Elephants Can Remember

"This must be the worst Agatha Christie book ever."
"Predictable"
"The math is off, so badly and so often..."

I heard a story on NPR the other day in which a professor had analyzed several of Agatha Christie's novels. He fed the text of a selection of them that spanned her career into a computer. He was looking at what he referred to as "indefinite words" (thing, something, anything, etc) and he also noted the number of different words used. Apparently in her penultimate novel, Elephants Can Remember, her vocabulary dropped by 20 percent and her use of these indefinite words spiked. It has been speculated that Dame Agatha suffered Alzheimer's disease.

I have loved her books. I read the Miss Marple series, then reluctantly read the Poirot series - start to finish. In order. (I ended up loving the Poirot books as well, but for entirely different reasons.) In the later novels a character named Ariadne Oliver was somewhat of a sidekick to Poirot. She was a writer, a scatty writer who seems very much to be a way for Christie to poke fun at herself through her novels.

I also read her Autobiography. Hers wasn't a glamorous, action-packed life that one would associate with a celebrity, but Autobiography was frank and sincere. She indicated that she wrote her first mystery because she had time on her hands and it was a kind of challenge her sister had given her. She had studied piano and singing. She had done needlepoint. Writing was sort of the next step. She referred to her work as "definitely low-brow". I never read that she began - or continued - writing because of a fire inside to write, a calling or an inner need to write. She looked at it financially. If she produced one book a year she could live on that. (Granted, she also said that she could write whatever she wanted to aside from that, which gave her time to write other non-mystery books that may or may not sell.) Ariadne thought to herself in Elephants Can Remember that she wasn't necessarily Noble, as one reader had called her, "She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read."

Back to the novel. The NPR story indicated that she might have been expressing her mental situation in the book. (My goodness, she was 81 years old when she wrote Elephants Can Remember. I probably would have gotten bored of the whole thing much earlier than that.) I had already read this book, but hearing the story on the radio I had to read it again. This time it was different for me. That is to say that I took note of the atmosphere more than I previously had. It has a slight air of melancholy and even Hercule Poirot waxes nostalgic in thinking about his relationship with Ariadne. People complained that it was confusing trying to keep up with the disparate events and conversations, that there were discrepancies in the timing. The second time I read it I noticed those. Some of them were clearly discrepancies, but some of them were - it seems to me - part of the story.

The murder is one that happened in the past. How far back in the past is part of the question. Ariadne sets out to interview "Elephants" because elephants can remember. That is the way of this book - what people remember and why. How, even when people remember things incorrectly, it can be a good clue, because there is probably a reason that they remembered them that way. The events changed from one person's story to the next. The murder was 10 years ago, 15, 12. The ages of the people involved changed or were inconsistent with information that other people told Ariadne. But, that's the way of people who remember.

The murder in question was a tragedy; everybody agreed about that. And there seemed to be a certain sadness in everybody when talking about it. Even people who would love to gossip, even people who knew very little about it. Perhaps it was Ariadne projecting her weariness. Because she was weary. She was tired. It seems that she didn't want to continue investigating and even her natural curiosity wasn't enough to keep her going. Her goddaughter is why she continued. Her goddaughter feared that she might have inherited a genetic disposition to mental disorder and was hesitant to marry the man she loved.

If Christie was having trouble with memory, maybe this was her way of expressing it. So many people have said that it was one of her worst novels. But, maybe it is a better work of art if one looks at it from a different perspective. Don't look at it so much as a mystery. Set aside all of the other mysteries that she wrote, in which one took every little fact into consideration when trying to figure out whodunnit. Set aside the inconsistencies, or rather look at them in a different way. What if the book is not so much about a mystery as it is about memory. What if Dame Agatha was painting a picture of what life is like when one begins to lose their memory. The person is confused, lost in the details that are remembered incorrectly, tired from trying to think and remember, a little sad that they aren't as lucid as they once were. Of course she would present this painting in a mystery novel; that's what she was known for, that would be the best way to get people to read it. She had already established a character she could use to represent herself. It's brilliant, and beautiful and a little sad. But, she was woman who loved life. She did so much. And through it all, she kept writing.

Agatha Christie is my hero.

