How to capture in words that most evanescent of qualities, a sense of place?

In her latest novel, Portobello, Ruth Rendell visits the straggling thoroughfare in west London whose market was a handy source of bargains for Paddington Bear and the setting of a protracted song-and-dance routine in the children's film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, while its side streets provided a fashionable backdrop for lovers' misunderstandings in the romantic comedy Notting Hill.

'Vibrant' is the word often summoned to convey Portobello Road's singular blend of menace and modishness. Rendell's Portobello 'has a rich personality, vibrant, brilliant in colour … bizarre and splendid' with 'a spice of danger'.

It is this spice of danger that unites the characters whose story unfolds around the old street named after a British naval victory in the War of Jenkins's Ear.

Wandering the area after dark one spring evening, a young man is beaten and robbed and falls unconscious against the gateway of a house in Chepstow Road, dropping an envelope stuffed with cash as he does so.

The destinies of an oddly assorted group of people, whose only common characteristic is their postcode, are enlaced by the random act of violence.

Eugene Wren, a fastidious art dealer with an obsessive personality; his doctor fiancée, Ella; a hapless petty criminal, Lance; his uncle Gib, a reformed burglar who has undergone a conversion to a charismatic religious sect; and the mugging victim, Joel, in whose already troubled mind a kind of demon is unleashed by the assault; all perform an intricate narrative minuet in Rendell's ingeniously plotted novel.
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The atmosphere she conjures among the community of prosperous villas and bleak housing estates that lie to either side of Portobello is so ominous that the mild-natured denouement has a deflating, rather than gladdening effect.

And while the menace of her young villains is admirably rendered, the emergence of their better natures is not altogether convincing.

But these are not fatal flaws in a fiction whose effect on the reader is almost as addictive as the slimming sweets on which Eugene becomes so disturbingly dependent.



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