Abstract. The paper compares and contrasts Ruth Rendell’s Portobello to the author’s previous stand-alone psychological thrillers. It examines the novel’s prevailing themes and motifs, principal characters, plotlines and resolutions, and establishes that Rendell, while seemingly adhering to the subject matter of this strand of her writing, adopts a lighter, humorous approach which sets Portobello apart from the rest of her work and once again defies readers’ anticipations. The novel contains all the content ingredients expected of its author, but they are subjected to an almost parodic treatment which creates the impression that the writer has set out to break or subvert the rules of a subgenre in crime fiction established to a great extent by herself.

Резюме. Статията разглежда романа „Портобело” на Рут Рендъл в съпоставка с предишните психологически трилъри на писателката. Анализът на преобладаващите теми и мотиви, основните типажи, сюжетните нишки и развръзката им установява, че Рендъл, привидно придържайки се към специфичната за произведенията й тематика, прилага нов, хумористичен подход, който откроява този роман от останалите й и поднася поредна изненада на читателите й. „Портобело” съдържа всички очаквани от авторката елементи, подложени обаче на почти пародийна трактовка, която създава внушението, че Рендъл съзнателно нарушава или преобръща каноните на поджанр в криминалната литература, създаден до голяма степен от самата нея.  

Introduction. Obsessive compulsive behaviour, mental deterioration, arson, burglary, and murder: these would seem the typical makings of a Ruth Rendell psychological thriller, and they are all present in the author’s twenty-fourth – and for the time being latest – stand-alone novel, Portobello (2008). Readers familiar with Rendell’s work should feel on comfortably familiar ground, as for years she has tread basically the same thematic territory in her stories of suspense, though always seeking for new aspects of aberrant behaviour to explore. Portobello, however, while bearing the typical Rendell hallmarks of acute observation and adroit characterization, in a number of ways differs seriously from the author’s previous work, at times creating the impression that the writer may be set to depart in new artistic directions. The purpose of this paper is to examine these differences and investigate what makes Portobello less a typical Ruth Rendell novel than a subversion or mock-version of the by now established notion of a Rendellian psychological thriller.

Background on Rendell’s Thrillers. Ever since her first novel was published in 1964, Ruth Rendell has alternated between two strands of fiction when writing under her own name[1]: police procedurals featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford and non-series novels, novellas and short stories labelled psychological thrillers or suspense stories by critics, and invariably characterised as ‘disturbing’, ‘unsettling’ or ‘chilling’.

Portobello belongs to the latter strand of writing – which, incidentally, is not only Rendell’s preferred one, but also brought her the first of an impressive number of awards – and will be discussed here within its context.

Rendell’s stand-alone works revolve around crime (predominantly murder), but consistently break the rules of conventional crime fiction of both the ‘whodunit’ type and the ‘serial killer pursuit’ brand so popular in recent years. There is no ingenious detective to sift through a horde of suspects, and the police, if involved at all, are more often than not inept in their investigation attempts. Rather, these works are stories of crime waiting to happen, and the mystery for the reader is usually when it will happen, which direction it will come from, and who will be the unsuspecting victim. The major mystery, however, is what has brought about this crime, and what effect it will have on both the perpetrator and those unwittingly involved in it. Rendell’s thrillers are psychological because the problems they explore are problems of the mind – be it the deranged mind or the mind undergoing slow but steady deterioration. In fact, the author’s success to a great extent lies in her convincing portraits of psychopaths or, even more disturbingly, apparently sane people metamorphosing into psychopaths.

This thematic focus results in certain similarities in content and form in Rendell’s non-series works. Their characters, though frequently eccentric, are above all recognizable – people one can easily identify and occasionally even identify with – who, behind their public facades, often hide various forms of emotional disturbance. The setting, usually a particular area of London, is of considerable importance, as these people are nominally part of some small community. In reality, however, most of them live in isolation, and when their individual obsessions come to clash, madness breaks out and violence follows. Thus, a typical Rendell plot follows a number of seemingly independent storylines which eventually, thanks to some specific event, intersect to dire consequences, making for an atmosphere of increasing menace and allowing the author to explore subjects such as diseases and disorders, obsessions and delusions, dysfunctional families, class conflicts, alienation, isolation, and the general craziness of modern life.

