P.D. JamesTurning the Thriller Inside Out
By MAUREEN HOWARD
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INNOCENT BLOOD
By P. D. James.
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P. D. James is a writer of sophisticated English mystery stories, the sort of books that abound with an intelligence the reader feels complementary to his own. Those who delight in such fiction do not ask for emotional depth or intensity of style, but for the reassurance that, even in a world of murder, insanity and intrigue, a civilized logic can prevail. Surely, a quiet dose of superior murder mystery is one of the liveliest, least sinful of addictions.
In "Innocent Blood," Miss James has written a novel vastly dependent upon the genre that she handles with such success, but a novel clear and true. It is immensely readable, bright, almost satisfying with its artful plot and careful psychological dossiers. The themes of "Innocent Blood" are respectably literary: the quest for personal identity, the irrational love and strain of duty between parents and children, husband and wife.
Philippa Rose Palfrey, a cool, accomplished young woman about to go up to Cambridge, decides to discover her real parents. She is 18, and under English law can claim her birth certificate. For years she has lived as the adopted daughter of Maurice Palfrey, a debonair sociologist and television explicator of contemporary life, and Hilda, his passive wife, a woman whose lone finicky pleasure seems to be cooking and serving gourmet meals. Kind enough, good enough, the Palfreys have impressed Philippa with their deadening sense of responsibility toward her, as though she were yet another sociological sample fostered under perfect conditions. Given this made-up version of family life, who would not choose the facts? Philippa's gloss on her actual parentage-that she is the illegitimate daughter of a spirited maid by the master of a noble household-is an inauthentic as her life with Hilda and Maurice. "Innocent Blood" begins in the honorable novelistic tradition of the orphan's search for the past, and Miss James's self-assured heroine is given full warning by the Government counselor: "We all have our fantasies in order to live. Sometimes relinquishing them can be extraordinarily painful, not a rebirth into something exciting and new but a kind of death."
The truth is more bizarre than anything imagined: it is here that Miss James departs from the realm of the psychological suspense novel and enters into the familiar stuff of the detective story. Philippa discovers who her parents are: Mary and Martin Ducton, housewife and clerk of no ordinary stamp, for he had raped a Girl Guide and she had then beaten the child to death. The horror of the parental crimes seems arbitrary. Like the neatly severed limbs and clever hangings in mystery stories that reduce death to part of a game, the Ductons' violence advances the plot. We are not made to care, perhaps we are not supposed to care. Martin Ducton exists as part of a puzzle. A weak, modest man, his obsession remains private and, despite some further exploration, so does his wife's. Child-beating is presented as a foible that may accompany rape.
The father is dead, but Mary Ducton is about to be released from prison. Mother and daughter accept each other, sidestep their volatile histories, and begin an idyll, an interim life which P. D. James describes with a pleasant richness of detail. Mary and Philippa (now Ducton) go about London as tourists, working anonymously in humble restaurants, shopping, chatting about Shakespeare and George Eliot. Their freedom is false, for the reader knows it is only a matter of time before they will be trapped by the past. Norman Scase, the father of the slain child, is stalking them, tracking the bland murderess and fortunate daughter down to their hideaway, a contrived domestic nest with tea cups and plants.
Scase is the most original character in the novel. A lonely widower, almost grotesquely ugly, he is sweet-tempered, bumbling, naïve-a man of genuine feeling. "Innocent Blood" is a clever novel: the reader knows that he is being manipulated by the counterplot of melodramatic revenge. It is oddly exciting, for Miss James is accomplished at this sort of maneuver and it is a tribute to her deftness that I must not tell the results of the chase. She turns the intricate form of the thriller inside out, a device that brings her novel perilously close to being an adroit murder mystery manqué. The story is ingenious, but not surprising. There is never anything like the playfulness of Iris Murdoch's contrivances, which tell us a good deal about the accidental and comic nature of our passions. Nor does Miss James give us the macabre world of Beryl Bainbridge, where violence lurks, tangible, breathing, within the bounds of ordinary life.
P. D. James is capable of handling her themes with astonishing clarity: not to simplify things for us, as in her thrillers, but to give us the crisp honesty of her novelistic perceptions. All the parents in "Innocent Blood" have deceived their children.. All the children are born of peculiar or misguided love. There are brilliant touches of irony in the summing up: Hilda, to Maurice Palfrey's chagrin, ends up with a scruffy new dog as comfort; Norman Scase settles happily with a sweet blind woman who will never see his awful face, and Philippa, at Cambridge, surmises, "if it is only through learning to love that we find identity, he had found it."
The curious thing is that P. D. James is gifted in the techniques of the traditional novel, can create place, gives great attention to significant detail and the pacing of her narrative, but seems to mistrust her own art and run for the cover of artifice. London is beautifully seen, the bus routes and parks, the smart dinner party and third-rate hotel. The city as she renders it is more than background, more than a movie set: vandals roam the streets at dawn, and so do enigmatic ladies in evening dress; it is alive with terror and good fortune. There is no need to tidy the scene, as Miss James does, with a perfect chain of events. The real mysteries are in the muddle of the daily continuum, and fine novels do not yield easily to solutions.
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