550 - A Taste for Death

A Taste for Death

By P. D. James

New York, Knopf, 1986. 480 Pp. $18.95 ($4.95 Pb.)

"He told me he had had an experience of God."

Sir Paul Berowne, Member of Parliament and Minister of the Crown, from time to time furthered an interest in church architecture. At St. Matthew's, Paddington, London-as he told his mistress-he had an experience of God.

He was murdered there.

P.D. James has written ten novels of killing crimes. It may be that her latest has made the best seller lists in 1986-87 because A Taste For Death poses a theological question: "What happened when Paul Berowne had an experience of God?"

Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard successfully pursued the slayer, but none he questioned could imagine what occurred before Berowne took the sacrament at morning mass in the Lady Chapel of St. Matthew's. Perhaps one clue is grasped early on. The story mostly is about people permitting themselves to be church-connected by traditional piety without any real presence of God. There is reason to believe that, for the author, the meaning of such an experience is in knowing intimately the one who has it. No one, it seems, knew the real Paul Berowne. As his mother, Lady Ursula, put it, "Until this happened, I would have described him as a conventional Anglican.... His experience-his alleged experience-is inexplicable, and, to do him justice, he didn't attempt to explain it, at least not to me. I hope you won't expect me to discuss it."

James, however, depicts a victim whose conventional behavior was a fraud. Beneath the cultural mask, Paul Berowne was unique. It seems that God discovered it so. The priest said he saw the stigmata on Berowne's wrists as he came to receive the sacrament. But Father Barnes did not pursue the matter.

When Dalgliesh asked the lover of Berowne's wife what he made of it, Stephen Lampart, the obstetrician, suggested the victim used his God-encounter as an excuse for "chucking it all"-a suicide. Berowne's estranged daughter, Sarah, a so-so communist exclaimed: "My God! He couldn't even get converted like an ordinary man. He had to be granted his own personal beatific vision." Conservative party officials were mystified. One said to Dalgliesh: "He wasn't asking for help, was he? Or for advice? He's gone to a higher power for that. It's a pity he ever set foot in that church. Why did he, anyway? D'you know?" Dagliesh said mildly, "Out of an interest in Victorian architecture, apparently." "Pity he didn't take up fishing or stamp collecting."

The incident aroused a defence of her son by Lady Ursula when Stephen Lampart began making a joke of it. "Whatever happened to my son in that church, and I don't pretend to understand it, in the end he

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died because of it. When next you're tempted to indulge in a cheap witticism you might remember that."

Another thread is conspicuous in the novel's pattern-P.D. James commenting on the state of religion in our time-like this one sentence: "St. Matthew's, with its small and aging population, was an uncomfortable reminder of the declining authority of the Established Church in the inner cities."

Was this imputed ecclesiastical weakness mirrored in the upper class life of Paul Berowne? At last, had faith come to be a thing of breaking out, and away from, the life style into which he was born? The mistress, Carole Washburn, told Dalgliesh: "It's such an unlikely thing to have happened, that conversion, divine revelation, whatever it was.... He was, well worldly.... He wasn't a mystic. He wasn't even particularly religious. He usually went to church on Sundays and on the major feast days because he enjoyed the liturgy.... He wouldn't attend if they used the new Bible or Prayer Book.... He once said that formal religious observance confirmed identity, reminded him of the limits of behavior."

Dalgliesh asked Carole, "Would you describe him as happy"? "No, not really.... What happened to him in that church, whatever it was, I don't think it would have happened if he'd been satisfied with his life, if our love had been enough for him.... Nothing was enough for Paul, nothing."

By this, P.D. James must have put her foot in the theological door by design, implying something about suffering and conflict being necessary for faith.

Others associated with Dalgliesh became involved in the question of religion because of the murder. Inspector Kate Miskin and Chief Inspector Massingham decide that Dalgliesh is disturbed about something in the case. Kate begins the conversation by asking:

"What's bugging him then?"
"What happened to Berowne in that church, I suppose."
"Have you tried to talk to him about it?"
"No, I did try once but all I could get out of him was: 'The real world is difficult enough, John. Let's try to stay in it.' "
"Do you believe that something really did happen to Berowne in that vestry?"
"It must have, mustn't it? A man doesn't chuck his job and change the direction of his whole life for nothing."
"But was it real? ... Did he really have, well, some kind of supernatural experience?"

