An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

I’m sure I’ve discussed this here before, but at this time of year, my curiosity seems to sag a bit and I like to re-read old favourites rather than slog through (for instance) important but severe studies of East Germany, as I know I should be doing.  

So one weary evening, in need of the mental equivalent of an old, worn, comfortable armchair, I pulled down from its shelf my disintegrating paperback of ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman’ by P.D.James, as she then was.  She is now very deservedly Baroness James,  and I only wish she had come to prominence earlier, as she has a wise and sane voice on most subjects and is also a great defender of the 1662 Prayer Book, the beautiful and thoughtful founding document of Anglican England, now loathed and cast aside by the Church whose most valuable possession it is.

 

I don’t like all her books. I’m far from keen on her irritating detective, the chilly Adam Dalgleish, whose joint careers as published poet and senior Scotland Yard detective seem to me to be a fantasy too far. We don’t, as far as I know, ever see any examples of Dalgleish’s verse. No wonder.   Imagine Philip Larkin as a seen-it-all Hull Desk Sergeant, or Ted Hughes patrolling the North York Moors on a Velocette motorbike, or Wendy Cope as a feisty Wpc, battling with Millwall fans between bouts of verse. Mind you, Andrew Motion might make a fairly convincing Deputy Chief Constable in the Home Counties.

 

But I do like several of them, and the two best are ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman’, and ‘Innocent Blood’ . Dalgleish flits through the background in ‘Unsuitable Job’ and is absent from ‘Innocent Blood’ (which I won’t discuss here as it is hard to do so without spoiling it for a first reader. Let me just say that, written in an age when adopted children were only just being allowed to discover their true parents, it serves as a warning that such children may possibly get more than they bargained for).

 

Both books are obviously rooted in some bleak personal experiences which Phyllis James must have had , living in pretty tough circumstances, in that largely unvisited wasteland of brick houses on either side of the railway line that runs from London’s Liverpool Street terminus out towards Essex – Forest Gate, Maryland (how bitterly unsuited that name always looked to me on the rather adventurous blue tiled name-plaques which used to decorate stations on that route. You couldn’t be much further from Chesapeake Bay, the Great Falls of the Potomac, Annapolis or the Catoctin Mountains) . In both of them there are evocative descriptions of the bare lives people used to live in the non-golden-age 1950s in un-modernised and uninviting houses (now no doubt knocked-through,  extended, sanded, centrally-heated,  spotlit and IKEA-furnished out of all recognition, and scoured of the smells of cabbage and damp gabardine mackintoshes which used to linger in them.

 

For the Baroness had a pretty hard life of it ( details here http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/mar/03/crime.pdjames ), denied the university education she would obviously have loved by a combination of genteel poverty and a father who didn’t believe in higher education for girls. Having seen her mother hospitalised for a mental illness, she later married an Army doctor who gave her two daughters but returned from the war severely mentally ill, and then died young, at 44. She had responsibility, maturity and hard work (as a Home Office civil servant) forced upon her very young and very intensely ,and I have always been moved by the fact the amidst all these privations and hard thumps from fate,  she managed to become a distinguished and successful author.

 

This may have some bearing on why ‘An Unsuitable Job’ is so very good. Its heroine is Cordelia Gray, a clever and rather literary young woman, wrongly denied a Cambridge education, working in unlikely circumstances as the junior partner of a private detective agency, alongside a defeated but indomitable and cunning ex-Scotland-Yard copper, who dies on the first page, leaving her a business in debt, a gun and the agency’s first really good case.

 

I wish Phyllis James had gone on to write a lot more books about Cordelia (she did try once, in ‘The Skull Beneath the Skin’, but it didn’t, alas,  come off. Adam Dalgleish had by then pretty much taken over her life). She is one of the most attractive women in modern fiction, with her unconventionally attractive face ‘like an expensive cat’, and her combination of physical toughness and personal sympathy. In this book, it is her growing admiration for the personal goodness of a dead young man that impels her to take terrible risks in uncovering the truth of his death, and then covering it up again when that truth releases howling demons into the world.

 

Almost the whole drama is played in and around Cambridge at the end of the 1960s, when it was, as I well remember (I was at school there from 1965 to 1967), very beautiful and as yet unspoiled by the tourist plague which now soils it so in the warmer months. Her longing for what she cannot have is beautifully expressed in a quotation from one of John Donne’s sermons. ‘The university is a paradise, rivers of knowledge are there, arts and sciences flow from thence…gardens that are walled in, wells that are sealed up; bottomless depths of unsearchable counsels’.

 

If only it were really so.

 

(She doesn’t quote the next bit ‘the waters of rest, they flow from this good master, and flow into him again; all knowledge that begins not, and ends not with his glory, is but a giddy, but a vertiginous circle, but an elaborate and exquisite ignorance’.  But I bet she knows it) . The passage always makes me think of the Oxford Botanic Gardens, which Donne must have seen, and of its newer, larger Cambridge equivalent.

 

 

Cordelia, who has been excluded by the folly of others from this Eden, can only enter it as a private detective, a role in which she proves far cleverer than the wealthy, smart undergraduates who try in turn to get rid of her,  to suborn her and to throw her off the scent of what has really happened to their dead friend (oh, and for believers in the non-existent War on Drugs’ I should note here that this book, published in 1972 and written by a Home Office civil servant conversant with the law, refers to dope being openly smoked at a Cambridge party attended by students and dons).

 

There is much more here, about class, about ambition, about the power of money and also about what England was like, and felt like, at that rather shabby and aimless point in its history, yet before it had tipped down the rather steep section of the roller-coaster on which it now finds itself. James ‘s books are very good social history (I made great use of her debut novel ‘Cover Her Face’ in my chapter on the changing attitude towards unmarried mothers in ‘The Abolition of Britain’. The treatment and status of unmarried mothers as portrayed in this book  is now simply inconceivable and unimaginable for most people. Yet it was so then).

 

But it is also a very good mystery, and the final pages, in which Cordelia meets and fears Adam Dalgleish (I won’t tell you why), are gripping to the last word.  People compare her with Agatha Christie, but that’s unfair to Lady James. She’s more in the class of Dorothy Sayers, and sometimes comes close to Josephine Tey. As with many good authors, the earlier and middle works tend to be better than the later ones.