P.D. James is like a painter who uses the thinnest brush strokes and applies them meticulously and without hurry until a picture emerges. Many details are in place, finely drawn but not finicky or confusing.
The result is a masterpiece.
Being a novelist, James can also make insightful observations through her characters.
“The Lighthouse” is set on the fictitious island of Combe, off the coast of Cornwall, England. About Rupert Maycroft, who had been employed there for 18 months, James says: “At first the island had confused him. Like all beauty, it both solaced and disturbed.” And Maycroft describes a co-worker as having “the humility which had nothing to do with self-abasement or obsequiousness.”
James’ novels have many facets, including a murder mystery. Here, Combe serves as a refuge where people in high-level, stressful positions go for a brief time for the silence and security.
No bodyguards are needed. There is only one landing – guarded – for the island’s boat, and no way to swim ashore or climb the cliffs. There’s a helicopter pad, but it’s made usable only when a landing is expected.
Nevertheless, a famous novelist is murdered, his body found hanging from the island’s lighthouse. The murderer must be somebody on the island. Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh from Scotland Yard arrives, with a detective inspector, a sergeant and a forensic pathologist.
They sort through the stories of the people on the island, finding an unusual link between some of them and the novelist when he was a toddler. Dalgliesh is sure that isn’t it; he must dig deeper.
The book’s most frightening moment comes when Emma, the woman Dalgliesh loves, has a sudden feeling that he won’t live to leave the island.
Personal elements of the investigative team are deftly done. Readers have never known Detective Inspector Kate Miskin so well before, for instance.
James’ prose is so graceful and flows so smoothly that reading goes quickly. One can make it last a little longer by rereading (and re-enjoying) some of the descriptive passages about a storm or “the mild, sweet-smelling night made luminous under the glittering canopy of stars.”
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