All posts tagged Victor

The Hollow by Agatha Christie (1946)

‘Do any of us know what anyone else is like?’
(Edward Angkatell expressing one of the shallow truisms which litter Christie stories, helping to give them a spurious sense of depth)

‘Je suis un peu snob,’ he murmured to himself.
(Poirot commenting on his fondness for invitations from English aristocrats – but in this he surely reflects the snobbery of his creator and her fondness for upper class and aristocratic settings)

It was, he thought, an interesting pattern… Yes, that was how he saw it: a pattern. A design of intermingled emotions and the clash of personalities. A strange involved design, with dark threads of hate and desire running through it.
(Poirot ponders, p.199)

‘It’s bad enough for children to have a father who’s been murdered – but it will make it infinitely worse for them to have their mother hanged for it. Sometimes I don’t think you policemen think of these things.’
(Lady Lucy Angkatell’s amusingly eccentric take on the situation which develops, p.219)

The Hollow is a country house in Surrey belonging to the posh Angkatell family, so it is a variation on ‘the country house murder mystery’. (I say Surrey, but half way through the book we learn Christie has set it in the fictional country of ‘Wealdshire’, though God knows why she bothered as the descriptions of Gerda’s and Henrietta’s drives there both make it clear the house is located in Surrey, p.131.)

The lady of the house – eccentric, whimsical Lady Lucy Angkatell – has invited a group of friends down for a lovely autumn weekend of walks and meals and fine company. And so in a stately, leisurely way Christie introduces us to the key characters in their homes and workplaces before they pack up to travel down to the lovely country house.

They can maybe be grouped into three sets:

1. The Christows

John Christow, 39, a classy Harley Street doctor, is the central figure. He has a lucrative private practice reassuring worried but essentially healthy rich ladies. He is meant to be doing laborious research into (the fictional illness) ‘Ridgeway’s disease’, which resembles multiple sclerosis in that it involves degeneration of the cortex.

But despite all this success he is, in fact, tired and frustrated. In moments of reverie he remembers his affair with the beautiful actress Veronica Cray who got the offer of a part in Hollywood and refused to turn it down in order to remain in London with him. That was 15 years ago.

Angry and upset, on the rebound he married Veronica’s opposite, the plain, sheep-like, slow, stupid and nervous Gerda. After years of marriage and the arrival of two young children, Christow is liable to fly into towering rages at the drop of a hat and so Gerda goes in absolute terror of him. For the past year or so John has been having an affair with tall, beautiful, clever, creative sculptress, Henrietta Savernake.

Gerda is slow and stupid and she knows it. In everyday life, every single household decision she takes seems to drive her husband mad with frustration and irritation. When socialising she is cripplingly aware that she is the stupidest person in the room, always the last to get a joke, missing clever intellectual references and so on. She is crippled by an inferiority complex, which means going to stay with the oh-so-clever, well-connected, intellectually playful Angkatell family is her idea of hell.

2. Henrietta Savernake

Tall, clever, quick, independent, an impressive artist and shown to be ruthless at getting what she wants. For example, she offered to do a life bust of Gerda, which cheered the poor woman up, but next time he visits her, John realises she only offered to knock off the realistic bust because what she really wanted was to capture the pathetic posture, the kneeling, keening pitiful upwards look of a whipped dog, which Gerda embodies so well – in order to use it as the basis for a completely different, more modernist sculpture, which she titles ‘The Worshipper’.

John Christow is having an affair with her but she retains her independence and is perfectly capable of standing up to him in arguments and simply saying no.

The contrast between smooth Henrietta and hapless Gerda is epitomised by their respective ways of driving and handling a car: Gerda is all fingers and thumbs, grinding the gears and stalling in the middle of traffic lights; whereas Henrietta gets an almost sexual enjoyment from handling her sports car’s wheels and sticks with the confidence of a champion jockey riding a thoroughbred horse.

