Synopsis
Living in a school-turned-boarding house, Jarvis encounters a cast of bizarre characters--including hawk trainer Jed, Jasper and the truant boys, and Alice, who has abandoned her baby
Reviews
Imbued with a sense of foreboding so palpable that readers will turn nearly every page with deep apprehension, this lyrical, leisurely paced psychological thriller teems with deftly drawn characters who inhabit a dark world near the West Hampstead stations of the London Underground. There an eccentric troupe of boarders shares Jarvis Stringer's Victorian-style home. Among them are Alice, a confused young woman who's recently left both husband and infant to fulfill her musical ambitions as a concert violinist; Tom, a flutist who coaxes Alice into the Underground where they become buskers and then lovers; the sinister-looking Axel, whose constant companion is a man in a bear suit; and Jasper, a tattooed 10-year-old who rides the tops of subway cars for excitement. Strangest of all is their landlord, a man obsessed by subways and "not much troubled by sexual feelings" whose lifework is compiling a guide to and history of metro systems around the world. Vine (the pseudonymous Ruth Rendell), whose first novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye , won an Edgar, intersects the fates and feelings of this disparate ensemble in ways that are at once surprising and inevitable.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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. It's no shame for Vine/Rendell to fall short of her peerless model: the air of foreboding is as expertly invoked as ever, but the story, following one misfit after another but never bringing them very much closer together even at the inevitable tolling of the schoolhouse bell, lacks the momentum of Conrad, or of such earlier triumphs as A Judgment in Stone. Richly textured but slow-moving: a thriller for readers who think it's better to travel hopelessly than to arrive. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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