The Private Patient

Critics

• The Private Patient by PD James

  Cheverell Manor, a historic and beautifully appointed Dorset mansion, might seem an ideal place to spend the run-up to Christmas. But this is a PD James novel. Run by plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell as a surgery-cum-country retreat, the house ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

• Review: The Private Patient by P. D. James

  P.D. James's compassion transforms the traditional whodunit, says David Robson When an investigative journalist checks in for plastic surgery to a private clinic in Dorset, you know she is going to end up with more than a nip and tuck. With a more s ... (read full critics)

  telegraph.co.uk published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

3 Reviews

• 1 person find this helpful

  

  it must be read listening to mozart's requiem in d minor: death here is a welcome visitor, not the grim reaper. but after the killing things start to get a bit tedious and foreseeble, maybe you CAN have too much of a good thing. consider it is the book of someone who's 89 by now, and stoically read ... (continue)

  it must be read listening to mozart's requiem in d minor: death here is a welcome visitor, not the grim reaper. but after the killing things start to get a bit tedious and foreseeble, maybe you CAN have too much of a good thing. consider it is the book of someone who's 89 by now, and stoically ready to say farewell.

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  Elsastella said on Apr 4, 2009 | Add your feedback

• *** This comment contains spoilers! ***

  

  not as satisfying as the Lighthouse, which was a page turner and very moving.

  the characters in The Private Patient are less likable and hard to identify with, thus are a drag from time to time. The most interesting part is where Emma's father quotes Wilde and the depiction of Kate.

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  Ashley H. said on Dec 21, 2009 | Add your feedback

• 

  Adam Dalgliesh returns to solve the murder of Rhoda, an investigative reporter who goes to a lovely private clinic in the country to have an ugly scar removed from her face, a scar her drunken father inflicted upon her as a child and of which she said, "I no longer have need of it."

  As usual w ... (continue)

  Adam Dalgliesh returns to solve the murder of Rhoda, an investigative reporter who goes to a lovely private clinic in the country to have an ugly scar removed from her face, a scar her drunken father inflicted upon her as a child and of which she said, "I no longer have need of it."

  As usual with P.D. James, the book is beautifully written. What I don't recall in her previous novels are the occasional social commentaries. At 88 years of age, I guess she's ready to comment on the world around her: "She knew that already she had become used to viewing the wider world beyond the Manor as essentially hostile and alien: an England she could no longer recognise, the earth itself a dying planet where millions of people were constantly moving like a black stain of human locusts, invading, consuming, corrupting, destroying the air of once remote and beautiful places now rancid with human breath. . . . She would travel by boat, train, bus and on foot, leaving the shallowest of carbon footprints."(p. 348) "There are not enough students to justify a Clasics Department. I saw it coming, of course. They closed the Physics Department last year to enlarge Forensic Science, and now the Classics Department is to close, and Theology will become Comparative Religion. When that's judged to be too difficult -- and with our intake it undoubtedly will be -- then no doubt Comparative Religion will become Religion and Media Studies. Or Religion and Forensic Sciences. The government, which proclaims a target of fifty per cent of young people going to university, and at the same time ensures that forty per cent are uneducated when they leave secondary school, lives in a fantasy world." (p. 74-5) At another point, one of the characters ((Chandler-Powell) said that he had reconciled himself to the fact that England was no longer a free country, but couldn't they at least keep a free press. I found these little social commentaries of P.D. James interesting. Those were all there were in the entire novel; it wasn't as if the book were predominantly a social commentary. It was just a good read.

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  Missmath144 said on Feb 24, 2009 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
  (42)
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• English Books
• Others 416 Pages
• ISBN-10: 0571242464
• ISBN-13: 9780571242467
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Pub date: Apr 02, 2009
• Dimensions: 1503 mm x 987 mm x 194 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Hardcover
• In other languages: other languages Livres Français, Deutsche Bücher, Libros en Español, Libri Italiani, Svenska böcker

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