October 8, 2005
CRANK UP THE VCR:
The Murder Room (Mystery, Sunday 9pm, PBS)
The Murder Room
Airing Sundays, October 9 + 16, 2005 on PBS
(Check local listings; dates and times may vary)A family at war, a secret society for sexual favors involving lords of the realm and a copy-cat murderer... Martin Shaw returns as the enigmatic poet and detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh in P.D. James's The Murder Room.
When Neville Dupayne is found bound and burned to death on the grounds of his family's museum, the staff can't help but notice the murder resembles a murder from the museum's own chilling exhibition, the Murder Room, an exhibit featuring the most gruesome real-life murders in Britain's history.
The victim had no shortage of enemies -- he was determined to close the museum down and leave everyone there without a job or a home. But when the body of a prostitute is found murdered in a grisly reproduction of another Murder Room exhibit, it is clear something more than personal vendetta motivates the killer. With dozens more exhibits in the Murder Room, how many more murders are still to come?
The Murder Room has been adapted for the screen by Robert Jones from the novel by P.D. James. In addition to Martin Shaw, the drama also stars Janie Dee, Michael Maloney, Nicholas Le Prevost, Samantha Bond and Siân Phillips in a rare TV appearance.
Sadly the new Dalgliesh is no Roy Marsden, but it's tough to beat a PD James.
MORE:
A case for P.D. James as a Christian novelist> (Ralph C Wood, 1/01/03, Theology Today)
P.D. James is often regarded as the reigning Queen of Crime, a worthy successor to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. While these titles are indeed fitting, I believe that James must also be reckoned as a significant novelist in her own right. Her fifteen novels are far more accomplished works of art, for example, than the fiction of the much-touted Iris Murdoch. Yet it is also time to recognize James as an important Christian writer. Her fiction has far profounder moral and religious import, for example, than anything to be found in the Peter Wimsey books of Sayers. James must be regarded, I contend, as a contemporary successor to the twentieth-century literary masters who wrote from a Christian angle of vision. Even if she is a minor figure within it, she belongs to the grand tradition that runs from Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and Ronald Knox to the Oxford Inklings (especially C. S. Lewis), from W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Edwin Muir on to the great figures of the Catholic literary renascence: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Georges Bernanos and Francois Mauriac, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. Like all of them, James refuses to write for a religious audience alone, but for serious readers of all sorts and conditions, seeking to engage them with the largest human questions and the deepest theological truths.Posted by Orrin Judd at October 8, 2005 11:20 PMJames confesses, regretfully, that evil is much easier to depict than good. A stolen cache, a slashed throat, a slandered reputation-these all attract immediate interest. Goodness, by contrast, is enormously difficult to give vibrant fictional life. Precisely because it is often quiet and undramatic, James explains, charity is hard to make artistically compelling. There is not much artistic possibility to be found in caring for a sick friend, enduring an unhappy marriage, performing uncongenial work. Such deeds present an acute theological problem as well: Having minimal earthly honor and reward, they seem to vanish into the void. Mark Antony's praise of Julius Caesar puts the pagan case memorably:
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.
Our world remains pagan, James suggests, precisely in its unwillingness to perform what Wordsworth called "the little, nameless, unremembered acts/ of kindness and of love."2 Our loss of belief in the transcendent Witness and Vindicator has come at an awful cost. On one notable occasion, therefore, James has stepped outside the conventions of crime fiction to write a cautionary parable about the godless condition of late western culture.
The Children of Men (1993) is a dystopian novel set in 2012, when the whole world has been stricken with infertility. Childlessness becomes a metaphor of godlessness. Macabre things happen in this craven new age without babies. Kittens are christened in their place. New dolls are dressed up and wheeled about in prams; broken ones are buried ceremoniously in consecrated ground. Women experience false pregnancies and pseudo-- births. With a mania at once sinister and sad, everyone is desperate to keep alive the idea of birth and babies. Religious anarchy is also loosed upon the land. Churches that have not been abandoned entirely are used for occult rites, animal sacrifices, and Black Masses. Flagellants parade in Hyde Park, lacerating their bleeding backs. The senile and the infirm are subjected to a state-sponsored euthanasia program called the Quietus. Other aging folks who no longer "contribute to the well-being of society" are drugged into submission and sent out to sea for drowning. Worst of all, perhaps, is the response of the voters to this loss of a human future. They have elected a benevolent tyranny, thus fulfilling Dostoevsky's terrible prophecy in The Brothers Karamazov-namely, that a godless people will welcome despotism, exchanging perilous freedom for easy security: "Better that you enslave us, but feed us."
Perhaps because she found it easier to warn of the wrath to come than to prophesy deliverance in artistic terms, James has returned to the writing of murder mysteries. For murder still poses, in unavoidable ways, the essential theological quandary. It remains the most abhorrent of crimes: There is no reparation for either the living or the dead, since the victim cannot be brought back to life. Hence the acute eschatological question it raises: Having been denied justice in this life, do the murdered have hope beyond death? There is also the problem of the criminal's own guilt and punishment. "Unless they are psychopaths," one of James's characters observes, murderers "have to come to terms with what they have done."
Ralph Wood seems to be a bit of a pessimist, and from that vantage point writes an essay that is simply wrong in its conclusions.
On good deeds:
Having minimal earthly honor and reward, they seem to vanish into the void. Mark Antony's praise of Julius Caesar puts the pagan case memorably:
The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.
Our world remains pagan, James suggests, precisely in its unwillingness to perform what Wordsworth called "the little, nameless, unremembered acts/ of kindness and of love."
But almost ALL acts, whether of evil or good, are forgotten after their initiators die.