She shot away down the Mews, savouring the unfailing pleasure she always felt when setting off in the car alone. She much preferred to be alone when driving. In that way she could realize to the full the intimate personal enjoyment that driving a car brought to her. (p.61)

Henrietta is Lucy Angkatell’s cousin.

3. The Angkatells

Lady Lucy Angkatell, 60, is wispy, etiolated, eccentric, flits from one subject to another with ‘that curious elfin elusiveness of hers’ (p.76).

Her husband, Lord Henry Angkatell, was in the diplomatic service, a former high commissioner, and knows to keep in the background and say ‘yes dear’ to her various plans.

Then there’s a bit of family tree complexity. Tall bookish diffident Edward Angkatell is a distant cousin of Henry’s but somehow was the entailee of the family’s beloved house, Ainswick. In other words, Lucy was brought up at this lovely estate, Ainswick, Henry (her distant cousin) was often there, and Midge remembers visiting and playing their as a child, and they were all very happy there.

But when Lucy’s father, old Geoffrey Angkatell (a great ‘character’ in the county) passed away, his wealth went to Lucy but the terms of the entail dictated that the house and the estate could not go to a female, and so it was left to the nearest male relative, who was Edward Angkatell.

He [Edward] was of a bookish turn of mind, collected first editions and occasionally wrote rather hesitating, ironical little articles for obscure reviews. He had asked his second cousin Henrietta Savernake, three times to marry him.

And three times she turned him down. Anyway, so not having inherited Ainswick, Henry and Lucy moved into their family home, The Hollow, which is to be the setting of the story.

Then there is Midge Hardcastle, a less affluent relative of the Angkatells, who has been staying at the house for a while before the weekend commences. She is an old friend of the family and remembers visiting them as children when they all lived happily at Ainswick.

Midge is in love with Edward (‘She had loved Edward ever since she could remember…’), and who wouldn’t be:

The afternoon sun lighted up the gold of John’s hair and the blue of his eyes. So might a Viking look who had just come ashore on a conquering mission. His voice, warm and resonant, charmed the ear, and the magnetism of his whole personality took charge of the scene. who, however, only has eyes for Henrietta, who keeps politely but firmly turning down his proposals, and is happy enough having an affair with John Christow for the time being. (p.76)

And lastly, David Angkatell, a young man, up at Oxford, cocky and opinionated and left-wing, very anti-British Empire, very aggrieved on behalf of the working classes etc – ‘a tall, sulky young man with an Adam’s apple.’

Poirot

In addition, early on in the text we learn that Lady Angkatell has also invited a new neighbour, a man who’s moved into a nearby cottage, for lunch on Sunday. She refers to him in her eccentric airy way as ‘the crime man’ but when she goes on to say he has an egg-shaped head and she met him in Baghdad solving a case when her husband, Henry, was high commissioner there – we realise she must be referring to Hercule Poirot!

I’ve been reading Agatha Christie’s novels in chronological order and had noticed how we hadn’t heard of Poirot for some time. On investigation, it turns out that he ‘The Hollow’ was the first of her novels in four years to feature him, one of the longest gaps in the series of Poirot novels.

In the event Poirot doesn’t arrive on the scene until page 100 of this 300-page novel and when he does, it feels as if Christie is letting her dislike of her own creation seep through a bit. She describes how he dislikes the country, dislikes trees, dislikes the country cottage his friends have persuaded him to buy, and dislikes the way Englishmen are meant to dress for ‘a weekend in the country’. In everything he remains an urban dandy.

Incidentally, in the same conversation that Lady Lucy tells people she’s invited ‘the crime man’ to Sunday lunch, she adds the detail that he’s renting one of the cottages which adjoins their estate, while the other cottage (‘Dovecotes’) has been taken by some actress or other. This will be significant…

Shame about the murders

In these later Christie novels I’ve felt it a shame that anyone has to get murdered. In ‘Towards Zero’ I really liked the characters of old Mr Treves and haughty Lady Tressilian and was dismayed when they both got bumped off. Some of the scenes between the characters in that book had a depth and impact previously absent from her novels.

