This thriller reveals P D James to (possibly) have some particularly unpleasant victim blaming beliefs - it appearing to be the fault of victims and their parents when rape and murder is committed. At first I thought this was just the view of the particularly unpleasant fictional narrator but by the end, when these views went unchallenged, realised they were very likely the author's opinions too. I wish I had not read this book. I've always had problems with her right wing (Conservative) politics and contempt for working class people but have tolerated this for the sake of her excellent plotting, but this novel (together with the transparent plot of The Lighthouse and the truly awful Death at Pemberley) has 'killed' PD James for me.

I had a very hard time putting this story down. I would race home after work so that could cram in more reading time. This is one of P. D. James's non Dalgliesh books.

If you found out a secret about your family would you still be able to forgive? Once the truth is out things start to happen.

This is the second PD James I've read. As a murder mystery, it's above average. It's also an exploration of what forgiveness means or is, in the context of a child murder. As with real life, it's incredibly messy, not least in the ending. So, it wasn't a pleasant read (hence the 3 star rating), but rather a grim depiction of reality slamming into fantasy. I have a feeling this story is necessary to understand PD James' stories (in addition to which, Ken Myers has mentioned that this book marked a turning point in her novels becoming more serious).

This book is super crazy. In fact I think that P D James must have gone crazy when writing this book.
Reasons why this book is horrible:
1. Having a main character who is probably a sociopath may be a problem. She absolutely has no feelings except for her self.
2. Having the killer be the most sympathetic character is also strange. And he really shouldn't be sympathetic but he is better than everyone else.
3. Overuse of the word Fawn. As in the color. I swear James must have used it at least five times a chapter.
4. Excusing child molesters is totally ok. Cause it was probably caused by not being man enough to handle a woman.
5. Having an affair with your adopted father is also cool since you aren't actually related and it's totally normal.
6. Number 5 was thrown in at the end of the book with no warning. Yuck! All the people in this book are perverts.
7. Have your teenage main character talk like John Green's characters.
James is a really good writer but this book is crazy.

Wish we could award half stars - liked the writing, but the story dragged in places. James as always did a great job setting the scene, describing locations, and helping the reader to picture the characters. I always learn new vocabulary from her books, at least one new word each title. She writes in what I consider a typically "English" way, evoking a totally different atmosphere from the usual crime novel. While this book did not engage the reader in solving a crime, it did engage me in a coming of age tale about an adopted child and in the psychological development of a man seeking revenge. A stand-alone psychological study that is well worth reading, despite its gray atmosphere.

Ok, I must admit that I just couldn't bring myself to finish this book; thus, the date finished would be more accurately titled "Date I FINALLY Gave Up on this Book". This is not P.D. James' best work. It lacks even remotely likable characters and the plot drags like turtles wading through peanut butter. I used to be one who simply had to finish a book once I started it; but, I have learned that life is too short to read mediocre books, devoid of one small modicum of hope or decency.

So, technically, I didn't read it--all. I am grateful to previous reviewers who expressed similar impressions of the book and I feel absolved as to the need to persevere.

June 2024: Ack. I finished it. Ack again.

Over the last year or so, I have met a wide variety of people who like knitting - not least the ferocious and redoubtable knitters of CERN, one of whom was even featured on a recent Swiss TV program. So, although I do not knit myself, I have come to develop some appreciation of the joy and heartbreak it can bring people.

This book is one that I would advise knitters to approach with great caution. Suppose there were a person you had thought about every day for many years, and longed desperately to meet. Suppose, by some extraordinary chance, that you were suddenly granted an opportunity to meet that person. Suppose, as a token of your love and gratitude, that you knitted them a miraculously wonderful sweater, a piece of knitting into which you had poured your very soul.

And then suppose they threw it in the river...

I wonder why this author feels compelled to write interesting, but extremely verbose, stories around characters that are impossible to like or even feel sorry for.

Here, we find a cold, arrogant young woman, who finds love and kindness to be impossible concepts, looking to find out "who she is", by searching for her birth mother. Well, she finds the mother and now we know why the main character is a sociopath. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

A disappointment.

A previous reviewer called this one a "slow-burning psychological thriller". This one burned too slow for me, sorry, I gave up half way.

