Ruth Rendell, A Demon in my View
Arthur Johnson lives on the top floor of a London house otherwise divided into rooms to rent. He is a man of habits, a man with a taste for order and punctuality and who likes to keep himself to himself. Never late at work, never missing his laundry day or skipping his cleaning and dusting duties, he also has a more sinister passion, that he sometimes feels the need to fulfill in the cellar of the building. Everything is “under control” for him, until the day when a homonym, Anthony Johnson, rents the room below his apartment…
Arthur Johnson soon develops a strong dislike for his neighbor. Sociable, good-looking, Anthony’s main default, in Arthur’s eye, is that he never leaves his room on evenings, the only other room (beside Arthur’s) overlooking the cellar door. Arthur cannot go to the cellar anymore and starts to resent Anthony… Anthony has no interest to go out, since he is writing a thesis on psychopaths, which takes whatever time is not devoted to thoughts of love for Helen, a married woman he left in Bristol so that she could chose between her husband and himself…
Soon, dramatics events are set in motion for the people in 142 Trinity Road. As we can expect from Ruth Rendell, she leads the story masterfully to a very ironical conclusion. Rendell starts with a quote from Poe (a poem from which the line “a demon in my view” is taken), and the whole story has echoes of Poe’s William Wilson. Also, I realized that one of her latest book, The Rottweiler, reads a bit like a weaker, longer version of A Demon in my View. Too bad that now Rendell feels the need to plagiarize herself a bit, I am sure she can still come up with original ideas, she still manages it when she writes as Barbara Vine…
A Demon in my View is a good (not outstanding) Rendell’s novel…
Rating: 4/5
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