I don’t know if all men suffer from this condition but I have been afflicted for as long as I can remember. For as long as I have been reading. I’m not sure this deficit has a name. If it has it would be something like “arelationalitis” or “dysfunctional family connectionality syndrome”.
It is the inability to remember the relationships between family members. Is Bob Marge’s uncle or her cousin?
I know women will find this hard to believe because I realise they are all born with their family interconnection neurones intact. Why even my 5 year old granddaughter has clearly and precisely connected her family members into a functioning and well categorised mental family tree. I haven’t and am still asking my wife what is the connection between Bob and that woman Marge.
This has turned my trying to read “A Dark Adapted Eye” into a dark and unadapted maze of names of a cast of characters, all related to each other but how? Married? Cousins? Sisters? Brothers? Children? I am struggling but I am enjoying the story, broken up for me, by constantly flicking back to see whether I am dealing with a cousin, wife, sister or daughter.
Another ABC Book Club member inadvertently, but kindly, set me on this voyage of Ulysses. She revealed that Barbara Vine, who wrote “A dark adapted eye” was actually Ruth Rendall. THE Ruth Rendall of murder mystery fame.
She warned me that the story was well written and it surely is. Lovely words, languidly used, in a way most appropriate to its immediate post-war setting, which was a cusp in time, I suspect. A moment when what was considered most normal and appropriate became old fashioned and pushed aside by a new and modern age.
Even though the family relationships are defeating me I can tell you the story. Quite simply a niece mulls over the earlier execution of her aunt for murder. The brilliance for readers, and the torture for me, is the exquisitely slow and careful revelation of the facts as more and more of the family history is exposed.
But I should stop there. I haven’t finished the book, not by a long chalk, and I am writing not to review but to ask for help.
At the End of the Day 