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Portobello | 
| Author: Ruth Rendell
Publisher: Hutchinson
Category: Book
List Price: £18.99
Buy New: £11.39
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 357
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0091925843
EAN: 9780091925840
ASIN: 0091925843
Publication Date: November 20, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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Amazon.co.uk Review
As well as Ruth Rendell’s customary expertise with the narrative demands of crime fiction, Portobello provides a colourful and eccentric portrait of one of the most distinctive areas of the capital, the Portobello district of West London. To both Londoners and visitors, the areas is lively and exciting, but there is a level of criminality here which Rendell handles as adroitly as ever. The book is something of departure for the author, less plot-led than customarily. Eugene Wrenn, who lives modestly despite his wealth, has inherited an art gallery from his father. But Eugene moves to a more upmarket location in Kensington Church Street. He is 50, but looks older than his age, and is plagued by an addictive personality (currently, he finds himself unable to give up an addiction to low-calorie sweets). Despite this, he has a reasonably happy relationship with a GP, Ella, who finds herself able to put up with these quirks -- at least, those she knows about. Eugene discovers an envelope containing money, which he picks up in the street. But instead of doing the logical thing and taking it to the police, he sticks a note on a lamppost near his house, asking whoever lost it to claim the money (but withholding information only known to the real owner) The first to apply is a small-time criminal, Lance (recently thrown out of his house for domestic violence), who is thinking of casing the house of his benefactor -- even if he is initially unable to get the money. But the genuine owner of the money is the disturbed Joel, who lives in a self-induced darkness and shares his life with a phantom companion. Utilising this disparate and eccentric cast of characters, Rendell forges a discursive but compelling novel that (as always with her work) keeps us reading inexorably. Some may find the characterisation broader than they are used to with Rendell, but this is still seductive fare. --Barry Forshaw
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| Customer Reviews:
 Ruth Rendell - Portobello November 25, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
With Portobello, Rendell progresses her London obsession to new lengths: for years it's been obvious that Rendell loves the city and it's different corners, each with its own atmosphere, character and characters, and here, her mission is clear even from the very title: this is a book about Portobello. Which is absolutely fair enough, as atmosphere and character are two of the things Rendell are best at. In neither department does she disappoint here, either.
One day Eugene Wren, owner or an art-gallery near the Portobello Road, finds a sum of money in the road near his house. Instead of handing it in to the police, he finds it easier to stick a note on a lamppost requesting that anyone who has lost a sum of money slightly above or below that which he has found (to wheedle out false claimants) contact him to retrieve it. It's this act that brings the lives of several different people - some harmless, some troubled, some malicious, some foolish - into orbit with one another, with sometimes devastating results. But whose lives, exactly, will be negatively touched? And who'll escape the bustle of Portobello's underbelly unscathed?
Rendell's London manifesto is well-served here: Portobello lives and breathes, and in terms of the novels she's written about the city (from the Regent's Park-set The Keys to the Street, or the Rillington Place area of Thirteen Steps Down), Portobello is by far the jewel in the crown, the most evocative of them all. The atmosphere of the place is rendered superbly, and it feels almost like a foreign country, an eccentric bazaar rich in both wares and people, full of contrasts in class, naivety, vice and wealth. Indeed, the passages in which her brief is simply to describe the area, her writing is as good as it always is when portraying her characters and their hidden little defects, deficits and desires. Which, of course, are plentiful here: Eugene Wren is elderly but eccentric, obsessively secretive and more than a little obsessive-compulsive about petty things. Joel Roseman, the fascinating young-man who is the genuine loser of the cash, and who harbours a dark secret in his past, is haunted by an angel he believes came back with him after a near-death experience. He sits in a darkened apartment day and night, wearing dark glasses, and believes the angel talks to him unseen in shadowy corners. And there's Gilbert, an ex-thief who's taken refuge in his new belief in God, and who holds prayer-meetings for his church in a run-down, shabby house. These are all fine Rendell examples, all of whom become tangled up variously in each other's lives: the tension, as always, comes from the thorny problem of how exactly they will collide.
