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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't take any notice of me, 22 Feb 2004
If there is one thing you can be sure of when reading these reviews, it is that they are usless. As much as I love reading them, to guage some sense of opinion on books I've read, they are largely useless, and that is hardly more clear than in this case. As soon as you get one star reviews and five star reviews for the same book, there's no point judging a book by them. All they tell you is that some people hate it, some love it. And that your opinion will also fall between those two points. The only reasonable path left open to you is to try the book, see what your own opinion of it is. Mine is that this book is excellent. But, so many people disagree -even though others agree - that that opinion is largely pointless here.I've read all Rendell's novels, every single one (well, apart form the elusive novella, "Heartstones", which I still pursue avidly) and they have all been of such incredible quality that I am left stunned. I felt the same here. Adam And Eve And Pinch Me is a beautiful portrait of twisted minds, a remarkable exmination of colliding worlds, with results of destruction and catastrophe. The Paddington trrain crash alluded to here is a brilliant metaphor for Rendell's own work. The lives of her characters crash; they go disastrously off the rails, and they even endanger the lives of the others around them in doing so. Kinks in the metal, the mind, send them down paths of disaster and death. It's a book peopled with fascinting - yet not always likeable - characters that make the reading speed along. As always, the psychological pictures she paints are realistic, disturbing, unsettling, and grippingly compelling. This is not only a book about going off the rails, but of the sometimes catastrophic results of what happens when a person's mental delusions (in this instance Minty's belief that she sees the ghost of her "dead" lover Jock) collide with the true reality. The supernatural elements are mixed with the detached realism to create an effective, unnerving juxtaposition. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is, actually, my second-favourite of all Rendell's many many titles. This is clearly in contrast to some other people's opinions... I found it a riveting, engaging picture of madness, a wondeful example of Rendell's greatest fiction. Once again, too, Rendell has created a novel entirely different from any other she has written. I applaud.
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by Ruth Rendell
by Ruth Rendell
by Ruth Rendell
by Ruth Rendell