It’s no coincidence that it was in the 1940s that Christie wrote her two best ‘straight’ non-murder novels, published under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring (1944) and The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948). She wanted to escape from the straitjacket of crime fiction in order to explore character and relationships.

You feel the same here. I was enjoying the characters of angry John Christow, his pathetically abject wife Gerda, and springy confident Henrietta – it feels like another, more interesting novel could have been written if only Christie didn’t have to bend her talent and distort her characters in order to accommodate the inevitable murder. It had to happen but in some ways it feels like a let-down. ‘Here we go again’, the reader sighs…

Preparing the way for the murder

The way is prepared not only for the murder but for as many people as possible to be suspects, in her usual manner, by having numerous characters either threatening murder or describing other characters as being perfectly capable of carrying out a murder.

Thus gentle Edward Angkatell gets cross when Henrietta explains why John Christow won’t do the decent thing i.e. divorce Gerda and marry her, in effect permanently keeping Henrietta beyond his grasp, leading him to say:

‘If there were no John Christow in the world you would marry me.’
Henrietta said harshly, ‘I can’t imagine a world in which there was no John Christow! That’s what you’ve got to understand.’
‘If it’s like that, why on earth doesn’t the fellow get a divorce from his wife and then you could marry?’
‘John doesn’t want to get a divorce from his wife. And I don’t know that I should want to marry John if he did. It isn’t – it isn’t in the least like you think.’
Edward said in a thoughtful, considering way: ‘John Christow… There are too many John Christows in this world…’

Later, Lord Henry remarks of his wife Lucy:

‘She’s always been the same from a girl – only sometimes I feel it’s growing on her… I mean that she doesn’t realize that there are limits. Why, I really believe, Midge,’ he said, amused, ‘that Lucy would feel she could get away with murder!’

And the atmosphere is ramped up when, once the guests have all arrived, Lord Henry decides to give Christow a little go with his impressive gun collection. They take pot shots at target cards, the others come up and they all have a go themselves. Henrietta is a poor shot, Gerda is, predictably, worse, Midge is no good… but everyone is surprised when Lady Lucy comes marching up:

took the revolver from Midge as her husband greeted David Angkatell, reloaded it and without a word put three holes close to the centre of the target.
‘Well done, Lucy,’ exclaimed Midge. ‘I didn’t know shooting was one of your accomplishments.’
‘Lucy,’ said Sir Henry gravely, ‘always kills her man!’ (p.79)

Why do I have the feeling that this scene, and these words, will come back to haunt us…

The revenant

And then, just as the family and guests are embarking on their after-dinner games of bridge, the french windows are thrown open and who should stand there picturesquely framed against the night, but John Christow’s old flame and original love, Veronica Cray! So she is the actress who Lucy mentioned had taken the other cottage.

Anyway, her reappearance cycles very quickly through a number of stages. Astonishment, as everyone takes in her dazzling appearance, all platinum blonde hair and fox fur. Then politeness, as she says she’s popped over to ask for matches to light the fire, and Lady Angkatell recovers her manners and gets the butler to fetch not one but six packs.

Then pretend surprise, as Veronica catches sight of John Christow and affects astonishment at bumping into her old flame after all these years. Then simpering apologies as she asks the assembled guests if it’s alright to ask John to accompany her back to her cottage to see her safely home, and with that she and John exit the french windows to everyone’s astonishment.

Cut to hours later, to 3am in the morning, to find John making his way quietly through the grounds back to The Hollow. Two important things have happened. Number one, Christie hints, as strongly as she can in a book published in 1946, that the pair have had sex. One last fling.

But far more importantly, John has been exorcised. For fifteen long years he now realises he has been pining for Veronica, wondering what might have been, living a double life, not fully committing to his wife or children. Now, one night with Veronica, rather than reawakening the past, has laid the ghost. He feels cleansed and renewed. he has shaken off her haunting shadow. He will never see her again.

