P.D. James: Death in Holy Orders

            Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team interrogate members of a religious community and their guests after a universally hated visiting administrator is brutally murdered in a church. There are two other murders before this one, though it’s not entirely clear they are actually murders, and one more after. The story comes to us through a rotating cast of narrators, something I find off-putting, though it makes for very interesting possibilities in terms of contrasting or contradictory narration of the same events. We only see this in a few isolated cases, though. Mostly the device seems to be used here so that one person isn’t improbably everywhere every time something interesting happens.

            I’m sort of dismissing this, but of course that’s a feature of a first person narrative. All of the interesting things happen when the narrator is present. Spreading the narrative point of view over quite a few characters gives the author a lot of colors to paint with. So for example we know about the creepy incestuous relationship between a half-brother and half-sister before the investigators do, which means we’re not shocked when the information comes to light, which therefore allows us to assess their alibis fairly. It’s an odd and interesting way to be sure that the facts don’t unfairly bias us as readers. James uses this device several times. When we know a thing, and how we know about it, changes the way that we react to it. This is so important!

            Further, there are a couple of scenes that appear more than once, since different narrators recount the events. We therefore know who is telling the truth, who is concealing something, and who can’t be trusted at all. Most of the cast of characters are either police or priests, which adds another layer of skill in the art of secrecy to the palette. Neither will betray trust, but both are excellent at recognizing lies and deceit. I like this wrinkle very much. Do we believe everything that either group says? Do we trust them some of the time, most of the time, all of the time? Do we know for sure whose belief systems will override their obligation to the other? Even a nurse at one point refuses to divulge information because she has promised two people who are now deceased that she would never tell. Strong guiding belief systems add another layer of interest to the currents of truth and concealment.

            Mysteries obviously rely heavily on keeping information from the reader. Sometimes all of the facts are presented but in such a careful way that the reader won’t understand their significance. That is not the case here. We learn things even near the end of the novel that are essential to unraveling the mystery. In other words, we don’t learn anything until the investigators learn it, so there’s no possible way to figure out the mystery before they do. As I’m working on writing a mystery of sorts right now, and I’m noticing that practically everything has some kind of mystery element to it, clearly this particular aspect of what we know and when we know it needs a lot of attention.

            I’ve been interested in this question forever. With ancient and most medieval literature, we’re supposed to know what happens going in. It’s not about finding out who did it. The stories are familiar: it’s the way the story gets told that we enjoy. The same probably goes for most if not all genre literature these days. We generally know how things are going to pan out in the end, whether it’s a romance, a western, speculative fiction, or young adult, but we enjoy the telling. When the author yanks our genre chain, as with Liar, we get disoriented and don’t know what to believe. I don’t think anyone walks into a tragedy or comedy by accident these days. We know going in which one the work will be. With a detective novel like this one, we know perfectly well Adam Dalgliesh is going to solve the case. That doesn’t mean I knew who the murderer was, though. Not at all! The process and the intricacies of unraveling the secrets are what we’re there to see.

            One reason Liar was so genuinely disorienting was that it wasn’t possible to know which genre we were in, and therefore where the story would end up. And our interpretation of the facts depended heavily on our choice of genre. Where storytelling might have started out with familiarity, something like: “Hey, tell them about that one time with the megatherium,” a lot of fiction depends on the twist, the secret, the thing that can be spoiled or ruined if we know what happens with the megatherium ahead of time. It’s not a spoiler that Adam Dalgliesh brings the murderer to justice. But if I told someone about to read the book who the murderer was, that would ruin the experience. I would expect to be whacked about the head with the book in that case. I would deserve it.

            Cudgeling my brains (not with a book) to remember the last time a work of fiction really threw me, I can only think of the movie What Dreams May Come. I might have been fooled because it starred Robin Williams, I suppose. It’s not a cheerful film, or even just a sad film, but an utterly wrenching story. If I had known where it was going and what it would be like, I never, ever would have watched it, gorgeous though it was. Thanks for the trust issues, movie! We do have to be able to trust our authors and our genres, even if we’re trusting them to surprise and delight us. Don’t I have Fight Club on my reading list?

            The most interesting thing I took away from this novel was the conflicting and contradictory narrators mentioned above. That might be something very interesting to play with in the future. I have always loved epistolary novels, especially when all of the sources are different, like in Dracula, where we read newspaper articles, letters, etc., and piece the story together from those. Considering how much I love an unreliable narrator, I’m just imagining all the fun I could have with more than one at a time. This might be the solution to my monster novel, actually. I’ve been struggling with it forever because it crucially hinges on what the main character knows and when he knows it. The most successful version of it that I’ve written was fifty thousand words in alternating points of view, which allowed me to have a somewhat oblivious main character who thought he was fooling others, one of my favorite tricks stolen from Chaucer, as I’ve mentioned before.

            It’s not charming when a grown human fails to realize when a lie is completely transparent. Isn’t that fascinating, though? What if our narrators were like that? I’ve been thinking about this lately because I found it several times in Death in Holy Orders, as our hero would interrogate hopelessly bad liars. Bad liars are so much fun in fiction! Bad truth-tellers are just as great, though. A character leaves out crucial information because the investigator only asked about the movement of people on a specific night. He claims that the police didn’t ask anything about washing machines. Which is true, but….

            Interrogating bad liars and bad truth-tellers seems like it’s at the heart of the investigation into how authors use what we know and when we know it to best effect. “Lie to me,” we say to our authors. “But make it interesting.”