The above characteristics, as already stated, are in a certain way present in Portobello, too, but it is the author’s specific treatment of them that makes this particular novel rather different from her previous stand-alone works.    

Characters and Storylines. Portobello follows three main storylines, and the characters or groups of characters they revolve around initially have nothing in common except their residential area – London’s Notting Hill, through which the road of the title runs. If it was not for one of them discovering a lost sum of money in the street, they would probably have remained – and preferred to remain – unaware of one another, but this event will make their paths cross.

        The one character who can be said to be truly central to the novel is middle-aged art-gallery owner Eugene Wren. Smart and sophisticated, Eugene is also a man with a secretive and addictive personality. Having managed to conquer alcoholism, heavy smoking, and overeating, he now has a new addiction which is also his greatest secret – and pondering what he can do or whether he can do anything at all about it is his greatest obsession.

        Welcome to Ruth Rendell-land. If there is one blanket theme to the writer’s overall body of work, and especially to her stand-alone psychological thrillers, that is obsession. Most often her characters fall victim to romantic obsessions, but not always: one recent Rendell novel has a protagonist obsessed by a glamorous fashion model, by the goal of attaining fame at any price, and by a historical serial killer whom he idolizes; various other works of hers feature characters obsessed with cleanliness, personal safety, memories of dead loved ones, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, works of art, household objects, and even crosswords. Whatever the particular form of obsession a Rendell character harbours, though, one thing is certain: sooner or later it will inevitably lead to destruction and death.

        In Portobello, however, the addiction Eugene Wren obsesses about is not only innocuous but borders on the ridiculous. When he finally succeeded in giving up smoking, Eugene gained weight because of his snacking between meals. Looking for a non-fattening alternative to these snacks, he found a sugar-free, low-calorie brand of sweets called Chocorange – to which he quickly became hopelessly addicted. The opening of the novel sees him on one of his regular weekend shopping expeditions, stocking up on small quantities of the sweet from different establishments lest the shopkeepers start suspecting his dependency. He keeps secret stashes of Chocorange in various hiding places at home; he thinks of each next pastille he pops into his mouth as his ‘fix’; he agonises that his neighbours, colleagues, and above all his fiancée, Ella, will discover his addiction; he progresses from trying to convince himself that his habit is harmless and perhaps even healthy to regarding it as absurd and humiliating, something one can never confess to in a candid interview, unlike smoking or alcoholism; and because he is soon to marry Ella, he knows he must try to give up Chocoranges, but his attempts at first quitting cold turkey and then phasing them out both prove futile – the sweets have become ‘the whole aim and purpose of his life, his controlling obsession, the demon he was in thrall to[2].’ (p.265)

        In other words, Eugene Wren has once again become a fully-fledged addict, and Ruth Rendell’s depiction of his addiction is gleefully detailed and utterly convincing – but, unlike the obsessions of characters in her previous works, it is neither disturbing nor frightening and is mostly played for comic effect. In fact, Eugene’s Chocorange-related antics and worries become increasingly farcical: at one point he even starts drinking before meetings to cover up the smell of the sweet on his breath, fully realising that this is an ironic reversal of common behaviour patterns. Knowledgeable readers have come to expect anything from Rendell, but even the most seasoned among them would find it hard to believe that good-natured, law-abiding Eugene’s preoccupation with his craving and its secrecy may lead to madness, mayhem or murder. ‘An addictive diet pill as a key plot device instead of a savage killing?’ asks one reviewer incredulously (Batten 2009).

Obviously not. But madness, mayhem and murder are precisely what one anticipates in a Ruth Rendell thriller, so here they must surely come from other quarters.

