Ruth Rendell
The Waters Lovely
Ismay is haunted by a recurring dream. In it she encounters the drowned
body of her stepfather, Guy, and her sister, Heather, in a wet dress, while
her mother, Beatrix, descends into madness.
But this is more than a dream or a nightmare: it really happened. What Ismay
doesn't know for sure is whether 13-year-old Heather drowned Guy in the bath
or whether it was an accident. No one in the family dares ask, because all
of them fear the truth. Ruth Rendell is the mistress of festering silence.
Fast-forward 10 years and the sisters are residing in the same house, now
divided into two self-contained flats. While Heather and Ismay live downstairs,
their schizophrenic mother endures a kind of half-life upstairs in the care
of her sister, Pamela.
It's a scenario worthy of Ibsen or Chekhov. Two sets of sisters representing
two different generations trapped by a shared past and by ties of mutual obligation
and secrets. How they manage to escape this trap, or not, is the primary theme
of this elegantly crafted chamber quartet.
Now in her mid 70s Baroness Rendell is still producing psychological
thrillers with twists in their tales. In 1964 she introduced Inspector Wexford.
In 1986 she branched out as Barbara Vine, writing books that were hardly crime
fiction at all, although a sort of crime generally figured. In the meantime,
she has regularly published distinctly different one-offs, of which The Water's
Lovely is the latest.
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