The Veiled One | Social Concerns

The Veiled One Social Concerns

The title of Rendell's fourteenth Wexford novel suggests its principal theme, carried out simultaneously in the crime that Wexford must solve and in his relations with his family and environment: the classical Greek philosophical fallacy that if she is veiled "you can recognize your own mother and not recognize her" — "something to do with all of us and our parents, and with knowing and not knowing."

The veils modern society imposes on its members prevent individuals from distinguishing between the ideal and the real, with results that are all too often tragic.

Rendell explores several of these in her most richly textured Wexford novel to date. Her primary concern is to lay bare the twisted psychological motives behind the murder of a respectable middle-aged woman garrotted in a shopping center parking basement almost before Wexford's eyes. She also addresses sensitive current issues: a hypocritical media treatment of famine; the disregard of the old and infirm under the guise of a national socialized welfare system; well-intentioned but misguided police work that attempts to justify a brutal interrogation by achieving a suspect's confession and finishes in disaster; intrafamily stresses brought on by a parent's helpless preference for one child over another; a wrongheaded refusal to compromise and adjust in marriage. Wexford sums it all up: "It's not so much a depraved society that we live in as an idealistic one" — and as Rendell reveals them here, the ideals that these individuals espouse, no less than the society which encourages them, often create darksome veils of deceit and self-delusion.

One of Rendell's favorite causes, antinuclear lobbying, enters The Veiled One through Wexford's favorite daughter, a prominent BBC actress whose public protests seem to bring on a car bombing that nearly kills Wexford.

This "unveiling" turns out for the better; Sheila's father cringes at her wellpublicized ban-the-bomb protests, but Sheila's openness...
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