Doughnut with no jam

This latest novel by Barbara Vine - Ruth Rendell's

He is, too, bedevilled by troubles of his own. His wife, Jude, obsessed with having a child, continually miscarries, on such occasions tending to appear with the foetus, "bird's egg-sized in its net of white membrane" in her hands. In addition, he is, like most other hereditary peers, about to be thrown out of the House of Lords, which will deprive him of his attendance fee, apparently his only income.

The narrative, told with the author's usual art, flows smoothly, if slowly. It would be churlish to cavil at the obvious pleasure which Baroness Rendell of Babergh takes in describing the House of Lords, where much of the action takes place: its interior decoration, its quaint rituals, its faithful old retainers, its restaurants, lunch-rooms, tea-parlours, and bars.

This does, however, induce a certain torpor, from which one is forcibly wrenched by the novel's climax: one so grotesquely ludicrous as to cause the eyes to start from their orbits, and the hair to imitate the quills of a fretful porpentine.

Its action, furthermore, is retrospective: the earlier, careful and skilful creation of plot and character is suddenly rendered wholly nugatory. It is as if, having chewed one's way lingeringly through a highly delicious doughnut, one should encounter at its centre, not the expected small pond of raspberry jam, but the decomposing corpse of a small and unidentifiable rodent. What on earth can Barbara Vine have been thinking of ?