A review by lara99
King Solomon's Carpet by Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell

3.0

This book takes the reader on a weird, meandering nightmare of a journey through the eyes of a group of misfits living in a decrepit former school house in North London. Far creepier than the characters in A Fatal Inversion, here Vine gives us a loner who smells of rotting meat due to the hawk he dotes on, a violinist who has abandoned her husband and baby daughter, a narcissistic musician potentially brain damaged following a road accident, and the sinister Axel Jonas, who travels the tube leading a disfigured companion dressed as a bear, terrorising commuters. The common thread between them is Jarvis, the owner of the house, who is obsessed with and writing a book about the London Underground, excerpts of which are included in the novel. And that's it really. There's no plot to speak of. There is a dramatic denouement, but it took me two thirds of the book to figure out the connections that lead to it. Still, I enjoyed the characters and Vine's beautiful prose. It's a mystery to me that she was considered a genre writer - this book particularly (along with a Fatal Inversion) seem to me to be literary fiction which just happen to include elements of suspense.