BitterSweetLife

Flash Review: Awful Devices & Haunting Desires with Dickensian Characters

Grade: A

Highlights: Adam Dalgliesh drinks a lot of excellent coffee; we glimpse telling flashbacks to his childhood; a ghoulish serial killer turns out not to be the most malevolent antagonist.

Devices and Desires represents the modern era of P.D. James; she ratchets up the level of suspense, creates a cast full of vivid minor characters, and adds extra flavor to the dialogue with what I take for an ironic smirk. By the time James penned this national bestseller (1990), she had discovered that she could freely insert quips on her favorite topics into her storylines, and she does so with effortless relish.

"I imagine [Adam Dalgliesh]'s come to Larsoken to get away from people who want to talk about his poetry. But it wouldn't hurt you to take a look at it. I've got the most recent volume. And it is poetry, not prose rearranged on the page."
"With modern verse, can one tell the difference?"
"Oh yes," she said. "If it can be read as prose, then it is prose. It's an infallible test."

In this book, P.D. James also seems to indulge in theatric phrases that sometimes borders on melodrama, but I suspect it was lines like these that made Adam Dalgliesh accessible as a "mainstream" mystery hero:

Horror and death were his trade and, like an undertaker, he carried with him the contagion of his craft.

I guess I'm willing to forgive such lines if they get the essence of Adam Dalgliesh (brooding, painfully self-aware, poetic but tenacious) across to a more popular audience. In fact, this seems to be a primary goal of Devices and Desires, as James scatters suggestive flashbacks to Dalgliesh's childhood throughout the volume, including a telling portrait of young Adam's fear of darkness. Finally, P.D. James' absorption with the paradoxically jagged texture of life is expressed clearly in this book. Two women converse at a dinner party:

"At the heart of the universe there is cruelty. We are predators and are preyed upon, every living thing. Did you know that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds, piercing the weak spot in their armor. Then the grub grows and feeds on the living ladybird and eats its way out..."
"Perhaps it doesn't feel anything, the ladybird."
"Well, it's a comforting thought but I wouldn't bet on it. You must have had an extraordinarily happy childhood."

Adam Dalgliesh, as the central revelation of James' psyche, often seems convinced himself that the world is a dark, God-forsaken place - but never fully, never finally. And despite the existential murkiness, it is Dalgliesh's efforts which ultimately reveal the subversive and nagging evidences of redemption, justice and order, which must be considered as clues unto themselves.

That's right, it's listed on the Master Book List.

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