A Novelist’s Profound Discourse on Human Suffering

This was my first foray into the writing of Ruth Rendell, who now apparently publishes under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, and I was affected to the core by what some reviewers call her finest work. She takes the story of an outwardly successful family—a popular British author, his two beloved daughters, his caring wife—and forges a mystery so infused with sadness and psychological trauma that it can leave no reader unscathed.
Gerald Candless is an imposing figure of a man—deep-voiced and towering, with leonine features and the ability to charm– who lives in a sprawling cliff-top house in Essex, England with his wife Ursula. He has produced nearly a score of novels, most of them highly popular and successful, and he is worshipped by his two adult daughters, Sarah and Hope. When Candless dies of a heart attack at age 71, Sarah undertakes to write her father’s memoir at the behest of his publisher, and discovers to her shock that he had assumed the name Candless and created a new identity for himself at age 25. Everything before that is a void.
Vine successfully gives us the perspectives of wife and daughter Sarah in alternating chapters, and long before we begin to penetrate the mystery along with Sarah, we discover that Candless was a cruel husband who married Ursula as his child-bearer, later to be relegated to housekeeper and typist of his manuscripts. He either denigrated or ignored Ursula throughout their long marriage, and—cruelest of all–stole her daughters from her by rearing them single-handedly, showering them with love and praise, and turning their mother invisible in their eyes. In Vine’s masterly hands, we experience Ursula’s initial confusion, her loss, her pain, her anger, even as we wonder at her passivity. Both daughters are psychologically and emotionally damaged by their father’s obsessive attentions, and we see that damage played out repeatedly throughout the book.
The reader slowly puts together pieces of the puzzle that is Candless along with Sarah, and lots of the “clues” that have been woven into the narrative from the beginning suddenly start popping up, creating the classic “ah ha!” moments. But it is not until the last dozen or so pages that the final stunning revelation occurs and we see Candless with new eyes. A classic tragedy, beautifully crafted.