Book review: The Betrayal of Trust

DESPITE a 40-year back catalogue of literary novels, children’s books, Gothic chillers and detective fiction, Susan Hill has only recently found herself enshrined among the literati as a household name – a position evidenced by her current position as a Man Booker judge. The Betrayal Of Trust is not itself a Booker-baiter, but a genre novel: part six of Hill’s Simon Serrailler detective series.

THE BETRAYAL OF TRUST

Susan Hill

Chatto & Windus, £14.99

When serious flooding in the south of England tosses up a couple of long-buried skeletons near his hometown of Lafferton, Serrailler is called in to trace the identities of the dead. Meanwhile, his doctor sister Cat is fighting to keep the local hospice open; and one of her patients, Jocelyn, is facing up to a devastating diagnosis of motor neurone disease. Elsewhere, two other women – irascible retired teacher Lenny and mysterious beauty Rachel – crave release from the burden of caring for their ailing partners. Themes of dependency, self-sacrifice and society’s responses to old age and chronic illness preoccupy Hill here; indeed, for all its genre trappings, this is more a novel of ideas about death and sickness than it is a murder mystery.

Cynically, one might suspect Hill of brainstorming subjects particularly likely to strike chords with the ageing, affluent, conservative demographic that keeps Ruth Rendell and PD James in trouser suits. The neglect or active abuse of the sick and elderly; troubling changes wrought by Eastern European immigrants and convention-flouting younger persons; floods in pretty little towns; a general decline in safety and wholesomeness... it can all feel a touch Daily Mail. A particularly melodramatic treatment of euthanasia appears geared to tweak the nerves of older readers who harbour the fear that their relatives are secretly desperate to bump them off.

However, if certain elements of the story can come across as a little histrionic, Hill’s style hits the opposite extreme: it’s restrained and straightforward, sometimes to the point of greyness.

Conversations, particularly in the first third of the book, are staunchly factual, lacking humour or the sparkle of individual personalities; descriptions, similarly, are chuggingly blunt. Interest does gather as the story develops, however – especially as a chink opens in the carefully maintained reserve of Serrailler. Hill evidently has fun exposing this controlled, enigmatic man to a passion that utterly derails him. Love, here, is as ravaging and as impossible to combat as a physical illness.

Hill doesn’t shock us by revelling in descriptions of torture or depravity, or by emphasising the existence of random psychopaths who could strike at any time. Rather, she relates one-on-one violence directly to wider social phenomena. Whether or not you entirely buy her political points or enjoy her slightly blank style, her intellectual stance is engaging, her plot unpredictable and her detective a likable presence.