Posts
Elizabeth Zelvin
Celebrated mystery novelist PD James’s new Jane Austen pastiche, Death Comes to Pemberley, is the first book I downloaded to the Kindle I got for Xmas that wasn’t either my own work or in the public domain. It’s only the latest of a big enough bevy of novels to be called a subgenre—some mysteries and some I’d call historical chick lit—featuring either Jane Austen herself or her characters, most often Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, their fictional lives extended through marriage and parenthood.
The novel started well enough that I began to make notes for a possible blog post. James’s meticulous use of language and majestic pace, so out of sync with most of today’s crime fiction, serve her well as she sets her scene in Austen’s universe. She replicates Austen’s lightly ironic tone.
“The town has an assembly room...but...the chief entertainment takes place in private houses where the boredom of dinner parties and whist tables, always with the same company, is relieved by gossip.”
When social events are threatened due to the war with France, it is finally concluded that “Paris would rejoice exceedingly and take new heart were that benighted city to learn that the Pemberley ball had been cancelled.”
Unlike many of the authors who have borrowed Austen and her characters, James avoids anachronism in both language and content, beyond a few delicate references to marital love and pregnancy, on which Austen would have remained silent or even more euphemistic. It could even be argued that the lack of onstage drama—for example, there is no confrontation between Wickham, who plays a major role, and either Darcy or Elizabeth—is justified because overt confrontation would be out of character for Austen.
Unfortunately, the promise of Austenian delights is not fulfilled, nor is the hope of a good mystery. I’ve already seen one online review that perpetrated more of a spoiler than I think fair. However, I must say that there is no puzzle and no detection, that certain characters are introduced only for the sake of unwarranted revelations at the end about their role in the crime, and that James is self-indulgent in slipping in her own critique of Pride and Prejudice.
When Darcy’s sister Georgiana has a suitor, Elizabeth reflects:
Surely they were in love, or perhaps on the verge of love, that enchanting period of mutual discovery, expectation, and hope. It was an enchantment she had never known. It still surprised her that between Darcy’s first insulting proposal and his second successful and penitent request for her love, they had only been together in private for less than half an hour....If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?
James also drags in references to characters from Persuasion and Emma, who by coincidence are only two or three degrees of separation from the Darcys.
James commits almost every literary crime that new writers are cautioned against: endless backstory, telling rather than showing both character and action, lack of conflict and suspense, and avoidance of dramatic scenes or interaction between the characters in favor of tedious exposition and narrative musings. Yet within a month of its appearance, Death Comes to Pemberley had already been on the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks and will no doubt remain there for some time to come. Like me, an awful lot of readers were seduced by the combined names of Jane Austen and P.D. James and will no doubt be equally disappointed. Or will they even notice?
________________________________________________________________________
Showing posts with label PD James. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PD James. Show all posts
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Thursday, May 29, 2008
PD James: Time Traveler from the Golden Age of Detection
Elizabeth Zelvin
I recently read PD James’s 2005 mystery, The Lighthouse. It’s a stately read that is best savored at a leisurely pace rather than gobbled up in a night. In fact, I had saved it for airplane reading to and from a signing in Minneapolis, where it not only entertained me but provided a promotional bookmark (mine, not James’s) to give to the potential reader in the next seat.
Even in the first 50 pages, it struck me that James, at 80 a revered and much honored author, is allowed to construct a mystery that would never pass muster with agents or editors from a newbie, even if a beginning writer could achieve her magnificent prose style. Today we’re exhorted to put the murder up front—in the first chapter if not on the first page—and keep the action non-stop. Some respected authors who teach writing insist that the right amount of backstory in a manuscript is none whatsoever. It’s considered amateurish to “tell, not show” what our characters are like. The omniscient author point of view is out of fashion, and if we introduce too many POV characters, we’re castigated for “head hopping.”
It’s inevitable that the literary world says James’s Adam Dalgleish series “transcends the genre.” Yet The Lighthouse is constructed quite like a Golden Age mystery of the Thirties, when Agatha Christie reigned and Dorothy L. Sayers ruled the Detective Club with an iron hand. In the opening scene, Dalgleish is presented with the case by his superiors. Each of his subordinates gets a scene detailing the daily life that gets interrupted when the murder call comes. This tells us that we’re reading a police procedural, in which all the investigators will have their turn on center stage. The scene then shifts to the isolated island where the murder has occurred, rolling back time to the day before and giving us in turn the close third-person point of view of the victim and each of the nine or ten characters who will become suspects. Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh did the same, whether in narrative form like James or by listing a “cast of characters” at the beginning of the novel. The scene in which the body is discovered begins on page 55, too late, or on the brink, if it appeared in an unpublished writer’s manuscript.
