Delight of the old familiar
14 Nov 2008 New Indian Express
Here is the familiar formula of the Golden Age of crime fiction – the shared clues, the plot a variation of the ‘locked room puzzle whodunit’ with the usual unlikely mix of suspects and their unravelling motives of a threatened social respectability or security. The secluded English country house comes alive with James’ eye for art and architectural design and is enhanced by her typical motifs of a richly evocative atmosphere (imagine Hardy’s Wessex, the Dorset Jurassic coast and a standing stone circle tainted by a witch-burning) and the looming presence of church as both sanctuary and scene of crime.
Adam Dalgliesh is back – a welcome throwback to the gentleman detective. Endowed with the universally popular tall dark good looks, mandatory intelligence, education and culture, this otherwise flat, cardboard cutout character is redeemed by P D James with facets of poetry writing, Jaguar driving and significant romantic punch with his tragic personal background! - (a parson’s son, he lost his mother when young, and his wife and newborn son in childbirth). Fans will finally see in ‘The Private Patient’, the end of previous romantic cliffhangers, with the marriage of this eminently eligible bachelor to Emma Laversham, who first appeared in ‘Death in Holy Orders’!
It’s not surprising that the author who created the first definitive female detective in Cordelia Grey is at her best describing her female victims. Be it Sally Jupp (’Cover her face’), Venetia Aldridge (’A Certain Justice’) or in this case Rhoda Gradwyn – James expertly brings to life tough,intriguing women who even if not particularly likeable, arouse a respectful understanding, however grudging.
How can one not feel for Rhoda, ‘the only child of a frightened and ineffective mother and a drunken father.’ That was how she had defined herself for more than 30 years and how she still defined herself. ‘Trapped in a tense and violent household, she and her parents colluded in their lies and endured their voluntary exile from life. The front room was for special occasions, for family celebrations never held and for visitors who never came, its silence smelling of lavendar furniture polish and stale air, an air so portentous that she never tried to breathe it.’ Her life is irrevocably changed one night, when she speaks up in an attempt to protect her mother and her father in his drunken fury smashes a whisky bottle on her face and she is marked for life.
P D James may be 88 years old – but her 18th novel, ’The Private Patient’, manages to keep up with the times in everything but language (try skimming through words like palimpsest, solipsistic, plangent, limned, colophon and the like without half-wishing you had a dictionary at hand!). The same sex marriage of Emma’s closest friend is described with honesty and sensitivity and wiccans worldwide over will be delighted with the medicine-wheel symbolism of the stone circle.
While Dalgliesh may be limited because his character is set in a time lock, James’ other characters are not found similarly wanting – the self-absorbed cosmetic surgeon whose satisfaction in his long-coveted, prized manor defines him, the fey, toy boy, gold digger haunting cousins who have come into an inheritance - “I like to remind them that I exist”, the same-sex marriage of Emma’s closest friend, the gay junior doctor struggling to explain his reluctance to participate in a gay pride march with his nurse lover - “I don’t see the point of it. If I were heterosexual you wouldn’t expect me to go marching down the high street to proclaim that I was straight. Why do we need to do it? Isn’t the whole point that we have a perfect right to be what we are? We don’t need to justify it or advertise it, or proclaim it to the world. I don’t see why my sexuality should be of interest to anyone except you.”
Rhoda’s isolation in school is echoed elsewhere in the book, in the universal words of everyone labelled different. “I was a grammar school boy, you see, there on a county scholarship. Difficult for you to understand.Things may be different now, although I doubt it. “Not that different. I wasn’t mocked or despised or made to feel different. I never felt I belonged there – and of course, I didn’t. I knew from the first that I had no right to be there, that something in the air of those quads rejected me... I wasnt the only one.”
Words like ‘perambulatory’ may make one wince, but James’ understanding of some situations is timeless. This book’s cliffhanger is true to the foreboding atmosphere - Is this the last we are to hear of Adam Dalgliesh?