Waiting

I read Agatha Christie's Autobiography.  It was kind of interesting the way she described when she was a teenager hearing and reading that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated and nobody thought much of it. Days passed and they read about the development, still without too much concern. It took precisely one month for WWI to begin - from the Archduke's assassination on June 28 to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia on July 28, 1914.

Here we sit as the Powers discuss chemical weapons use in Syria.

The End of an Era

March 11, 2013

Page 131. The end is approaching and I'm not emotionally prepared for this. Out of 166 pages, 9 of them are about the author, related products, etc. So, there are a total of 157 pages of novel. And I'm on page 131. I've gone from the early interbella period through the 70's and now I'm approaching the end. In 1920 Agatha Christie published The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first novel and the first Hercule Poirot mystery. Admittedly, I'm less fond of Poirot as I am of Miss Marple, but even she was born of a side character (not of the same name) in an early Poirot novel.

Thirty-three novels spanning from 1920 to 1972. And, I'm at the penultimate, which is probably the last of the Poirot novels I care to read. I read all of the Miss Marple novels first, but there are only 12 of those. I wrote about them here. I began to read the Poirot mysteries almost begrudgingly. "If I can't have the character I want I'll go ahead and read these." That was more or less my mindset. I've taken issue with him on occasion, but good lord, with that many novels not every one of them can please everybody. But, I've grown accustomed to him. I look forward to weekends with a light novel and a nap on the sofa. The Miss Marple novels helped me keep my sanity when I lived in a small town 20 miles from Austin (I ramble about that here) and Poirot has become a part of what I enjoy about my apartment; part of what makes this little place feel like home.

And now I'm on page 131.

The last novel is called Curtain and I'm almost certain that Poirot dies in it. It was written during WWII and set to be published postmortem. Actually, it was published just before she passed away, but after she had realized that she would not be able to write another novel. I'm not certain I want to read about him dying. It would be like watching the Last M∙A∙S∙H, knowing that Hawkeye was going to die. (He doesn't.) Miss Marple also had a final novel written at the same time and it was published after Christie passed away. I read it in the order it was written in, not published, so it fit in. (I think that Christie adjusted Curtain to fit in at the end of the series, but didn't get a chance to do so with Sleeping Murder.)

There's always Tommy and Tuppence, but, I'm not excited about them. Maybe I'll give them a whirl. There aren't that many of their novels. They could at least tide me over until I find the next thing that I want to read.

And, this is a remarkably long series. I really have nothing to complain about. When I started it, and I found an official reading order, I felt comfortable that I'd be set for a while. I guess I was. But, now it's coming to an end. I'm on page 131 and this is likely the last one I'll read and I'm sad, and not just a little anxious. How will I fill my Saturday afternoons? Cleaning? Pffft! I'm going to go to bed now and read. It's likely that I will be finished with the book before I fall asleep. And then tomorrow will come along and somehow I'll go on. Maybe I'll cry.

Until later,

eArnie

Hickory Dickory Dock

Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

January 6, 2013

If you are considering reading all of the Hercule Poirot novels from beginning to end, may I suggest that you skip Hickory Dickory Dock, AKA Hickory Dickory Death. This is not Agatha Christie's greatest achievement in literature.

First of all, there are just a lot of characters. I was tired from trying to keep them all straight. I do give Christie credit, because I was, indeed, able to keep them straight... beginning about a third of the way into the book. And I'm very inclined to not pay attention to names and get lost. And, I don't want to call her a racist, because I don't believe she was, but some of the characters – the majority of whom are foreign and some from Africa and India – were not very developed and the result was that she seemed to rest on racist stereotypes. In her repertoire, Christie doesn't have a lot of characters of color. I just felt a little uncomfortable with her treatment of them in this book. Not all of them, but enough to make me uncomfortable.

The book does have some redeeming qualities, though. There's the issue of Communism. The book actually does a good job of recording the mindset of the time. Written in 1955, it is post-WWII, the beginnings of that long ideological conflict known as the Cold War, and after McCarthy's famous declaration of his list of names. Though the word McCarthyism is not used, the word Communist is thrown around frequently, especially by frustrated men who have nothing more substantial to accuse the foreigners of, so they default to the inquisition-style of accusation. Interestingly, she doesn't seem to make the issue of Communism a sinister threat, just an epithet used by men who should probably mind their own business.

