Category Archives: Literature

Arts, Books, Literature

Recommended Biographies…

SUMMARIES

. Robert Graves by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (published by Bloomsbury for £25, 480pp)

ALONG with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves was one of the great poets of the First World War. Graves was born in 1895 and when war broke out a week after he left school, he enlisted aged 19.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson describes his troubled schooldays at Charterhouse and the horror of the war, during which he was wounded and reported dead. He survived, and, whilst he was haunted by his experiences, married 18-year-old feminist artist Nancy Nicolson.

The first volume of Moorcroft Wilson’s finely researched biography concludes with the scandalous end of Graves’s marriage, when he and American poet Laura Riding – who had been conducting a turbulent, four-sided relationship with Nancy and Riding’s married lover – threw themselves out of the upstairs windows of their Hammersmith house.

. Becoming by Michelle Obama (published by Viking for £25, 448pp)

FOR most of us, making a toasted cheese sandwich would be almost the least exotic thing we could do. But for Michelle Obama, after eight years in the White House, sitting in the garden of her own house and eating toasted cheese felt like “my new life just beginning to announce itself . . . Here I am, in this new place”, she writes in the preface to her autobiography, “with a lot I want to say”.

Born into a working-class family in Chicago, she studied at Princeton and became a lawyer at a prestigious Chicago law firm, where she mentored a geeky summer associate named Barack Obama. When they bought ice-cream cones one summer evening and kissed for the first time, Michelle had no idea of the destiny that would one day find her bonding with the Queen over their uncomfortable shoes.

Warm-hearted, funny, passionate about social justice and movingly candid about the problems of being a politician’s wife, Becoming is as compulsive to read as a great novel.

. On Leopard Rock by Wilbur Smith (published by Zaffre for £20, 368pp)

FROM his early childhood years and onwards, Wilbur Smith’s twin passions have been hunting and writing. The secret of both, he observes, is tenacity. Smith was born in 1933, in what is now Zambia, to parents who would inspire his future career in different ways. His father, Herbert, was obsessed with hunting (when Wilbur was a child, Herbert shot three man-eating lions), while his mother, Elfreda, was a passionate reader. Shelves of books lined the walls of their ranch house, and every night she would read to Wilbur in bed.

Soon he was determined to become a writer himself, an idea that his father vigorously opposed: “You’ll starve to death,” he predicted.

Uninhibited by the political correctness he detests, Smith’s memoir is a rollicking yarn of slaughtered wildlife, literary superstardom and late-blooming love. “I won’t stop writing until I stop breathing,” he promises.

. Not The Whole Truth by Angela Huth (published by Constable for £20, 320pp)

“SUDDENLY I am old”, writes the journalist and novelist Angela Huth, author of Land Girls. She was born in 1938, the daughter of the director and producer Harold Huth and his wife, Bridget. While Angela adored her father, her mother was “bored stiff by small children”, leaving Angela and her sister to be looked after by a devoted Nanny, who did her best to conceal their mother’s penchant for gin: “Oh dear, poor mummy fell down the stairs last night.”

Haphazardly educated at a girls’ boarding school, Angela studied art in Paris and Italy before returning “to face the dotty business of becoming a debutante”. A longing to write led her to Queen Magazine, where she met the brilliant journalist Quentin Crewe, who would become her first husband. There ensued an intensely glamorous Bohemian social life, with friends including David Frost and Princess Margaret, who shared Huth’s unusual phobia about dolls.

Deliciously gossipy and trenchant, Not The Whole Story is an entertaining collection of stories from times past.

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Arts, History, Literature, Theatre

Theatre: The Convert

REVIEW

COLONIALISM is undoubtedly one of the most vexed issues of modern times. If you throw God into the mix, things can really be stirred up.

But what many theatre goers will love about Danai Gurira’s dramatical play, set during the 1890s in what is now Zimbabwe, is that in the end it also achieves something transcendental.

First seen in America in 2012, Gurira’s story is about a young black Catholic called Chilford who saves a young woman from an arranged marriage.

The girl is the niece of his maid, who secretly practices the traditional religion of her Shona tribe.

Outside their home, trouble is brewing, with attacks on black collaborators known as “bafu” (meaning “traitor” in Shona). After a fatal scuffle, the girl is forced to choose between her people and her Catholic faith.

The big – and some critics may say ultimate – question posed by Gurira’s compelling and intense play is expressed by the maid: “What is wrong with our ways?”

It’s a subject that goes to the heart of our understanding of cultural identity, economic development and whether one way of life can ever be set above another.

The language is uncompromising, with the missionary reviling his fellow Africans as “savages”. But there is innocence and humour about the writing, too, with English phrases mutating into local forms, echoing the direct effects of colonisation.

Ola Ince’s solemn yet vital and emotional production distils all this, and more, into a spellbinding and riveting two hours and 40 minutes, with two short interludes.

The stage design by Naomi Dawson, with a central concrete arena set with European furniture surrounded by red cracked earth – all under a crucifix provocatively bearing a conspicuously white Jesus – is a clear example of the divisions on show.

It’s a fine play for two reasons. One is that it is potently tragic, hingeing on a hard-won and deeply moving act of forgiveness at the end. The other is that it has terrific stage parts for the actors. Paapa Essiedu is taut with uncertainty throughout as the strict and pious, chaste Chilford.

He is offset by Pamela Nomvete as his insubordinate maid, and Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo as a social climber speaking the Queen’s English.

It’s Letitia Wright, though, who is the play’s dramatic engine, transforming from nervy tribesgirl to a confident young Christian woman. Her role portrays a determination to hold together her past and her present.

This is a serious piece of play writing, which deserves a run in the West End.

Verdict: A potent mix of God and tradition. A missionary’s culture clash in colonial Africa is utterly spellbinding.

★★★★

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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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