John is understandably tense as he approaches the house. Was that the sound of a door closing? Did someone twitch their curtain, observing his return? Was it the curtain of Henrietta’s room? And then, tiptoeing through the french windows, up the stairs and into his bedroom. Will Gerda be awake and furiously waiting for him? No, she’s fast asleep and only half wakes up as he slips into bed beside her. Phew! He’s got away with it.

Except that next morning, after a late breakfast, he is handed a note, that has been delivered by one of Veronica’s servants demanding to see him. So, dutifully enough, he walks in full daylight back to her cottage where they have a flaming row. After last night (i.e. sex) Veronica thinks John is in love with her and so now demands that he divorces his wife and comes away with him.

But John, as we’ve seen, is in the exact opposite state of mind. Having laid the ghost that haunted him, he now sees Veronica in the cold light of day, as hard and egotistical and manipulative. Once again she ridicules his work as a doctor, says anyone can be a doctor whereas hardly anybody makes it to the top of the acting procession as she intends to do. When he claims he is now committed to his wife and children, she laughs in his face.

Suddenly the penny drops and Veronica realises it’s not Gerda John wants to remain loyal to, it’s his mistress, Henrietta. With a woman’s intuition, she knows Gerda is nothing, but realises that the tall elegant woman standing at the fireplace when she made her dramatic entrance the night before, she’s the stumbling block which is preventing John’s return.

Which makes her erupt with anger:

‘You turned me down fifteen years ago… You’ve turned me down again today. I’ll make you sorry for this.’
John got up and went to the door.
‘I’m sorry, Veronica, if I’ve hurt you. You’re very lovely, my dear, and I once loved you very much. Can’t we leave it at that?’
‘Good-bye, John. We’re not leaving it at that. You’ll find that out all right. I think – I think I hate you more than I believed I could hate anyone.’

The swimming pool scene

So John leaves her seething and walks back through the woods towards The Hollow. He feels a wonderful sense of release, into a new life. he will be a new man. He will be kinder to poor Gerda in future. He will stop rowing with Henrietta. He can’t wait to tell Henrietta that rather than going off with veronica, as she probably suspects, the opposite has happened and he has at last liberated his mind from her thrall.

On his way back through the grounds John arrives at the swimming pool and suddenly has an uncanny sense of being watched. He looks around at the thick border of chestnut trees which surround it and hears a metallic click. Suddenly he is aware of danger, sees a figure (‘His eyes widened in surprise’) but has no time to move or shout when there is a shot, and he falls on the edge of the swimming pool, his blood dripping into the blue water…

Poirot arrives

Moments later, by sheer coincidence, Poirot arrives at the pool having been brought by the Angkatell’s butler with a view to arriving at the pavilion where the family often have cocktails or pre-luncheon drinks. Instead the butler and Poirot are both astonished at the scene which confronts them: there is John Christow lying on the verge of the pool, bleeding to death; over him stands his wife, Gerda, holding a revolver; and at just that moment also arrive at the pool, from different paths which converge on it through the woods, the other family members and guests, namely: Edward and Midge, Henrietta, and Lady Lucy.

Often Poirot only hears about a murder weeks or months after it has occurred. In this story he is right at the scene of the crime within moments of it having been committed.

What strikes him more than anything is how much it all looks like a scene, from a movie or stage play. In fact, comically enough, his first impression is that the entire thing has been staged for his benefit, in some obscure expression of the notorious English ‘sense of humour’. He thinks these toffs are playing a silly game of murder mystery. It’s only after a minute or two, as he bends over the dying man, that he realises, with a great shock, that this is the real thing.

The really startling aspects of the scene are that 1) it is Gerda who is standing over John’s body holding the revolver. In subsequent hours and days she will insist to everyone that she came across his body and the gun lying beside him and without thinking picked it up… But it makes her the number one suspect from the first.

