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Dumb Witness – Agatha Christie

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I’ve mentioned a few times that I have spent the past couple of months immersed in Agatha Christie, being the only author who was able to circumnavigate my reader’s block – everything else I tried was abandoned after a page or two, but I could tear through a Christie in a day or two.  Thankfully (for my general reading) I’m now having more success getting past p.1 with other authors, although it’s still a bit impeded, but I did enjoy getting into Christie mode and wolfing them down.

I haven’t blogged about them, partly because Christie novels are often very similar and partly because you can’t say much without giving the game away – but in the spirit of my Reading Presently project (reading and reviewing 50 books in 2013 that were given to me as presents) I shall write about Dumb Witness, because my lovely colleague Fiona gave it to me when I left my job at OUP (which, incidentally, I am missing furiously.)  It was (is?) published in the US under the rather-better title Poirot Loses A Client.

We had quite a lot of chats about Agatha Christie over the months, but the reason Fiona picked Dumb Witness as my leaving gift wasn’t only because she knew I hadn’t read it – it was because of the dog on the cover.  We had lengthy cat vs. dog arguments (publishers, it turns out, tend to prefer dogs – librarians and book bloggers definitely fall down on the cat side) and this was Fiona’s funny way of making a point – so, of course, I used a bookmark with a cat on it.  Sherpa, in fact, painted on a bookmark by Mum.

Dumb Witness is a Poirot/Hastings novel, which is my favourite type of Christie after a Marple-takes-centre-stage novel (she is sadly sidelined in a few of her own novels).  You may recall an excerpt I posted from Lord Edgware Dies, in which the delightful relationship between Hastings and Poirot is perfectly illustrated.  More of the same in Dumb Witness – Hastings constantly makes suppositions and conclusions which Poirot bats away in frustration, never revealing quite why Hastings is wrong (other than his touching readiness to believe what he is told by almost anyone) and holding his own cards close to his chest.

I shall say very little about the plot, because (unlike most novels I read) the plot is of course crucially important in a detective novel – so I’ll just mention the premise.  Poirot wishes to follow up a letter he has received Miss Emily Arundell, asking him to investigate an accident she had – falling down the stairs, after tripping on her dog’s ball.  Her letter isn’t very coherent, but she seems to be suggesting that it may not have been an accident… Although she recovers from the minor injuries sustained in this fall, by the time Poirot receives the letter – mysteriously, two months later – she has died from a long-standing liver complaint.  Poirot decides to accept the posthumous commission into attempted murder…

As far as plot and solution go, Dumb Witness has all the satisfying twists, turns, and surprises that we all expect from a Christie novel – it certainly doesn’t disappoint on this front, and this is one especially excellent twist, albeit with a few cruder details that are not worthy of her name on the cover.  But, alongside that, I loved Poirot’s determination that attempted murder should be investigated and prosecuted, whether or not the victim was dead – Hastings, for all his gentlemanly bluster, can’t see why it is a matter of importance.  Poirot’s moral backbone is one of the reasons I find him such a fantastic character.

And the dog?  Yes, Fiona, the dog (Bob) is rather fun, and Hastings is predictably wonderful about him – although I did find the amount of words put in the mouth of Bob a little off-putting.  It reminded me of Enid Blyton’s technique of including passages along the lines of “‘”Woof’, said Timmy, as if to say ‘They’ve gone to the cove to fetch the boat’.”  There, I believe, I have spotted the major flaw with Dumb Witness – or at least, an aspect where it could be improved.  It would be a far superior novel, had it featured a cat.

Song for a Sunday

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I’m a big Siobhan Donaghy fan, so was delighted when I heard that she would be reuniting with the other original members of (hideous band name alert) the Sugababes.  For those not in the know, Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan, and Siobhan Donaghy founded the Sugababes when they were about 15 with the fantastic song Overload, then left and were replaced one by one, so that the Sugababes now has no original members.  So the originals reformed, under the nicer but less imaginative name Mutya Keisha Siobhan, and will soon be releasing this lovely track – Flatline:

The Red House – Mark Haddon

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What with reader’s block, moving house, and not having internet for a bit, it’s been a while since you had a proper review from me.  And today is no different, because I’m handing over to somebody else to write about The Red House by Mark Haddon, which I was sent as a review copy.  Tom (who recently married my best friend) spotted it on my shelves, and commented on it, so I decided it would find a better home with him.  Whether or not he ended up agreeing, you can discover below… Tom, by the by, can also be found at the blog Food, Music, God.  Over to you, Tom!
I promised Simon a while back that I’d read Mark Haddon’s The Red House and review it for him, and have sincerely been reiterating that promise to him ever since whilst getting distracted by other tasks like getting married or trying to qualify as a teacher. However, the other day my mother rang me up and told me that my father had recently read The Red House and she had just started it, and so it occurred to me that now might be the time to take action and stop anyone else having to read it ever again. That way, we can pretend that it didn’t happen, that Mark Haddon can still write novels with razor-sharp characters and compelling narrative, and that this clichéd series of adolescent writing exercises is the work of someone else.
The novel is about two families united by estranged siblings who are trying to reconnect with one another after the death of their ferocious mother. There’s Richard, the hospital consultant who remarried recently but doesn’t really know how to talk to his new wife Louisa, and may have A DARK SECRET. His estranged sister, Angela, who’s haunted by the ghost of her stillborn daughter, but of course she can’t tell anyone about that, and married to Dominic, who seems reasonably normal but may also have A DARK SECRET. Richard’s kids – Alex, a sex-obsessed teenager; Daisy, a buttoned-up Christian who also thinks rather more about sex than she’d like; Benjy, who is eight (I think) and I can’t remember much more about. Angela’s daughter Melissa, who is a self-obsessed cow who’s kind of hot and whom Alex fancies, of course. Then there’s the house itself, allegedly the conduit for all of these stories for some reason, although that’s arguably just an excuse for the fact that Mark Haddon couldn’t decide which character to focus on. The house seems to know quite a lot of poetry, and it talks like a travel guide written by James Joyce.
If you think that sounds like a lot going on, you’d be right, and that’s part of the problem. It’s a shame, as there are some good ideas here, especially with the teenagers in the cast – Daisy’s struggle with her sexuality and where it fits with her faith is clearly aiming for some wider significance, for example. Alex and Melissa’s teenage angst is sharply drawn, if rather aimless, and the differences in Angela and Richard’s approach to their upbringing and the effect on their families could have been channeled into something effective in the manner of Jonathan Franzen. However, it just doesn’t feel like it’s been edited into any kind of coherent shape. It’s this huge splurge of styles and influences and this, rather than seeming ambitious, comes across as amateurish instead. It doesn’t build, it doesn’t have much of a climax to speak of, and the central narrative just isn’t strong enough to provide any real mooring.
It’s also overwritten and laden with unnecessary detail. What is one supposed to make of a passage like this:
Louisa works for Mann Digital in Leith. They do flatbed scanning, big photographic prints, light boxes, Giclée editions, some editing and restoration. She loves the cleanness and precision of it, the ozone in the air, the buzz and shunt of the big Epsons, the guillotine, the hot roller, the papers, Folex, Somerset, Hahnemühle. Mann is Ian Mann who hung on to her during what they called her difficult period because she’d manned the bridge during his considerably more difficult period the previous year.
It’s like Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”, that, only about photocopying. And that’s not even the worst linguistic crime in the book – reading about Angela reading modern poetry, with snippets of Robert Browning woven through the text, is pretty painful, as is Richard’s attempt at reading ancient Greek poetry, not to mention the inexplicable quoting of something that seems to be an encyclopaedia about lorries.
Or what about this:
Richard slots the tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and pre-molars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offence to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant’s arm no doubt. Ridiculous man.
If you can find another novel in which you can find a narrative reason to justify spending this much time on one of the characters brushing his teeth, I’d be interested to hear about it. It’s a testament to the way that The Red House is written that the author thought that this belonged, but it is apparently a novel about the mundane and the ordinary (or so the blurb says), and so there’s plenty of that. Again, perhaps it’s an attempt at being clever; to impart some wonder into the everyday processes of how peoples’ minds work. If you feel a sense of wonder at the above, I’d be interested to hear about that too.

