Take Advantage Of Portobello Devised By Ruth Rendell Displayed As Print

picked this up at the library on my last vacation, A free book to read while on vacation that I didn't have at home so I ditched the couple of reads I brought with me I can read those when I get home and read this instead.
I have never read Ruth Rendell and the cover touted her as a "reigning queen" of crime fiction and the premise interested me so jumped in.
Set in London's Notting Hill and featuring Portobello Road, a middleaged art dealer finds an envelope full of cash one day and attempts to return it to its rightful owner.


The opening, the premise, the writing all engaged me from the very beginning, However, I just never grew to care enough about the characters to want to invest that much time or energy on the story.
The addiction developed by the main character and his subsequent decisions made as a result of this addiction had me thinking, "Really!" Partial Spoiler alert! I mean, he can't stop eating Chocoorange flavored sugarfree candies and his fiance's discovery of this brings on such shame that he cancels their engagement! God help them if they ever have any REAL life issues in their relationship to deal with.
In addition, I don't know many human beings in this day and age who have read the news or are even remotely aware of societal dangers that would invite a complete stranger inside their home who is trying to claim cash that they found.
Give them the benefit of the doubt and meet them at a coffee shop Yes, Come on over to my home and come on inside when I know nothing about you, haven't asked you anything about yourself and the only reason I'm talking to you is because you responded to an add stating I had found money No.


By the way, the first page or two telling the story about how Portobello Road got its name is worth picking up the book in an of itself but beyond that, it didn't impress me much and I actually forced myself to finish the book speed reading the res of the way because it wasn't that long and I didn't want to have yet another halfway read book uncompleted.
I can be a bit obsessive that way, First off, sitelinkTim Curry is an INCREDIBLE narrator!

Now, let's get to the book, This was a wonderfully atmospheric novel, The characters were alive and vibrant, Even the ones committing crimes you were sympathetic with, The interconnectedness of the area of Portobello really came alive,

To me, I always remember the song from Bedknobs and Broomsticks "Portobello Road" as performed by David Tomlinson,

The characters in this one are so much fun, crazy, neurotic, and wrapped up in their own lives, After awhile, you get wrapped up in them too! Much fun! Im not entirely sure how to rate this book, I picked it out solely because the audio book is narrated by Tim Curry, I needed a book to listen to at night before bed and heard Tim Curry audios were amazing, And since this was the only one that was available right away from the library I have it a go, I cant say a really liked the book but I didnt hate it either, It ended up taking the wholeday loan to finish mostly because I would fall asleep unusually fast while listening, I found the characters rather unlikable but also was drawn in enough to want to know how it all wrapped up,
I had been disappointed in the most recent Rendell/Vine novels I'm not counting her Wexford books which I don't read but I'm pleased to say she's back at the top of her game with this one.
There's no gimmicky ending, which is what I found in sitelinkThe Water's Lovely, and the voices of her characters are true, something I found lacking in sitelinkThe Birthday Present.


In many ways, this is a novel of addiction and while being inside the head of one character got a bit repetitive at times, that is the nature of dependency, after all and this character has quite an unusual craving.
Creating such a varied range of personalities along with each one's flaws and yearnings is one of the reasons I find Rendell so readable.


This isn't her best book, but it certainly is a good one, It was quite different from other Ruth Rendell novels I've read, I'm not really sure why it was classified as a mystery, so that puzzled me, but overall, it was an enjoyable read.
Now here's an author who can interweave different storylines and really make it work! I love Rendell's standalone fiction, Not crazy about her Inspector Wexford series, which is beterthanusual British police procedural, but I have read with gusto most of her standalone novels.
Most of them involve ordindary really really ordinary people caught up by happenstance in extraordinary circumstances and the stories unfold and weave together expertly and tantilizingly.
So much so, that I find myself gasping out loud in the 'Don't go down the cellar barefoot in your nightgown with only a candle' kind of dread because you just know some of these people are making disastrous choices which will lead to their undoing.
Sometimes there's a murder mystery involved, as well, but mostly it's her keen character development that drives the narrative, OK, so this one starts with someone fainting on a doorstep and losing an envelope of cash and what happens when the finder posts a 'found' flier in the Portobello Rd, a London flea market type place with lots of criminal activity.
And always a satisfying conclusion with Rendell, Borrowed Ruth Rendell's Portobello on audiobook from the library to listen to during myhour drive over to Indy as an extension of the crazyfun that is Tim Curry amp Tequila night.
Also: Ruth Rendell has been on my toread list for a little bit, Anywho, Tim Curry is amazing, was not only in Rocky Horror and Clue, but also this odd's tv drama called sitelinkWorst Witch filmed shortly after I was born, and inspires fantastic evenings with my particular group of friends.


As to the book: No, this is not a book about mushrooms or poisoning, as some of us i, e. me might have thought for a moment as we hit the 'BORROW' link on the library OverDrive site, Rendell's Portobello is set on Portobello Road, a street in the Notting Hill district of London that hosts the weekly Portobello Market incidentally, this road was named for anth century naval victory and mushrooms don't come into it at all.
In said market, all sorts of people come to buy all manner of eccentric wares, and on occasion, lose thingswhether a wallet to a pickpocket, valuable antiques to a gang of street thugs, selfrespect to a sugarfree sweets addiction, or an envelope of cash to the chaotic fallout of a heart attack.