For reasons inexplicable even to himself, when Eugene finds an envelope filled with banknotes in the street, rather than take it to the police, he puts up a notice on a lamp-post inviting those who can name the exact sum to collect it. (Rendell says that sighting just such a notice in a London street gave her inspiration for the novel – Rendell 2010.) Two claimants come forward, the first of whom is Lance Platt – a young layabout who has lived his whole adult life on the dole (‘[n]o one wanted to employ him and now he had given up trying,’ p.28), and who is fixated with the idea of winning back his former girlfriend, Gemma. Now the latter would seem more like classic Rendell material: as noted above, obsessive love is frequently explored in the author’s work, and in her fictional world it seldom brings its bearer or its addressee anything but pain and misery, and often proves lethal. But then again, Lance’s dream of getting back together with Gemma is not based on the kind of crazy romantic delusion Rendell’s characters are usually afflicted by, but on a decidedly pragmatic motive – he would love to move back into her newly furnished council flat and out of his miserly, chain-smoking, born-again ex-con Uncle Gib’s decrepit house. And Gemma herself is neither the innocent/lost/damaged soul of previous Rendell works like Thirteen Steps Down, A Sight for Sore Eyes, and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, nor the predatory, calculating or downright criminal female of novels such as The Bridesmaid, The Face of Trespass, or The Lake of Darkness. Though already equipped with a new boyfriend, she has no objections to resuming intimate relations with Lance, only she would like them to take the form of a secret affair, as she has never had one: ‘It’s always been relationships everyone’s like known about. Boring, really. This way’ll be romantic.’ (p.118)

        The problem is, Gemma threw Lance out in the first place because the one time he struck her for commenting on his laziness she broke a tooth, and now her new boyfriend Fize and a lowlife pal of his are menacing Lance for money for an implant. Always strapped for cash and on the lookout for money-making schemes, Lance decides to resort to crime and, having rejected kidnapping cats as more difficult than expected, he turns aspiring burglar. While failing to pinpoint the exact sum Eugene Wren has found in the street, he does take advantage of their meeting to case out Eugene’s house and then burgle it. He then proceeds to make two forays into Eugene’s neighbour’s house while she is away on holiday.

        From this point on Ruth Rendell has great fun setting up Lance Pratt as possibly the world’s most hapless burglar. On leaving Eugene’s house with his loot, he is attacked and badly beaten up by Fize and Fize’s violence-inclined friends, who make away with the stolen goods. Ever-starved, during his first break-in at Eugene’s neighbour’s he falls upon a chocolate cake in her fridge and, like Hansel and Gretel, leaves a trail of crumbs in the house, making its owner later speculate that a poor hungry child must have been the intruder. His second visit to the same place proves more lucrative, but when he hands his pickings to his grandmother’s boyfriend for safe-keeping and then pawning, he gets blatantly cheated. Rendell lands one misfortune after another on Lance until his bumbling efforts start to resemble those of a doomed cartoon characters who is always getting punched in the face. And as it emerges that Lance is not destined for a brilliant criminal career, it becomes even clearer that no violence or murder will come by way of him – unless he is its victim. Events do seem to proceed in the latter direction, but Rendell yet again turns things around: when Fize and his friend Ian come to torch Uncle Gib’s house down, Lance for once is in luck, having chosen that particular night to go out and commit what will be his last burglary (and his uncle, fighting with an upset stomach in the outdoor toilet, also remains unscathed).        

        It follows from the above that any thrills and chills in Portobello should come from the novel’s third storyline – that of Joel Roseman, the second claimant for the envelope found by Eugene and its rightful owner. With Joel, things are definitely stranger than with the other characters in the book, and with him readers know almost immediately that they are on typical Ruth Rendell territory. Joel is a young man who feels comfortable only in the dark and is haunted by the accidental drowning of his little sister, which he inadvertently caused and which led to his father banning him from the family home. He also has a heart problem and during an operation for it undergoes, or believes he undergoes, a near-death experience; the only things is, when he comes back from the bright, sunny place which he visited during that experience and which he considers hell rather than heaven, he is accompanied by one of its inhabitants, the fair-haired angel Mithras. Mithras may or may not be a grown-up version of Joel’s imaginary friend from childhood Jasper, but he certainly takes up residence with Joel – though invisible to anyone else – and starts talking to him in his head.