There was a lot I liked about this book but there was far more that I disliked.

I liked a plot that was always moving forward, and that the ending, when it came, took me by surprise. I didn't abandon it because I genuinely wanted to know what happened

There were some decent physical descriptions, perhaps at their strongest when trying to depict the grubby streets of Inner London. I particularly liked the small details, such as the Casablanca Hotel, or the card/collection when Scase left the GLC. But even then, I found that they were laced with PD James's contempt for people of a lower social class.

Descriptions of people and their personalities were superficially adequate. But the characterisations were ultimately one of the main reasons why I didn't like the book.

About a third of the way through, I felt compelled to write a list of all the reasons why I found Philippa Palfrey to be an implausible protagonist. Some of those implausibilities were explained later, but I found the explanations even less plausible.

I found Philippa especially implausible. She was supposed to be 18 years old but was portrayed as if she was 30something. There was a general inability to give distinguishing characteristics to any of the characters. Everybody spoke in grammatically correct English with a rich and complex vocabulary. Several reviewers have poked fun at the over-frequent use of the colour 'fawn'. I also found repeated use of the word 'preternaturally', when 'early' could - would - have done.

Nobody seemed real, except perhaps, meek Hilda. No one had second thoughts or ambiguities. No anxieties or self-doubt. No one had blazing rows. They all acted rationally, if implausibly.

I just think the book is very dated now. It's set in the late 1970s (plus flashbacks) but that isn't my problem. Of course life was different then: monetary values, lack of the technology we take for granted; the convoluted method of paying for Tube fares before Travelcards, let alone Oysters, were used.

But it's more than that. What comes out quite clearly is that PD James was a snob. If I liked other aspects, I might overlook the snobbery. But again and again, I grew to dislike her belittling of people who didn't share the Palfreys' social circle. The sneer at the suburbs, provincial towns and backwater villages where most people live - where most of PD James's paying customers live. The lazy racism, which I've tried to reflect on below (I've concluded that it isn't just a product of its time).

I got a bit bored of the 'show don't tell'. We kept being told that Maurice Palfrey was left wing, but other than some post-Marx analysis of privilege there seemed nothing to back this up. We were 'told' an aspect of someone's character without it being shown to be true.

There were a lot of aspects about Philippa's psychology that were conveniently glossed over. I won't go into so much detail as to be a Spoiler. but you know early on that she was adopted at 8, yet all the evidence now is that children taken from their birth family even as young as 4 or 5 are deeply disturbed. Yes, Philippa has very little attachment to her adoptive parents, but that just seems a natural function of being poised between childhood and adulthood, not the result of suffering major life changing upheaval as a child.

It doesn't bother me that all the significant characters are unlikeable, but it's quite dull that they are all invariably unlikeable and all without any sense of hope, all bound up in their selfish existences.

If one or two things don't ring true, I can happily gloss over them, but there's so much wrong with this book that it's actually left me vaguely angry and in no hurry to read any more PD James anytime soon, if indeed ever. In fact, my favourite GoodReads review of this book states succinctly "Love Ruth Rendell".

As for the Epilogue...wholly unnecessary and diminished some of the positives I did take away from the book.

Annoyed review I banged off when I was about a third of the way through.

At 38% read I feel compelled to note down a list of things in this book that irritate me.

Phillipa is the least plausible 18 year old imaginable. She can remember nothing before the age of 8, which is unlikely - except if she had suffered great trauma at that age. Being taken from her birth family and transplanted into the Palfreys is about as traumatic as it gets. Nevertheless, despite being traumatised she sails through the Entrance to a selective fee-paying schools, takes her A-Levels a year early and gets a 'Cambridge scholarship'.

What is the big deal about a Cambridge Scholarship? It's 1978, the achievement is getting into Cambridge. Fees will be paid for by Westminster City council, and her maintenance either by a maintenance grant or parental contribution equivalent to grant. Given that she had been at a fee-paying school, her parents would easily afford her maintenance.

Her father is a University lecturer. Not even a Professor or head of department, yet he can afford to send her to fee paying school. Granted, he has a free house from his late wife and fees for TV appearances. But, really, school fees on a lecturer's salary?

