THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 12, 1995 TAG: 9503090373
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY DOUGLAS G. GREENE
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
ORIGINAL SIN
P.D. JAMES
Alfred A. Knopf. 416 pp. $24.
EVER SINCE HER first book, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962, P.D. James has been a dominant force of British detective fiction. The English scholar B.A. Pike has written that James has ``ennobled the form'' of the classical, fair-play mystery. Her books have all the characteristics of the Agatha Christie school - a multitude of suspects, clues, red herrings and, often, a least-likely culprit.
But James has added much more. Her books investigate the influence of character on event; they frequently examine ethical issues, and, like modern life, the answers are often equivocal. She combines evocative description of setting with a bleak, almost fatalistic view of the human struggle. It seems beyond her characters' ability to change who they are or how they act, and what happens to them sometimes seems the result of malignant fate. In short, James takes the fundamentally optimistic form of the detective story and adapts it to the 1990s, a time when many of us feel powerless to affect the world.
After the publication of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman in 1972, a book that many fans consider her finest work, James began a controversial series of novels that were deeper in meaning - and longer in page count - than common in detective fiction. Each of her recent books has examined the human need for religion and, in what I think is James' viewpoint, its ultimate irrelevance to the human condition.
A Taste for Death (1986), for example, investigates the murder of a man who has experienced the stigmata, the marks of Christ's passion, on his own body; and Devices and Desires (1989) uses the prayer for forgiveness from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer to investigate the smallness of our human wishes.
As its title indicates, James' new book, Original Sin, is also caught up with a religious issue, in this case whether we can ever escape the sins of our parents. Throughout the book, we meet people who, for one reason or another, cannot come to terms with their origins.
Gerard Etienne, director of the Peverel Press, is attempting to change his family-owned business into a modern publishing house by breaking with the past. When he is found murdered with a stuffed snake thrust between his jaws, James hints that someone has succumbed to the temptation of the Garden of Eden of seeking too much knowledge. More mundanely, Etienne has offended most of his co-workers - and others: his partners who don't want the Peverel Press to change, his still-aggrieved former mistress, the press' accountant who will soon get the ax, an author whose books he has summarily rejected as not part of the company's new image, his sister who needs money to support the schemes of her lover and the family of an editor who recently committed suicide.
James' detective, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, is less to the forefront than usual. Much of the police work is done by his two subordinates, Inspectors Kate Miskin and Daniel Aaron, and both find that the crime challenges their assumptions about right and wrong.
Etienne's body was found in the Peverel Press' archives, and evidence emerges that he was forced to listen to a tape recording explaining why he was to be murdered. Does the original sin have to do with some matter hidden in the publishing company's vaults? Or, perhaps more biblically, have the sins of the father been visited on the son?
Etienne's father is a frail, elderly man, much revered for his leadership of the French resistance during World War II. What could he have done to justify the murder of his own son? The book concludes in a riveting scene as Aaron tries to head off the murderer, even though he finds himself sympathizing with the motives for the crime.
Original Sin is a rich, multilayered work, written by a master of the English language. The book is filled with the imagery of bodies of water: The River Thames and the North Sea will continue to ebb and flow as humans are born and die. Even though human reason does identify the murderer, reason in James' books cannot resolve our fundamental human dilemmas. The Original Sin may be simply that we are fated to struggle against our human limitations, and ultimately to fail. MEMO: Douglas G. Greene is director of the Institute of Humanities at Old
Dominion University and author of the recently published ``John Dickson
Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
P.D. James' latest mystery is ``Original Sin.''
by CNB