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I'm in love with Adam Dalgliesh. I know it's weird to have feelings about a guy who doesn't exist outside the printed page, but I've done it many a time (Heathcliff, Mr. Darcy, Prince Andrei…). A man of action (he catches murderers) and intellect (he writes poetry), Dalgliesh is simultaneously a romantic figure and a practical one --- a policeman with a conscience and a complicated sense of justice. I thought a confession was in order because my bias disposed me to adore THE LIGHTHOUSE, the latest Dalgliesh novel, and I did.
I don't want you to think I'm always this easy to seduce. Actually, I'm rather choosy about mysteries. Anything experimental or slangy --- especially authors who strive too visibly to write "more" than a mystery --- turns me off; James is a favorite because she is a master at taking the classic formulas to a higher level and burnishing them until they glow.
Among these traditional conventions is a controlled setting and a limited number of suspects --- in this case, the inhabitants, temporary and permanent, of Combe, a fictional island off the Cornish coast where VIPs seek a sanctuary of security and quiet and nobody can come or go undetected (its isolation is increased later in the story by the imposition of a quarantine). As in the best thrillers, the landscape has a spooky beauty (cliffs, mists, and so forth) that James evokes with her customary skill. One of the pleasures of reading her, in fact, is a keenly literate voice in a genre that does not always treat words with grace and respect. Even the title is a sly homage to Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE.
But there is little of Woolf's cryptic interior voice in the straightforward plotting. When celebrated novelist Nathan Oliver is found hanging from Combe's nonfunctioning (but meticulously restored) lighthouse, and the evidence suggests that it wasn't suicide, Dalgliesh --- head of Scotland Yard's Special Investigation Squad, which handles politically tricky cases --- is called in. He is a sleuth in the mastermind tradition of Holmes and Poirot, and the very opposite of a hardboiled contemporary cop (he feels every death deeply, one might even say soulfully). His team is interesting, too: D.I. Kate Miskin is a self-made woman from a poor and dysfunctional family, and Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith is an Anglo-Indian man with a privileged background. They are alert, ambitious, frighteningly bright, and wedded to their jobs. They also hate each other's guts, partly because of class differences and partly because they are rivals, both knocking themselves out to impress the boss.
THE LIGHTHOUSE isn't a rapid-fire read. You have to savor the deliberate pace, the quiet buildup, and the accumulation of incriminating evidence and guilty secrets, as well as a creeping threat of further violence (a second murder does, in fact, take place). But there is an explosion of derring-do toward the end, as Dalgliesh's team takes physical risks that show them to be intrepid as well as intelligent --- Benton-Smith scaling cliffs with a suspect, Kate stripping and oiling her body so she can slide through a window of the lighthouse and nab the culprit. It's no surprise that James is a master at this sort of action sequence.
Still, it is the more contemplative moments --- the moral context, if that doesn't sound too pretentious --- that make James's mysteries so extraordinary. By creating a detective with a tragic past, a complex sensibility, and a host of inner struggles between the poet-humanist and the functionary of law-and-order, she can permit herself ruminations of a sort that might otherwise seem forced or digressive. In the course of THE LIGHTHOUSE, Dalgliesh ponders (to name just a few) the secret service's declining mystique, the risks of becoming a bureaucrat, the allure of islands, the nature of good and evil, and the "finality and mystery" of death. James's implicit point: Murders can be solved, but the bigger issues of justice, truth, love and community are still with us.
I have three complaints: The romantic entanglements of Adam, Kate and Francis seem artificial, as if James is making certain to endow her authority figures with a private life (I don't think she's awfully comfortable writing about sex). The book could have been more tightly and cleanly edited --- it does run on a bit, losing momentum in places. And sometimes a blinding flash of insight or crucial clue arrives just a little too fortuitously. But these are minor quibbles. Although THE LIGHTHOUSE may not be James's best book, it's a very satisfying one.
One last comment: P.D. James is now 85. Clearly, Dalgliesh is her principal literary alter ego, but there are two other characters in THE LIGHTHOUSE that suggest an autobiographical element: Nathan Oliver, who is consumed with anxiety about whether or not he can still write as well as he did as a younger man ("Give me back my words!" he yells in a recurrent nightmare), and Emily Holcombe, at 80 the last surviving member of the family that established the island retreat. Emily is smart, sharp, beautiful, honest to the point of unkindness, and often self-absorbed, an unflinching realist and something of a snob. She and Nathan Oliver, I suspect, are ironic self-portraits, reflections of James's own coming-to-terms with age. What a woman.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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