2) Second thing is that, as Poirot kneels to the dying man, John Christow says one word, ‘Henrietta’, loud enough for them all to hear and then expires. Well, quite obviously, did this mean his last thoughts were of Henrietta? Or more simply, that it was Henrietta who shot him?

Suspects and motives

So: it is a classic country house and closed circle mystery – country house because of the setting, and closed circle because only a handful of suspects we have been lengthily introduced to, can have dunnit, namely:

  • Gerda – found holding the murder weapon, motive: jealousy that her husband had revived his old love affair with Veronica
  • Henrietta – same as above, she mistakenly thinks John is going to dump her and run off with the Hollywood actress
  • Veronica – who, as we saw, was driven to insensate rage by John’s calm rejection of her offer to run off with him, especially if I’m right in thinking they slept together
  • Edward Angkatell – who thought the only thing standing between him and happy marriage to Henrietta is charismatic John Christow, so has a motive for wanting him out of the way
  • Lady Lucy – remember how good a shot she was, and her husband saying she always kills her man? Well, earlier on she was given several scenes where she implied that it would be best for poor Henrietta and Edward if John Christow could be got out of the way; if Christow disappeared, Edward and Henrietta would marry, as they always intended to, and then they will have babies and Ainswick, the estate she really loves, will be saved for the family – if not, no marriage, no heirs, and the Angkatell line will end with ineffectual Edward
  • David Angkatell – more remotely, might it have been young David, the firebrand socialist who despised John Christow and his Harley Street practice pandering to spoiled fat posh women?

Whodunnit? Well the local cops are called in, in the shape of sturdy, lugubrious Inspector Grange, and the last two-thirds of the novel (the shooting occurs on page 105 of this 308-page-long book) are spent very enjoyably watching all the characters react to the murder, adjust their lives to the new matrix of relationships, while Grange goes about his work, and Poirot interviews all the suspects in his usual way, casual conversations, and much sitting on a bench in the woods pondering, pondering…

As usual I won’t carry my summary on any further, as Christie’s denouements are always tangled and convoluted, and also, not to give it away. The full text is freely available online (see link, below).

Cast

  • Lady Lucy Angkatell – mistress of The Hollow – 60s, eccentric, talks in non-sequiturs and ‘swift inconsequences’ – distant cousin of her husband…
  • Lord Henry Angkatell – husband, former diplomatic service, discreet and wise – married his distant cousin, Lucy Angkatell. they keep an impressive number of servants, several characters comment on it:
    • Miss Simmons – the housemaid
    • Gudgeon – the butler
    • Mrs Medway – the cook
    • Doris Emmott – kitchenmaid
    • Mears – the gardener
    • Mrs Mears – his wife
  • Midge Hardcastle – ‘from the North country grimness of a manufacturing town’ – works in a posh clothes shop run by a Madame Alfrege – ‘Midge pushed thick, wiry black hair back from her square forehead with a sturdy brown arm. Nothing unsubstantial or fairylike about her’ – she is in love with Edward, who’s in love with Henrietta
  • Edward Angkatell – very tall and thin – inherited the Ainswick estate and lives there alone, diffident, sensitive, bookish – has asked Henrietta to marry him three times and been rejected
    • Tremlet the head gardener at Ainswick
  • David Angkatell – just down from Oxford, clever, intellectual, very left-wing and bitter against the world
  • Henrietta Savernake – sculptor, clever, passionate, quick – John Christow is in love with her and she’s enjoying their affair but is maybe not as committed
    • Doris Saunders – her model
  • John Christow – posh Harley Street doctor, meant to be doing laborious research into ‘Ridgeway’s disease’, in fact is tired and frustrated; takes it out on his dog-like wife in bouts of furious rage, and is having an affair with Henrietta
    • Beryl Collins, ‘Collie’ – his plain efficient secretary
    • Mrs Crabtree – the patient at St Christopher’s Hospital who John is experimenting on to find a cure for Ridgeway’s Disease
  • Gerda Christow – his dutiful wife – stupid, slow, dim, anxious, drives John mad with frustration
    • Terence – their detached, brainy 12-year-old son
    • Zena – their 9-year-old daughter
    • Collins – servant
    • Lewis – servant
    • Cook – servant
  • Mrs Elsie Patterson – Gerda’s sister
  • Hercule Poirot – has rented the country cottage, Resthaven, where he is attended by:
    • Victor – his Belgian gardener
    • Françoise – Victor’s wife and cook
  • Inspector Grange – local police – ‘a large heavily built man with a down-drooping pessimistic moustache’
  • Sergeant Clark – Grange explains: ‘He’s been working on the servants – the friendly touch. He’s a nice-looking chap, got a way with women’