A page of talk and reflection on the subject of religion then follows.

Only one of the more than five hundred whodunits on our own shelves has this sort of dialogue. The exception is another by P.D. James, Innocent Blood, which concludes with a young woman on her knees in a university chapel after an upbringing and education on the emotionally violent side of atheism.

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A bit later in the conversation Kate asks:

"If you have a kid, will you have him christened?"
"Yes, why do you ask?"
"So you believe in it, God, the church, religion."
"I didn't say so."
"Then why?"
"My family have been christened for four hundred years ... longer, I suppose. Yours, too, I imagine. It doesn't seem to have done us any harm."

Habitual persistence in religious form that "does no harm" may have goaded Berowne to discover something more.

Dalgliesh became bitter after interviewing the grandparents of Theresa Nolan, a nurse employed for Lady Ursula, who committed suicide after an affair with the murdered one that ended in abortion. "He felt himself contaminated by the Nolans' bitterness and pain. He thought: 'And if I tell myself that enough is enough ... if I resign, what then? Whatever Berowne found in that dingy vestry, it isn't open to me even to look for it.' As the Jaguar bumped gently back onto the road he felt a spurt of irrational envy and anger against Berowne, who had found so easy a way out."

When an angry Dalgliesh mentioned resignation to Gilmartin of government special services, the latter replied: "Oh, I shouldn't do that.... I suppose that Berowne was murdered, by the way. There's a rumor that it could have been suicide. After all, he was hardly normal at the time ... isn't he supposed to have had some kind of divine revelation? Listening to his voices when he should have been listening to the Prime Minister. And such a very curious church to choose. I can understand an enthusiasm for English Perpendicular, but a Romanesque basilica in Paddington surely is an improbable choice for a good night's sleep, let alone one's personal road to Damascus."

Paul Berowne, restless and searching for something better than religion's bifurcation of an eternal heaven and his personal hell on earth, at last met God in a vestry where the church scarcely expected having to defend the unnoticed absence of deity within its precincts. As another party official said: "After that nonsense in the church, no one was going to take him seriously any more."

The body of Paul Berowne was discovered by Miss Emily Wharton, age 65, a spinster who brightened her days by the small duties she was allowed to perform at St. Matthew's, and by Darren Wilkes, age 10, fatherless child of a prostitute, who took a shine to the lonely woman and was befriended by her. "She wants looking after," Darren used to say.

None thought to ask Miss Wharton's opinion of Berowne's religious experience. But at the end, when calmer days prevailed, she came again to see about altar flowers and spent candles. Entering, she is startled to encounter a young woman departing-Carole Washburn, Berowne's mistress. Commander Dalgliesh had told her there was nothing to see, but she had gone anyway, curious about the room where her lover had an "experience," and where he died. Coming onto Miss Wharton, she

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exclaimed: "He was right.... It's just a room, a perfectly ordinary room. There was nothing there, nothing to see."

Surely, it was her use of the word "ordinary" that suddenly made a proper theologian of Emily Wharton, belatedly in her sixty-fifth year. Shaken by the visitor's words, she walked on to the grille at the passage's end. Seeing the red glow of the sanctuary lamp, she thought, "And that, too, is only an ordinary lamp.... And the consecrated wafers behind the drawn curtain ... are ... only discs of flour and water ... ready for Father Barnes to say the words over them which will change them into God. But they weren't really changed. God wasn't there in that small recess behind the brass lamp ... he had gone away."

As this sickening, new doubt possessed her, Miss Wharton recalled the teaching of a former pastor, Father Collins, who advised: "If you find that you no longer believe, act as if you still do. If you feel you can't pray, go on saying the words."

The apostate but still committed Miss Wharton went to her knees and "said the words with which she always began her private prayers: 'Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.' "

It may have been that Paul Berowne, in the vestry, also came to a vision of the transformed ordinary. For him, the mystery and meaning of life may have been joined at last by the paradox of the million dollar house where he resided brought beside this paltry room in the house of God. In one fiery moment, after the manner of Emily Wharton, Sir Paul Berowne, Member of Parliament and Minister of the Crown, may have murmured, "O Lord, I am not worthy...." We are left to wonder whether, by confession, he renounced religion so that he could be visited by God.

CARL E. ERICSON

Peoria Journal-Star
Peoria, Illinois