Any reader familiar with Rendell’s short story ‘Divided We Stand’ or her novel Adam and Eve and Pinch Me will at this point hear warning bells ringing loud, as the imaginary friend of the former work and the ghostly voices of the latter take the respective protagonists on a harrowing descent from madness to murder. What is different about Joel’s situation is that, unlike those protagonists, he seems quite aware that Mithras’s presence does not bode well: having read his share of pop psychology, he expects that Mithras may eventually ‘tell him that certain people he knew were his enemies and perhaps they would kill him if he didn’t kill them first,’ although ‘[t]his didn’t happen or hadn’t happened yet.’ (p.108) However, despite clearly feeling uncomfortable about having Mithras around, Joel to a great extent actually exploits him for the purpose of social interaction and as a means of enlivening his tedious, solitary, lightless life. On reclaiming his lost money, Joel meets Eugene Wren’s doctor girlfriend Ella, has her sign him on as her private patient and, from that point on, updates her on Mithras’s visitations at every possible instance. When Ella disbelievingly refuses to break up her engagement and move in with him, as he asks her to do, he exploits the subject of Mithras to make her feel queasy: having read in a newspaper that scientists have found a way to breed schizophrenic mice, he taunts her, ‘If they have delusions, these mice, what do you think they hear? Strange squeaks telling them to do bad things? Telling them to kill other mice? What about hallucinations? Do you think they see sabre-toothed cats, big as tigers?’ (p.136) Soon afterwards, he informs the red-haired psychiatrist Ella has referred him to that Mithras has started telling him to kill people with red hair, because ‘When demons are incarnated their hair turns red.’ (p.183) All the time, though, Joel knows he says these things because he has read that this is how schizophrenics behave, and because ‘It would be quite interesting to act the part of a schizophrenic, like a kind of hobby. Joel had never had a hobby of any sort.’ (p.184) At points the reader even wonders whether Mithras is not a deliberate, pragmatic invention of Joel’s to assert his confused self and get back at the outside world.  

Whatever Mithras’s place in Joel’s mind, he – and through him, Joel – is the only character in the novel generating any real sense of unease, and Ruth Rendell expertly mines him for all the narrative tension he can provide: the reader is constantly faced with the question of what Mithras will ultimately make Joel do, and to whom. That Joel’s mental state deteriorates throughout the novel is inarguable, yet Rendell manages once again to subvert expectations and in the end neither has Joel killed, nor has him kill anyone. His downing of a handful of sedatives at one point is, he tells Ella, not an attempt to kill himself, but to recreate his near-death experience and take Mithras back to where he belongs. Or is it just an attention-getting device? Rendell is too clever to provide clear-cut answers, but what matters is that the attempt fails and Joel and Mithras live on.

Others are not so lucky.

Murder Most Incidental.  Murder does eventually happen in Portobello – and happens twice, at that. The two murders which take place in the second half of the novel, however, are certainly not the type of murder one has come to expect from a Ruth Rendell thriller, nor are they made use of for the author’s usual artistic purposes.

Rendell, who has made a highly successful career by writing, over four decades and a half, books about or at least featuring murder, has commented repeatedly that she is not interested in the act itself or in the various ways in which it can be committed. ‘It is the impetus to murder, the passions and terrors which bring it to pass and the varieties of feeling surrounding the act that make of a sordid or revolting event compulsive fascination,” the writer states in the introduction to her Anthology of the Murderous Mind (Rendell 1996). It is precisely the murderous mind that all her previous psychological thrillers probe into, exploring it before, during and after the act, and investigating the impact of that act on the minds of those it affects. This is why the main characters in her non-series works are either killers, practicing or potential (some of whom, like the protagonists of A Demon in My View and The Rottweiler, try to analyse or even curb their lethal urges), or the living victims of these killers. This is also why her narratives are usually driven by the painful exploration or dissection of damaged mental and emotional states.

