King Solomon's Carpet by Barbara Vine - Book review

A great story, very well written and increasingly tense and unpredictable, one of Barbara Vine's darkest creations. A feeling of impending catastrophe grows as the story's convolutions wind and wander.

There are a dozen or so characters, all misfits in their own way, but who is the protagonist, the main character? Is it Jarvis, the obsessive railway enthusiast who is writing a history of the London Underground? Is it the poor little rich girl who goes on the tube for the first time in her life and loses her wedding dress? Is it Alice, a talented violinist, fleeing her loveless marriage to Mike? Or maybe it's young Jasper who's careless mother Tina lets him skive off school and ride the underground with his friends? Or Jed, who owns a demented hawk, or Tom the busker with delusions of grandeur, or Axel the dangerous stranger who has a dancing bear. Maybe it's Jasper's grandmother Cecelia, who is in love with her best friend.

Some of these people are more unhinged than others. They and others live in or visit a ramshackle former school where a former headmaster had hanged himself with the bell-rope. By the end of the story his is not the only death.

The main character is actually the London Underground, a surface section of which the garden of the old school backs onto. The presence of the tube permeates the entire novel, the people are all bit players by comparison, their stories depend on it.

Set in around 1980, the book seems somehow old fashioned for that era, the writing style and characters don't feel quite modern enough. But then it was published in 1990 and the author was born in 1930, so it's not so surprising. The faint scent of quaintness doesn't detract from the obsessive grip the story has on its characters, or the reader.