THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 3, 1996 TAG: 9610030065
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: 66 lines
WITH ALMOST 50 published books, Ruth Rendell (``Simisola'') must be one of the most successful crime novelists in the world. She writes under her own name and also as Barbara Vine (``The Crocodile Bird'').
Her attraction to the thoughtful mystery lover is that she does not simply wring a plot from a crime; she delves into the mind and heart of victim, criminal and detective with equal insight and compassion. Her work borders on sociological study. Each mystery brings a glimpse into other lives far removed, more dangerous, yet familiar as the reader's own.
Rendell's latest, ``The Keys to the Street,'' explores the depths and the heights of human nature - and how poorly we understand its motivations.
The protagonist, Mary Jago, becomes a medical donor. Her ``harvested'' bone marrow gives Leo Nash, a frail young man with acute myeloid leukemia, another chance at life. But Rendell focuses on the effect of the transplant on Mary's world. One character notes, ``when you save a man's life, he belongs to you.'' Another warns: ``Is it true we dislike those who have done us a service?. . . If so, the greater the service, perhaps the greater the dislike.''
That's just one plot. There is an underworld of petty criminals, and another of homeless people. Rendell explores the problems of street life. Not just the obvious ones, such as food and shelter, but where to bath, where to stash belongings, whom to trust, even where to make love.
There are the genuinely down-and-out, alone, unwanted, mentally ill folks, like ``Pharaoh,'' who has sewn keys to every inch of his clothing. He's acquired this glittering, clinking coat of armor in search of ``the keys to the kingdom.'' But the only doors that open seem to be exits.
And then there are others, like sane but grief-stricken Roman Ashton, who choose homelessness to escape some intolerable reality.
Soon the problems of all become more basic: surviving the depredations of ``The Impaler,'' a serial killer who spikes the bodies of his homeless victims on the pointed railings enclosing London's Regent's Park.
The most engrossing theme is not murder, but the way the lives of the members of Parliament and actresses, cops and butlers and shop owners, street thugs and druggies and homeless people intersect daily - how small a gulf lies between. One pivotal viewpoint character linking the rich to the mean streets is a professional dog walker.
``The Keys to the Street'' at times seems a perfect microcosm of modern life, with all its banalities and brutalities, its fleeting pleasures and kindnesses, exposed like so many insects fleeing an overturned rock.
The story is not without flaws. Rendell cannot resist tying up loose ends. Two antagonists obligingly (if messily) do away with themselves, one in heavy traffic in an awkward deus ex machina scene unworthy of this author's skills. And she has subordinated the murderer so thoroughly to the larger questions in the plot that when his identity is revealed, it seems anticlimactic.
Still, ``The Keys to the Street'' remains powerful, sensitive and moving. We are all a turn of the key from the streets; the door swings both ways, and there is no magical kingdom free of want, hurt or despair. Like Rendell's characters, we all at some time are fearfully entering, temporarily trapped in or thankfully exiting the dark recesses of life and of the human psyche. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' is a novelist who
lives on Virginia's Eastern Shore. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
BOOK REVIEW
``The Keys to the Street''
Author: Ruth Rendell
Publisher: Crown. 326 pp.
Price: $24 by CNB