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

Theology Today, Jan 2003 by Wood, Ralph C

James is a writer who possesses considerable learning, and she treats her audience to a good deal of the art and literature that she has mastered. Emma Lavenham, for instance, lectures at St. Anselm's on the Anglican literary tradition. During a classroom discussion, she helps the studentsand thus James's readers-solve a famous crux in George Herbert's poem "The Quidditie." Both of the teacher's euphonious names may have been borrowed from James's beloved Jane Austen, as well as from one of the loveliest villages in her own native Suffolk. Yet for all her literary knowledge, Emma Lavenham doesn't know quite what to make of her own beauty. James provides sage assistance by describing such gorgeousness as an "extraordinarily overvalued possession." We know that Ms. Lavenham is on the road to wisdom, however, when James tells us she is "already half aware that, while good looks and prettiness were benisons, beauty was a dangerous and less amenable gift."13

It is not only the wise maxims that make James's readers regard her as their unseen companion and tutor. Her descriptions are also arrestingly apt. She calls fingerprinting an "unofficial thieving of identity."14 Another pleasure to be found in the typical James novel lies in her shrewd metaphors and elegant sentences, most of them long and periodic. She describes the act of falling asleep, for instance, as the moment "when the mind slips free of the burden of consciousness and sinks unafraid into its little diurnal death." 15 The alliterating dental sounds clinch the sentence's dark sense. Nor is the Latinate "diurnal" a fancy indulgence. It is a more powerful word than "daily" because it originally pointed to one's earnings from a day's work. Such craftsmanship is to be encountered on virtually every page of James's novels. It reveals, if only implicitly, James's conviction that a writer with Christian loyalties can never make faith suffice for art. Thomas Merton ruefully confessed that a bad book about the love of God is still a bad book.

TRANSIENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

P D. James's fiction is Christian precisely to the extent that it refuses to balk hard questions and to supply unctuous answers. Chief among the griefs that she visits in this and her other novels is the tragedy inherent in the evanescence of all things human. The college cook, Ruby Pilbeam, bends over the corpse of the novel's fourth murder-victim with a poignant recognition that, in the end, we may leave nothing behind but an unpleasant odor: "She could smell in the hair and from the dressing gown the sour smell of unkempt old age and wondered that this should remain... when all else had gone."16 Already in the opening chapter we are confronted with the problem of human transience, as an elderly widow whose son was killed by the Irish Republican Army reflects on it:

I found myself thinking of all the people who had lived and died on this coast, and of the bones lying a mile out under the waves in the great churchyards [that had been gradually swallowed up by the invading ocean]. Their lives must have mattered at the time to themselves and the people who cared about them, but now they were dead and it would be the same as if they had never lived. In a hundred years no one will remember Charlie [her husband], Mike [her son], or me. All our lives are as insignificant as a grain of sand. My mind felt emptied, even of sadness. Instead, gazing out to sea, accepting that in the end nothing really matters and that all we have is the present moment to endure or enjoy, I felt at peace.17