No Man's Nightingale by Ruth Rendell

Inspector Wexford is retired. In this latest novel in the series, his creator lets him have a look-in at a current case involving a woman minister called Sarah Hussein, who also happens to be a single mother of a seventeen-year-old.

Now a private citizen, Reg no longer has the powers of a "centurion" who is routinely called Sir or Inspector. On the other hand, he is now free to speak frankly to all those connected to the case, who talk far more openly to him than to his friend Mike [Burden], who is still a policeman.

Reg Wexford also has the perspective that comes with age.  Looking back over his life, he ponders how things have changed. Language flows steadily forward, carrying his daughter into middle age, marked by her use of outdated expressions like "flavour of the month."

The plot of this story is intricate, yet the social commentary is arguably more interesting, covering as it does the contemporary atmosphere of slowly evolving attitudes to class, to race, to language and to the precise levels of formality and usage that have kept an eroding social order in place.

In breaks between investigating, Wexford reads Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Enjoying the sonorous beauty of the antiquated language, he approves the author's advanced way of remarking the "absurd" attribution of "guilt and shame" placed by "imperious man" on an unwed woman. Equally, he notes Gibbon's ignorant and prejudiced certitudes.

Reg still writes letters, and he muses on the imminent disappearance of this old custom, along with so many others. Brooding over the social consequences of the contemporary ability a woman has to impregnate herself with donated sperm and a turkey baster, he does what he can to help the person who is shocked to learn she was born this way.

Unafraid to say what's on his mind, Wexford points out to his policeman friend that his summary of the Reverend Sarah Hussein's background is ''riddled with apologetic racism." A lover of language, he can't overcome his fascination at the steady march of the language of political correctness. In a humorous moment, Reg irritates his friend Mike by his inability to resist the temptation to keep commenting on his word choices. As the ex-policeman pontificates on the usage of the words hit man, henchman, and accomplice, readers smile at such agreeable imperfection. This is made all the more amusing when several days later, Mike jumps on something Reg says, taking the rare opportunity to demand, "'Who's a racist now?'"

Wexford shows calm diplomacy within his own family, with his daughter Sylvia and grandson Robin. He reads the boy's actions with a view to his age, and refrains from commenting when he observes that his middle-aged daughter, who has lost "an alarming amount of weight on that Dukan diet" [a reprise of a forgotten diet used by previous generations] now dubs "all even slightly overweight people fat." When he comments on her extreme slimness, she attributes this to envy; he forbears from telling her that at his age, he's more concerned with cancer.

Though language and culture changes, the class system stubbornly persists, though different in detail. The behaviour and speech of Maxine, the odious housekeeper, who wallows in gossip and racial slurs, seems typical of her position in the social hierarchy. She praises her immature and egotistic son, while denigrating her daughter-in-law for not knowing a woman's place. The author provides a satisfying foil for Maxine in the person of the replacement housekeeper, a modest and hard-working woman of Asian heritage, a blue-jean wearing mother of two accomplished children. Nevertheless, thinks Wexford, she shows his visitor into the room "with all the self-effacing meekness of a parlourmaid in Gibbon's own day."

Ever the observer of human nature, Wexford draws certain inferences about the new minister when he uses the antiquated phrase "How do you do?" which he himself has not heard for several years. I was intrigued to note that like many older Canadians, he is "uneasy with the metric system," and still thinks in feet and inches.

Certain pleasing ironies are woven through this story. Now that Reg is no longer a police officer but a private citizen, he is free not only to speak his mind but to offer comfort where it is needed. In sharp contrast to the resistance a policeman encounters when interviewing people, now everyone wants to confide in him. While Mike fears criticism in the press so much that he avoids being photographed in public eating or drinking while a murder case remains open, the situation is very different for Wexford, who observes how words that might once have "pierced to one's very soul" can now be "reflected on with wry humour" and "actually make one laugh."

Another important element of this rich book is a gentle meditation on aging. It brings the compensations of wide experience and perspective, even as it reveals the ignorance that drove certain past actions. Reading this recent wirj by Ruth Rendell felt like being plunged into a certain time and place even while feeling oneself moving with the relentlessly flowing river of life.