Craft: when the practice becomes absorbed into the writer’s natural intelligence and the active imagination takes over. Ruth Rendall assuming the mask of Barbara Vine writes herself into the story as Faith the narrator of ‘A Dark Adapted Eye’. The title refers to the perceptual adaptation to low light by the eye. Of course it has the metaphorical import of the ‘falling of the scales’ also. Faith has come to the home of her aunts Vera and Eden who live in the rural England in a quiet village. Does a half sister become a half aunt? Helen the daughter by a first marriage of a paternal grandfather lives in a large country home nearby. Faith is avoiding the blitz and she is about eleven when the story opens. A swirl of information and dramatis personae come at you through the opening pages mirroring the narrator’s confusion and as the story progresses everyone takes their places. You are immediately told about the central event which isolates and maims this family history. Vera murdered her sister Eden and has been hanged for the crime. Its as if all the participants had their own observation platform of this landscape bringing horror, denial , revenge, reticence, snobbery, and the make and mend of frugal wartime.
Faith’s voice changes as she grows through the years of contact with her aunts, her cousin Francis, his capers and later on Vera’s other child Jamie about whom there is a mystery. Who was the father if it was not Gerald the army officer who is serving abroad? All will not be revealed or rather some genteel obscurity of questions will remain at the end. The subtlety of diction reflecting progress towards being an English Literature student at Cambridge is what only instinctual craft can manage. Landscapes become a little more florid, personal reflection more stylised, and the persona of the non-judgemental liberal becomes clearer. But the horror, the horror as the man said will not go away as knowing the precise hour and manner of a death fixes the picture of the family. Faith’s father is Vera’s twin. He’s a respectable bank manager in London and he hides all evidence of connection. He rips out a photo of Vera from its frame and in doing so cuts himself leaving a smudge of blood on it. Barbara Vine must have hesitated over that piece of metaphor but an execution makes Shakespeares of us all.
This is a why dun it story and the skein of tangled motive is like the jumper which is unraveled to make baby clothes for Jamie and must be washed and ironed to take out the kinks before knitting. I’d read it again. It’s a minor classic, a gothic analogue of ‘Middlemarch’. To say more would be, so to speak, drop stitches.
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