Alice, a promising violinist and just a beautiful young woman, must be the most shocking of them all, since, when we meet with her for the first time, she is cold-bloodedly contemplating leaving her child – her two-month-old daughter – forever and running away from her kind and responsible husband, just so she could become a concert violinist one day. Soon she meets Tom, a talented flautist, for whom a road accident became the end of his career, not so much due to the damage to his body as due to his mental injury. The accident made Tom a difficult, easily annoyed person. He abandoned his college and started playing in the tube. Alice joins his band for a short while. Together with them, we can see a gay couple – Peter and Jay – and some other individuals who come and go.

The plot of the book revolves around the London’s tube and around the old house called Cambridge School or just “the School”. It’s no longer a school though, but just a house in extremely bad repair where the owner – Jarvis Stringer – lets rooms as an extremely cheap rate, just so he could afford travelling around the world examining metro systems, which are his one and only hobby, the only passion of his life. Considered slightly crazy by many, Jarvis is in fact one of the most normal persons in the book, and his hobby is quite harmless. Most of the time we just hear about him, since he is in the USSR, studying our metro systems – lucky man, in fact, since 1991 was the last year of the USSR’s existence, and if he had postponed his trip just a little, he might have had fifteen visas instead of one. But I digress. Jarvis is writing a book about the history of the London Undeground, and “King Solomon’s Carpet” is full of quotations from his book. I must admit I skipped most of them this time.

Among the people who occupy his large house we meet his distant cousin Tina and her two kids, Jasper and Bienvida. Tina is very promiscuous – and proudly so, to the great distress of her mother Cecilia, old enough to be her grandmother and struggling to reconcile her old, almost Victorian morals with the standards of the new world. Cecilia lives in her own house nearby. Her life-time friend Daphne – Peter’s mother – is equaly distressed with her son’s “silliness” – her name for his homosexuality. Peter suffers from AIDS, and by the end of the book his health deteriorates to such a condition that we know his days are numbered, though it is not explicitly stated.

Alice’s love for Tom doesn’t last long – she meets Axel. Axel is all mystery, walking around the tube with an ugly, sinister man named Ivan, usually dressed up like a bear, embarrassing and even scaring some people who, like Cecilia, see no fun in it. We know Axel is up to something, but what it is we won’t know until the end of the book.

A lot of time is given to describing Jasper’s adventures. Tina’s nine-year-old son, usually neglected by his mother, truant and rebellious, travels a lot by the tube accompanied by a few other boys of the same age. Guilty of smoking, shop-lifting and endless fights in the train cars, these boys make enemies at every turn, but the worst of their entertainments is the so-called “sledging” – riding on the top of the train. Jasper has done it many times and enjoyed it intensely – mainly, I think, the danger of it – until his friend falls from the roof of the car he is in when the train stops abruptly. When Jasper sees his friend fall and realises what it means, it changes him.

I don’t know why, but I can’t help liking them all – Alice, Tom, Tina, Jasper and even Axel, who is contemplating a really dreadful thing. He scares Jasper, pretends to be Jarvis’s friend in his absense to squat in his house, seduces Alice while pretending to be friends with Tom – and these all are steps towards his ultimate goal: revenge. It was his twin sister who died in the underground train from a heart failure when she entered it for the first time in her life, a spoilt child of a wealthy family. She did so to satisfy her curiosity and didn’t think of possible consequences, didn’t know what was awaiting her there during the rush hour. But her brother decided to blame the tube. “I am mad”, he said once about himself. I think he was right.

By the end of the book they all get punished, except, probably, Tina, who inherits a nice villa after her mother’s death. Now she can meet all her boyfriends in more comfortable environments and not worry about anything. She is even planning to let some rooms, like Jarvis does. She’ll be alright, this easy-going, untroubled pretty creature. Axel, Alice and Tom are much less lucky, though they all have nobody but themselves to blame.

My special admiration goes for Jed, the hawk-keeper whose chothes stink of stale meat repelling people from him and his room. When told by a vet that his hawk will never be able to fly again due to an infection disabling his wing, he at first decides to euthanise the bird – an obvious thing to do, under the circumstances – but then decides to keep the hawk alive, not for the sake of training it, but just for the sake of being together, of living under the same roof. By sparing the bird’s life, by being able to value it he won my undying respect.

Though Ruth Rendell is mainly known as a detective novel writer, this book is not a detective story at all. It’s a huge psychological study, deep and somewhat disturbing, when we can’t help wondering if normalcy still exists in our world. Why do people do such things to themselves and their lives? She doesn’t give us any answers to the question – just makes us think.

The book definitely does deserve the Gold Dagger Award it got in 1991.