It's interesting that the characters in this book are divided into three very neat class-based categories: working class (Keith, Teddy, etc) middle class (Richard, Julia, Francine) upper class (Harriet, Franklin). I look forward to thinking about it more. I'm not sure yet whether the novel is best read as a document of that thing, or an example of it or both, perhaps? I've not finished it yet. I may write more about this later, but some of it seems redolent of a certain tabloid atmosphere of moral panic that I mostly associate with the late 90s and early 00s. The book has a lot to say about class and I am not sure all of it is good. So now I picture them living in my old family home, which is strange - but weirdly fitting for a portrait of middle-class anxiety. I was surprised to find several of the characters living in a large semi-detached house in Ealing, which is an unassuming borough of London where I've lived for pretty much my whole life. Not many books would bother to chart the upbringing of the principal characters in such painstaking real time detail. But somehow it isn't wordy - it covers a lot of time and space in relatively few words. It feels very slow I can kind of see how everything is coming together but it takes an awful long time for the book to gets its ducks in order. This is my first experience of a Ruth Rendell novel, and it's not at all what I expected. The pacing is very curious.
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