Not so in Portobello. The novel does explore the peculiar mental states of its principal characters, but they are neither the perpetrators of its murders nor are to any great extent affected by them. The murders, in fact, though quite logical as plot developments, are more or less incidental and are committed by and upon characters who can at best be said to be peripheral. When Gemma’s boyfriend Fize and his hoodlum friend Ian burn down Lance’s uncle’s house, the only victim their act claims is a Romanian immigrant who has recently taken up lodgings there – a quickly sketched character whose sole function in the novel seems to be to allow Rendell to comment on the mundanity of crime among the underclass, and to briefly set up Lance as a suspect. The only person on whom this murder has any real emotional effect is Fize, a background character himself, who develops a guilty conscience when Lance is arrested, tries to persuade Ian that they should confess to the police, and in the ensuing fight gets stabbed. The impetus to murder in both these crimes is self-evident and provides no interesting ground for psychological investigation on the part of Rendell. As one reviewer notes, the violent events in Portobello are ‘simultaneously at the forefront and background. They force their way through into people's lives as they would otherwise normally go about their business. They have their effects on the few but not the many, even among the characters concerned.’ (Walker 2008) In other words, the murders in this particular novel are not, as in previous Rendell thrillers, presented as horrifying events that will deeply scar its protagonists, but rather as everyday happenings that should not really surprise one in the modern world. Especially on Portobello: in this novel of Rendell’s, ‘they come woven much more into the finer tapestry of Portobello life than they would in any other of her novels.’ (Walker 2008)

Portobello is the title of this novel by Ruth Rendell, and Portobello life is in fact what it is actually about, much more so than about crime and its consequences. For years, critics have lauded the sense of place Rendell conveys in her work, and have noted her fascination with recreating in loving detail various pockets of London. (‘Years from now, an aspiring cartographer may attempt a map of 20th century London using only Ruth Rendell's novels as a reference point,’ as one critic puts it – Taylor 2004.) Certain of the city’s areas have featured prominently in her previous works, like Regent’s Park in The Keys to the Street, within whose confines disparate lives are drawn together and a series of brutal murders occur, or Notting Hill again with its infamous 10 Rillington Place, where a celebrity-crazed young man seeks inspiration from the home of real-life serial strangler Reginald Christie (Thirteen Steps Down). Never before, however, has the writer titled a work after a particular region, and never before has setting come to function as prime character in her narratives.

Portobello opens and ends with Portobello Road, and it dominates the lives of the human characters, central or secondary, in more ways than they are aware of. Eugene Wren, Lance Pratt and Joel Roseman may now meet for the first time because of a dropped envelope of cash, but unknown to them, their way of life was to a great extent determined decades ago, by their forebears’ dealings on the Portobello market. Rendell describes the road as a living organism – a centipede, its legs its side streets – which is ‘vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy […], bizarre and splendid’, and with a ‘spice of danger’ which makes it both fascinating and fearsome: ‘There is nothing safe about the Portobello, nothing suburban.’ (p.2) And just as you can purchase anything you can imagine from its market stalls, the novel seems to imply, so can you expect anything to happen in its environs: love, madness, murder, comedy and tragedy are simply part of its life process, as are the people to whom they happen. The narrative tension in the novel arises not only from the disparate personalities that come into forced interplay, but from the constant presence of this snaking road along which their fates cross, ‘instill[ing] an undercurrent of unease from start to finish, rather as if you are wandering through the market-place of an unfamiliar town, expecting to have your pockets picked.’ (Jorgensen 2008)

And at the end of the day, no matter what events have taken place and who has survived and who has not, the important thing is that ‘in the deep of the night all is silent while the centipede street draws breath and prepares for another day.’ (p.278) Portobello lives on – and this must account for the overall atypical conclusion which Ruth Rendell gives her novel.  

Happy Days? With Rendell, one has come to expect the unexpected, as in the unconventional. Murder hardly ever goes unpunished, but it is moral judgment and poetic, not formal justice that the author usually delivers. Few remain unscathed by the consequences of murder, which in Rendell’s world indiscriminately touches and harms all, and happy endings are not the rule. Obsessions are not conquered but are at the most exposed or unwillingly faced, often leaving protagonists in a heightened state of anxiety and readers with a greater feeling of unease. Love, as a fickle force, is very rarely requited, and romantic delusions are either cruelly shattered or drive their bearers deranged. Overall, life is not fair and Rendell, acknowledged master of the sly plot twist, frequently reserves a sting in the tail for the very ending of a story (which is particularly true of her two thrillers preceding Portobello, Thirteen Steps Down and The Water’s Lovely). Adjectives which have been used for her plotline resolutions range from ‘dark’ and ‘grim’ to ‘malicious’ and even ‘spiteful’.        

Given all of the above, Portobello really surprises in its denouement.

