Author: Ruth Rendell
Publisher: Fawcett
Pages: 352
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐Publisher: Fawcett
Pages: 352
This was my first Ruth Rendell book and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Joy Williams’ husband,
Rodney, leaves for an office trip and then goes missing. Inspector Reg Wexford
looks into the case at the request of
his wife.
Through the course
of his investigation, Inspector Wexford discovers that Rodney had a second bank
account that received the bulk of his high salary from a job to which he had been
promoted years ago. A promotion and bank account that his wife, Joy, knew
nothing about. Wexford believes that Rodney has tired of the utterly joyless
Joy and run away with another woman, a commonplace affliction in the case of middle-aged
males, and that there is not much to the case. But then Rodney’s body is found
in his badly battered car.
Meanwhile,
Inspector Burden, partner of Inspector Wexford, seems increasingly listless at
work and out of harmony with his pregnant wife, Jenny, at home. A feminist,
Jenny inexplicably begins to hate her unborn child because it is female. The issue
has strained the marriage dangerously.
To complicate
matters further, a young woman, or more than one of them, is stabbing men who
she suspects of contemplating sexual assault. Inspector Wexford comes to know
of a militant feminist organization called Arria, which has adopted the raven
as its symbol, and which preaches stridently against male domination.
I enjoyed the literary
allusions that were sprinkled throughout this book. There were references to
Raymond Chandler, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Olde Wife, the detective fiction of Cyril
Hare and to the tropes employed by Victorian novelists. We even come across the
Arabian Nights Tale, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, though the reference is
all wrong. Plenty of poetry is quoted especially by the two inspectors.
It’s hard to tell
the year in which the books are set, except that typewriters, and manual ones
at that, are widely in use. In fact, a typewriter is critical to the
investigation.
There is a
sub-plot on women’s rights, and militant women’s movements that makes for
interesting reading and is central to the plot.
The brilliantly
named title, An Unkindness of Ravens, is telling in more ways than one. An
unkindness is the collective word for ravens. The English language is so
entertaining, particularly when it comes to collective nouns.
Inspector Wexford
is my new favourite. His ideas about women’s equality, his humour etc set him
apart. He thinks of aspects related to
the relations between men and women in ways that I have never encountered
before. Because he is in his late ‘50s or early ‘60s, he has the self-assurance
to think of young people and their sheer audacity, as displayed by his own
younger daughter.
My first Inspector Wexford book is number 13 in the series. I have a lot of catching up to do.
