For me, a keen admirer of Barbara Vine, the recent novels have been
a little disappointing. This is a return to the form of the
wonderful early ones: A Dark-Adapted Eye, The House of Stairs, and
A Fatal Inversion. I found it completely gripping. This is a
classic Vine novel. It combines the teasingly delayed revelation of
past acts of violence, cruelty or oddity, with a fast-moving
narrative in the present tense. It moves towards a horrible climax
that is inevitable, yet hard to predict because of the generous
choice of disasters that threaten to occur. Vine has always been
facinated by obsessives, by those who focus on one element to the
dangerous exclusion of everything else. But she is also
particularly good on the dynamics of a group, and in Grasshopper
she takes a group of very young people caught up in an addictively
exciting activity that is absurdly dangerous (climbing on the roofs
of buildings). However, the real danger, as always in her novels,
is not the physical risk so much as the psychological danger for
which it is a metaphor. One of the weaknesses of Vine's method of
stirring into the pot more and more melodramatic elements is that
she relies too much on an implausible conjunction of events often
amounting to an unbelievable coincidence. That is a pity, not least
because the realism of everything else is, as usual, so convincing:
the very specific London locale (in this case, Maida Vale), the
precise historical setting (the late 1980s viewed from the present
day) and the exploration of the nastier side of human nature. So as
well as a compelling story, the novel offers some thought-provoking
insights. (Kirkus UK)
Blamed by her parents for the tragic death of a friend, Clodagh has been banished from their home in the countryside to a dingy basement flat and a meaningless existence in the city. Then she meets the inhabitants of the top floor of 15 Russia Road. Charismatic Silver, brutal Johnny, paranoid Liv and exotic Wim range across a London of roofs, eaves and ledges, unseen by the ordinary inhabitants, thrilling in the freedom and danger. Clodagh, haunted for two years by the accident on the pylon, finds that running the roofs with these fascinating misfits brings her back to life, but it seems that tragedy and misfortune may not be done with her yet …
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