It's also amusing the way Christie pokes fun at Poirot – square crumpets and symmetrical sandwiches. He likes square rooms and furniture rather than round. He almost seems like a precursor to Monk, the OCD detective of television.

But, the plot includes smuggling and blackmail and Christie doesn't seem at her best with those subjects. In reading different reviews, I've come across more than one complaint about the convoluted plot, and it is almost comical in its twists. It was virtually impossible for me to suspend disbelief, and I'm a very forgiving reader. I think, though, that the overly twisted plot had more to do with her being in unfamiliar territory than just being unable to come up with a workable story line.

And God bless that Ariadne Oliver. She makes an appearance in the very next novel, Dead Man's Folly. In it she says, "It's never difficult to think of things. The trouble is that you think of too many, and then it all becomes too complicated, so you have to relinquish some of them and that is rather agony."

Some people who reviewed the book wrote that all in all it was worth the read because it was entertaining. Honestly, I had never thought of it that way, and I've been reading books for over thirty years. Possibly I've felt the same way before, but really, what an idea: a bad book is okay because one enjoyed oneself while reading it. I'll have to think about that a while. However, in this case I disagree. I don't think I enjoyed myself enough to justify having spent time reading it. Square crumpets can only take you so far.

Thank you for reading.

eArnie Painter


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The Hollow

I'm working my way through the Hercule Poirot novels. I've made it through more than half of them. With The Hollow I think I've stumbled across the point in which the author, Agatha Christie, has learned to hate Poirot. (I really need to read her autobiography for myself. She wrote and said a few colorful things about her most popular character, and not all of them are very nice.)

What I found most interesting about this particular Poirot novel is how completely superfluous he actually is. She developed the other characters very well, more than I've seen from her in other novels. Poirot makes almost a cameo appearance. The plot develops and everything seems to be happening around him as usual, but in reality that exactly what's going on – it's all happening around him. He doesn't seem to interact with the plot as he did in his earlier novels.

My two favorite characters are Lady Angkatell (Lucy) and Henrietta Savernake – Lucy's first cousin. Lucy is a delightful airhead who somehow seems, in her own vague way, to be a very good judge of character and is able, through her seeming ditsyness, to manipulate people when she feels it's necessary. Henrietta is an artist and, like Lucy, has a unique perspective on life. Though Lucy introduces Henrietta in the first chapter by talking about her, we first get to know her in the second chapter as she's working feverishly on a new sculture that has completely consumed her mind for days, and she is even jerked awake in the middle of the night wondering about it. She is also a good judge of character, but her character (no pun intended) is stronger, more straightforward. We learn that it's also not beneath her to manipulate when there's a good cause.

The cast of characters consult with Poirot, and Christie uses these conversations to delelop the plot. However, they could just as easily be talking with each other. In the end, Poirot doesn't bring about the solution to the problem; he simply witnesses it. He plays the part of the beneficent father figure. But, if one needs a sounding board for the thoughts going through their minds, it may as well be Christie's most popular detective as anybody else. And, there is very likely a very good reason for adding him to the story: money. I would imagine, though I have no evidence of this beyond the very-convincing circumstantial, that a Poirot novel sold more copies than a non-Poirot novel. So slap his name on the cover, by all means. He certainly does no harm, unless you happen to loathe him.

Another favorite character, who appears with Poirot from time to time, is Ariandne Oliver. She's in Cards on the Table, but she makes a much more colorful appearance in Mrs. McGinty's Dead. What I love about Ariadne is that she seems to be a caricature of Mrs. Christie herself. A flighty, nonsensical writer of mystery novels who talks a lot and has a comical affection for apples. She also hates her main character. My favorite quote from the book: "'How do I know?' said Mrs. Oliver crossly. 'How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic manerisms he's got? These things just happen. You try something – and people seem to like it – and then you go on – and before you know where you are, you've got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life I'd do a better murder than any I've ever invented.'"

Through Ariadne Oliver, Christie seems to be making fun of herself and her readers at the same time. (In Greek mythology Ariadne is the daughter of Minos who helps Theseus find his way out of the Labyrinth. Could there be a deeper reason for Christie's choosing this name?) And yet, ever-faithful to her readers, she continued writing his novels. He appears in The Hollow, which is more or less his 24th novel out of 35, which doesn't count the numerous short stories. Christie could, and did, write other things – though mysteries seem to be her strong point. Even then, she has other sleuths. But, she always came back to Poirot because that's what her fans wanted.

