Time to be in Earnest - P. D. James

This "fragment of autobiography" caught my attention for several reasons, and lived up to expectations on all counts. P.D. James herself has interested me since I saw her give an excellent talk on detective fiction as social history last year, and since then I have read several of her novels and found them much more complex (and a lot darker!) than the "genre fiction" I had previously dismissed them as. This was not a conventional autobiography, as it explicitly excludes detailed discussion of painful subjects such as her husband's long-term mental illness, choosing instead to take the form of a diary which mingles records of current doings with reminiscences from a lifetime and more general reflections. One of its main strengths is the insights it gives into the experiences of her generation - for example her memories of working in the NHS in its early years, at a time when MPs were assuming that the annual costs of the service would decrease as long-standing conditions were treated and the health of the nation gradually increased as a result!

One rather self-indulgent reason for my interest in this book was that there are several points of overlap between her life and mine in terms of locations, and I find it oddly satisfying to read about familiar places through unfamiliar eyes, particularly casual mentions to obscure train stations and pubs that I haven't thought about for years. I found that this had the strange effect of making it feel rather shocking whenever she expressed strong opinions that I do not share, as she occasionally did - for example her vehement outrage at the "injustice" of the intrusion into the lives of those persuaded to take part in family therapy sessions.

However, my main reason for picking this up was to see what she had to say about the writing process and about crime fiction. For her, the fascination of detective fiction lies in

"the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of a murder enquiry. Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and of the dead. If forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being."

I was also struck by her observation, in a discussion of the contrasts between modern detective novels and their 1930s counterparts, that although they have become so much more realistic in many ways, they still contain an element of fantasy in that so many modern fictional detectives are curiously childless and able to devote their lives to their work...

On the writing process itself, she offers four pieces of advice: read widely; practise writing ("the craft is learned by practising it, not by talking about it"); increase your vocabulary; and finally, welcome experience:

"This means going through life with all senses open: observing, feeling, relating to other people. Nothing that happens to a writer need ever be lost."