Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: Agatha Christie’s Golden Age

REVIEW

WHAT a fiendish and villainous person Agathe Christie could have been, had she chosen to commit crimes instead of only writing about them.

When asked about her approach and methodology, she said: “You start with the wish to deceive and then work backwards.”

John Goddard, the author of this forensic examination of Christie’s complex puzzles and tightly constructed dovetailed plots, stands amazed at her satanic ingenuity. He relishes, as many readers will have done , the arresting opening lines such as “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”, which have (to date) hooked more than two billion readers.

There have been many studies of the Queen of Crime, who died in 1976 – full-scale biographies, accounts of her world travels and archaeological excavations, editions of her notebooks, picture books featuring her big house in Devon, cookery books and even a scholarly investigation of her days as a dispensing pharmacist and nurse.

Goddard, though – a former partner in a firm of City solicitors called Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer – looks at Christie’s work from the viewpoint of a lawyer. He spots how key information in the tales is extracted from the Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1857 and 1923, particularly in connection with insanity as grounds for divorce.

 

THE Legitimacy Act of 1926 has a bearing on Christie’s many plots about lost or unwanted children and those born out of wedlock, and how this ties in with the laws of inheritance, intestacy, and the Wills Act of 1837.

Christie knew the difference between the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1908 and the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1933 and thus on what the average killer could lay his (or her) hands.

She therefore created stories revolving around the effect of bromide on a solution containing strychnine, what happens when you inhale prussic acid, the effect of phosphorus on the liver (it mimics liver disease) and how a quick injection of apomorphine can function as an emetic.

Christie often made use of the double jeopardy loophole – only closed in 2003 with the Criminal Justice Act – whereby once a person had been acquitted, they can never be tried again for the same offence.

As Hercule Poirot points out, “It’s not enough to be arrested.” There has to be a full jury trial, as in The Witness For The Prosecution.

In addition to the innumerable short stories, Christie published an impressive 66 crime novels, beginning in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair At Styles. This is where we first encounter Poirot, this “queer little foreigner”, a World War I Belgian refugee and “fusspot for whom specks of dust are more painful than bullet wounds”.

Obsessed with neatness and symmetry, he wears button boots and sports an absurd moustache, though not as farfetched as Kenneth Branagh’s in the latest film.

“I am probably the greatest detective in the world,” says Poirot, modestly.

Whilst he claims to be an exacting intellectual – “It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think” – Poirot’s little grey cells do, however, always need a bit of help. He examines stains, looks under mats, finds charred fragments of paper and spots the importance of candle grease, cigarette cases, discarded kimonos, brooches or a thornless rose. We, the readers, are, says Goddard, “skilfully deceived as to their significance”.

Whoever saw the importance of the repaired Dictaphone in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, or the fish paste sandwiches in Sad Cypress?

As awkward in company as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot nevertheless always interviews several suspects, “sometimes in a pleasantly disarming manner, sometimes threatening”.

David Suchet was always good at the curdled courtesy, followed by a sudden snarl of rage. Poirot’s general belief is that “there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation”, an aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde.

The more Goddard probes Christie’s work, the more psychological – indeed, subjective and impressionistic – is the approach.

“When I know what the murderer is like, I shall be able to find out who he is,” says Poirot in the ABC Murders, sounding more like a novelist than a cerebral policeman.

As a legal practitioner, Goddard can see how clues support, but do not actually always prove, the solutions given.

These often rely on intelligent supposition – that is to say, sheer guesswork – as in Murder On The Orient Express, where “one cannot complain of having no clues in this case. There are clues here in abundance.” There are also five plausible versions of events, until it is revealed they all did it.

The bustling, busy approach is the particular realm of Miss Marple, the heroine of 12 complete novels.

Far from being a sweet, harmless little old lady, Miss Marple has an instinct for recognising wrongdoing and she mistrusts each and every person she encounters – who do, in fairness, all seem to be gossips, liars, adulterers, cheats, frauds, bastards, stranglers and poisoners.

“I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little,” she says, understandably. St Mary Mead is rampant with bodies in libraries, on the golf links, in vicarages and under rhododendrons.

 

GODDARD points out that Christie makes her venues – cosy and comfortable studies, resplendent drawing-rooms, train compartments, paddle-steamers – take on “a tense or sinister atmosphere”. She was particularly keen on placing horror in settings of picturesque Thirties luxury, such as the railway carriages belonging to the Calais to Nice “Blue Train”, which went via Paris and Lyon.

The Middle Est turns up a lot, too. This is an area and region Christie had explored with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan. She made extensive use of the Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island in Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon – it became the Jolly Roger Hotel on Smugglers’ Island.

Instead of explaining Christie away with his analytic exercises and legalistic assessments, Goddard’s superb take should serve to deepen and enrich her success and mystery.

We are shown how Christie can formulate characters we dislike, but who may be wholly innocent, and characters whose side we take – yet who are then unmasked as villains. Christie always saw through the perils of charm.

As a connoisseur of evil and ego, Agathe Christie is as great an author as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark or Jean Rhys.

Christie’s Golden Age brilliantly shows how she wove particular tales around the universal themes of greed, lust, hate, redemption and atonement.

