Family Brume: a short review of Barbara Vine's "A Dark-Adapted Eye"

A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ruth Rendell was 15 years old when the Second World War came to an end. Her family's experience of the war coloured many of her novels, including her last novel published before her death, The Girl Next Door, and this one, her first work under her pseudonym Barbara Vine, published in 1986.

She is known for her popular Inspector Wexford series and her psychological crime novels. With Barbara Vine, from what I've gathered, she wanted to focus on how place plays a part in a crime as well as further explore the psychology of families and their secrets. This first Vine novel is also notable for its many autobiographical elements.

Rendell had a particular writing style all her own. Many of her sentences sound like they were written back to front, and in this story in particular it takes a good 50 pages before the plot begins to make some sense. But one thing that's particularly enjoyable in her writing - and which I think she isn't given enough credit for - is how much she explored and knew the different facets of the post-war English psyche. The recreation of life in England during the war years in A Dark-Adapted Eye is faultless, filled with details that only a person who lived through it could remember. She also builds suspense here around the question of "Why", instead of the usual "Who" or "How" of crime fiction, and turns an antagonist into a protagonist by the end of the story, which I imagine is quite difficult to pull off.

The story is told through the point of view of Faith, who recalls how her aunt Vera was one of the last women in Britain tried and hung for murder. Through Faith's memories of the war years, we find out what led Vera to commit her crime and how various secrets in their family may, or may not, have played a part in it.

Don't expect to get all your questions answered in this nicely crafted, compelling read.

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