What Happens At The End Of Master Of The Moor?

Question

Hoping for spoilers without ruining the whole story. Did that final plot twist leave anyone else totally stunned? I'm still reeling!

SRISHTY RAJ · Answer

I’m not familiar with the ending to the story “Master of the Moor”. But in a long, supernatural, thingy, kind of story like that, “Master of Life and Death” by J. Mannering is a good choice. It’s a very conclusive story which ends with a central battle for control of the cosmos. Our hero is forced into making a very definite, world-changing choice which I thought was very good.

Nora · Answer

Rendell slowly undresses Whalley to reveal the killing of his aunt. The quiet devastation of the ending is to be particularly noted as the moor that the tortured man loved becomes his nemesis. His loss of self in the moor is followed by his mad wandering of the paths and moor roads of his favorite haunt. There is no resolution in this book but plenty of unease left to enthral fans of psychological tension.

Spencer · Answer

I have just finished reading the book ‘Master of the Moor’ by Ruth Rendell. I hadn’t expected that ending at all, it is one of her psychological twisty thrillers. Stephen Whalley is the main character of the story, at the beginning he is portrayed as an introverted and rather unusual man. He is very obsessed with a certain moor. Throughout the book his obsession gets worse and worse and in the end it becomes clearer and clearer that he is the killer. The reader realizes his fragile state of mind more and more but still does not realize the full extent of his downfall until the end. He is revealed as the killer, but the way Rendell describes this to the reader is very subtle and unsettling. The last scenes of the book are particularly haunting.

I love how Rendell plays with our perceptions in this novel. We believe throughout the book that Whalley is an unusual and somewhat odd outsider, but he is so very much more than this. His obsessions are brought into sharp relief against the vast and wild beauty of the moor and the contrast between them and his appalling actions is powerful. The way we are misled by his narrative is masterful. We are left questioning everything throughout the novel and the ending is as messy and as unresolved as life itself. There are no neat resolutions, no clifhangery showdowns. Instead we are left with the quiet and chilling spectacle of a man descending into madness.

Henry · Answer

Oh ‘Master of the Moor’ the ending was classic Ruth Rendell, dark, psychological and unexpected. The main character Stephen Whalley is a loner and appears harmless but his love of the moor is destructive. He is revealed to be one of the murderers but there is nothing dramatic to mark this revelation, just a slow growing understanding of the truth. The way Rendell explores the reality of Whalley’s world and what is real and what is just his twisted imagination is brilliant. The moor is more than just a setting, it is a manifestation of Whalley’s declining mind.

It is left to the reader to piece together the darker implications of Whalley's behavior, yet he has been guided through them with such subtlety that it is possible to go back and re-read the last chapter of the book twice over and yet still feel that all the implications of it have not been grasped. It is not a happy ending, but it is an ending of great merit, masterfully contrived.

Justin · Answer

LOL, all these deep analyses. My take? The poor man was a bit of an eccentric and his love of walking in rainy hills was his downfall. His wife was mixed up in some shady business and he was so caught up in his own moor-hippy image that he had no idea what was going on until it was too late. The end. A cigar is sometimes just a cigar. A very depressing book is sometimes just a very depressing book.

Jim Gardner · Answer

Yes. I think it is a very cautionary tale and Stephen Adley Relph leads his reader to believe that he is living in his own perfect world of fantasy on the moor whilst reality carries on as normal down at his home with his wife. But the reality that he tries to avoid is worse than he could have ever imagined. His escape into his own mind is brutally evicted and he is left to face the real horror of what he has discovered. The moor that he loved and retreated to in his day dreams is just a place. His refuge, his escape was his internal world and that has been contaminated by his knowledge. He is a stranger to the moor and to his own life.

Stephanie Foley · Answer

For me the power of this ending is in its quiet horrific clarity. Stephen’s fog of obsession has lifted and he is faced with the harsh reality of things as they really are. He had used the moor and the murder(s) to escape from his unhappy marriage and dull life. But now he is brought back to reality, and it’s a reality that has been poisoned by his terrible knowledge. He’s realized that he’s got everything wrong – the killer of the girls, his wife, his perceptions of life. The moor is still there, eternally unchanged, but Stephen’s inner world has been irreparably changed. It’s not a thrilling end to a novel in the action sense of the word. It’s deeply sad and disturbing. We feel his creeping dread and his intense loneliness as he experiences these things. We see him come apart. It’s a masterful piece of work by Rendell.

Ellieson Grey · Answer

After finishing the book off I sat there for a few minutes staring at the cover of the novel. The way in which Rendell has managed to create an ending to Stephen’s story that is not in fact an ending but rather the beginning of a particularly terrible sentence is nothing short of remarkable. We leave Stephen in the midst of the worst period of his life, and there is to be no epilogue which attempts to explain whether he has in time managed to come to terms with what has occurred or not. Instead we are given a sense of closure in relation to the murder that had formed the basis of the plot, a sense of closure that in reality is trivial when placed against the extent of the human wreckage that we have witnessed throughout the novel. It is a difficult read, but it is one that leaves you feeling like little else could have been done in order to truly explore the events as they unfold. You don’t forget an ending like that.

Montaño Moises · Answer

Stephen's vast expertise, that had once served him so well on the moors, completely fails him in this, his greatest hour of need. He can tell you the exact route to take, the best way to avoid getting stuck in a bog, the precise species of heather that grows on the moors, but none of this information helps him to negotiate the complex web of human deceit that has led to his downfall. It becomes clear that, despite his best efforts, Stephen is not a master of anything other than his own irrelevant expertise. His downfall is a consequence of his inability to empathise with others, his lack of attention to the needs of those around him. The truth, when it finally dawns on him, is a simple one: it is a truth about people, not about places. And Stephen, the Master of the Moor, is blissfully, helplessly, ignorant of both.

What Happens At The End Of Master Of The Moor?

9 Answers

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