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Death in Holy Orders
P.D. James
Alfred A. Knopf
415 pp.
$25
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Death
in Holy Orders, P.D. James's latest Adam Dalgliesh mystery,
offers something relatively rare in the genre: a complicated
mystery whose character development and setting detail are as
sophisticated and engrossing as anything offered by the best
literary novels. In fact, the mystery elements lag a bit behind
the novelistic touches, at least in the opening pages.
After the son of a prosperous businessman is found dead under
the dangerous sand cliffs near his remote theological college
(a fictional St. Anselm's on the coast of England's East Anglia),
the school's staff is relieved to hear it officially declared
an accident. The college is in jeopardy of being shut down--it
has only twenty students, and the Church of England wants to
centralize its theological training in two or three main centers--and
the death of one of its students doesn't help its cause. But
the dead student's father isn't willing to let the verdict stand
unchallenged, and he insists that New Scotland Yard send Commander
Adam Dalgliesh to investigate the death himself.
Dalgliesh, as it happens, spent three childhood summers at
the college, and he's more than happy to take his week off and
travel back into the past, as it were. But this is a murder mystery,
of course, and James does a wonderful job of filling the college
up with a variety of compelling suspects--among them, the Archdeacon
whose single-minded purpose is to close the college, the policeman
who aggressively investigated the suicide of the Archdeacon's
wife, and the priest the Archdeacon successfully accused of child
molestation. And before it's all over, at least one of them will
become a murder victim.
Until the bodies start piling up, though--yes, this is a 'cozy'
with a relatively high body count--the chief delights offered
by Death in Holy Orders lie it its intelligence and abundance
of carefully observed and patiently assembled minutiae of details.
James's patience as a writer--her dual understanding of narrative
pace and character and setting development--is remarkable. The
feeling that we have slipped deliciously and completely into
another person's world and can experience everything--memory,
the smell of autumn, the sorrowful joy of being alone--is fundamental
to our desire to read, I suspect, no matter what the academics
may say against the mimetic impulse. The fact that James can
satisfy that desire while walking us through a cunning maze of
clues and intriguing suspects as if solving the mystery were
the only thing she is up to is impressive, indeed.
Death in Holy Orders is a wonderful, satisfyingly dense
work from a master.
--Daphne Frostchild
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The Inventory
Gila Lustiger
translated from the German by Rebecca Morrison
Arcade Publishing
294 pp.
$24.95
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Given Gila Lustiger's
refreshingly experimental tendencies, one must inevitably, I
suppose, declare her debut, The Inventory, a postmodern
novel of sorts. Its fragmented, collage-like storyline about
Nazi Germany certainly invites the description, as does its range
of narrative voices. Rather than taking the course of a traditional
novel, in which we follow a small group of interconnected, hierarchically
defined characters through a storyline that falls neatly into
a set beginning, middle and an end, Lustiger builds her text
incrementally and circumspectly through a wide range of seemingly
peripheral characters, vignettes and extended stories, and she
doesn't force their associative links to the surface as one might
expect. Indeed, if the reader doesn't have a good memory for
character names, the cunning work Lustiger does to connect her
seemingly unrelated characters might go unappreciated.
While her structural experiments are impressive, though, it's
the range of Lustiger's narrative voice that I find most impressive.
Some chapters are told in the first person with the narrator
seemingly aware of his fictional status (more postmodern acrobatics,
of course); others are told in the first person by narrators
who seem to be delivering resoundingly real reports. Other chapters
are told in the third person by an uncharacterized narrator,
and it is these that tend, most interestingly, toward an unexpected
sort of sarcasm and ironic distance. It's the same sort of device
French New Wave directors like Godard and Truffaut used to great
effect in their early films (think, for instance, of the voice-over
narrator in Jules et Jim): understated and documentary
in tone, it has the effect of rendering the characters into ironically
scientific curiosities. It's a seductive effect, particularly
given Lustiger's grim subject. Because she doesn't overdramatize
her text, the randomness and sudden terror of the Party's attacks
become more immediate and deeply felt.
For all the structural and tonal variety, The Inventory's
characters share a common trait: they all learn to doubt 'certainties'--that,
for example, receiving an Iron Cross in the First World War demonstrates
conclusively that one is solidly German, despite being a Jew,
or that doing the bidding of the Party will secure one's own
position among the 'elect.' In place of their lost certainties,
Lustiger's characters find only paranoia--the feeling that nothing
(and no one) can be assumed to be what it appears. Characters
learn not to speak too much and to inspect a public room carefully
before entering. And perhaps most devastatingly, Lustiger's characters
learn not to expect happy endings with anything like the certainty
their earlier lives suggested. "Yes," one character
tells us, "we were presumptuous, because we considered ourselves
untouchable, because we thought that luck was on our side. And
had anyone said to me that I would lose everything that was dear
to me, I would have laughed in his face."
