P.D. James's Uncomfortable Autobiography. - Review - book review

Time to Be in Earnest. A Fragment of Autobiography. P.D. James. Faber and Faber. [pounds]16.99. 281 pages. ISBN 0-571-20094-X.

P.D. James' account of her 78th year is, in prospect, a tantalising book: a mix of meetings with luminaries -- prime ministers, writers; discussions of murder cases -- real, and imagined; and reflections on the art of fiction from one of the most successful writers of the last twenty-five years. What is surprising is that a book with such rich potential fails to captivate.

From the start, this is a book that doesn't know quite what it is. It is part diary -- basing itself round an almost daily note of events -- but it is also a very public text, guarding its words like a diplomat. 'Many social events', the prologue notes, 'can't properly be mentioned since I have no intention of betraying confidences and some of the most interesting things I learn are said to me in confidence'. Admirable loyalty, of course, but as a part of a larger philosophy of self-censorship, it deprives lime to be in Earnest of any sense of intimacy, immediacy or candour.

Time and again a polite decorum descends, and while I am not calling for a betrayal of confidences, a diary surely does require a sense of the unrehearsed to amount to anything more than polished platitudes. There are occasional glimpses of intensity: powerful but passing notes on the mental illness of her husband and her mother; recollections of her early books that really do capture the excitement of publishing for the first time. But these moments of unguarded honesty are exceptions. They should be the norm.

In fact the only time the prose develops any consistency of 'edge' is in the repeated jeremiads against contemporary society. But even here, the complaints are so familiar - so surprisingly standard for a professional writer - that they do little to add life. We get Daily Mail generalisations: 'Today we have a generation of children more disturbed, more unhappy, more criminal, indeed more suicidal than in any previous era'; 'in the 1960s ... attentive, disciplined ... learning ... would probably have disqualified the student from any chance of becoming a teacher'.

We are told that 'ours is not a dignified, courteous or generous-minded age', that the author is 'becoming tired of women presenting themselves as victims', and that 'fortitude and self-control [are] ... qualities which are not much in fashion'. She and her friends congratulate themselves 'that we were at school before the arrival of political correctness' (which she later terms 'pernicious linguistic fascism'), and she criticises those 'young people I meet [who think] that everything that has gone wrong with world in the past century is the fault of Britain'.

My problem is not with complaints per se -- these are her opinions, of course, and are therefore valid in her diary -- but rather the sheer predictability of them all. When she comes to worrying about the rise of big publishing corporations at the expense of the small company, the lack of self-awareness -- what else is P.D. James if not a mass market writer and the product of international publishing houses? is remarkable.

Fans of her fiction will, I am sure, find interest in her many references to the origins of her books, the genesis of plots, the relation between the realities and representations of murder, and her notes on the writing of novels (but here, again, the sense of surface over depth is striking). But the real and fascinating question the book provokes -- why, particularly amid these concerns over moral degeneracy, is P.D. James so inexorably attracted to murder -- is left unanswered.

The book feels like a great missed chance. It feels like a publisher's idea, thrust on an author who never felt comfortable with the commission. It feels very aware of its shortcomings. Why else would it include an eight-point section of 'advice for reviewers', and the fascinating observation - with which I must close - that 'There are, of course, some reviewers who use reviewing to compensate for . . . sexual failure'? (See also Murder Most Oxford, page 238.)

COPYRIGHT 2000 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group