I’m concerned with the lost the lonely the shy she says
Posted in General on 10. Aug, 2010
“I’m concerned with the lost, the lonely, the shy,” she says. Yet he has also meant something very important to people, and we learn that even to those he has wronged he has also done, in his own way, good. His kind of samizdat is maybe what every truly moral and audacious writer has to practise, and Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, and contemplating her own career and achievements, must have had this in mind while creating this ambitious novel.Meeting her, you feel no whiff of the macabre. Gerald has made his wife, to use her own words, “deeply unhappy”, and has smothered his daughters in a love with neurotic roots. But one can say, while spoiling nothing, that the novel compels readers to re-examine their ideas about honesty in art. Gerald Candless lives a deliberate lie, his novels both traffic in and are nurtured by that lie, yet they are – as the summaries and quotations reveal – instruments of truth, bringers of light.
So she must find out who he really was.His novels could, if properly read, offer clues – in their plots, choice of characters, recurrent symbols, and sequence. But dictating these – and intrusive into all the lives of those connected with him – is that existence of the writer’s before his self-metamorphosis, and the emotions involved.Such is the tension engendered by the quest for the man behind Gerald Candless, such is the careful and elaborate nature of the plotting, culminating in the desolation of the episode in the past with which the book ends, that it would be wrong to give away more of the plot. Gerald Candless was not even Gerald Candless, that being not merely an assumed but a borrowed name. After inconsistencies and untruths in the story of his life as he has presented it have become undeniable, Sarah in particular realises that he quite literally was not the man they’d believed him to be. He dies before this of a heart attack (the result of a chance glimpse of someone from his past), thus bringing Sarah and Hope the shock and distress that, ironically, a less considerate father would have spared them.Further shocks and distress are in store. Such is Gerald’s anxiety that life should be as untroubled for his daughters as possible that he hides from them the fact that he is shortly to undergo bypass surgery.
But this I knew I must, it was so horrifying.”Gerald Candless is a novelist of considerable standing, critical and popular, living in an isolated house on a superbly rendered North Devon coast, with his wife, Ursula His two daughters, Sarah and Hope, regularly visit him. “It actually derives from a story a friend – the novel’s dedicatee, Patrick Maher – told me. People are always telling me stories, of course, and suggesting that I make something out of them, but never before this have I felt I wanted to use one. Especially where these relate to questions of sexual fulfilment: “I very much like writing about homosexual relations I don’t quite know why. Perhaps it’s because I feel there’s still so much to be said about them.” Another reason – and certainly The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy would suggest it – is that homosexuality exists often in defiance of both social and individual wishes, and at variance with much conscious programming.”The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy began differently from any previous book I’d written,” she reveals. No Night Is Too Long (1994), for example – possibly the most suspenseful of the nine – is unimaginable told in any other voice but young Tim Cornish’s, with his sexual ambivalence and his literary ambitions.