Book review – Innocent Blood

“There was no hurry to explore the past; experiencing the present was interesting enough, and they had, after all, their whole lives before them.”

Innocent Blood was the novel that made P. D. James’s name, and the one that got me interested in her writing. I’d read a couple of Dalgliesh novels before that, but none of them grabbed me like this one did. Innocent Blood is a standalone novel following mostly two narratives: the eighteen year-old Philippa Palfrey, who gets to know her birth mother Mary Ducton, and the widower Norman Scase, who wants to kill Mary. Out of this simple premise is born a story of immense depth and unbearable tension.

Let’s start with the plot, which is an extraordinary slow burn. It is a bit slow to start, full of introductions to characters and setting up. There are always moments in the plot that seem to come to a complete standstill as the book focuses on description, but James manages to hold the reader’s interest, because from the very start, we are presented first with a mystery (who are Philippa’s birth parents) that then morphs rapidly into a very tense thriller. As Philippa gets to know her birth mother better, and grows closer to her, she encounters objections from her adopted family. Meanwhile, Norman Scase gets ever closer, with murderous intentions, so every moment between Philippa and her birth mother is coloured with fear. James is an expert at writing Scase’s hunt, having him get closer, then run into roadblocks, sometimes experiencing unexpected luck at key moments, till the whole thing becomes unbearable and the last hundred pages or so almost needs to be speed-read so we know how the damn story ends.

Then there are the characters. There’s a genius in writing Philippa and Scase as the two main point-of-view characters, where a good ending for one must be a bad ending for the other, and have us simultaneously root for both of them. This is credit to the extraordinary care and attention James pays both characters, fleshing out their backstories, explaining their motivations and, crucially, immersing us in their thoughts. Philippa is an intelligent young woman with a slight edge to her personality, not the most personable person, one might say. Scase, meanwhile, is a lonely man consumed with a mission he doesn’t fully understand. They are both sympathetic, and in a way that is the tragedy of the novel, that you don’t really know who to root for, thought I suppose Scase is harder to root for as his mission is so violent. But certainly you can’t root for him to fail.

Another reason the characters are so powerful is that their world views dovetail perfectly with the themes under exploration. James examines the nature of family ties and the importance of blood, obvious both from Philippa’s embracing of her birth family and in Scase’s reason for wanting to murder Mary Ducton. We see the theme also in the fact that Philippa’s adopted father is sterile. Everyone in the book is thinking of family in one way or another. Philippa’s character arc is tied to the question of who her family is and who she is. Even the ending ends up not only being a stunning plot twist that is hard to predict, but also going straight to the heart of the theme in question. The way everything is tied together, even thematically, is unexpected, and I think also far deeper and more penetrating than the reader’s naive guesses.

In a way, I’m surprised a book with so much philosophy and written in such a slow, heavy prose style managed to become a bestseller as a thriller But putting that aside, it is clear why Innocent Blood made really gave P. D. James her first taste of extraordinary success. It is well-plotted, probing and gloriously brought to life. Add to that her beautiful evocation of London in the 80s, with its dirt and grime and verve and truly awful food, and you have a crime novel that is hard to surpass. It’s a great way to begin reading P. D. James, if you haven’t read her before.