Just Finished Reading Ruth Rendell's The Crocodile Bird

A few days ago I read my first Ruth Rendell book, the novel Portobello.  I enjoyed it enough to want to investigate other writings of hers, including her celebrated Inspector Wexford series.  But first I decided to read another standalone Rendell novel, this one titled The Crocodile Bird.  Once again, the setting and culture is distinctly English...but whereas in Portobello the focus was mainly on three different men living in London, this story is about a mother and her daughter living in the secluded English countryside...

Ruth Rendell has been described as a psychological mystery writer.  I think I now understand that assessment: it isn't necessarily so much that her narrative immerses the reader in a whodunit-type mystery as much as unravelling the underlying background and motives of the characters and their actions.  Eve is the mother and Liza her daughter, and they live alone together throughout the girl's childhood in the gatehouse to an estate called Shrove.  Eve, already well-educated in the classical sense, keeps her daughter out of school and teaches her at home.   Eve is obsessed with Shrove and wants to live the rest of her life there while insulating Liza from the rest of the world, which Eve loathes as a terrible place.  The problem here is that Eve doesn't own Shrove...it is another, Jonathan Tobias, an absentee-but-benevolent man about Eve's age, who controls the property she covets and lets her reside there in the role of estate manager.  The entangled, long-running relationship between Eve and Jonathan, the overly protective manner of mother bringing up daughter, and Liza's little acts of rebellion along the way are all significant parts of the story.  Of course, we want to know the roots of all this as well, and that is gradually revealed in the book.  If this were all there was to The Crocodile Bird, it might be interesting on some level...but Liza knows the dark secrets of her mother regarding the disappearances of men on the property.  She loves her mother and is protective of her while herself not subscribing to the latter's cynical view of the world.  And why should she, being brought up ignorant of things others take for granted...like television and shopping, for example...

I guess that's about as far as I can go discussing the plot of The Crocodile Bird without giving away important elements and spoiling it for the reader.  And this is a very good book, a worthwhile investment of your reading time.  One thing I got out of it was something that I had long known from personal experience.  As a child, you can grow to discern the faults of your parents and become reconciled to them, intellectually separating yourself from their undesirable traits while still loving and respecting them.  But there can still be a strong, unconscious imprint of the parents' personalities on the child, the result of which often is displayed throughout that individual's lifetime, for better or for worse.  Can we as adults rise above what we've unwittingly picked up as children and chart our own courses without that imprint negatively affecting us?  The Crocodile Bird is ultimately an examination of this important question...