I'm enjoying experiencing the development of Poirot more than I expected to. I was never too fond of him in the first place, but at least I'm in agreement with the author on that point.

Thank you for your time.

eArnie

BYRC – Appointment with Death

August 26, 2012

I have read all of the Miss Marple books I could find and now I'm working my way through the Hercule Poirot series. It just so happened that the next book on my list was Appointment with Death, which was published in 1938, so it qualified for the Birth Year Reading Challenge. It's kind of cheating because the challenge is supposed to introduce us to books we wouldn't have otherwise read, and clearly I was about to read this one anyway. But, oh well.

The story itself is 178 pages on my Nook, and the Nook is generally comparable to actual books w/r/t the number of pages. The publisher fills up the rest of the 209 pages with a list of Poirot books, snippets about the books and an "essay" by Charles Osborne, which was actually a list of facts about the book and its subsequent appearances on stage and screen. It was taken from a biographical companion to the works of Agatha Christie. I realize that I put far too much of my personal reactions in book reviews that I write, but that was just entirely too dry. (It was a little informative, though.)

In this novel Christie incorporates a dominant matriarch who is actually a "mental sadist". This sort of character is commonplace now, especially in TV, but I don't know how common it was in 1938. I did deep, in-depth research on the subject (I read the Wikipedia article on the book) and I did not find any reference to this aspect one way or another, so I can't report how edgy Christie was in writing about dangerously deranged people. (I'm trying not to be offended that the sadist is American.)

As usual Poirot interviews the suspects, but this time I couldn't help wondering why they agreed to be interviewed. I mean, I wouldn't have answered his questions; I wouldn't even have answered his summons to the interview. He didn't have any authority. A couple of the girls looked at him with pleading eyes, but why would they plead with this person who was not an official detective, when the real detective wasn't even present? Why would they collectively agree to gather together in the end with him so that he could reveal who did it? I don't remember ever feeling this way with the other Poirot novels, so I suspect that Christie didn't do as good a job this time of justifying it.

Not only that, I didn't want him to find the answer. She did a good enough job of creating the dominant, sadistic mother/bitch that I wanted him to keep his Belgian nose and his luxurious moustaches out of the family's business. Even the ending didn't satisfy me in this respect; it did not justify – in my eyes – his interference.

Christie married an archæologist in 1930 and from what I understand her experiences with him led to this novel – its location, anyway. I enjoyed her description of Petra and it seems accepted that it is accurate. In the snippets of her Autobiography that I read she shows acute interest in archeology and a longing for the Middle East whenever she left it.

I also read that she learned to hate Poirot, but was faithful to her readers and kept writing about him as long as they kept enjoying him, which was all of her life. I much prefer Miss Marple, though there are far fewer of her novels than of M. Poirot. I think I'm okay with that. Her Marple novels seem much more involved, especially with regard to character development. Christie wrote her first Poirot novel (indeed her first novel) in 1916. (It was published in 1920.) Published in 1938, Appointment with Death is her 16th Poirot novel, which doesn't even count the 4 novellas and many short stories. I can't help feeling that she's tired of him by now.

I read this Novel basically in one day. I enjoyed it, partly because it was not too taxing while I lay on the sofa drinking coffee. I have no real love for Poirot, but I do have a love for Christie's writing style and the whodunit nature of her books. I enjoyed the scenery she paints, even if I wasn't as fond of these characters that she used to paint it.

Thus concludes my review of the first book I read on my Birth Year Reading Challenge. Next up, I believe, is Are You There, God? It's me, Margaret.

More later,

eArnie

From Side to Side

Why do I love Miss Marple?

The books in which she resides are older; some of the books were written between the two World Wars. Agatha Christie didn’t have to recreate a past; she didn’t have to study English history to see how things were. She was writing about her own time. Miss Marple’s quaint village of St. Mary Mead is loveable and Christie had the resources to be true to life. It’s a lovely world where people live in old houses and have gardens instead of back yards; where people have sitting rooms and visitors and for some reason the kitchens have doors just like bedrooms. There is actually a meal called Tea, though where it fits in with the rest of the eating schedule I never did pin down.