Further, there are FAR MORE people who have been remembered throughout the ages for positive things, rather than for negative things.
Although there are many currently-living people who will be long-remembered, among the dead Homer, Hammurabi, Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Newton, Adam Smith, Galileo, Hobbes, Locke, Shakespeare, Columbus, Cook, Magellan, Washington, Lincoln, Edison, Einstein, Tesla, Franklin, Lewis and Clark, John Paul Jones, Ronald Reagan, Benjamin Graham, Madison, Jefferson, Salk, Pasteur, Edward Jenner, Alexander Fleming and Howard Walter Florey, and Henry Ford spring immediately to mind. (Apologies for the all-masculine list).
Can anyone else name 35 people remembered solely due to their evil acts, without doing any research ?
I get 27, including quite a few 20th century American serial killers, who, although definitely evil, didn't really change the course of human affairs much.
Otherwise, a few Biblical bad guys, some Old West American outlaws, a female WW II spy, a few female outlaws, the WW II Axis leaders, some Asian leaders, a few conquerors from the middle ages, some really horrible French and English leaders, a couple of Roman emperors, and of course the mysterious Jack the Ripper.
The obvious and long-lasting cumulative effect of the great deeds of those on the first list above, as well as the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love that are performed every day by billions of people, is that at least half of the people on Earth live in decent enough, fairly well-ordered societies, where they have opportunities to live fruitful lives, be somewhat comfortable, have kids, and know love.
Some of those societies are lousy, by contemporary American standards, but there's more to life than decadent comfort and pleasure-seeking.
Another behavior that, in my view, substantiates the belief that most people still do little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love on a daily basis are the immediate and overwhelming donations to the victims of 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and before them to Farm-Aid and Ethiopian famine relief. Also, President Bush wasn't hounded from office for pledging to give $ 15 billion of the American tax-payers hard-earned money to African AIDS victims, nor was there much outcry about his decision to forgive some of the billions of dollars in debt owed to American interests by developing nations.
Those aren't the acts of a miserly and self-serving population.
Our loss of belief in the transcendent Witness and Vindicator has come at an awful cost.
Umm... Say what ?
Maybe in Britain, but not in the U.S., for sure.
James has [once] stepped outside the conventions of crime fiction to write a cautionary parable about the godless condition of late western culture.
The Children of Men (1993) is a dystopian novel set in 2012, when the whole world has been stricken with infertility. Childlessness becomes a metaphor of godlessness. [...] Flagellants parade in Hyde Park, lacerating their bleeding backs. The senile and the infirm are subjected to a state-sponsored euthanasia program called the Quietus. Other aging folks who no longer "contribute to the well-being of society" are drugged into submission and sent out to sea for drowning. Worst of all, perhaps, is the response of the voters to this loss of a human future. They have elected a benevolent tyranny, thus fulfilling Dostoevsky's terrible prophecy in The Brothers Karamazov-namely, that a godless people will welcome despotism, exchanging perilous freedom for easy security: "Better that you enslave us, but feed us."
Except that these fictional behaviors don't stem from Godlessness, but rather, from the certainty that God is dead - hopelessness.
With no ability to have offspring, the human race would be doomed, and that would certainly lead to a pervasive attitude that hedonism is all that's left.
Also, and I don't know if James explores this in her novel, a significant number of evangelical Christians would see universal infertility as a GOOD sign - that it would mean that all that needed to be born, HAVE been born, and that the Rapture is just around the corner.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://brothersjuddblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 9, 2005 5:57 AM
You miss the point: Godlessness is hopelessness.
Posted by: oj at October 9, 2005 7:50 AMGodlessness promotes pessimism, but that's not at all the same as hopelessness.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at October 9, 2005 8:06 AM
The Godless should be pessimistic--their hopeless societies are dying. Their pessimism is realism.
Posted by: oj at October 9, 2005 8:55 AMMichael:
Your focus is too narrow, on the famous/infamous. Got to a 12 step meeting and you'll see ordinary men are remembered only for the "evil" they did their children.
Posted by: oj at October 9, 2005 12:35 PMHer latest, The Lighthouse,is available on preorder at Amazon. She's 85 now, so each new book is an event.
Pat
I hope that the TV version works; the book is a dog.
Posted by: AC at October 9, 2005 6:36 PMWhat makes The Children of Men so terrific is how artfully she showed what good sense euthanasia, dependency, totalitarianism and the dissolute life would make in a childless world. If anyone needs convincing that the family is the seat of freedom and morality, that is the book to read.
Posted by: Peter B at October 10, 2005 6:27 AMOrrin:
I have no doubt that dysfunctional people often had dysfunctional parents, but that says nothing whatsoever about the general population.
Further, I thought that your official stance was that either personal or familial experiences are proof of nothing whatsoever ?
By your own standards, the tales that adult drunks and druggies tell of childhood abuse and worse are irrelevant.
Understand that I do not believe such, I merely note that YOU have said such in the past.
Bottom line: Most people remember their loving parents fondly.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at October 12, 2005 1:07 AM
The particular parent doesn't matter, it's how everyone recalls their parents. They dwell on the negative.
Posted by: oj at October 12, 2005 1:11 AMIt is true that human brains are more fine tuned to pain than to pleasure, and probably best so.
Maybe I'm just a freak.
I try to let the negative go.
Life's too short to horde past pains for future review, and there are sure to be more upcoming, anyway.
at October 12, 2005 2:06 AM
What do you know of your great-great-grandfather other than that he was less enlightened than you--racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.?
Posted by: oj at October 12, 2005 8:07 AM