The Clothes of the Dead Wear As Well As Any Other (The Brimstone Wedding - Barbara Vine)

Member Name: plipplop

Product:	The Brimstone Wedding - Barbara Vine
Date:	27/06/06 (96 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Deliberate, subtle, intriguing story telling

Disadvantages: Not for those in search of excitement

Stella is dying of cancer. Her last days are to be spent at Middleton Hall, a care home for the elderly. Intelligent, articulate and lady-like she adores the butterflies that flitter past her bedroom window, listens to classical music and enjoys regular visits from her doting son and daughter. But Stella is a lady with a story to tell – a shocking tale about love and loss. As her final hours draw closer, she takes it upon herself to confide in one of the care assistants, named Jenny, and through a combination of tea-time conversations and private tape recordings, she gradually shares the secrets of her terrible past.

There was something about this book that captivated me from the outset. I didn’t buy it. I found it on a bookshelf in a friend’s flat, and whilst I was waiting for her to get ready one evening, I picked it up and started to read through the first few pages. And that was enough to get me hooked.

The Brimstone Wedding is a subtle, deliberate and yet cautious tale woven around the relationships of two friends. Jenny, the care assistant at Middleton Hall, lives a dual life, splitting her time between a loveless relationship with her husband Mike, and a passionate affair with a local man named Ned. You would imagine that her exciting, dangerous existence couldn’t be any more different to the last days of her friend and patient, Stella. But you’d be wrong. In Stella’s time, she has lived her share of dangerous times and has secrets and stories to tell that gradually draw the two women ever closer together.

Told in the first person, The Brimstone Wedding is never an exciting book to read. At times, it could be accused of dragging its heels and dwelling on unnecessary detail. But the whole tone of the thing is so interesting that you genuinely don’t mind sharing Jenny’s innermost thoughts and fears. As her part of the tale draws towards its rather inevitable conclusion, you feel as though you have developed a bond with her character. You genuinely share her sadness and you feel her excitement felt as though this was your best friend telling you about her latest adventures. The beauty of the first person narrative is that sometimes the text rambles along in a rather incoherent fashion. This makes it characterful. I’m sure it was a careful consideration on the author’s part, but it works particularly well. As you read through The Brimstone Wedding, you do feel as though someone has downloaded several months of thoughts, copied them onto paper and then allowed you to read them. And you almost feel privileged. It’s a very curious thing.

It might not be exciting, but this book is extremely engaging. I guess it would be considered to be a crime thriller, because it contains a crime that is gradually solved. But it isn’t a crime thriller in the sense that someone is deliberately trying to piece things together. The Brimstone Wedding is essentially a three hundred-page confession of a long-forgotten crime. This means that you don’t marvel at the characters’ ingenuity or instinct. You aren’t fed clues in the same way that you might find in a Morse novel. In The Brimstone Wedding there are puzzles and questions and curiosities everywhere. But you never take the time to try and work them out. You wait patiently for Stella to tell you all the answers for herself.

As a character, Jenny is very appealing. I found myself extremely empathetic to her situation. Her husband shows more interest in the new conservatory than he does her, suggesting that it is all for her benefit. Jenny is clearly a very passionate woman, and her affair with Ned is endearing and welcome rather than seedy or damaging. You really do feel as though she deserves those moments of intimacy. She’s also incredibly superstitious. The book is absolutely crammed with Jenny’s quirky little beliefs about the significance of a certain colour or an unusual natural phenomenon. In many ways, the book is a journey of discovery as she gradually makes up her mind about whether her beliefs are in any way justified.

Stella is equally appealing in similar and yet different ways. Her affinity for Jenny’s situation gradually becomes understandable and rather like Jenny you do sympathise with her predicament. Coming from a completely different era, Stella is very different from her friend Jenny, but the story weaves itself in such a way that you do eventually conclude that they aren’t so different after all. And everything weaves itself around a secret house in the fens known only as Molucca. The house and its mysterious past certainly helps to develop the whole air of intrigue about the book and one of my favourite parts of the book is when Jenny first visits the house to explore it for the first time. Every thing she touches, smells or sees seems to have a mysterious significance to the story and as things draw to a close, things all start to fall into place. Why is there a car hidden in the garage – and why has it been damaged by fire? Why have pictures been taken from the walls and placed in the drawers? What is the significance of the stained dress in the wardrobe? And why has the bottle of champagne in the refrigerator never been opened?

Nature is also an extremely important part of this book. It’s everywhere. Set in the Fens, the narrator goes to great pains to describe the countryside, noting the change in colour of the leaves and the movements of the farmers in the fields. To start with, you feel as though it’s really only there to try and make the thing pretty, but gradually I started to decide that the author was trying to suggest some empathy between what we do and the world around us. There are some very direct, obvious links to the fields and fens that become clear by the end, but the whole thing has a very wholesome feel about it. Jenny’s mood is dictated by the world around her – a bath full of ladybirds is a mystery, whereas a single magpie is a tragedy. You know that this can’t go on. And you know that it won’t.

The Brimstone Wedding would make a very awkward dramatisation or film. Comprised of huge sequences of flashback and reminiscence, it would be hard to engage the audience on film in the same way that the book can. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was (or even already had been) dramatised. Although the author is credited as Barbara Vine, it wasn’t until I read the notes at the beginning that I realised that it was in actual fact Ruth Rendell under a different name (I’m slow – work with me on this). And there is something characteristically “Ruth Rendell” about this book.

Contrary to what I had expected, I enjoyed The Brimstone Wedding. The controlled, subtle story telling was different to what I am used to reading and the tale is told in a particularly absorbing fashion. If you were looking for thrills and excitement then this would not be a good choice. But there’s a good story to be told here, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this. Val Hennessy from the Daily Mail describes the book perfectly in one line when she says:

“The icy hand takes off its glove in the very first sentence.”

Recommended

ISBN 0-14-025280-0 – published in 1995.

Summary: Intriguing tale of secrets old and new