Ruth Rendell - A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999)
A Sight for Sore Eyes is one of those crime novels that are also literature. It's a grim contemporary fairytale about corrupted beauty; a twisted yet beautiful love-story about two damaged people gradually moving together, with catastrophic consequences.
I had read several of Rendell's books before I came to this several years ago, but this was the first one I fell I love with. Normally, whenever anyone says "I couldn't put it down," that's just a stock sentence to convey some sense of the quality of the book; they don't actually mean that they physically couldn't put the book down. True cases are very very rare indeed, and they have little to do with physicality.
Sometimes, though, books like this do come along, which cause you suddenly to realize it's five in the morning and you should have slept long ago. In these cases, you and the book have actually melded, briefly, into a whole. The book is an extension of the self, so remarkable as to almost seem forged in the mind, to seem, perhaps, to be only created as you are reading it. This is such a book. A book that is so gripping, whose universe is so totally convincing that you, in a sense, become it, to the ignorance of all other external stimuli.
A Sight for Sore Eyes is the story of the lives of a group of people, most notably Francine Hill -- who was in the house while her mother was shot by a man at the door, and who hid in a cupboard, only coming out to discover the bloodied body -- and Teddy Grex -- a young man who comes from a squalid, loveless family, who reveres aesthetic things, beautiful objects and fine craftsmanship, and tends to ignore the fact that other people exist around him. And while, after his parents' deaths, Teddy lives in a world of almost unlimited freedom, Francine is virtually imprisoned by her obsessive, over-protective stepmother Julia. From childhood, they grow into young adulthood, and the two damaged souls somehow find each other, with traditionally Rendellian consequences.
This book is remarkable. It's one of those books that words to describe simply don't exist for. If you are a Rendell fan already, I don't know why you haven't already bought this. If you are new, this is probably a great place to start. It is a beautifully twisted, complex and resonant piece of work, and it displays all her talents: her sharp, ironic, Austen-esque wit; her ability to construct plots which mesh in with one another in a way that leaves your jaw dropped in admiration; her ability to draw a cast of wholly human characters, some of whom are dangerously damaged; and her ability to make the skewed logic of those damaged characters seem so perfectly plausible. Her prose style is so tempered, so plain yet beautiful, that she can convince the reader of anything she wants. We would believe, implicitly, anything she tells us.
The story moves at such a suspenseful pace the characters collide like comets. There are wonderful touches, here; for example, in one of the final scenes the beautiful diamond ring which Teddy's mother found in a pub lavatory in the 70's, and served as their engagement ring, ends up once again lost and forgotten on the basin in a pub lavatory 30 years later. It is simple, but it's beguiling, wondrous touches like this, of bringing the story of the character's full circle, that make the book sparkle so. There's something bizarre and twisted about it all (especially the remarkably creepy ending!), yes, but there is also something magical and beautiful lying in the ruins of the character's psyches: something that glints like bloodstone, something that could be salvaged.
I've said very little of all that could be about A Sight for Sore Eyes, but there is simply not enough space to expound upon the brilliance of this book. Too, there aren't really enough adjectives -- excellent, brilliant, etc -- to do it justice. It's a book that should be read by all.
A Sight for Sore Eyes is one of Rendell's masterpieces. It is a piece of fiction so beautifully and impeccably wrought that it almost beggars belief to consider Rendell's craftsmanship of it. Certainly, I feel sure that any Rendell fan will treasure its art, beauty and beguiling intricacy, as, probably, would Teddy.
Posted by Fiona Walker in Book Reviews | Permalink