Malcolm & Hilda are childless because Malcolm is shooting blanks. How likely is it that Hilda would have agreed to adopting an 8yo? It was still quite common back there to adopt babies - perhaps easier if you subscribed to the 'right' religious groups. But Hilda wasn't infertile. So she could have left Malcolm for a fertile man, conducted a discreet affair, or - possibly - had AI. It makes no sense to adopt an 8yo daughter of a rapist and murderer - wouldn't she be worried about 'bad blood'?

Phillippa is 18 in the summer of Grease dominating the pop charts and popular culture. Perfect movie for a teenager. Oh, but Phillipa's an intellectual, she doesn't do pop culture. She's going on her Cambridge Scholarship to study English Lit, so her bookshelves are crammed with 19th classics. But we don't see P. reading, not even on the train journeys she makes. She's going to become a writer, yet we don't see her writing - not a diary, not short stories, not the first stab at an epic novel, nothing. At 18 I thought I was going to be a writer. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. It's something that you do if you have it within you. If you are a writer you don't get defined by commercial or critical success, or even by whether you're any good at it. It doesn't matter. You write a diary. Nowadays a blog, or reviews on GoodReads.

She got a painting for her 18th birthday. Who does that? Knowing she was going to University, she didn't choose to get something that would be useful for Uni. No, she got a painting. 18 yos really don't do that, and given that I was 18 in 1986 I'm not prepared to accept that 18yos did that in 1978.

She has saved up nearly a thousand pounds from Christmas and birthday money. That's equivalent to £5300 in 2013 values (latest available). I find this unbelievable. She's only had 10 years to save this, remember. And so far there has been no mention of rich aunts or grandparents. I got birthday and Christmas money in the 70s. Most of it went straight on books (and crafts and toys). I put a little away in the Post Office. I think it came to just over a hundred pounds (including the remains of a small legacy) by the time I was 18.

Phillippa is 18 but has no friends, other than a not-really-boyfriend.

Other things that are annoying. Malcolm is left wing. We know that because PD James keeps telling us. So far, she has failed to show us anything that suggests he's Left Wing.

Malcolm teaches Sociology and assumes that his Sociology students will become Social Workers. Why would they? People going to Uni because they intend to become Social Workers will study Social Administration. My mother did in 1954, my contemporaries did in 1986. Actually, even that's not true. My friend a social worker studied Theoretical Physics. I think sociology is one of those subjects one studies partly when you're not clear where you're heading, or because you want to learn about the world, or because you have strong and fixed views of the world. (I did it as a subsidiary during the first year of my Politics degree).

I'm conscious that I'm looking at this book published in 1980 with the eyes of 2015, so I'm probably not surprised that PD James refers to 'coloured' people. I'll stick my neck out and say that BBC News were using 'Black' when reporting on the notting Hill Carnival riots of 1976. But I accept that ordinary white people were probably still using 'coloured'.

However, this was the 1970s, not the 50s. The National Front were active, and in 1979 Blair Peach was killed on an Anti-Nazi march. We discussed this at *Primary School* in leafy Cheshire suburbia. Viv Anderson made his full England debut in 1978, a milestone for black footballers. Top of the Pops featured many black artists, albeit quite a lot of Americans. The Black and White Minstrel show ended in 1978, as I understand it (and understood it then) because of the controversy about 'blackface'. This was several years after the expulsion to Britain of thousands of Ugandan Asians.

But according to this book, BAME people were 'other' remarkable only for their braided hair or being visible in the distance on the street. Yes, it's good to read books from decades back and learn about the attitudes and mores of the time. But when the book is by a right wing snob, I question the value. I wouldn't read contemporary books with an underlying mood of snobbery. I doubt that such books nowadays would be so overtly lazily racist (not the same as portraying a racist character), but when the book is entirely premised on some types of people being better than others, it's quite hard to take seriously.

Challenging story

Había leído muy malas reseñas de este libro y tan malo no me parece.
La personalidad poco común de la protagonista y su deseo de conocer a su familia me parece normal.
Eso sí, no pude con Maurice sobretodo su relación con Philipa y de fondo Hilda.
Me sentía tan mal porque lo veía real y posible. Hilda merece más.
Y el epílogo fue muy corto para saber en detalle de los personajes. Una pena.