No Night is too Long
Barbara Vine
Penguin pbk, 326 pgs
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 woman-dominated gene. 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 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 as 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 by jealousy, selfishness and lack of money to desperate ends. Now, with neither Isabel nor Ivo, he sits in his Suffolk family home drifting day to day, anxiously awaiting each mysterious letter from the States with a grim detailing of maritime disaster.
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 - and this is a book very much about the sea - pummelled and torn by wind and rain. Vine belies any preconceived notion of genre, the writing beautifully sculpted, language double-quilted. It’s certainly a slow book, spending most of its first three-quarters establishing the pay-off in the last few. She can be uneasy, even difficult (check the labyrinthine shenanigans in her last, Asta’s Book) but as the final page turns, leaves the reader with a real sense of accomplishment. This is heavy stuff.
Vine narratives are character-driven, their plots emerging, often in flashback, from individuals that literally haunt their pages. It doesn’t always work - in Asta’s Book you need a diagram to keep up to speed - but when it does, her 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 own singularly pathological obsession and passion it’s hard to fine anyone with which to identify. At its best - A Fatal Inversion, the King Solomon’s Carpet - the books fizz with so much compulsive malevolence it ceases to be an issue. Here though, so deliberately paced is the piece - so self-absorbed is Tim, so unusually cruel Ivo, so desolate the ship’s voyage - 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 sufficiently strange, sufficiently elaborate and alluring to intoxicate. And, thankfully, most definitely not PD bloody James.