Not altering when it alteration finds
Harriet Waugh
GOING WRONG by Ruth Rendell Hutchinson, f12.95, pp. 250 LONGSHOT by Dick Francis
Michael Joseph, f13.99, pp. 277
Going Wrong, Ruth Rendell's new Psychological thriller, is about obsessive love and how it can, while the person suffering it plods along in a seemingly rational manner, turn dangerous and bad.
Guy Curren, one-time teenage gang- leader around Notting Hill, then protect- ion racketeer, drug dealer and now at the age of 29 a respectable yuppie business- man, is in love with Leonora Chisholm. They first met in the Portobello Road when she was 11 and he was 14, and Guy has never wavered in his devotion since that time. He is very proud of the fact. He does have another girlfriend but this is only because Leonora is so difficult about admitting that they are meant for one another. As a teenager, Leonora had said, I am Guy and you are Leonora', and for Guy that is the truth. Leonora is nice, quite pretty, fairly intelligent, family-orientated and middle- class. From the age of 11 and until she went to university she was attracted to Guy's streetwise working-class style. Since then she has outgrown him and, most import- antly, acquired a boyfriend. It is at this point that the novel opens. She allows Guy to take her out for lunch every Saturday. Guy rings her every day, more often if he cannot get hold of her. Her friends and relations resent him on her behalf. Guy and Leonora have nothing in common; he would like to dress her in wonderful clothes, take her to expensive restaurants and on luxurious holidays. She does not care for clothes, is vegetarian, practically teetotal, mildly socialist and (although I may have made this up) a unilateral disarmer.
Leonora has a pretty awful mother and brother and because of them Guy decides to believe that Leonora really loves him but has been persuaded to give him up because her snobbish family may have found out that he used to push drugs. He discounts anything she says that does not fit the picture he wants to believe. When Leonora introduces him to her fiancé, William, Guy's paranoia turns dangerous.
Ruth Rendell's last novel as Barbara Vine, Gallowglass, dwelt on much the same theme, only the character living the fantasy of requited love 'if only' was more innately unbalanced than Guy and the action was seen through the eyes of some- one else whose sense of reality was also pretty hazy. Unfortunately, that novel unravelled badly at the end. Going Wrong, however, has a narrower focus and is far more convincingly realised. Like Live Flesh, in which the reader enters the mind of a rapist, everything is seen through Guy's eyes, but at the same time it is possible to interpret what is really happen- ing while Guy is going off at a wicked and dangerous tangent. This is an emotionally cool novel (there is no real knife-edge to it), but Ruth Rendell is back on form and this is her best book for some time.
Dick Francis's Longshot is very good indeed. Its particularly likeable hero, John Kendell, is a one-time travel writer who has produced a series of books on how to survive in jungles and deserts. His first novel is now about to be published and when the story opens he is starving in a chilly garret writing his second. Cold and hunger drive him to accept an unexpected commission to ghost the autobiography of an eccentric but good-hearted, well-known racehorse trainer called Tremayne Vick- ers. When Kendell arrives in Berkshire it turns out that not all is happy down at the stables. For one thing, a stable girl who disappeared the previous winter is found murdered in some woods nearby, and for another there are considerable tensions in the neighbourhood.
A brilliant but violent amateur jockey, who rides for the stables, gets off on a charge of manslaughter for the killing of a young girl at a party. But was it really murder? Then there is a very nearly successful attempt to murder a particularly amiable character, only thwarted just in time by Kendell. After this, John begins to suspect that his survival books (which are doing the rounds of the neighbourhood) are being used for an unexpectedly deadly purpose: the laying of traps. As a consequ- ence of his own meddling in country matters, John finds himself facing a chilling and grotesque attempt on his life.
The satisfactory thing about detective stories is that wrongs are righted, after a
fashion, and the moral code is reinforced. Longshot is an exceptionally well-plotted novel with convincing characters, a strong elegiac feeling for the countryside and horses, and is also truly exciting.
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