We can assume that Rendell has no life-threatening disease hanging over her head (or perhaps she did, until 1986: who knows?), and so: Barbara Vine, the literary Ruth Rendell.
    I’m not sure about this ploy. Is Rendell simply trying to delineate one style of work from another? Or is she suggesting that her other stuff, the stuff she publishes under her real name, is inferior to this, her "real" "literary" work? If the latter is true, one cannot help wonder why she didn’t let all her work be as good as her "best" work, instead of inaugurating an entirely new writer. And indeed, this is more or less what has happened. Since the advent of Vine, almost all of Rendell’s work has improved; she is presently producing a book a year, in a Suspense-Wexford-Vine pattern, and there haven’t been any stinkers for a decade, at least. That said, the Vine project seems to have swerved from its original intent; none of the later Vine books are as well-written as the first, while the Rendell books have gotten better. The worst thing you could say about Rendell is that her writing is essentially styleless–it is elegant and supports the plot and characters in the way that, say, a nice place setting supports a good meal. Rendell’s sentences are not the featured performers: her astonishing puzzle-master’s mind is the only
star. It would seem that, since discovering that she could produce a very well-written novel, Rendell decided that it wasn’t what interested her. This is fine by me; as I said, she can still write circles around any popular suspense novelist of our time.
    The new book, Grasshopper, is plotted in typical Vine fashion. A grown woman, expressing herself in the first person, is looking back on a tragic, mysterious past: two pasts, actually. In the first past is an incident that occurred when the narrator, Clodagh, was sixteen; we know early on that somebody died, and that this death involved a pylon, the kind that supports high-tension power lines. "They sent me here because of what happened on the pylon," the book begins, and continues for six pages in a breathless, melodramatic style, until, at the beginning of chapter two, we read, "I was nineteen when I wrote that." There: the first authorial subterfuge. The real narrator, the adult Clodagh, takes over from here and reveals that the teenage Clodagh was responsible for the death of her best friend and lover, Daniel; he followed her as she climbed a pylon and was electrocuted on the wires. The adult Clodagh, now an electrician (!) still feels guilty about this. We learn that the teen Clodagh was a claustrophobe, that she loved to climb, that her parents sent her away to school to put the tragedy behind them.
    The bulk of the book takes place in this middle past, the past of the nineteen- and twenty-year-old Clodagh, as related by the adult one. She goes to live with distant relatives in London, a couple who put her up for free but in the basement, which of course her claustrophobia renders intolerable. They treat her poorly, and each other even worse. As she watches their relationship deteriorate, she discovers a boy named Michael Silverman, called Silver, who lives on the sixth floor of a neighboring house owned, but rarely occupied, by his parents. Silver saves Clodagh from a panic attack she has in a pedestrian tunnel, and they begin to fall in love.
    Silver’s apartment, it turns out, is a kind of semi-commune for a number of young people whose only commonality is that they love to climb across the roofs of London. Clodagh finds herself begging off school to spend her time with them: Wim is a childlike, Buddha-esque Dane who lives for the roofs; Jonny is a common criminal who uses the roofs for access to the possessions of the rich; Liv is an ex-nanny whose ignominious escape from her employers has rendered her too paranoid to go out onto the street. She is also Jonny’s lover and slave, and is not-so-secretly in love with Wim. There are others, but these are the major players, and their defining traits–Wim’s confidence, Silver’s generosity, Jonny’s heartlessness and Liv’s fear–drive the events of the book.
    These involve a murder, two thousand stolen pounds, and a kidnapping. The kidnapping is the main thing. A white couple, at first seemingly unrelated to the book’s main characters, have adopted an eight-year-old Indian boy, and the government has decided to take him away, believing that he should be with parents of his own race. But the couple has fallen for the boy, and they run off with him. The story dominates the papers, and false sightings (or are they?) of the trio become increasingly common as the book unfolds. The central events of Grasshopper are set in motion when Silver and Clodagh decide to find the fugitive family, and help them escape the country. We can guess–we are all but told–that things are not going to work out quite right.
    These disparate elements are sewn together by psychology, and as in all of Vine’s books, the psychology is basically airtight. Everyone is perfectly motivated to do surprising and risky things, and these motivations, usually consisting of prior incidents, are active mysteries, not just character details. Silver, for example, was kidnapped once as a child, and mysteriously found on a beach three days later. He has only vague memories of the three days. This event does compel him to help the fleeing family, with whom he identifies powerfully, but it is also a loose end that is–surprisingly–tied up before the book’s end. Every character in Grasshopper does double duty in this way; there are hidden layers of event and emotion that cause the plot to twist and ripple. The dynamic among the many characters in Silver’s apartment is also of great importance; this is a place where Rendell/Vine always shines, in these tiny societies of the young, with their byzantine rules and circumscriptions. Such groups of characters create the kind of insular, seeming inextricable circumstances that a great mystery needs; a reader finds himself begging the characters not to do what he knows they must do because of who they are and how they feel about one another.
    The book, like all of Vine’s, tugs at you from every direction; there are never fewer than five little mysteries going on at a time. Who kidnapped the young Silver? Where did Wim come from? Where has Liv hid the two thousand pounds? Where is the missing family? Who killed the woman found by the river? There are times when it would be a relief not to have to think of them, but Vine doesn’t let you rest; she reminds you constantly of the complexity of her own book. If that isn’t enough, she also seasons the text with flash-forwards, hints that Clodagh drops about what is to come. "For a while I had a feeling of hope, of optimism, but it was the last I was to have for a long time," we are told. "I was dissatisfied with my hiding place and I considered moving it. On Sunday, two days away, I was to wish I had." This seasoning can get a bit too strong at times: at one point the adult Clodagh is talking to Liv, whom she has discovered living in a mansion years after the book’s major events:
 

She sat down opposite me, showing knees that were smooth and rounded yet with that sharp angle at the patella that defines perfect legs. I realized, amused, that I’d seldom seen her legs before, not counting the night they were splashed all over with blood.

    Plenty of nice touches embellish Grasshopper. Vine writes strikingly about London as seen from the rooftops, about the pleasures of being an electrician, about people’s tics and vanities and foibles. Her layers of narrative intrigue, but never confound; at one point, the twenty-year-old Clodagh is telling Silver the story of the sixteen-year-old Clodagh, and all this is being told by the adult Clodagh, who is the creation of Barbara Vine, who is actually Ruth Rendell. Vine delights in this kind of play, and it is a hallmark of her books. Themes from other Vine novels return here; even the gigantic dollhouse from Anna’s Book (my favorite Vine, I think) appears here, and is rewired by Clodagh.
    The ending is a mixed bag, but largely satisfying. Not all the answers convinced me–or, rather, they were all too convincing, too much what the less refined portions of my imagination wanted them to be. And the resolution of Clodagh’s and Silver’s affair, which has its ups and downs throughout the book, strikes me as a bit cute. But there is always something of a letdown at the end of a mystery as complicated as this one; the pleasure is not in knowing the answers but in anticipating knowing them.
    In the end, every novel is a suspense novel. We read because we want to know what will happen, and which words will be used to tell us, and how they will make us feel. Good mysteries–and Vine’s books are good mysteries indeed–force the imagination to extend itself logically and psychologically. Herein lies the legitimacy of the form, and a good reason not to be ashamed of loving it. God knows I gave up feeling funny about loving Ruth Rendell long ago; it seems that Rendell has given up feeling funny about being Ruth Rendell, too. Her recent books show it: they are confident, thrilling, and provocative, the way literature ought to be.