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

Theology Today, Jan 2003 by Wood, Ralph C

As in her previous novels, James again refuses to indulge in any sort of apologetics. Dalgliesh is her hero but not her mouthpiece. His excellence as an investigator has its own secular integrity, for his vocation as a detective is driven by humanist motives rooted in nothing ultimate. In Devices and Desires (1989), Dalgliesh offers this important meditation on murder and its detection:

Perhaps this was part of the attraction of his job, that the process of detection dignified the individual death, even the death of the least attractive, the most unworthy, mirroring in its excessive interest in clues and motives man's perennial fascination with the mystery of his mortality, providing, too, a comforting illusion of a moral universe in which innocence could be avenged, right vindicated, order restored. But nothing was restored, certainly not life, and the only justice vindicated was the uncertain justice of men.5

Yet as the son of an Anglican clergyman, Dalgliesh has been schooled in the Christian virtues, and he has much of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer by heart. Despite his unbelief, therefore, he remains profoundly sympathetic to the faith, especially its mercy for criminals and other sinners. Nearly everyone in James's fiction has his or her own secret pathos, a suffering so deep that, though it does not excuse the evils they commit, it enables us to understand and often to pity them. And even the worst of her killers usually has a chink of kindness opening a ray of light into his depraved heart. Knowing the immense vagary of human motives, where good and evil come in dark disguises, Dalgliesh constantly challenges his own judgments, wondering whether they are sufficiently charitable toward people whose purposes he has cause to question.

James's plots are as intricate as her characters are complex. They often depend on hairpin turns and wild coincidences that sometimes seem contrived. Yet their wonder lies not chiefly in the laying down of clues that, if we are alert enough, we might pick up along the way and thus solve the mystery. Quite to the contrary, her novels keep us at the edge of our chairs because she makes us want to know not only who "done" it but also why? That plot and character are so deeply intertwined makes James's novels bear repeated readings, as most crime fiction does not. They reveal that human lives are constituted by the complex totality of their acts, but that these acts are prompted by often-contradictory motives and that many actions result not so much from willful choice as from happy or unhappy circumstance. Far from being a Pelagian moralist who believes that we all get what we deserve, James reveals that human existence is a mysterious enmeshment of providence and freedom and grace and luck.

James has transformed the detective genre, among other ways, by giving her novels carefully rendered settings. In A Taste for Death (1986), for example, she recreates the urban atmosphere of contemporary London, much as Dickens evoked the damps and fogs of the Victorian city. Here again the topography and the architecture, the concrete smells, autumnal sights, and sea sounds enliven the environing world of Death in Holy Orders. In fact, James often makes the weather serve as what T. S. Eliot called an "objective correlative" to human events. The murder in the chapel happens on the night of a fierce storm. Its destructive consequences echo the human calamity that has occurred: "A large bough of the tree had been torn from the trunk and now lay on the grass verge, looking in the growing light as bleached and smooth as a bone. From it sprouted dead branches like gnarled fingers."6