Fri 12 Feb 2016
P. D. JAMES – The Lighthouse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover. First US Edition, 2005. Vintage, trade paperback, October 2016.
Yes, Steve reviewed this recently, and no he didn’t much care for it, in fact he didn’t get far before James somewhat dense prose slowed him to a halt. This is a much more positive review of the same book.
The Lighthouse is a somewhat slimmer book than many of the later James novels, a welcome respite from writers like Elizabeth George who seem determined to slay Sherwood Forest with their latest doorstop mystery. It is the 16th Adam Dalgliesh mystery and finds him at a crossroads in his life.
Our sleuths are Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard whose unit, consisting of D.I. Kate Miskin and Sgt. Francis Benton-Smith catches a possible murder on Combe Island off the Cornish coast. Dalgiesh is in the middle of an affair and torn about his feelings for the woman; Miskin involved with a former colleague; and Benton-Smith, a half-Indian bright young thing newly assigned to the unit falling in love with a woman he knows isn’t going to fall in love with him.
To further muddy waters Miskin doesn’t much like Benton-Smith and resents his class, and he in turn is none to happy to have a woman who obviously dislikes him in charge of him. Add to the team the difficult forensic pathologist Professor Glenister, a woman in her mid-sixties, semi-retired with a tendency to pedantry, who is assigned to accompany the trio.
Combe Island is another of James’s closed societies, the kind of place James loves to set her novels in, a place with a colorful history of pirates, wreckers, storms, and cruelty. Owned by the Holcombe family for generations it was left to be used as a sort of secular retreat for the great and famous who need a little down time and privacy.
The PM hopes to hold a high end meeting on the island in the near future so security and discretion are of the highest order. Now one of the guests, novelist Nathan Oliver, has been found hanged in the old lighthouse which was burned in WWII and restored. None of the people on the island is particularly happy to see outsiders arrive, much less nosy police types asking awkward questions.
As Emily Holcombe, last of the Holcombe’s observes, they aren’t the sort who usually visit the island.
Steve found the going too slow and dense, and I don’t flaw him on that, but I enjoyed James carefully crafted prose. You don’t find passages like this too often today describing the scene as Dalgliesh leaves the room where the body has been examined:
It’s a good investigation. Dalgliesh finds his life threatened by an unexpected outside force and Miskin and Benton-Smith are forced to work together in a way neither is ready for. Of course the usual lies are uncovered, a crime dating back to WWII surfaces, raw emotions are laid bare, and Miskin and Benton-Smith are forced to face the killer before he strikes again in the deserted lighthouse of the title.
This one proves a very physical case, and there are some fine passages late in the book where Benton-Smith puts his life in real danger simply retrieving evidence, the climbing scenes particularly well-written.
I will add a small caveat. I’m afraid I spotted the killer, not because of clues or any mistake on James part, but because of a certain distaste both Miskin and Benton-Smith show for a rather fussy porcelain figure in the suspects living quarters. I refer to these as television moments because they are the literary equivalent of figuring out who the killer is because of the actor cast in the part. In a James novel tacky taste is motive enough to be a murderer.
James does not write in short staccato sentences. She not an advocate of the hard-boiled style, and her books are more novels about murder than thrillers, detective novels more than detective stories, a subtle difference, but one I think true of her work as well as Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George. She became more novelistic as she aged, and while her work is nowhere near as painful to read as John Le Carré’s tangled prose, she writes English prose ‘as she is written’ to borrow a phrase.
Most readers are not going to race through this at a sitting. If, on the other hand, you invest some time, let James detail-oriented heavily descriptive prose envelop you, and become involved with Dalgiesh, Miskin, and Benton-Smith as well as the various suspects, it is a good book, a solid read and not a flashy or quick one. I enjoyed getting to know the people involved as human beings and not simply quickly sketched in character parts. James can be cinematic, but only in the sense of a Gainsborough Studio or Ivory and Merchant film.
I have to admit there are things in James books that I enjoy that most people would not care for. When someone leaves a copy of Middlemarch for Dalgliesh to read, he thinks of it as “that safe stand-by for a desert island†— as good of a description of that book as I have ever read. A mention of William Morris wallpaper tells us all we need to know of a room and its potential inhabitants, and Miskin hearing “small agreeable sounds from the kitchen†as her lover makes coffee of morning is a perfect touch.
I’ll read almost anything with passages like that.
Perhaps the best line comes mid-book when Benton-Smith wonders if the murder of Nathan Oliver will harm the island’s reputation and Dalgliesh replies: “Combe will recover. The island has forgotten worse horrors than putting an end to Nathan Oliver.â€
Depending on what kind of mystery you are looking for, this is a fine example, especially for a book so late in a writer’s career and an ongoing series.
February 12th, 2016 at 8:01 pm
You almost make me wish I hadn’t sent my copy of the book to you, David. You make it sound a whole lot better than I did. Maybe I need a do over.
February 13th, 2016 at 12:25 am
It took me several books to get into James as a writer, but THE BLACK TOWER and AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN hooked me.
I’m not sure you wouldn’t still find it top heavy and slow going until Dalgliesh and his team arrive on the island to begin the investigation. The way it is structured we learn there has been a death on the island, possibly suicide and possibly murder, and meet Dalgliesh and his team who are being sent because the island is a retreat for VIPs.
We then go to the island before the death, meet the characters and suspects, the death occurs, and only then do Dalgliesh and team arrive and begin investigating, so easily the first third of the book is setting up the death.
Beginning with DEATH IS AN EXPERT WITNESS James decided to write novels as much as detective stories, and I can see how that may not please everyone, I just think she turned out to be a good novelist.
February 13th, 2016 at 10:15 am
I like all of the Dalgleish mysteries, but, boy, did they become door-stops toward the end of the series. I do think that by the time she wrote this, James was less concerned with the “mystery” of the book and more concerned with crafting a literary novel. She really could have benefitted from some ruthless editing– but probably by this point no editor was going to tell her that her book was overstuffed. I remember that I too guessed the culprit way before they were uncovered–not because of the figurine but because of the way the character was written: James seemed to show a lot of dislike for the person. Another instance where some editing might have been worthwhile.
February 13th, 2016 at 7:47 pm
As an American I know, vaguely, who William Morris is. I know what a Morris chair is, but William Morris wallpaper? Never heard of it before.
February 13th, 2016 at 8:09 pm
David might reply and perhaps add to this (hopefully not correct me) but here’s a link:
https://www.william-morris.co.uk/shop/wallpaper/?act=ssocomplete
from which I quote,”William Morris began designing wallpapers in the 1860s which were hand printed by Jeffrey & Co. in London using wood blocks and mineral based natural pigments. Along with other designers, most notably John Henry Dearle, Morris created stunningly beautiful wallpapers with complex rhythms and movement which seemed to capture the randomness and symmetry of nature.”
So I learned something!
February 13th, 2016 at 8:39 pm
Dover used to have several books collecting William Morris wallpaper patterns among their craft and art books.
It is a short cut to describing a kind of late Victorian or Edwardian gentility of the upper and upper middle class here.
Deb,
I noted how much distaste James has for the character, and he turns out to deserve it, but when both Miskin and the Sgt. fixed on that Watteau figure a little alarm went off.