The Birthday Present [Kindle Edition]

The best writers of psychological-type thrillers use both inner and external knowledge to set the scene of their chosen story and this kind of thing is what Ruth Rendell, in her Barbara Vine persona, does best. Now Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE, Labour Party Peer in the House of Lords, gives us the cleverly created tale of a fictional Conservative Minister with some unconventional sexual tastes. It is the end of the Thatcher years as the novel opens, and the Conservative Party is riven by sleaze and corruption, but the country is about to return a precarious Tory Government under John Major, and the sleaze is about to get worse.

Weaving the fictional story of Ivor Tesham MP with incidents connected to the IRA campaign and press scandals of a similar ilk to those which led to the 1997 Labour landslide, Vine builds a tension-filled plot related to Tesham's penchant for kinky sex with his mistress, Hebe Furnal. For her birthday present he pays two men to enact an "adventure sex" abduction. Hebe will be bundled into a car, blindfolded, tied up and delivered to a pre-arranged location. Then it all goes horribly wrong. There is a car crash and the only survivor is Dermot Lynch, the driver of the car, but he is in a coma.

I was initially engaged by this scenario, especially as the plot thickened, and was even able to feel a measure of sympathy for Tesham, whose only crime seems to be trying to keep his part in the abduction secret so that his career does not suffer. His coldness and arrogance was not endearing, but those around him, his sister and her husband (the narrators of much of the book), his new girlfriend Juliet, Dermot Lynch's brother Sean, Hebe's best friend, Jane, who has provided alibis for Hebe on a regular basis, Hebe's husband, and a window-cleaner called Stu, all have awkward connections which are going to play out in the finale of this rather unhappy story. This is not one of Vine's best books, but it is well written, credible and engaging.

After more than three years, Ruth Rendell's alter ego Barbara Vine finally makes her long-awaited return with this, her thirteenth novel. 'The Birthday Present' is set during the political upheavals of the early 1990s, with Margaret Thatcher about to be ousted from power and John Major waiting in the wings, while the IRA are still waging their campaign against the British government and the tabloids are full of sleazy scandals involving Tory MPs. Ivor Tesham, an up-and-coming government minister, has a taste for exotic and risky sexual adventures, but finds himself in serious trouble when his mistress is accidentally killed whilst tied up and gagged on the way to one of their trysts. The novel follows the fallout from her death, with Ivor increasingly desperate to avoid exposure as his career advances while his deceased mistress's friend is on his trail, out to get what she can from him.

As with the other Vine novels, this is not crime fiction per se; rather it's a psychological study of people who keep dangerous secrets, the unforseen and devastating effects they can have on the lives of everyone they touch and the lengths they will go to in order to make sure the secrets stay buried. Both Ivor Tesham and Jane Atherton (the mistress's friend) are flawed, desperate individuals - the kind of characters that Barbara Vine excels at creating. While there is no real mystery as such to be uncovered, there is still a real frisson of tension as events begin to spin out of control; we know disaster is imminent, but where will it come from and what will the consequences be?

No doubt readers with right-wing sympathies will object to the depiction of Tory MP Tesham or some other imagined slight but in reality Rendell is pretty even-handed; she resists the temptation to preach her own political views and, despite being a Labour peer, doesn't make Tesham into a complete monster, as she so easily could have done. In fact, it's a credit to her skill that I was surprised to find even I felt some sympathy for the man by the novel's end, however much I wanted to hate him on principle. In terms of his background and certain aspects of his personalityTesham is typical of a type that still dominates the Conservative Party today, but he is in no way a caricature.

All in all, this is a gripping, thought-provoking read which I enjoyed more than the two previous Vine novels ('The Blood Doctor' and 'The Minotaur'), good as they were. On a final positive note, it does no harm for us to be reminded that when it comes to scandal and hypocrisy, the Tories have always been in a league of their own.

The Birthday Present is Ruth Rendell's 13th novel writing as
Barbara Vine,and is set during the tail-end of Thatcher's
government.It concerns an ambitious rising star in her government,
who is also something of a philanderer with 'lively' sexual
preferences.He arranges a birthday present for his lover,an
attractive young married woman,which consists in arranging for
her to be kidnapped,gagged and bound,and delivered to his sister's
residence.Things do not go to plan,and the tense plot involves
cover-ups and subterfuge until a few years later much of the truth
is revealed with dire consequences.
Whilst this is a gripping tale,full of suspense,superbly written
and constucted,and well worth reading ,for me it lacked the
consummate psychological acuity of the very best of Barbara Vine.