Eugene Wren’s fiancée Ella finally discovers his addiction and confronts him with it. In a state of shock at having his secret revealed, Eugene, to Ella’s disbelief and dismay, breaks up the relationship, cancels their wedding and sinks into depression. Mental distress leads to physical instability and he goes down with a two-week flu – during which, he amazedly realizes on recovery, he has not once thought of Chocoranges. The addiction has passed, but not his love for Ella – a feeling which is reciprocated. The air is cleared, the two get together again, the wedding takes place and, in the last pages of the novel, they are happily awaiting a baby.

Eugene and Ella’s reunion will be of great service to Lance Pratt, as their joint recollections will provide him with an alibi and clear him as a suspect in the arson/murder case. With Fize dead and gone, Lance can now go back to Gemma, on whose insistence he even gets a job, even if under the minimum wage (‘which is illegal, but [the owner] tells Lance that if he doesn’t like it there will be plenty of people from Romania and Bulgaria who will,’ p.276). Fize’s friend and murderer Ian is eventually arrested, but Lance’s burglaries go forever undetected and he and Gemma can play happy families.

Even Lance’s cranky Uncle Gib gets a better deal out of everything that has transpired. He now has money, from the insurance on his burnt-down house, and a new home and family, having moved in with his best friend’s widow. When last seen in the novel, Uncle Gib is contemplating proposing marriage.

And Joel Roseman? He is no more – for he has become Mithras and ‘seems to be happier in his new identity than he ever was as himself’ (p.277). With his bleached hair, his recently acquired love of the light and his new sunny personality, his father has decided he can take him back. The dysfunctional family has started functioning again, and Joel/Mithras’s parents no longer feel embarrassment when their son talks of ‘the city from which he is a wistful exile, its towers glittering in the sun, its wide boulevards and its white walls on which angels sit and gaze at the broad shining river.’ (p.277)       

‘Rendell's sensibility lies somewhere between the Gothic and the very sick joke,’ writes critic Charles Taylor (Taylor 2004). Rendell’s works, in fact, have often been laced with a strong vein of humour, but it has basically been humour of the bleakest, blackest kind. Only in the last few years, with novels such as Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, The Rottweiler, Thirteen Steps Down and The Water’s Lovely, has the author displayed a decidedly more playful comic tone, making her thrillers read like tragicomedies of very bad manners. This tone, however, only sets off the darkness of her subject matter in these titles – psychosexual aberrations, rape, incest, serial killing, religious fanaticism etc. – and brings their stories to the nasty-surprise endings mentioned above.    

Rendell’s choice of resolution for the Joel/Mithras personality split in Portobello is certainly a joke – as already noted, it would hardly be a Ruth Rendell novel without at least one such twist – but calling it ‘sick’ would be going too far. Darkly ironic it may be, but it not only keeps the character alive, but also gives him a sense of happiness which, no matter how fragile or illusionary, is rarely allowed Rendell’s characters. And the rest of Portobello’s cast, excluding the incidental murder victims who are treated more or less as collateral damage, of course, seem to fare surprisingly well.     

References:

Atkins 2008: L. Atkins. Folks that Live on the Hill. The Sunday Times, 23 November 2008; Culture, p.55.

Batten 2009: J. Batten. A Downright Perky Rendell. The Toronto Star, 8 March 2009, p.IN07.

Jorgensen 2008: C. Jorgensen. Fiction: Books. The Courier Mail, 6 December 2008, Section: Etc., p.22.

Rendell 1996: R. Rendell. Anthology of the Murderous Mind. Vintage, Random House, London.

Rendell 2008: R. Rendell. Portobello. Hutchinson, London.

Rendell 2010: R. Rendell. Xtra Diary: My characters sometimes try to take over a plot and I have to crush them. West End Extra, http://www.westendextra.com/news/2010/may/xtra-diary-crime-novelist-ruth-rendell

Petit 2008: C. Petit. Saturday Review: Crime: The Dropped Wallet.. The Guardian, 29 November 2008; Section: Guardian Review Pages, p.11.

Shilling 2008: J. Shilling. Fiction: Portobello, by Ruth Rendell. The Sunday Telegraph, 7 December 2008; Section: Seven, p.51.

Taylor 2004: C. Taylor. Woman with a Loaded Gun. http://www.powells.com/review/2004_12_03.html

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