This novel of mystery and detective fiction features a first-person narrator, Faith Severn, who is the niece of the hanged murderess, Vera Hillyard, twin to Faith’s father, John Longley. The story is set after World War II but looks back to events that happened then and includes further recollections of the 1920s; the action unfolds in a village near London.
The catalyst for the telling of the tale is a biographer, Daniel Stewart, who is delving into Vera Hillyard’s murder of her younger sister, Eden (Edith Mary), who had been like a daughter to her. The story is filled with familial attachments and rivalries. The nuclear family expands as its members marry, but new spouses are not always congenial to their in-laws.
Thus, when John marries an older half-Swiss woman, she does not meet with his family’s approval for her age, class, or nationality; for her part, she does not like John’s sisters, and this leads to friction between her and John that affects their children, including Faith. John’s view of his sisters is highly idealized—he sees them through blinders, incapable of recognizing their faults.
In contrast to this theme of attachment, the story also features a strand about the failure to bond: Vera becomes a mother to the orphaned Eden and virtually abandons her own son, Francis, to private schools. He becomes expert at manipulating his mother’s emotions for the worse, on his way to a miserable adolescence and adulthood.
Several tragic events happen during Vera’s residence at Laurel Cottage, where she grew up and where Eden was born, and these cast a shadow on Vera’s life, mental health, and morale. Then, in her middle 30s, Vera delivers a baby boy, Jamie, 10 1/2 months after her husband’s last visit home, making her the focus of village gossip.
She is deeply attached to this child, who fills her life when Eden marries Tony Pearmain, a wealthy gentleman. But the sisters are soon engaged in a mysterious custody battle for Jamie that divides the tight-knit family; each sister claims that Jamie is actually her child, and each can offer evidence to support her claim. Their quarrel pushes Vera past her limits and she finally resorts to violence.
Vera’s guilt in the murder is established to the satisfaction of a jury, but the question of Jamie’s maternity seems insoluble. Silence, concealment, repression, and shame stretch the Longley family bonds until they snap, but the novel also shows how the absence of bonding is cruelly corrosive.
Since the story is told by an onlooker who must recall events in which she was only a peripheral character, the novel is also about the fragmentation of storytelling and the defect of memory across the generations. Memory can rely on letters, minutes of meetings, and court proceedings to prop it up, as Faith must do at various points in her story, but even the presence of bald facts cannot erase a family’s stains nor eradicate their effects on other family members.
Although A Dark-Adapted Eye followed the publication of more than 20 mystery novels by Ruth Rendell, it was the first novel she published under the pseudonym of Barbara Vine. It won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986.
Bibliography
Dubose, Martha Hailey, and Margaret C. Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000.
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Categories: British Literature, Crime Fiction, Detective Novels, Literature, Mystery Fiction, Novel Analysis
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