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Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter - a beautiful, leggy, married woman named Hebe - the two become lovers obsessed with their trysts, spiced up by what the newspapers like to call "adventure sex." It's the dress-up and role-play that inspire Ivor to create a surprise birthday present for his beloved that involves a curbside kidnapping. It's all intended as mock-dangerous foreplay, but then things take a dark turn. After things go horribly wrong, Ivor begins to receive anonymous letters that reveal astonishingly specific details about the affair and its aftermath. Somehow he must keep his role from being uncovered - and his political future from being destroyed by scandal. Like a heretic on the inquisitor's rack, Ivor is not to be spared the exquisitely slow and tortuous unfolding of events, as hints, nuances, and small revelations lay his darkest secrets hideously bare for all the world to see. The Birthday Present is a deft, insightful, and compulsively readable exploration of obsessive desire - and the dark twists of fate that can shake the lives of even those most insulated by privilege, sophistication, and power. From the Hardcover edition.… (more)
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The police investigation after the accident comes to the conclusion that Hebe is the victim of mistaken identity. There is no linking at the time between Ivor and Hebe although there are those who know bits of the truth. For the moment Ivor's meteoric rise in Parliament is unchecked, even when his next girlfriend is the the former lover of the other passenger in the car, who was also killed. But five years later things start to unravel.
The main narrator of THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT is Rob, Ivor's brother in law. I actually found him a very annoying narrator, taking far too long to spill the beans, parsimonious with the truth. He is telling the story retrospectively, there is no doubt that the whole story is all over, but he goes about it in an exasperatingly long winded fashion.
There is a secondary narrator, Jane, Hebe's girlfriend, the source of her alibis when Hebe, a married woman with one child, has an assignation with Ivor. Jane has a sense of foreboding and keeps records on sheets of paper which she keeps in a shoebox in her flat.
There was a point about 70 pages from the end when I wondered why I was still reading THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT. There is a lot of minutiae that feels like the basic story is being padded out. I think perhaps it would have made a good short story or even a novella, and I understand that Barbara Vine wanted to explore the intertwining of relationships between the characters, but I think she really milked this scenario for all it was worth. There's a lot of detail supplied by Rob, in keeping with his pedantic longwindedness, about his family, his children, and how he and his wife Iris are devoted to Ivor. The second narrator Jane, a rather unstable character, similarly supplies details about her relationship with Hebe, and then later with Hebe's widowed husband.
Ivor
I love how Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell weaves murder and insight into the human psyche together.
The story is told from two points of view: Ivor’s brother-in-law Robyn; and Hebe’s best friend Jane, a sad, pathetic, obsessive, and mostly deluded librarian (she’s a classic Vine character) who provides Hebe with an alibi while she’s out at her trysts with Ivor. Jane is easily the best character of the bunch; at once, you feel sorry for her and revulsion at the things she thinks and says. The real strength of the novel, however, lies in the psychological suspense, which kept me interested the whole way through.
There are a couple of things that seemed anachronistic to me, however (would an unemployed woman with no money have owned a cell phone in the early 1990s?), and the ending is a bit predictable. And for people who aren’t really into politics, Vine does get a bit into the subject here. The Birthday Present isn’t quite as good as, say, The House of Stairs or The Minotaur, but it comes very close.
My only gripe is that I was expecting the plot to live up to the standard of the writing. OK so there were some moments of drama along the way, but I was expecting some hidden fact to emerge, someone to be other than what they seemed, or in some way to be surprised close to the end, whereas in reality it was a case of starting on a high and coasting gently downhill to a tame conclusion.
I very much like Barbara Vine and this is precisely why.
The weakness of the novel is that after a promising start it never comes together in any sort of satisfying manner. The ending is essentially stated at the opening of the novel and the unfolding of the events leading to it contain little in the way of surprise or a satisfying conclusion. Still, it remains interesting to the very end -- although some of that comes from the expectation that Rendell/Vine is going to deliver something different than what she ultimately did deliver.
The weakness of the novel is that after a promising start it never comes together in any sort of satisfying manner. The ending is essentially stated at the opening of the novel and the unfolding of the events leading to it contain little in the way of surprise or a satisfying conclusion. Still, it remains interesting to the very end -- although some of that comes from the expectation that Rendell/Vine is going to deliver something different than what she ultimately did deliver.
Although Barbara Vine's novels are quieter than those written under Ruth Rendell's name, they are equally filled with
Compared to her other books, the end dragged on a little longer than usual and longer than necessary.
Ivor arranges a birthday present for Hebe, an ‘adventure sex’ episode that goes horribly wrong. The story unfolds from two separate viewpoints, first Ivor’s friend and brother-in-law and then that of Jane, Hebe’s best friend and the person who provided her with alibis to cover her absences from her family. Jane’s version comes in the form of diary entries. I actually found Jane to be the most interesting person in the book, very much a Barbara Vine character, solitary, lonely, bitter and self-pitying.
Although not a bad book, I ended up being slightly disappointed with The Birthday Present, it didn’t seem to have any deep psychological statements to make and compared to other Barbara Vine books that I have read in the past, this one was lacking. I thought the author could have explored the theme of ‘adventure sex’ in a more exciting way, instead this book was rather dreary, sad and unsurprising.
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823.914 |