A Tangled Web (1956)
Blurb:
My review:
A Tangled Web (1956) is the dullest and weakest of Nicholas Blake’s novels. Nicholas Blake’s usually excellent writing has deserted him, replaced, instead, with a prose style more fitting to a Mills & Boon novel, as the following extract indicates:
“He gazed at her a moment across the little room. With a rush of excitement and terror, she saw his dark face change. His eyes, piercing bright, seemed to pin her against the wall where she stood. She felt impaled, powerless, yet wildly acquiescent. He was a stranger, he was a hawk hovering to swoop down upon her. They came together as if whirled by a clap of wind out of a cloudless sky. She was naked, staring up at him transfixed, an animal in a snare shamming dead under the poacher’s hands, then quivering and struggling. But the pain was good, the surrender and fierce abjection were wonderful; and presently she heard him say, ‘There's no one like you, my love.’ … They were upstairs again: and this time Daisy came into full possession of her womanhood. She could not have enough of him. ‘Master! Master!’ her peasant blood cried out. She went to sleep, still sobbing with pleasure, a scent of wallflowers from the window-boxes blowing into the room.”
The plot is just as bad—Mills & Boon with bits of Ruth Rendell thrown in. Daisy Bland, “a creature who could cry easily, laugh easily, make love easily—a child of nature”, falls in love with Hugo Chesterman, cat burglar with a heart of gold—yet a murderer by halfway through. Through the machinations of Chesterman’s closest friend Jacko, Daisy Bland gives the fatal evidence that condemns Chesterman to death. That is the plot. Because of the fact that the plot details are obvious from the first page, critics rant and rave about the book: it is neither obvious nor dull, they cry, nor does it lose whatever impetus it may once have had as it draws to its inevitable and protracted close, but it is classic in its inevitability, ground-breaking, earth-shattering. They rejoice in the irony which continually bludgeons the reader over the head (would that it would put him out of his misery, but—alas!—such things are not to be).
What this simplification of a simplistic story leaves out is the motivation—utterly unconvincing psychopathological tripe. Chesterman is a criminal because he “hated his father … when he was a boy. Now that hatred is deeply engrained in his character. He's simply transferred it to a wider reference: authority, respectability, society—whatever represents the father-figure he violently reacts against”. Furthermore, and in the modern style where everybody suffers from some bizarre psychological affliction, he is a manic depressive (I am a couch!) suffering from claustrophobia—which Blake diagnoses as being due either to “the rigid and intolerable oppression of his father’s personality, or in some remote, buried memory of the womb and the struggle for birth.” Even more unconvincingly, Jacko’s betrayal is due to his impotence, brewing within him “some explosive mixture, barely under control, of self-pity, resentment, malice”. One cannot sympathise with the characters, all of whom—even the minor ones—are psychoanalysed in great detail, because the contrived situation in which they find themselves is entirely their own fault: Daisy Bland’s stupidity, Hugo Chesterman’s moral weakness.
In short, this plateful of boiled tripe is offal rot, and can be recommended only to completists and admirers (if any there be) of Ruth Rendell's psychological novels.