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Deep mysteries

Christian Century, Sept 27, 2000 by Ralph C. Wood

THOUGH OFTEN compared with Agatha Christie, P. D. James is a different kind of detective writer. She is not chiefly concerned with escapist delight. While fulfilling the page-turning requirements of the mystery novel, she also creates characters who have moral complexity and depth. She reveals their tangled motives through careful attention to their bodily gestures and their ambient scene no less than their words and their deeds. The thick social texture of James's novels makes them resemble the fiction of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope.

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Just as these 19th-century English masters often sought to address the clamant issues of their time, so does James agitate the vexing questions of ours: abortion and euthanasia, drug addiction and environmental disaster, political terrorism and juvenile crime, religious belief and unbelief. Nowhere has the moral and theological import of fiction been stated more succinctly than by two of the other great writers, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. "We trust to novels," declared James, "to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities." "The secret of fiction," Hardy is reported to have said, "lies in the adjustment of things uneven to things eternal and universal."

Yet only with considerable dubiety does P. D. James cite these noble notions of fiction in her recently published "fragment of autobiography." She confesses that such ideals are now impossible if not laughable. Writers can no longer stir the passions of their audiences for the sake of moral reform and religious redemption. The triumph of television--with its dreadful coarsening of the imagination--is but a single symptom of the larger disease. James believes that our culture's real sickness unto death results from the collapse of the Christian liberalism that once undergirded Western art and society alike.

We get a glimpse of James's brand of liberalism when she describes her schooling. Hers was not the age, she notes wryly, of "child-centred education." Her teachers sought to build strong character--"personal morality, social responsibility and good behaviour." Knowing that teenagers in the mass are prone to barbarism, her instructors imbued her with a profound sense both of limitation and aspiration. James describes these teachers as unabashedly "liberal, Christian, scholarly."

She writes, "We were taught, as much by example as precept, to respect our minds and to use them; to examine the evidence before rushing in with our opinions; to distinguish between fact and theory; to see history through the eyes of the poor and vanquished, not merely those of the powerful and the conquerors; not to believe that something is true simply because it would be pleasant or convenient if it were, and, when exposed to propaganda, to ask ourselves, `In whose interest is it that I should believe this?'"

According to the liberalism James espouses, governments should create a culture that enables its citizens to sustain a morally valuable life. Churches and schools make their essential contribution to this joint communal enterprise not only by promoting the virtues but also by teaching that morally harmful choices are indeed injurious, both to oneself and others.

James's version of Christian liberalism stresses the individual autonomy--and thus the pluralism--that grants people the liberty to decide among the many morally valuable forms of life. Christian liberals of James's kind want, therefore, to avoid any sort of moral paternalism that would use coercion to produce character. In her dystopian novel The Children of Men (1994), James offers a frightening account of a future Britain whose populace has surrendered its individual freedoms to a paternalistic government, welcoming a rigid despotism in exchange for easy security.

BUT JAMES also worries that contemporary liberalism has made autonomy its only good. It denies that we are obligated to any ends--whether given by religion or nature, by families or peoples or traditions--that we have not chosen utterly for ourselves. The result, she contends, is a terribly fragmented and secularized social world. This religious and political calamity has been compounded, she adds, by the widespread belief that the natural order itself is the product of chance and perhaps of chaos. How can the novelist have moral and religious responsibilities, James asks, in such a shattered world--a world having no "immutable value system, [no] accepted view of the universe and man's place in it, [no] set of ethical rules of conduct to which all right-minded people conform"?

James's answer lies in the nearest equivalents of the old-fashioned Christian liberalism handed down to her. Religiously she is a high-church Anglican and politically she is a Thatcherite Conservative. More than a little nostalgia is at work here. James looks back, rather wistfully, to the time when throne and altar were still united in a national church that symbolized England's "moral and religious aspirations," its "generally accepted values ... [its] common tradition, history and culture." She recalls, for example, the annual Armistice Day observances that brought the nation to a reverent standstill, as the whole country shared its grief over the slaughter of an entire generation of young men.

Deep mysteries

Christian Century, Sept 27, 2000 by Ralph C. Wood

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