I’ve read a little bit about the series and about Christie (though I haven’t read her autobiography) and nothing of what I read mentions that she had any particularly strong agenda. I think I might have to read her autobiography, just to see if it does go into more detail. I did read that an elderly lady character appeared in a novel, which was then written for stage and that in doing so they changed the character to a young woman. This appears to be the reason for the birth of Miss Marple: to give a voice to elderly spinsters.

That is what I mean by agenda. There was a reason for writing this type of character. In her novels there are many young, middle-aged and older single women. It seems to me that the First World War caused a distinct lack in eligible bachelors and many women had to cope with the fact that there weren’t enough men to go around. Women’s liberation got a boost after the Second World War; that’s when the sentiment really took root that women didn’t exactly nee a man in order to survive. But, before that, and after the First, women were in rather a different situation. This seems to be evident in the novels, and it makes me wonder if somebody in the year 2010 reading them would understand this. It makes me wonder if Christie wrote so that people 50 to 100 years later would get an idea what life was like in England and in general during that time, would get an idea of some of the residual consequences of war.

There is also the issue of maids and servants. It is an issue written about directly in the novel, The House at Riverton by Kate Morton, but it is addressed more subtly in the Miss Marple books. Early in the series she has a maid, as does every household it seems. Many had several servants, depending on the size of the property and the ability of the estate to afford it. In The Mirror Crack’d (from Side to Side), a later novel, they talk casually about how things used to be when one had a parlor maid. Something had shifted and that wasn’t the norm any more. Was it because the people who had been in those positions had new opportunities for lives of their own? Was it because WWII consumed the money from the estates and people couldn’t afford those luxuries any more? Or because it had consumed the lives of those who would have been in those positions? A common complain in the later novels is the difficulty in finding a reliable gardener. In The Mirror Crack’d Miss Marple considers a woman who is hired to help clean for her. She contemplates that this new class of woman was educated, but that she lacked the skills that her previous maids had had – how to wash a delicate tea set and how to scrub a floor. She doesn’t, as far as I can tell, lament this change; she simply notices it.

But, that’s not why I read them on the weekends sitting in a coffee shop when I should be cleaning my home. No. First of all, the avoidance of cleaning is an end unto itself. But, aside from that it makes me feel good to read these novels and stories. Of course murder is not a nice topic, but Christie approaches it in such a delicate way. One is not overwhelmed by graphic detail of decaying corpses and blood splatter. Miss Marple’s expertise is human nature and it seems to me that we could all use a lesson in that. America’s love affair with sociopaths should only strengthen that point of view. And, I just love to read about an older, Victorian lady, people drinking tea and all of those quaint things that I should probably be rolling my eyes at. I have faith that Christie knew what she was talking about and described them accurately. Of course it’s more of the privileged class that we read about and it might not be quite as nice if one were to consider the “other classes” who live at the periphery of the plots. I, myself, certainly would not be on par socially with Miss Marple. But, maybe that’s why I’m so in love with her; it’s so very different to me. I don’t really need to read about struggling with finances and the frustration of working with people that one would rather not work with; I live that every day. Miss Marple provides a nice escape from that reality. When I finished the series I felt the same way as I did when I finished the novel The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Though the ending is obviously why we read novels, I was very sad to have come to it.

By the end of the series the irony of a fluffy old lady being such a shrewd, unshakable sleuth gets a little tired, but a writer can never assume that the reader of the tenth novel in a series has read the other nine. Reading them in order was especially nice. Of course, I had read most of them previously when I was much younger, but many of them I truly did not remember that well and reading them in the suggested order I was able to see how an older lady who loved to work in her garden adapted to not being able to do so and to the shifting social paradigm. It’s definitely worth the effort to do so, but don’t rely on the publication dates. At least one of the novels written during WWII was published in the 70’s and would be noticeably out of sequence if it were read at the end of the series.

Now I can watch the movies. Many actresses have played the part of Miss Marple, but I seem to be drawn to Joan Hickson. And Julia McKenzie did a very good job as well, though I don’t feel that she came off as scattered or fluffy as she should have.

If you are interested in reading these mystery novels in the officially suggested reading order I would direct you to an Agatha Christie web site: http://www.agathachristie.com/story-explorer/reading-order/miss-marple-reading-order/, or you could go straight here (http://www.agathachristie.com/cms-media/assets/Miss_Marple_readin_order.pdf) and save a pdf. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

e A r n i e