You should not read The Red House. Tell your friends not to read it. If people suggest taking it on holiday, don’t. If you find it in your holiday home, leave it there. It’s not a good holiday book. It’s not good literary fiction. No, it’s not lightweight, and yet it also doesn’t seem to mean anything. It’s shockingly dark in places (and shockingly dull in others) and it doesn’t seem to known what to do with that darkness. Curious Incident was (and still is) magnificent, thanks to an exceptionally strong narrative voice. A Spot of Bother was flawed, but still gripping and surprisingly visceral in places – and the characterisation was second to none. In The Red House, despite a couple of strong passages such as Richard’s disastrous run out on the moors, there’s nothing to make this stand out. It’s an ambitious experiment, and perhaps an admirable one; to his credit, at least Mark Haddon is still pushing his craft and trying new things. However, it’s a huge disappointment that in doing so he has moved so far away from his strengths.

Leaving OUP (and which Jane Austen character are you?)

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It feels as though it’s only just started, but my time as blog editor of OxfordWords came to an end yesterday.  I was there on maternity cover, and the lovely woman who’d had her beautiful baby came back to the fore.  Although I was only there for just under six months, I’ve made some very dear friends, and was incredibly touched by the leaving gifts and cards I got.  As you’ll see from my selection, I certainly didn’t keep my love of the Queen (and kittens) quiet…

Notice also that my friend Fiona is feeding my Agatha Christie habit – and deliberately picked one with a dog on the cover, because of our long-running feud of cats v. dogs.  (This feud manifested itself almost entirely in sending each other cute pictures of our preferred animal.)

Luckily for me, they say I can still write for OxfordWords now and then, as an external writer, and I have one in the pipeline which isn’t at all literary.  Today, though, to commemorate the anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, my parting gift to OxfordWords was a ‘Which Jane Austen character are you?‘ quiz – go and take it, and let me know who you ended up as!

(I’m Mr. Darcy, it turns out. Since I wrote the quiz, I could be accused of making sure of this… but I actually would have preferred to be Mr. Bingley…)

Oh, Hastings

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I seem to be experiencing a bit of reader’s block at the moment, struggling to ‘get into’ any novel I pick up (and it doesn’t help that most of them are in boxes, as I’m moving house this weekend.)  One author is working for me, and I am chain-reading her… it’s Agatha Christie.  I’ve read five in quick succession (Five Little Pigs, Crooked House, Cat Among the Pigeons, Lord Edgware Dies, and A Pocket Full of Rye) and I’ve just started The Secret of Chimneys.  I shan’t blog about all of them, because they’ve gone back to the library, and anyway it’s very difficult to write about a detective novel properly, but I did want to share an excerpt from Lord Edgware Dies.

 Is there anybody who has read an Agatha Christie novel in which he appears who does not love Captain Hastings?  He is so adorable – yes, he is essentially a Watson to Poirot’s Holmes, but without Watson’s adulation of Holmes.  Hastings can’t ever quite shake the feeling, during investigation, that Poirot’s best days might be behind him, or that his European ways are letting the side down.  I love their dynamic, and nowhere is it better illustrated than this fantastic exchange:

“No human being should learn from another.  Each individual should develop his own powers to the uttermost, not try to imitate those of someone else.  I do not wish you to be a second and inferior Poirot.  I wish you to be the supreme Hastings.  And you are the supreme Hastings.  In you, Hastings, I find the normal mind almost perfectly illustrated.”

“I’m not abnormal, I hope,” I said.

“No, no.  You are beautifully and perfectly balanced.  In you sanity is personified.  Do you realise what that means to me?  When the criminal sets out to do a crime his first effort is to deceive.  Who does he seek to deceive?  The image in his mind is that of the normal man.  There is probably no such thing actually – it is a mathematical abstraction.  But you come as near to realising it as is possible.  There are moments when you have flashes of brilliance when you rise above the average, moments (I hope you will pardon me) when you descend to curious depths of obtuseness, but take it all for all, you are amazingly normal.  Eh bien, how does this profit me?  Simply in this way.  As in a mirror, I see reflected in your mind exactly what the criminal wishes me to believe,  That is terrifically helpful and suggestive.

I did not quite understand.  It seemed to me that what Poirot was saying was hardly complimentary.  However, he quickly disabused me of that impression.

“I have expressed myself badly,” he said quickly.  “You have an insight into the criminal mind, which I myself lack.  You show me what the criminal wishes me to believe.  It is a great gift.”

Sketches from Year Six

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I passed my sixth anniversary back in April, and since then have been intending to put together my annual collection of sketches. I always intended these to be a running part of Stuck-in-a-Book, but they come and go, depending on me remembering I do them, finding time to do them, and if anyone says nice things about them!

