Rashmi bookmarks “Innocent Blood”

P. D. James' “Innocent Blood” is about the series of events that are let loose when Philippa Palfrey, on her 18th birthday, applies for the right to see her birth certificate and learn the identity of her birth parents. Her discovery that her mother - who she thought had died - was in fact in jail, convicted of murder, and her decision to form a new life with her, lie at the heart of this story.

I really liked the idea of placing two narratives side by side - concurrently we get to see Philippa search for her mother, and then the two of them search for a new apartment and a new life - as well as Norman Scase, the father of a murdered girl, as he searches for the killer.

But, other than that, I really struggled with this story. A smaller issue I had was with the pace of storytelling. It started off really well, diving into the heart of the narrative very early on. Soon thereafter, it slowed down more and more, till detailed trips to the real estate agents or the farmers' market made this a very tiresome read.

The greater problem I had with this story was that I either just barely tolerated, or immensely disliked, all of the main characters. My biggest issue was with the central character Philippa - I never got why she was so horrible to her adoptive parents ... more shockingly, I really didn’t get why she was so keen to re-connect with her biological mother - knowing full well that she was the woman who had killed a child that had just been raped by her husband. Also, a lot of things that were said by people got me quite angry. Mary Ducton (Philippa's mother) says that the rape of a child wasn’t as bad as one pictures it - and at one point even justifies the murder by saying, "I saved her a life of sadness that comes to a child of early sexual assault". Here’s another gem: Philippa at one point wishes her father had met someone else, for he would then still have been alive - she explains, "It was his bad luck to have met instead Julie Scase, that dangerous mixture of innocence and stupidity". His bad luck?? his Bad Luck?? … At one point when her stepfather tries to dissuade her from going back to her killer mother, she yells at him, saying he never bothered to find out the pressures under which she had had to kill the child. The book ended with a convenient suicide and Philippa's easy return to the home - and also the bed - of her stepfather.

This book was such a letdown; “Death of an Expert Witness” by this author had placed P. D. James in such high esteem in my mind.