The Lighthouse abounds in magnificent and detailed descriptions of the isolated island off the Cornish coast which acts as a “locked room”—another favorite Golden Age device—for the murder. Today’s mystery writing gurus suggest avoiding unbroken passages of description. “Don’t start with a weather report,” one of them, I forget which, advises. James’s landscapes and interiors run for paragraphs, sometimes for pages. Characterization too, for the most part, proceeds by “telling, not showing.” Interior monologues present characters with texture and complexity. But except for the victim and his daughter, characters’ behavior seldom demonstrates the truth of the analysis.
Along with the subtleties, James throws in stereotyped characterizations that are far less convincing from the perspective of today’s worldview than they were in the Golden Age. “It was a scholar’s face,” she says of one suspect from the detective’s point of view. What is a scholar’s face? Like Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” it’s a stock epithet rather than a description based on observed reality. Actually, I think I know what James meant: a resemblance to the portraits of such historical figures as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. Such assumptions used to abound in British fiction, not just in the Thirties but through the Fifties. Example: the classic The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, in which the detective comes to believe that King Richard III was framed because in his portrait, he looks like, yep, a scholar and someone who’s known suffering rather than like a villain.
I enjoyed reading The Lighthouse, even though I guessed more of the plot than I would have before I started writing mysteries of my own. It held my interest, and the literate prose was a pleasure to read. I prefer series, with their extended character arcs, so I was interested to hear more about the recurring characters’ lives, even though I still don’t find the relationship between Dalgleish and Emma quite convincing. In general, James at 80 is finally writing, if not erotic scenes, scenes of and passages about sexuality, which she never used to do. Overall, it’s a fine novel—but reading it is a very different experience from reading the mysteries of 21st century authors.
I recently read PD James’s 2005 mystery, The Lighthouse. It’s a stately read that is best savored at a leisurely pace rather than gobbled up in a night. In fact, I had saved it for airplane reading to and from a signing in Minneapolis, where it not only entertained me but provided a promotional bookmark (mine, not James’s) to give to the potential reader in the next seat.
Even in the first 50 pages, it struck me that James, at 80 a revered and much honored author, is allowed to construct a mystery that would never pass muster with agents or editors from a newbie, even if a beginning writer could achieve her magnificent prose style. Today we’re exhorted to put the murder up front—in the first chapter if not on the first page—and keep the action non-stop. Some respected authors who teach writing insist that the right amount of backstory in a manuscript is none whatsoever. It’s considered amateurish to “tell, not show” what our characters are like. The omniscient author point of view is out of fashion, and if we introduce too many POV characters, we’re castigated for “head hopping.”
It’s inevitable that the literary world says James’s Adam Dalgleish series “transcends the genre.” Yet The Lighthouse is constructed quite like a Golden Age mystery of the Thirties, when Agatha Christie reigned and Dorothy L. Sayers ruled the Detective Club with an iron hand. In the opening scene, Dalgleish is presented with the case by his superiors. Each of his subordinates gets a scene detailing the daily life that gets interrupted when the murder call comes. This tells us that we’re reading a police procedural, in which all the investigators will have their turn on center stage. The scene then shifts to the isolated island where the murder has occurred, rolling back time to the day before and giving us in turn the close third-person point of view of the victim and each of the nine or ten characters who will become suspects. Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh did the same, whether in narrative form like James or by listing a “cast of characters” at the beginning of the novel. The scene in which the body is discovered begins on page 55, too late, or on the brink, if it appeared in an unpublished writer’s manuscript.
The Lighthouse abounds in magnificent and detailed descriptions of the isolated island off the Cornish coast which acts as a “locked room”—another favorite Golden Age device—for the murder. Today’s mystery writing gurus suggest avoiding unbroken passages of description. “Don’t start with a weather report,” one of them, I forget which, advises. James’s landscapes and interiors run for paragraphs, sometimes for pages. Characterization too, for the most part, proceeds by “telling, not showing.” Interior monologues present characters with texture and complexity. But except for the victim and his daughter, characters’ behavior seldom demonstrates the truth of the analysis.
Along with the subtleties, James throws in stereotyped characterizations that are far less convincing from the perspective of today’s worldview than they were in the Golden Age. “It was a scholar’s face,” she says of one suspect from the detective’s point of view. What is a scholar’s face? Like Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” it’s a stock epithet rather than a description based on observed reality. Actually, I think I know what James meant: a resemblance to the portraits of such historical figures as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. Such assumptions used to abound in British fiction, not just in the Thirties but through the Fifties. Example: the classic The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, in which the detective comes to believe that King Richard III was framed because in his portrait, he looks like, yep, a scholar and someone who’s known suffering rather than like a villain.
I enjoyed reading The Lighthouse, even though I guessed more of the plot than I would have before I started writing mysteries of my own. It held my interest, and the literate prose was a pleasure to read. I prefer series, with their extended character arcs, so I was interested to hear more about the recurring characters’ lives, even though I still don’t find the relationship between Dalgleish and Emma quite convincing. In general, James at 80 is finally writing, if not erotic scenes, scenes of and passages about sexuality, which she never used to do. Overall, it’s a fine novel—but reading it is a very different experience from reading the mysteries of 21st century authors.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)