The Private Patient (P. D. James)

P. D. James The Private Patient. (2008)

Faber & Faber (UK); Knopf/Vintage (USA)

Summary
In deepest Dorset, the once magnificent Cheverell Manor has been renovated and transformed into a plastic surgery, run by the famous cosmetic practitioner George Chandler-Powell. Two days after Rhoda Gradwyn, an investigative journalist, arrives in the hope of having her lifelong facial scar removed, she's savagely murdered and Powell finds his surgery under scrutiny from Dalgliesh and his team, who are soon caught in a race against time when another body shows up.

My comments
The first of our authors whose work I've read before, so inevitably some of my comments reflect my previous reading.

It's hard to know how to classify the book (like her others).
• A detective/thriller novel? There are no clues in the text with which we can identify the killer/s - even if it's in hindsight after reading the brilliant reasoning of the star investigator.
There's enormous descriptive detail about places, which suggest that these details are significant. However, we never revisit many of the places, making the attention to description unnecessary and merely a distraction/delay in the unfolding of the 'plot' - such as it is.
• A romantic novel? There's a lot of detail about the non-work lives of the team that appears to have no relevance to the 'plot', so those parts read like extracts from a romantic novel.
• A 'philosophical' essay? The rather laboured references (3?) to the almost-human or sub-human nature of the sound of animals killing each other on the night suggest that she's making some 'philosophical' point about the distinction or similarity between humanity and nature, but this isn't followed-up.
Similarly, the cloying little moral tract about 'love' right at the end - is it meant to set our hearts at ease? If it is, it can't undo the awfulness of the events described in the preceding pages.

Why does it matter? Because each of those possible categorisations undermines the other two, both in terms of structure (what are we meant to expect here?) and in terms of characterisation. We don't really know anything more about the romantic entanglements at the end than we did at the beginning, so it's a failure on that score; and the 'philosophical' aspects are so fleeting and superficial as to offer no insight into 'the human condition'.


1. P. D. James (Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL) has a Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._James
Her 'official website' is, in fact, run by publisher Random House:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pdjames/
Also, see her autobiography, Time To Be In Earnest (Hardback: Knopf, 2000; P/back Ballantine, 2001)

2. The Private Patient has its 'own' site, run by Random House:
www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780307270771.html

3. P. D. James was interviewed by Alan Taylor for the Sunday Herald, following the publication of The Private Patient: http://www.sundayherald.co.uk/arts/arts/display.var.2446079.0.0.php
P. D. James was interviewed (1986, 1990, 1993) by Don Swaim for Wired for Books:
http://wiredforbooks.org/pdjames/
(An interview with James on the UK's South Bank Show has been withdrawn from UTube! A mystery worthy of Adam Dalgliesh!)

4. Recent books by P. D. James
2006 The Lighthouse. (Vintage) Combe Island offers privacy and guaranteed security. But one distinguished visitor is bizarrely murdered. (Won the 2007 Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award.)
2006 The Children of Men. (Vintage) The human race has become infertile and the last generation to be born is now adult. Everyone despairs, but one young woman and her followers may have the key to survival.
2005. A Taste For Death. (Vintage) In St. Matthew's Church in London, two bodies are found butchered - a government minister and a local derelict.
2004 The Murder Room. (Vintage) Commander Adam Dalgliesh is enmeshed in a terrifying story of passion and mystery - and is in love!

4. P. D. James's publishers
Faber & Faber. Independent UK publisher. Distributed in Australia & NZ by Allen & Unwin. James's publisher in the UK.
Knopf Publishing Group (at Random House). Formerly Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. until Random House bought it in 1960. James's publisher in the USA.
Vintage Books. Owned by Random House, itself owned by German multinational Bertelsmann AG. Publishes p/back versions of books by Random House imprints such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson, William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg.