PILLARS OF GOLD

The latest from Britisher Ellis may not have quite the depth (though it’s close) of The 27th Kingdom (1999), but it’s got

all the same bite, wit, and deft, intellectual allure. In a London neighborhood where (again) the well-off and derelict reside cheek by jowl, lives a family of three, consisting of Brian (third marriage); wife Scarlet (second marriage, and so depressed that, alone in the house, “she found that she wished she was dead”); and teenaged Camille, daughter of Scarlet, hater of stepfather Brian (he’s insensitive, he works in advertising), sneaker of margaritas, skipper of school. Of equal importance is next-door neighbor Constance, born and raised in the old neighborhood, quick-witted and self-educated, one who “still dealt in stolen goods when she got the chance” and whose numerous brothers (there had been ten siblings all together), although now grown and away from home, continue to lurk with genuine menace at the edges of the criminal life. Could these scary brothers, in fact, have something to do with the disappearance of neighbor Barbs—the privately disliked but publically praised feminist, social activist, and sleeper with the husbands and boyfriends of others—whose house has been empty for days and who didn’t even feed Constance’s cats as she’d agreed to when Constance was recently away? Barbs (as Camille discovers) has even left behind her cosmetics bag, an ominous sign in light of the area’s high crime rate—or in light of the unidentified female body dragged a few days earlier from the canal. As always, Ellis hints at enormities through glances at the smallest weaknesses and mundanities of her characters” lives; and here again, as the despairing Scarlet has a dinner party, as Connie wonders whether to go to the police, and as Camille teeters on the edge of the future, life itself does little more than—hedge its bet.

Smart, intelligent, near-perfect fiction: always amusing, deeper than it looks.