BISECTUAL:

P.D. James is unyielding in her suspicion of the human capacity "to be good without God", as our unbelieving friends claim. Her twenty novels give fictional life to St. Augustine's estimate of evil as the ruin of God's good creation by disordered desire: by a perverted love of the wrong things, or the wrong persons, or the wrong places, or to the wrong extent. In her memoir Time to be in Earnest, James quotes Adam Dalgliesh, her own master sleuth, on the unwitting Augustinian wisdom that an older detective sergeant once taught him: "All motives can be explained under the letter L: lust, lucre, loathing and love. They'll tell you that the most dangerous is loathing but don't you believe it, boy: the most dangerous is love."

In her only novel that doesn't feature Dalgliesh, The Children of Men, her terrifying book of 1992, James gives vent to some of her own worst fears. It's not the coming of Nietzsche's "overman" that James fictionally investigates in this apocalyptic novel. She prophesies, instead, the arrival of Nietzsche's "last man". Thus spake Zarathustra in 1883: "Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man ... The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest." The chief sign of the approaching end in James's novel is not writhing misery but coddling comfort.

A complex admixture of good and evil lies at the moral and religious heart of James's fiction. She depicts villains who are not entirely criminal and victims who are not wholly innocent. Most of her murderers kill for honourable reasons -- usually to avenge some prior injustice. Like the rest of us, they commit evil in the name of good. They thus leave us with a troubling sense of our complicity in the hidden crimes of our own lives. Murder, James contends, is the unique crime. It "carries an atavistic weight of repugnance, fascination and fear". We are at once repelled and attracted to depictions of this supreme offense because the line dividing good and evil does not separate the noble from the savage, the blameless from the guilty. It bisects every human heart. "Few people opening their door to two grave-faced detectives with a request that they should accompany them to the police station", she remarked, "would do so without a qualm of unease, however certain they may be of their complete innocence."

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