Manichaeanism

Manichaeanism enters the novel as a way of explaining the struggle between good and evil and the suffering of the innocent. Adrian Boyde’s belief gives theological form to his crisis of faith, while Joanna Staveley’s account of it reveals both its emotional appeal and the limits of judging people in absolute moral categories.

The belief as described

Joanna explains that Adrian came to believe God could not be both wholly good and all-powerful. In his view, life was a struggle between two forces—good and evil, God and the devil. The novel offers this concise account through conversation rather than a wider history of the religion; Adam Dalgliesh supplies the name Manichaeanism when Joanna can recall only that it is a heresy beginning with M.

Adrian Boyde’s religious crisis

Joanna says Adrian’s alcoholism contributed to his leaving the Church of England, but that his principal reason was losing faith in some of its dogma. She and Adrian could communicate about religion only to a degree, since Joanna says she does not understand it. Even so, she recognizes that his dualistic explanation addresses a question she considers difficult to answer otherwise: why the innocent suffer. She regards the belief as a coherent response to that problem, not merely as an abstract theological position.

Joanna’s response to innocent suffering

Joanna says that, if she had a religion, she would choose this one. She traces her own instinctive sympathy for its explanation to the first time she watched a child die of cancer: she felt drawn to its account of good and evil without knowing the name for it. The example makes the doctrine personally legible to her through suffering she has witnessed, while also distinguishing her response from Adrian’s more deliberate crisis of faith.

Moral judgment and its limits

Joanna applies the same stark division to the people around her, calling Adrian good and Nathan Oliver evil. Her certainty expresses her loyalty to Adrian and her condemnation of Oliver, but Dalgliesh resists treating the distinction as a sufficient guide to the case: if matters were that simple, he observes, his work would be easy. Manichaeanism therefore serves both as a framework for interpreting suffering and as a contrast to the investigative need to examine people and actions beyond a simple opposition of good and evil.