The Birthday Present: A Novel [Hardcover]

 

 

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A dark and subversive mix of political and social issues Barbara Vine's latest novel skirts around the ramifications of a Tory politician's sexual peccadilloes and the accompanying fallout from a kinky liaison gone wrong. The year is 1992 and England's ruling conservative party seems to be awash in scandal. Not so the wealthy 30 something MP, Ivor Tesham, an extremely ambitious politician through and though, and a rising minister in John Major's government, who seems tormented and deeply unlikable even though he thinks of himself as the personification of the "English gentleman." Ivor finds himself in a fog of gray ambivalence, somewhere unseen at either side, when his gorgeous girlfriend Hebe Furnell is killed in a car accident on the way to a evening tryst with him. A pretty blonde, almost beautiful with the looks of a model, the selfish Hebe was married with a two year old. But this didn't stop Hebe from indulging her wildest sexual fantasies, her affair with Ivor a meeting of two people with exactly the same tastes, the same feverish desires, and the same breathless greed.

Ivor hires the theatre actor Lloyd freeman and Dermot Lynch, a man who works on Iva's car to carry out the "birthday present," essentially to pick up Hebe and bring her to his brother-in-law's house in Hampstead. There are also "complications" how he and Dermot were to buy balaclavas to wear, handcuffs and a gag for Hebe. Their role to simulate a kidnapping by handcuffing Hebe, roping her ankles and tied a scarf round her mouth. After their car is hit by lorry driver, one man is dead and the other left with brain damage. It was determined to be fault of Dermot Lynch who was the driver of the car and who now lies in a coma unable to speak or move. Increasingly uncomfortable about the possibility of his little adventure coming to light in some gossip column, Ivor hopes that perhaps it will all blow over.

Unfortunately, Hebe's friend and confidante Jane Atherton remains fascinated by the implications of Hebe`s affair with Ivor, her curiosity exacerbated by her diary and then the discovery of Hebe's the dog collar of black leather with spikes, the thigh boots, the black lace corset and crotchless knickers. The poor unassuming Jane was jealous of Hebe's beauty, her self-confidence, her husband, a child, a lover and the fact that she had no worries in life. Certainly Jane filled her role as foil to Hebe's particular charms, providing her with alibis and particularly to that of Hebe's diffident husband, Gerry Furnell and their son Justin. She was the friend who agreed to deceive Gerry by supplying him with ostensible reasons for Hebe's absences.

But when Jane gets fired from her job and with her mother, always nagging and vituperative, she can do little else but contemplate blackmail. Adding to the complicated mix is Dermot, who suddenly regains consciousness, and in his fuddled confused state, mutters a hitherto unconsidered name. Certainly Dermot's struggling working class mother Philomena Lynch and his brother Sean is only to happy to accept hush money in the form of a yearly allowance from Ivor. Existing on in a place of shadows and incomprehension and oblivion, each character seems to be driven by some of Iva's secret, from one aspect or another. With a narrative that alternates between Ivor's rather tedious brother-in-law and the cynical Jane Atherton, who becomes increasingly desperate, this strangely mordant and rather weighty novel recounts days of sleaze where a Tory politician whose image is pure remains terrified that his name will be sullied by his sexual misbehavior.

Vine writes with her usual vigor, seemly at comfort in this genre, with the hallowed halls of the English political and class systems the perfect setting for this extraordinary cover-up as Ivor constantly gravitates between charm and unlikely restlessness. Meanwhile, the complicated web of half truths and the haze of lies and scandal remains dormant, for now anyway, until the shocking and unexpected finale unleashes a flurry of accusation and denunciations. Although parts of the novel are rather dull, murder and bloodshed liven the story up, with certain characters becoming collateral damage in the chain of events. As the years pass, the Tory's inevitably lose their power, yet the accident breeds more violence and family upheaval, leaving Ivor to repair the broken shards of his life and train of reprehensible events that he so very much wanted to keep secret. Mike Leonard March 09.

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