Just Finished Reading Ruth Rendell's Portobello

Ruth Rendell was a renown British mystery novelist, best known for her long-running Inspector Wexford series.  However, this writer, who sadly died just last year, is not as well-known here in America as she is in her home country.  I hadn't heard of her until just recently and decided to read a standalone novel of hers to get acquainted with her works.  The book was Portobello, published in 2008...

Portobello is a road in London, and various people of different socioeconomic groups live in its vicinity.  Although not so clear at the story's beginning, Portobello develops more as a character study of people as their vastly disparate lives touch upon each other and they deal with their own individual crises.  There is the middle-class bourgeois gallery shop owner Eugene, his girl-friend/fiancée Ella, a pathetic young man named Joel who suffers a heart attack and then claims to have someone from the other side in his mind, Lance, a ne'er-do-well, slow, socially naïve young man, and his reformed criminal-turned-religious fanatic uncle Gib.  While Ella, the most reasonable and "normal" of the characters, serves to connect the others together within the narrative, it is Eugene, Joel, and Lance on whom the novel focuses...

Lance, chronically unemployed and perpetually on the government dole, engages in petty burglaries to supplement his meager income.  At his core, though, he is very immature and even childlike: during one of his break-ins, he is completely distracted by a tasty cake made by the tenant, to the point where he eats most of it right there, strewing crumbs all over the floor and taking the rest of it with him when he leaves.  Joel is a tragic figure of sorts: his very wealthy father completely supports him financially but refuses to talk to him, years after Joel's sister died in an accident for which his father holds him responsible by neglect.  Now his health is poor and he retreats into darkness...with his "companion" increasingly taking hold of his mind.  And Eugene?  This is where Ruth Rendell makes a great contrast.  Eugene has no outstanding difficulties...at least as far as anyone else might be able to discern.  But he is a secretive man, and he has an increasingly obsessive habit of eating sugar-free candies called "Choc-orange".  Surreptitiously procuring and then hiding bags of this stuff from Ella eventually consumes his thoughts...the contrast between Eugene's ridiculous and trivial obsession and the ordeals facing Joel and Lance points to a message I think that Rendell was trying to make to the reader: what really is going on in our lives and our subjective judgments about what is going on are two entirely different matters.  And that, whether or not things are going smoothly in an objective sense, it is our own biased appraisals that will ultimately prevail as to whether we're O.K. or not. But then again, maybe that's not what she was trying to say at all.  I guess it's too late now to ask her...

Portobello is a good story that weaves together the lives of different folks who live under very different circumstances, but close to one another.  The ending is great, and if you like extensive character development in your fiction, you can't beat it.  I'm definitely not through with Ruth Rendell's books...maybe I'll start next on that Inspector Wexford series...