplishment. This is heavy stuff.

Vine’s narratives are character-driven, their plots emerging, often in flashback, from individuals that literally haunt their pages. It doesn’t always work – in her last, Asta’s Book (Anna’s Book in the US) you need a diagram to keep up to speed with the labyrinthine shenanigans – but when it does, the evocation of people and place is enviable.

Perhaps the big problem in this one is a lack of real sympathy. It can be true of her other books, characters so driven by their pathological obsession and passion it’s hard to find anyone with which to identify. At their best (A Fatal Inversion, King Solomon’s Carpet) Vine’s books fizz with so much compulsive malevolence it ceases to be an issue. Here though, so deliberately paced is this novel (so self-absorbed is Tim, so unusually cruel is Ivo, and so desolate is the ship’s voyage) that the darkness, the bleakness of it all can get a little tiring. The end, against the odds, shoots for redemption, but doesn’t quite come off. We’ve been through hell and demand that somebody gets burned.

Still, second degree Barbara Vine it might be, but still strange, elaborate and alluring enough to intoxicate. And, thankfully, it’s most definitely not PD bloody James.