That said, Goddard the lawyer does, however, catch her out just once in the dock. In Lord Edgware Dies, a character arrives home in Piccadilly at 8.30, changes for dinner and gets to Chiswick at 8.45.

This is simply not possible, is it, Miss Christie?

– Agatha Christie’s Golden Age by John Goddard is published by Stylish Eye for £18.99

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Arts, Books, Literature

An obscure and impenetrable winner of the Man Booker 2018

CRITIQUE: MILKMAN

THE Man Booker has got itself into a frightful twist. In 2013, it was announced that the prize, previously open only to UK, Irish and Commonwealth writers, would widen its remit to include any authors writing in English. Senior British novelists protested, and rightly so. It wasn’t hard to foresee what would happen when the juggernaut of US creative writing was allowed to bear down on the awards. Since then, two Americans have won (Marlon James for A Brief History of Seven Killings and George Sanders for Lincoln in the Bardo) while the longlist and the shortlist are jam-packed with US novelists.

Two Americans were on this year’s shortlist – Rachel Kushner for The Mars Room, a punchily brilliant account of life inside a women’s prison, and Richard Powers for The Overstory, a densely branched eco epic that was the favourite amongst many critics. But it couldn’t win, and neither could Kushner. Even if either had been a worthy victor, that would have sent the wrong message for a prize that now has to fend off accusations of American dominance.

Because of this, the 2018 winner of the Man Booker went to Milkman by Anna Burns, the first Northern Irish writer to take the prize. Milkman is the oddest, most impenetrable choice since Keri Hulme’s The Bone People in 1985. Not only is it not the best book on the longlist where Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight cast its spectral magic and Sally Rooney’s Normal People told a love story that had critics swooning.

Set in Northern Ireland, during the Troubles, Burns’ experimental novel is narrated by an 18-year-old girl who finds herself persuaded by a sinister, much older, paramilitary figure – the Milkman of the title. Burns writes in long, stream-of-consciousness paragraphs and there are no names to help the reader navigate or by aiding their bearings. The narrator is known as “middle sister”; other characters are perversely described as “third brother-in-law” or “first brother-in-law”. Good luck to any reader trying to tell the difference. And then there is the welcome, chirpy presence of car-obsessed “maybe-boyfriend”.

Chairman of the judges-panel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: “None of us has ever read anything like it before.” Which is strange as you would hope those paid to assess one of the world’s biggest literary prizes would have a working knowledge of two other rather well-known Irish writers, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Burns certainly belongs in the school of Joyce and Beckett, although not yet in their class of writing. You might say “middle sister” is Molly Bloom with bombs.

Those who consider themselves to be rather good and passionate readers will, undeniably, find Milkman hard work. Appiah acknowledged as much when he admitted the book is a challenge, “but in the way a walk-up Snowden is challenging”. You’re not likely to see that appearing on one of those staff endorsement cards in Waterstone’s bookstore (are you)? “Really quite enjoyable if you like ascending a Welsh mountain in driving rain and mist. Pack a kagoule and Kendal Mint Cake!” Pity the poor booksellers.

Appiah’s contention that Milkman “is enormously rewarding if you persist with it” sounds more like homework than great literature. You shouldn’t need to persist with a great book; you shouldn’t be able to put it down. As for his suggestion that it might be helpful to sing some of the paragraphs aloud… really? Most people, I would presume, don’t purchase a novel to do their own audio-book. The language should make its own music as Roddy Doyle did in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, his glorious Book winner of 1993. Like Burns, Doyle was working in the headlong, harum-scarum humour of Irish vernacular, but he opened that world to outsiders, always welcoming us in with a helpless generosity. Milkman, too, has wonderful shafts of wit, as when our heroine (no name, of course) is mulling over moving in with “maybe-boyfriend”. “If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, first thing I would have to do is leave.” Too often, though, the scintillating observations are muffled by the engulfing blanket of words.

Burns is at her best when she is clearest. The book tells you everything you need to know about what it’s like to be “brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there?”

Paranoia was the air they breathed in Belfast back then, when Burns herself was growing up in the Ardoyne area. In one superb scene early on, “maybe-boyfriend” is cock-a-hoop at getting hold of rare parts from a Blower Bentley, which are laid out on his living room floor. As the neighbours turn up to witness this treasure for themselves, the mood is curdled by one visitor who snarkily wonders who got another part of the classic car, “the bit with that flag on”. In a viciously tribal society, where giving your baby the wrong name could lead to a knock on the door from men in balaclavas, being in possession of a car part that didn’t have a Union flag on, but which might have had that flag “from over the water”, is enough to create an ominous atmosphere.

Even the blameless-sounding Milkman is a dark joke: the IRA delivered petrol bombs in milk-crates to doors at the corner of every street. The way the enforcer insinuates himself horribly into the young woman’s life, the way she is powerless in that ultra-masculine world, unable to tell him to go away, feels all too relevant and pertinent in the era of #MeToo.

Milkman is no Tristram Shandy, although its author shares many of Sterne’s startling gifts. One day Burns may well write a great comic novel that will find a huge and satisfying readership.

This year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize is, sadly, not it.

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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, History, NATO, Society

The Labour Party, Soviet intelligence and the Cold War

BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.

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