Grasshopper

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)