The narration switches viewpoints as the tale unfoldsbeginning with Eugene, a neurotic art dealer addicted to sugarfree sweets finding the envelope of cash on the street.
Rather than reporting this to the police, he fixes a notice to a lamp post, Long before Joel contacts him from hospital where he's recovering from a heart attack, the young, perpetually outofwork Lance tries to reclaim the money, but is unable to name the exact amount.
He does take the opportunity to case Eugene's house, seeing the priceless artwork as another solution to his lack of income, Eugene's doctorfiancee Ella halfunwillingly acquires Joel as a patient when she returns his money at the hospital, and dislikes visiting him in his illlit, stifling house where he sits in the dark hiding from an imaginary he calls Mithras.
Thefts, misunderstandings, and further health scares ensue,

I suspect different people will be pulled to different characters, I reluctantly identified with Eugene's useless! internal preoccupation and liked Ella's direct approach to problems, but found Joel the most tragic and interesting.
Rendell's character work is deft however the pace did tend to drag with so many characters to follow up with, Still, it proved a diverting listen during my sixhour round trip, and I plan to continue exploring Rendell's novels, I love Ruth Rendell so incredibly much that it's hard to step back and say exactly why, Partly I think it's because her books are both plotdriven they're total page turners and characterdriven I'm always drawn into the characters' lives and able to find sympathy for them, even the most evil/depraved/unsympathetic ones.
Partly because they contain the most compelling elements of classic mysteries, and yet at the same time they're completely unlike any other mysteries I know.
Partly because the writing is so smart and beautiful, Partly because they manage to be surprisingly funny, as well as scary, startling, thoughtprovoking, and incredibly moving, Ruth Rendell, I hope you live for a very very long time, and keep writing, What would I do without you I know a lot of people love Ruth Rendell and maybe this was just the wrong one of her books to start with Because this was an absolute zerostar book for me, a book that gave me not one fleeting second of pleasure or interest.
My local library shelves it as a mystery but it is not only not a mystery, it is almost

completely plotless, I would say aboutof its word count is about a man who wants to stop eating sugarfree candy, but cannot, No doubt you could write an interesting book on that theme, but you would have to have something pretty compelling going on at the level of language or characterization, and this book does not.
The prose style alternately reminded me of the terminally boring uncle from Derry Girls “Ella got her own way only about the venue for the ceremony, not a church, not a register office, but a beautiful old house in Chiswick, licensed for marriages.
The reception, which Eugene in his oldfashioned way called the wedding breakfast, though it would be a late lunch, was to be at the Connaught” and of those sitelinkbad twosentence Reddit horror stories “Secrecy is past.
A small voice somewhere inside him said, But you like secrecy, its what you do”, As far as psychological depth, most of the characters have a social class and maybe two other traits: rich and secretive, rich and crazy with a sad backstory, rich and a doctor and nice, poor and criminal.
The lowerclass criminal character in particular gets not one dash of uniqueness, but an incredibly long list of meanspirited stereotype box checking: hes too stupid to do basic arithmetic, his grandma is a slut, etc.
Theres also some business about an angel or a ghost or something which does not develop in any direction beyond characters having conversations in which one of them reiterates that theres an angel or a ghost or something.
I could sort of understand why this book exists if it were an extremely rough first novel written for the sake of proving that one could write a novel, but in fact it appears to be Ruth Rendells, like, twohundredth novel Just inexplicable! This book differs from the other Rendell books I read.
The novel studies several characters whose lives become intertwined because they live on or near or visit Portobello Road, One character is a middleaged man addicted to a candy his fiancée is a doctor who becomes a personal physician to a man we meet because he becomes injured on the Portobello Road.
A young thief who loves a girl he assaulted and whose relative belongs to a cultlike church also appears, The action is slow. The flawed characters often express themselves in peculiar manners, While it is not my favorite Rendell book, I didn't hate it, I listened to the audiobook read by Tim Curry, I've been a huge fan of Rendell since discovering her work not too long ago, This one was consistently out at the library and I finally got to read it, I have to say it wasn't my favorite of her books, though it is still quite good, Similar premise of several interwoven narratives of morally and otherwise challenged characters in London tangentially connected by crimes, There is a quality to Rendell's characters, they tend to be wretched, in fact I think of them as rendellian wretcheds, there is just a way she wrote about psychology of things that oppress a person be it poverty, lack of drive or obsessions.
In this case it is primarily the latter, The main character becomes spectacularly obsessed with a specific kind of sweets and nearly allows it to screw up his life, In fact it is this character that I had a problem with the most, He's well to do, has a comfortable life, intelligent and yet makes really bizarre choices, I'm not just talking about his obsession, The behavior I'm referring to is his strange careless for personal safety, Inviting random strangers in on chance the money he found belongs to them, leaving his house burglar ready, Rendell does a terrific job of describing the psychology of obsession and in all fairness she never did care all that much for likability of her characters, but this time the ratio was dramatically off for me and not enough occurred otherwise to offset it.
Still absolutely worth a read, such strong writing, the Portobello area described so vividly, it becomes a character itself, the one constant player, despite the changes, observing patiently the clumsy humanity scurrying past it, scheming and plotting and trying to get by.
Well observed. Well written. Recommended. .