Innocent Blood

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Promising but dull - Rated
I am sorry to be so blunt.

My early assumption was that the story line had an intriguing ring: London, end of the 70s. A young lady, Philippa, knowing she had been adopted, sets out to look for her biological parents. Her adoptive parents, with whom she never quite had a close relationship, are unhappy about this choice but nothing can stop Philippa. What she eventually finds out about her biological parents is shocking but, seemingly unperturbed, she sets out to try and establish a contact to learn more about her early childhood. Meanwhile, somebody else is looking into the past and, unbeknownst to anybody, is waiting for the right time to strike out, to quench the thirst of vendetta over the murder of his young daughter years ago.

Although the linguistic structure is definitely high class, the narrative is just too tediously overly-descriptive, resulting in total failure to engage me fully as a good thriller should do. I often found myself skimming through some parts, trying to get to the core of the chapter. Additionally, none of the main characters, Philippa in primis, were particularly likeable one way or the other, no matter how tragic or sad their backgrounds. This too, contributed to a certain degree of dislike for the whole tale.

I know and respect Mrs. P.D. James' reputation as a writer, but this book just was not for me.

Clever - but oh so cold! - Rated
The material is excellent: Philippa was adopted as a child. She has now turned 18 and can claim her original birth certificate - and seek out her natural mother. Philippa has grown up in the comfortable home of a celebrated academic, she is breezing through her A levels with distinction, a place at Oxford awaits her. All is secure. Until the birth certificate arrives and she makes a shocking discovery whose consequences provide the rest of the story.

Good stuff. You really feel for such a heroine, don't you? Well no, not this heroine, that's the trouble. In order to maximize the impact of the forthcoming revelations, the author has drawn Philippa as a cold and frighteningly superior young woman. And unfortunately she has succeeded in this only too well. Philippa is simply insufferable, and however much fortune rocks her stable surroundings she never loses that cold glitter of intellectual disdain. The other major character is Maurice, her adoptive father the academic, and he isn't much better either. When his first wife died Maurice married Hilda who, to please him, has become a fabulous cook, hostess and homemaker. But poor Hilda is uneducated and deplorably lower middle-class, so both Maurice & Philippa treat her with a kind of well-bred contempt. "We both wish we could love Hilda" Maurice says. Well yes, so did I, Maurice. And perhaps that is all it would have taken to redeem this book: a little less sneering and a tad more affection. A touch of ordinary, unexceptional, uncelebrated, non-class-conscious human feeling.

Gripping and disturbing. - Rated
I bought this book to read if I got really bored on holiday. In the end the holiday had to be worked round the book as it refused to be put down. A departure from P D James' more usual "detective novel", this story seems closer to the Ruth Rendell-as-Barbara Vine physcological thriller. The plot is centred on a past murder and its drastic reprocussions for two very different people caught up in its wake.

The novel is beautifully written with vivid descriptions of people and places and enough sense of impending disaster to keep you reading. I particulary liked the way in which one character's plans to commit a violent act of revenge were described in a completely deadpan way as if he was planning something as harmless as his annual holiday. This technique simply made the story all the more disturbing.

Gripping stuff!

A harrowing study of the legacies of murder and deceit - Rated
PD James produces superbly written, intricately detailed and meticulously crafted detective stories. Innocent Blood, however, is a departure from her usual whodunits as neither Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh nor the young private detective Cordelia Gray is featured, and there is no crime to detect. Of the two murders that permeate the story, one happened ten years ago; the murderers were brought to justice and the crime itself, once front-page news, is now nearly forgotten. The other murder is yet to happen, and we watch it being planned.

The book is set in 1978 (it was written in 1980) and takes as its starting point the Children's Act of 1975, by which adopted adults had, for the first time in Britain, the right of access to their original birth certificates, and thereby the means of tracing their natural parents. Philippa Palfrey is intellectual, privileged and gifted, and was adopted at the age of eight into an affluent but emotionally stunted family. Apart from a few flashes of memory, she has no recollection of her life before the adoption; all that she knows of her background is what her adoptive parents have told her and the cosy fantasies she has constructed for herself...it is a tribute to James' powerful writing that, even when you know it's coming, the moment that Philippa quite casually learns the truth is still shocking...

Philippa is not an appealing heroine but her arrogance hides her insecurity and desperate need to belong. Her emotional awakening and eventual self-realisation is one of the key themes of the book. But it's also a study of deceit: lies told for good or selfish reasons, how they alter the course of a life, and the way we blindly and wilfully collude in our own deception. It's an emotionally harrowing book, but utterly absorbing. James' descriptions of people, even of minor characters, are vivid; her locations, the different 'villages' of London in particular, are so accurately detailed that I had to check my A to Z to be certain that the roads in which her characters live are fictional; I first read this book in one sitting; I found it impossible to put down. It's a tour de force by an intelligent and accomplished writer who is also deeply compassionate, and the book ends with the promise that one of those who had been as dead has at last discovered the way back to life. If you only read one PD James book, read this one. Better still, read them all.