Clicking on the picture will, in each case, take you to the post in question… (the cartoons below include quite a few two-parters, but that should be obvious in each case…)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Young Entry – Molly Keane

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I usually run a mile from Irish novels of a certain period – memories of The Last September make me shiver at the thought of Irish Troubles novels – but I was attracted by Molly Keane’s Young Entry (1928), very kindly given to me by Karyn when we met up in Oxford last year. Any sort of political upheaval seemed a distant irrelevance to the carefree heroines of Keane’s first novel (written at the sickeningly young age of 20) – a dollop of romance, high-spirited teasing, and countryside dalliances seemed a fitting antidote to the more serious or tragic end of Irish literature (for which there is, of course, a place – but that place is not on my bookshelf.)

Well, the heroines did not disappoint – except perhaps in an unexpected name. Prudence and Peter (yes, they are both women) are described thus – first Prudence:

Her demeanour in public places was totally perfect.  Had she been a boy one would have looked at her and at once said – Eton.  As it was, those who knew her, if they saw the back of her head and shoulders across a crowded room, said: “Prudence Turrett – couldn’t be anyone else.”  And those who did not know her asked immediately who she was.
And lest you think she’s a totally passionless society great, I rather loved this description earlier in the novel:

A ladder in a favourite silk stocking could reduce her to tears, just as a phrase of wild poetry made her drunk with ecstasy, or a witty story moved her to agonies of mirth.  She did things to distraction – always.
And then, more level-headed, there is Peter (it is so strange thinking that Peter is a woman, given it is Our Vicar’s name – I’ve known a Peta or two, but are any women called Peter?):

Having long ago come to the conclusion that young men did not sparkle in her company, she very wisely restrained all impulse in herself to sparkle in theirs; and left matters at a satisfactorily comfortable companionship. 

These companionships were many.  Brilliant young men liked Peter, because she gave them time to make their cleverest remarks.  Lazy men liked her because she never attempted to stir them to energy.
I’m usually one to value character over plot, and Keane’s characters were a joy – showing all the signs of a young writer, in both a positive and negative way.  Good, that they were lively and enthusiastically drawn, and bad, that they were emotionally rather immature and over the top.  And yet, above and beyond this, the plot defeated me.

Much of Young Entry I enjoyed, particularly when it concerned the friendship of Prudence and Peter, and even their budding (and unlikely) romances – but, as Diana Petre points out in her introduction to the Virago reprint, a 20 year old Molly Keane could only write about the limited world she knew, and that was the society hunting set.

And so there is a lot about hunting.  I’m not just ignorant about the ins and outs and mores of hunting, I actively loathe it.  I have no problem with culling foxes humanely – I am a country boy at heart, and I know that country life is not all fluffy bunnies; I trust farmers to know what needs doing on their land.  What makes me shocked and angry and everything within me recoil is the idea that killing should be turned into a game or a sport.  It’s not often that I demonstrate such strong feelings on this blog, and I don’t want the comment section to become and to-and-fro on the topic of hunting, but I wanted to explain why there were reams of Young Entry that I could not enjoy.  Extracts like this one…

Peter was different.  More of a purist than Prudence; the hounds and their work was her joy, her interest and delight.  It supplied for her the poetry of existence.  She rode a fast hunt well enough; but in a slow one, with hounds working out each yard of a stale and twisting line, almost walking after their fox, she was nearly as happy.  While Prudence fretted and chafed, longing to get on, Peter – her eyes alight, alert for every whimper, watching, always watching – was content to see hound-work at its prettiest and most difficult.  Her soul blasphemed in chorus with that of the huntsman, when his hounds were pressed upon; and was with him also in ecstasy when the line was hit off afresh after a successful cast.
There are many scenes of hunting, and many which require knowledge of hunting.  They didn’t simply bore me, in the way that depictions of sporting matches would do, they upset and ired me. So when major plot points and character movements concern the social correctness (or otherwise) of hunting in certain areas, and Keane seems to think we will both know and agree with these principles, I was left rather lost.

I’m still very grateful to Karyn for giving me this novel, as it was fascinating to see where Keane’s writing career began and spot the seeds of what was to come – but, let’s just say I’m glad that she didn’t stop here.