Although The Inventory was a bestseller in France and
Germany when it first appeared six years ago, its appearance
in English translation has been decidedly slow in coming. It's
hard to see why. Rebecca Morrison's translation is agile and
even poetic at times, and while the subject matter and setting
are relayed with the assumption of a German native's familiarity,
they should offer the patient reader no more concern than she
might face with any other instance of world literature.
Perhaps most importantly, though, The Inventory is
a superb counterexample to the argument that novel experimentation
is necessarily an empty excuse for acrobatics. It's a significant
work that casts a familiar subject into a stark, fresh light.
--Woody Arbunkle
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Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s
Andrew Loog Oldham
St. Martins Press
400 pp.
$23.95
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As the Rolling
Stones's original manager and producer, Andrew Loog Oldham suavely
transformed the band's persona into a smirking funhouse mirror
image of the clean-cut Beatles and sold those goods to a public
eager for a rough-edged alternative to the Fab Four. It's an
image not far removed from Oldham's self-portrait: his new autobiography,
Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s, feels at times
like an object lesson in how to turn juvenile delinquency into
a career. Oldham's account of his eyebrow-raising exploits had
me repeatedly checking to make sure I still had my wallet, but
I'm eagerly awaiting the second volume of this projected three-part
series.
Stoned takes an unusual form for a rock and roll memoir:
Oldham's own recollections are intercut with excerpts from over
seventy interviews (including Mary Quant, Pete Townsend, Vidal
Sassoon and Marianne Faithful). I would have guessed it was a
recipe for disaster, but the book is so skillfully edited that
the narrative sweep isn't lost. Oldham should get special praise,
I think, for not pulling his readers into confusing diversions
just for the sake of name-dropping. In fact, the interview style
fleshes out the book's depth, and in some cases, it offers alternative
views that are humorously at odds with Oldham's own take.
More than just a book on the Rolling Stones or a biography
of Oldham, Stoned brims with the rock elite of the sixties.
The Beatles, the Who, and a host of other rock and roll legends
have walk-on parts that, far from having that sad, tacked-on
feeling that many of these memoirs give, actually serve an integral
role in the story. Certainly, there are moments when Oldham's
self-promotion shines through, and his exploits occasionally
come across as tinted with a little rose-colored hindsight. But
just as we readily forgive Oliver's Artful Dodger for
his transgressions, you finds yourself grinning at the hint of
an underlying Oldham con; we're simply won over by its audacity
and its wit.
As a memoirist, Oldham is impressively open, but one has to
wonder how much any of the participants of the sixties really
remember. Mick Jagger himself retreated from a high-profile autobiography
and publishing advance a few years ago under rumor that he actually
couldn't recall his own exploits with any real accuracy. Nonetheless,
Stoned offers the same veracity the Impressionists were
able to achieve a century ago: maybe that haystack wasn't actually
purple, but in the midday sun, it certainly felt that
way.
Generally, the production values on these types of books are
minimal, but Stoned feels solid from its excellent cover
and layout to its selection of photographs. Even the fonts are
well-chosen. St. Martins Press deserves kudos for producing a
little gem that, after having been read, feels like it should
have a place on your shelf, not the remainders bin. Indeed, Stoned
will leave you wondering why it wasn't written and published
years ago.
--William Shinault IV
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Back from the Dead
Chris Petit
Alfred A. Knopf
260 pp.
$23
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Chris Petit's
Back from the Dead is, to put it mildly, a highly unpredictable
thriller.
McMahon, an aging rock star who hasn't written a song in years,
receives a series of erotically charged letters written by a
girl psychiatrists would consider dangerously obsessed. Granted,
it's not unusual for celebrities to be the target of stalkers
and obsessives, but this girl's case is different: she died in
France fifteen years before, while babysitting the child of one
of MacMahon's bandmates.
Creepy, eh?
Youselli, a thirty-six-year-old New York City cop with all
the world weariness you'd expect in a thriller's fallen hero,
agrees to investigate the letters but--inevitably, perhaps--he
finds the case becoming complicated. Complicated by his
failure to find evidence that the letters are not, in fact, coming
from a dead girl; complicated by his inability to determine how
the girl died or even if she died at all; and perhaps most unnervingly,
complicated by Youselli's own powerful attraction to the dead
girl.
Before it's all over, several unexpected turns will be taken,
including black magic, child murders and the possibility of physical
resurrection. Sometimes, the turns intoxicate; sometimes, they
merely surprise. Petit isn't a tidy miniaturist; for a relatively
short novel, Back from the Dead sprawls comfortably--even
decadently--across a crazily scattered plot.
In part, Back from the Dead is an exploration of fame
and the dangerous illusion of invincibility it seems to offer.
It is also, I suppose, an examination into what Borges called
the Garden of Forking Paths--the possibility that the world isn't
as linear and easily known (or remembered) as you might like.
We all know that feeling of wondering what the world might have
been like if a seemingly minor event hadn't happened--if the
car in front of you hadn't stopped for that red light, say. In
Back from the Dead, Petit blows that feeling up to include
the seemingly known fate of a whole life--or many.
For readers who like their plots loose and a little wild,
it's a perfect, unsettling meditation of a thriller.
--Charlie Onion
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