A case for P.D. James as a Christian novelist

Theology Today, Jan 2003 by Wood, Ralph C

P.D. James is often regarded as the reigning Queen of Crime, a worthy successor to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. While these titles are indeed fitting, I believe that James must also be reckoned as a significant novelist in her own right. Her fifteen novels are far more accomplished works of art, for example, than the fiction of the much-touted Iris Murdoch. Yet it is also time to recognize James as an important Christian writer. Her fiction has far profounder moral and religious import, for example, than anything to be found in the Peter Wimsey books of Sayers. James must be regarded, I contend, as a contemporary successor to the twentieth-century literary masters who wrote from a Christian angle of vision. Even if she is a minor figure within it, she belongs to the grand tradition that runs from Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and Ronald Knox to the Oxford Inklings (especially C. S. Lewis), from W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Edwin Muir on to the great figures of the Catholic literary renascence: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Georges Bernanos and Francois Mauriac, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. Like all of them, James refuses to write for a religious audience alone, but for serious readers of all sorts and conditions, seeking to engage them with the largest human questions and the deepest theological truths.

James confesses, regretfully, that evil is much easier to depict than good. A stolen cache, a slashed throat, a slandered reputation-these all attract immediate interest. Goodness, by contrast, is enormously difficult to give vibrant fictional life. Precisely because it is often quiet and undramatic, James explains, charity is hard to make artistically compelling. There is not much artistic possibility to be found in caring for a sick friend, enduring an unhappy marriage, performing uncongenial work. Such deeds present an acute theological problem as well: Having minimal earthly honor and reward, they seem to vanish into the void. Mark Antony's praise of Julius Caesar puts the pagan case memorably:

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones.1

Our world remains pagan, James suggests, precisely in its unwillingness to perform what Wordsworth called "the little, nameless, unremembered acts/ of kindness and of love."2 Our loss of belief in the transcendent Witness and Vindicator has come at an awful cost. On one notable occasion, therefore, James has stepped outside the conventions of crime fiction to write a cautionary parable about the godless condition of late western culture.

The Children of Men (1993) is a dystopian novel set in 2012, when the whole world has been stricken with infertility. Childlessness becomes a metaphor of godlessness. Macabre things happen in this craven new age without babies. Kittens are christened in their place. New dolls are dressed up and wheeled about in prams; broken ones are buried ceremoniously in consecrated ground. Women experience false pregnancies and pseudo-- births. With a mania at once sinister and sad, everyone is desperate to keep alive the idea of birth and babies. Religious anarchy is also loosed upon the land. Churches that have not been abandoned entirely are used for occult rites, animal sacrifices, and Black Masses. Flagellants parade in Hyde Park, lacerating their bleeding backs. The senile and the infirm are subjected to a state-sponsored euthanasia program called the Quietus. Other aging folks who no longer "contribute to the well-being of society" are drugged into submission and sent out to sea for drowning. Worst of all, perhaps, is the response of the voters to this loss of a human future. They have elected a benevolent tyranny, thus fulfilling Dostoevsky's terrible prophecy in The Brothers Karamazov-namely, that a godless people will welcome despotism, exchanging perilous freedom for easy security: "Better that you enslave us, but feed us."3

Perhaps because she found it easier to warn of the wrath to come than to prophesy deliverance in artistic terms, James has returned to the writing of murder mysteries. For murder still poses, in unavoidable ways, the essential theological quandary. It remains the most abhorrent of crimes: There is no reparation for either the living or the dead, since the victim cannot be brought back to life. Hence the acute eschatological question it raises: Having been denied justice in this life, do the murdered have hope beyond death? There is also the problem of the criminal's own guilt and punishment. "Unless they are psychopaths," one of James's characters observes, murderers "have to come to terms with what they have done." In her recent Adam Dalgliesh novel, Death in Holy Orders (2001), James comes to grip with these and similar perplexities. And because her art and theology are displayed there at full stretch, it provides an apt occasion to assess her work as a whole.

AN INCARNATIONAL AESTHETIC

In a recent Atlantic Monthly B. R. Myers offers a witty, if doleful account of what is affected and pretentious in the novelists who are now in high literary vogue. Byers cites Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy as two especially egregious cases of the so-called Serious Writer who has received encomiastic praise but whose prose draws attention to itself, while telling a poor story and often making little sense. "Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose," Myers declares, "is deemed to be `genre fiction'-at best an excellent 'read' or `page turner,' but never literature with a capital L."4 As Byers observes, this latter form has been elevated to the high falutin' status of "literary fiction." He thus laments our devotion to inferior contemporary novelists, when we should be recovering the glories of such old-fashioned storytellers as Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham, Budd Schulberg and John O'Hara, even Stephen King! Surely P. D. James belongs in this latter class, for she is the unabashed genre-master of plot-driven detective fiction.