April 29, 2001
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
In P. D. James's new novel, Adam Dalgliesh looks into the death of a young seminarian.
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Featured Author: P. D. James
Excerpt: 'Death in Holy Orders'
By SARAH FERRELL
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DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS
By P. D. James.
415 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $25.
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haracter, plot and setting take equal part in the work of P. D. James, and never have they been in greater supply than in ''Death in Holy Orders.'' Here, within the setting of a great Victorian mansion set on crumbling cliffs -- a landscape that is both creepy and creeping -- a large cast of variously unscrupulous men and women is brought together in a tangle of murder, mayhem, betrayal, incest and generally bad behavior.
It all starts with Sir Alred Treeves, an arms manufacturer rich and powerful enough to bully New Scotland Yard into dispatching Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh, James's elegant poet-detective, to investigate the death of his adopted son, Ronald. Never mind that an inquest has found the death accidental and that the body has been cremated. And never mind that Sir Alred never much liked Ronald -- especially after the charmless youth decided to go into the church instead of becoming a munitions tycoon. Sir Alred is determined to get to the bottom of things.
At the time of his death, Ronald was a student and candidate for the priesthood at St. Anselm's, a small (limited to 20 students), elite, High Church theological college. As it happens, Dalgliesh had spent several pleasant summers there as a boy, while his father, a Norfolk pastor, traded parishes with an inner-city priest. He is given his old set of rooms in the college guest quarters. The cottages are full, on what turns out to be an eventful weekend -- in addition to Dalgliesh, visitors include Roger Yarwood, a deeply troubled policeman on sick leave, and a less than welcome visitor, Archdeacon Crampton.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times |
P. D. James.
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The archdeacon is opposed to everything that St. Anselm's celebrates, from its bells-and-smells services to its isolation to its comparative luxury. (It's the kind of institution that has inherited a fine cellar, although it does not serve wine on Friday or during Lent.) He also holds a deep personal resentment toward the warden, Father Sebastian Morell, and the class and privilege that he represents -- Father Sebastian is a descendant of bishops and married into the gentry. The ambitious and evangelical archdeacon sees the college, which was established by a Victorian millionaire (''Probably the woman had been half mad,'' he muses), as outdated and useless, and he plans to close it -- but only after he has got his hands on its portable assets, including an altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden. He sees Ronald Treeves's death as a weapon to bring the college down. It is easy to wish him dead.
Three priests besides Father Sebastian are in residence: Father Martin, a frail and probably holy elderly man who is an old friend of Dalgliesh; Father John, a sweet and kindly (no kidding) convicted pederast; and Father Peregrine, a hilariously pompous librarian, whose fussbudgetry leads to the discovery of a major piece of evidence. Of the four ordinands on premises for the weekend, one, Raphael Arbuthnot, would, were the college to close, inherit it all, were he not illegitimate.
FROM THE ARCHIVES
"The American crime novel seems to be very much in the hard-boiled tradition that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War -- the end of puritanism, the Depression, Prohibition, gangsterism and so on. Your heroes tend to be tough and sensational, reacting very instinctively to danger and absorbing more punishment. Your stories are also generally set in a more violent society.
"While on the whole the British detective story is gentler, more pastoral. Because it is firmly rooted in the soil of British literary tradition, it shares assumptions that are strong in our literature; for example, the assumption that we live in an intelligible and benevolent universe; the assumption that law and order, peace and tranquillity are the norm; that crime and violence are the aberration; and that the proper preoccupation of man is to bring order out of chaos. Our stories are also more likely to have happy endings."
-- P. D. James, in an interview with The New York Times, October 9, 1988 |
These are only a few of the characters, each of whom -- stars, featured players and members of the chorus -- comes with a fully realized personality and history. Their pasts linger, often darkly intertwined. Raphael Arbuthnot, for example, hates the archdeacon for hounding Father John to prison, while Roger Yarwood believes, but has been unable to prove, that the archdeacon murdered his first wife. (The archdeacon, in turn, hates Roger Yarwood and filed a complaint against him that led to a reprimand.) When murder is done, the candidates for murderer are many, and all of them have one or more motives. Almost everyone is either a suspect or at risk, and it takes all of Dalgliesh and his team's resourcefulness and imagination, as well as good forensics, to come to terms with escalating violence. Indeed, in a ''Survivor''-like test of strength and determination, the cerebral detective almost comes in second to the murderer, as his friends and colleagues (it's nice to see Dalgliesh's associate Kate Miskin again) watch in horror.
Even for P. D. James, the plot is complicated, and purists might complain that its resolution depends on the most Dickensian of coincidences. Most of the rest of us will marvel that a story of such baroque intricacies can be resolved in any way at all, and will be dazzled by the way James keeps all her characters moving with only deliberate collisions. And after all the intervening ghastliness, we finally return to poor Ronald. In the end, Sir Alred is given no choice but to accept the verdict reached at the inquest. Dalgliesh, however, knows that Ronald was the victim of blasphemy and heartlessness, the latter shockingly compounded in ways that will not be revealed here. But he's not going to tell.
The classic detective story ends with the restoration of order. But here James, whose sympathies lie clearly with St. Anselm's and its traditions, goes beyond restoration to reconciliation in an epilogue in which Father Martin, Raphael Arbuthnot and Adam Dalgliesh affirm the great virtues of faith, hope and probably love.
Sarah Ferrell is deputy editor of The Sophisticated Traveler, a Part 2 of The Times Magazine.
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