BOOK REVIEW / Crimes with an aria of passion: No night is too long by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine: Viking pounds 15

THE protagonist of this novel is a confused young man who falls in love first with an older gay man, a palaeontologist, and then with his boyfriend's sister. The notion that it is a certain configuration of looks and gesture which attracts, quite regardless of gender, is not inherently unbelievable, especially with a central character as self- obsessed as Tim Cornish.

On the contrary, this set-up looks at first glance like an interesting variant on the old eternal triangle. Ruth Rendell has written about lesbianism in the past - in her first published novel, From Doon with Death - and the reader instinctively trusts her to handle homosexual relationships without lubriciousness.

Unfortunately, what she has not been able to eschew is melodrama. The novel's title is a line from Ochs's aria in Der Rosenkavalier, and its excesses are certainly operatic: ludicrous coincidences, characters living in isolation from any semblance of social context, and an exhaustingly high emotional pitch. Tim does not realise until the very end of the book that Isabel is Ivo's sister; indeed, he spends most of the time consumed with guilt over a crime that never in fact happened - his supposed murder

of Ivo by abandoning him on a gloomy

Alaskan island.

One is reminded here not so much of Rosenkavalier as La Forza del Destino with its concealed identities, vendettas and concluding mayhem. Fatally, though, No Night Is Too Long is not saved by the verbal equivalent of Verdi's music. The novel is for the most part parodic, conceived in what Rendell takes to be the style of a graduate of a creative writing course (which is what Tim is). Yet in setting out to mock affected writing, it often seems as though Rendell has simply produced a bad novel instead of poking fun at one.

It is just too easy to make Tim's tutor a pedant, an unsuccessful novelist whose obsession is contractions; he strikes out every 'didn't' and 'shouldn't' in his students' work but has little else to teach them. Tim's writing style, with its literary pretensions and whimsical diversions, is especially irritating once it becomes clear that the crime he claims to have committed could not possibly have succeeded. Even an island as desolate as Chechin is frequently visited by cruise ships, one of which promptly rescues Ivo.

This is a novel about obsession, with sexual passion supposedly its linchpin. Yet the characters are as chilly as the Alaskan seascape in which much of its action takes place. Rendell is not an author one associates with coyness, yet the sexual acts, straight and gay alike, are described through the standard evasions of women's magazine fiction: 'Her back arched and her body reached for me and she wasn't silent any more, her gasps - or mine, they were indistinguishable - were as eloquent as the rushing water.'

Because of its ambitious and deliberately non-judgemental presentation of homosexuality, No Night Is Too Long has a veneer of modernity. Yet it contains many elements of the traditional crime novel which, like grand opera, relies heavily on a limited repertoire of motivations, subterfuges and misunderstandings.

The early and most successful Barbara Vine novels were memorable for the atmosphere of uncertainty that pervaded them, leaving the reader in suspense to the very end even about the exact nature of the crime. This was in itself a trick, but a highly accomplished one, and it was only with the most recent in the series, the overlong Asta's Book, that an air of contrivance began to intrude.

Perhaps Rendell's Barbara Vine persona is finding it harder to invent situations and characters which can sustain the almost dream-like sense of approaching doom that characterised the earlier novels; this might explain why Asta's Book was set in the past and No Night Is Too Long lurches into sexual territory still relatively unexplored by the crime novel. It may also indicate that Vine has reached the limit of her usefulness and it is time for this hugely gifted novelist to go in another, more fruitful direction.