50 Book Challenge: Book 43
The Lighthouse – PD James
Standing in Borders at the weekend, I found I had to interrupt my plans to continue reading about the adventures of Aurelio Zen. This was caused by the sudden, if not entirely unexpected, reappearance of Commander Adam Dalgleish (who almost certainly outranks him, anyway). What I am trying to say is that I found PD James’ latest, The Lighthouse, out in paperback and lying right there on a table in front of me as part of an enticing stack on a three-for-two offer. Rejecting a book by Louis Theroux and a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go I managed to part with a mere £6.99 for just the single volume. A good thing that the new PJ Tracy isn’t out in paperback yet. I must admit that I probably succeeded because that Ishiguro book feels like something that I should be reading rather than something that I want to read. Not so the Theroux, however. That was pretty hard to leave behind.
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Anyway. On to the substantive point. PD James’ speciality is the locked-room mystery – where you have a closed community and a tightly-controlled ring of suspects. This means no messy distractions to upset the good Commander’s intellectual puzzle for him and enough complications to ensure that there’s at least a second murder for him to agonise about. Over the years we’ve had a nurses’ hostel, a seminary, legal chambers, a nuclear power station, a psychiatric clinic, a nursing home for the disabled, a police laboratory, a museum and (featuring Cordelia Gray) a Victorian Gothic island castle. This must inevitably mean that the author, some fifteen detective novels to the good, is casting around to some extent for new settings. Does the fact that this seemed to me to be a synthesis of several of the previous ones make me a bad person? This story is set on a private island retreat off Cornwall and I was powerfully reminded of both The Black Tower and The Skull Beneath The Skin. I am a huge fan of PD James and have every one of those 15 novels occupying rolling acres of space on my bookshelves, as well as Innocent Blood and The Maul and the Pear Tree. But I am acutely aware that she is nearly 86 years old and I have the unwelcome literary fate of Patrick O’Brian post-The Yellow Admiral in front of my eyes. James’ last three novels, A Certain Justice, Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room, have all been at least as good as anything else she has written and a convincing attempt at engaging with the modern world. Certainly the reviews of The Lighthouse I have looked at do not appear to support my opinion. Baroness James is accorded the deference and respect commensurate with her status as a major Establishment figure and the ‘queen of crime’ (even by The Guardian). But – well, I wonder. Especially as a major character in this novel is a writer bemoaning the decline of his powers.
By now you’ll have gathered that I found this disappointing and felt it had nothing new to say to me. I sensed a retreat to former themes, plots and characters rather than a novel that moves the James canon on, in the manner of the three books I mentioned above. That said, I did find it a comfortable, enjoyable, page-turning read, and set firmly once more in that unique early-60s-displaced-to-the-present world of all the author’s novels. In this world people have first names like Francis, Dennis and Rupert, almost everyone speaks in perfectly grammatical sentences and – this was a telling detail for me – grinds coffee beans every time they want a cup of the beverage. Never mind instant, even ground coffee is overly proletarian for this lot. The novel has a slow start characteristic of James – I think she likes to get the pieces arranged on the board before the starting gun is fired – and we are treated initially to an almost soap-opera-like summary of the lives and loves of the various police officers in Dalgleish’s special investigations squad before moving on to a similar exercise with the suspects. Someone must have put something in the coppers’ freshly-ground coffee. And, as I have said before, I find Dalgleish-in-love extremely tedious and regard this entire aspect of the plot as an unwelcome deviation from the matter in hand. I also found it deeply amusing to see them rather pretentiously referred to as Dalgleish and Emma, as if they were Darcy and Elizabeth, which they are certainly not. I’m afraid I saw the villain coming a mile off – and I realised early on the significance of the piece of evidence that would condemn them. There was a topical twist that I thought was masterful and that made me catch my breath and I thought the plot in general was wrought with great skill.
I just came away with the very strong feeling (certain topical details excepted) that I was reading a book that was at least a decade old.
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