Despite its quota of arson, burglary and murder, Portobello is actually a rather quieter affair than usual from the Rendell pen. Violent events happen, indeed, and shock they do, but they come woven much more into the finer tapestry of Portobello life than they would in any other of her novels. They are simultaneously at the forefront and background. They force their way through into people's lives as they would otherwise normally go about their business. They have their effects on the few but not the many, even among the characters concerned. The novel is much more a sustained ensemble piece than many of her books, a constant almost-climax. The fact that this might become wearing is one of the only criticisms of the novel I can think of, and even that is tempered by the fact that it's one of her shortest novels in some time. And, as it's one of her shortest for a while, it's also her most abundant. Portobello's a rich feast of everything you might her for.
In the end, the final note she plays is major rather than minor. She steers away from the ironic, cynical endings of her past two stand-alones, and instead provides what is almost a happy ending. Which is an almost Rendellesquely unexpected twist in itself.
Finally, as with so many of her books, Portobello's major secondary theme is obsession and addiction: Eugene has a shameful addiction all the more ludicrous for its banality; Joel is addicted to the dark, his father addicted to an event in the past; Lance is addicted to a girl, and his Uncle Gilbert seems addicted to his church. And, thank heaven, then - as it's produced some of the finest, most sinister pictures of the city in 20th century fiction - for Rendell's addiction to London.
 The Queen of Psychological Suspense returns with an excellent standalone thriller... November 18, 2008
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
In the mid-70s, Ruth Rendell published a short psychological novel entitled `A Demon in my View'. This slim masterpiece was sad, seedy, and concerned the creepy characters and goings on in a boarding house. She revisited similar themes in the recent `Thirteen Steps Down' and now once again in this novel where three properties (including a boarding house) provide the focal point for much of the action.
All of the main characters live on or within touching distance of Portobello in London - hence the title - and the book explores how their lives intersect with one another.
Eugene Wren, art gallery proprietor, lives in a well-to-do area which he comes to share with his fiancée Ella Cotswold, a medical doctor. One day he comes across a sum of money and advertises his find (without stating the exact sum) on a local telegraph pole in an attempt to find its owner. Lance, a young unemployed and unemployable burglar, decides to chance his arm at conning the cash out of its finder.
Unfortunately for Lance, by the time he calls round, Eugene knows the identity of the real owner - Joel Roseman - a young man who's currently recovering in hospital from a heart complaint. The socially isolated Joel subsequently engages Ella as his private doctor, and she visits him a few times at his property, a handsome dwelling but kept in a shabby, darkened state by its incumbent. This is all paid for by the obscenely rich father who's ostracized him for years because of a family incident. As the book progresses Joel's mental health deteriorates alarmingly.
Lance's uncle Gilbert Gibson (Uncle Gib) - an ex-jailbird who's now deeply religious - owns a run down property half a mile away from Eugene. He rents out rooms to his burglar nephew Lance (burglary is the family trade), and later to a barely-seen immigrant, who nevertheless becomes an integral part of the plot.
Although Eugene and Ella seem like the perfect upper-middle class couple, Eugene has his own 'dark' little secret...
The book title is ironic in that Portobello is famous for its bright, breezy, bustling market, and Rendell deliberately contrasts this with the empty, sad or grey lives of most of her major characters.
It features several outstanding passages that describe what it's like to be mentally ill, or ostracized, or in the grip of a strange obsession. Dame Ruth does sad, creepy individuals with obscure motivations better than almost any living writer. The novel also contains deliberately understated scenes of violence, that hit home without being visceral.
Of course there's so much more to the book than I've indicated: once again it's a study of the impact of chance and coincidence on the lives of a set of very disparate individuals. I don't feel I'm spoiling it when I point out that for once, everything ends well (though not in ways you'd expect) and is an illustration of the redemptive power of love. Even crime queens have their sentimental moments!
Rendell has hit a rich vein of form recently with the previously mentioned `Thirteen Steps Down' and `The Water's Lovely' being outstanding reads. Unfortunately she suffered a minor blip with last year's disappointing Wexford novel, 'Not in the Flesh' which was readable but a little clichéd. Happily `Portobello' is once again, top-notch entertainment. As Barbara Vine she published `The Birthday Present' a few scant months ago. She was 78 years old this year, and no one should be able to write as well, or prolifically as this at that age!
This is a compelling novel and a great study of psychologically damaged and/or disadvantaged people. Told in her usual elegant, spare prose this is very definitely recommended and just fails to get the maximum 5 stars. I make it a 9/10, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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