Innocent Blood – P. D. James, 1980 ★★★★½

Blood Is Thicker

A departure from P. D. James' famous run of detective novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh, Innocent Blood is a stand-alone mystery less about crime than those who are its victims. It's a satisfying read, well-plotted and suspenseful, that raises unsettling questions about identity and love.

18-year-old Philippa Rose Palfrey is about to embark for Cambridge and a promising life, but there's a hole at her center. Adopted at age eight, she remembers very little of her life before she was taken in by a celebrity sociology professor and his wife. Forcing the issue as she reaches her majority, Philippa learns her real parents were decidedly different from the bio-parents of her imagination.

The more she learns about her original parents, the stronger her determination to forge a new connection with them. For Philippa, the blood that runs through her veins becomes thicker than any other human connection she knows.

"You stand outside life and look at it as if you aren't really part of it," Philippa is told early on by the woman who has looked after her for so long without much in the way of thanks. "You don't really care...It doesn't touch you. Nothing does."

This sums up both the fascinating character at the center of Innocent Blood as well as the challenge presented to us readers. Stiff, cold, Philippa is hard to warm up to, and spending so much time in her company can become taxing. She has a sociopath's tendency to devalue relationships, even if she isn't exactly one herself. She just not that far removed from one.

The challenge of reviewing mysteries is in not giving too much away. More than other fiction genres, mysteries need that quality of surprise. They really shouldn't come with those back-cover descriptions that serve as spoiler material for the first 70 pages. But it needs saying that "Innocent Blood" is not a mystery in the conventional way. You get suspense, plot twists, shocking horror, and all the usual trimmings, but they come at you in ways that feel more grounded in reality than one expects in a mystery. James' ability to draw you into the moment-by-moment stuff of life is from display on the first page, a tense meeting between Philippa and a social worker, and that fine descriptive focus never lets up.

P. D. James. Image from https://dev.ageing.ox.ac.uk/bsg/gala-dinner

This sticks out most with James' handling of the main character. Philippa puts it simply herself: "I'm not a kind person." And she isn't. We see her treat her adoptive parents brusquely, consider a brutal crime with only the slightest pang of compassion, and deal with people throughout the book with a kind of jaded selfishness. James handles this aspect wonderfully by not calling our attention to it; instead she lets us readers discover it for ourselves.

Throughout the book, the author plays her cards close to the vest like that. Readers will find themselves trapped deep in the POVs of various characters of subtle shadings and motivations. This not only allows James to probe some deep psychological and emotional material in the guise of plot exposition, it leaves us vulnerable for some shocking left-field revelations which James allows to unfold masterfully. A good novel works at developing story or examining underlying questions of character; "Innocent Blood" is great in the effortless manner it pulls off both at the same time.

Published in 1980, "Innocent Blood" also touches on the question of Great Britain in its post-Christian age, with both Philippa and her adoptive father representing strong atheistic outlooks. As James is well-known as a person of faith, I wondered what she was up to here, and found this a very involving subtext of a strangely gripping novel. The only character who espouses religious belief is the one we are introduced to as a killer. Is James making a point about redemption, or damnation? I can't really say that I know, but I felt myself swept along by the theological implications of the book, best represented by its enigmatic title.

I've only read one James novel before this, "Cover Her Face," the first of her Adam Dalgliesh novels. It is a decent read but not so much so that I missed the guy in this novel. It's hard to imagine any authority figure swooping in and sorting out the emotional and physical mess found in "Innocent Blood," and that is in my view to the book's advantage. It's not a neat tea-cozy mystery at all, but a bloody, messy, unsettled slice-of-life drama of sad vignettes, of old men looking back on missed opportunities and a young woman willfully seeking out something of life, no matter how miserable, as long as she can call it her own.