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The Water’s Lovely by Ruth Rendell
Published by Doubleday Canada, 2006
Reviewed by Roger Gordon
The Water’s Lovely is another Ruth Rendell masterpiece. Since 1964, Dame Ruth Rendell, C.B.E (yes, she has recently been awarded these deserved accolades along with many other ones), has produced a steady stream of fascinating and insightful novels. To characterize her, as many have done,
as a “crime novelist,” undervalues her as a writer. The essence of her writings
is not “whodunit?” nor is it action-packed drama. Her specialty, and she stands head and shoulders above the rest in this, is the mindset of the darker side of society: the marginalized poor, those with personality disorders, lacking in self-esteem, the over-possessive, compulsive ones, whose thought processes often lead to criminal acts. But Rendell’s talent is to enable the reader to follow those processes and appreciate them as being logical to those of flawed character, while the rest of us can only offer sympathy. “There but for the Grace of God” is not a cliché, but describes what I always think after reading one of her superb novels.
The Water’s Lovely is just such a novel, in the same genre as Live Flesh, A Sight for Sore Eyes, and countless others, in which the lives of one or more characters with flawed personalities become gradually more intertwined with undesirable consequences as the storyline progresses. The opening setting is an old two-storey house in London that is divided into two flats. Heather and her sister Ismay occupy the downstairs one, while their confused and hallucinatory mother Beatrix and Aunt Pamela are located upstairs. The physical barriers and emotional problems are the fallout from the death of Guy, the daughters’ stepfather, whose bath-tub drowning was assumed in the very first chapter of the novel to be at the hands of Heather. Other than Beatrix,who is really in another world, all three of these family members crave a permanent 
relationship with a man, in one case to an obsessive degree. As a wider cast of characters are drawn in, we encounter the hypochondriacally afflicted mother-in-law, her scheming friend Marion, the control- freak boyfriend, the abusive boyfriend, and even a pleasurably eccentric boyfriend of the unlikable Marion. How this all works out is neither for me to tell, nor as I have remarked, is it the point of any of Rendell’s novels.
As you can tell, I am a Ruth Rendell devotee, so I thoroughly enjoyed this book. On a Ruth Rendell scale of 1 to 5, I would give it 4, only because I was a little disappointed in the ending, which seemed somewhat contrived and a bit too far outside of the storyline. While “endings” are not all that important to enjoy one of her novels, she normally does cap off the story with more imagination and reference to the characters she has painted than she chose to do here. Nevertheless, I still can’t wait for her next novel. After over 40 years of writing them, I hope she keeps going.
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