Poirot’s method

Loads of times in earlier novels, Christie has made it abundantly clear that Poirot is not the kind of detective who gets down on his hands and knees to find cigar ash and distinctive footprints. Instead he sits back in his chair and ponders the human relationships among the suspects, the kind of person the murder victim was, and the kind of person all this implies the murderer is. In other words, he reflects on the psychology of the situation.

Poirot said, ‘That is one of Inspector Grange’s men. He seems to be looking for something.’
‘Clues, I suppose. Don’t policemen look for clues? Cigarette ash, footprints, burnt matches?’
Her voice held a kind of bitter mockery. Poirot answered seriously:
‘Yes, they look for these things – and sometimes they find them. But the real clues, Miss Savernake, in a case like this, usually lie in the personal relationships of the people concerned.’ (p.194)

Poirot murders are never simple

They are contrived, like the contrived plots of murder mystery novels.

‘It has seemed to me from the beginning that either this crime was very simple – so simple that it was difficult to believe its simplicity (and simplicity, Mademoiselle, can be strangely baffling) or else it was extremely complex – that is to say, we were contending against a mind capable of intricate and ingenious inventions, so that every time we seemed to be heading for the truth, we were actually being led on a trail that twisted away from the truth and led us to a point which ended in nothingness. This apparent futility, this continual barrenness, is not real – it is artificial, it is planned. A very subtle and ingenious mind is plotting against us the whole time – and succeeding.’ (p.260)

Poirot can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that the whole thing has been somehow staged for his benefit. But in a sense what he’s perceiving is the way the entire novel has been staged for the reader’s entertainment. There are at least two levels of stageyness, of artifice, at work.

Poirot

I assume that from the start Christie had a checklist of Poirot characteristics or qualities which had to be dropped into each story. A recurring one is his foreignness, which keeps him outside all the social circles involved in the murder, at an angle from the events and the society they occur in, from English traditions and turns of phrase, an askewness which gives him countless small advantages and, in the end, the one Big Advantage, of seeing the sequence of events in a way nobody else can. So it signifies more than just he comes from abroad.

VERONICA: ‘I didn’t know who my next door neighbour was – otherwise I should have. I just thought he was some little foreigner and I thought, you know, he might become a bore – living so near.’

He [Sergeant Clark] came in a little breathlessly. He was clearly pleased with himself, though subduing the fact under a respectful official manner. ‘Thought I’d better come and report, sir, since I knew where you’d gone.’ He hesitated, shooting a doubtful glance at Poirot, whose exotic foreign appearance did not commend itself to his sense of official reticence.

‘[I was] hoping Mrs. Medway would make a really rich Mud Pie –’
‘Mud pie?’ Inspector Grange had to break in.
‘Chocolate, you know, and eggs – and then covered with whipped cream. Just the sort of sweet a foreigner would like for lunch.’

Grange came into Resthaven to drink a cup of tea with Hercule Poirot. The tea was exactly what he had had apprehensions it might be – extremely weak and China tea at that. ‘These foreigners,’ thought Grange, ‘don’t know how to make tea – you can’t teach ’em.’ (p.263)

An outsiderness which Poirot turns to all kinds of advantage, sometimes in just being able to say what the tightly-wrapped, buttoned-up English can’t say to each other.

Poirot put his hand gently on her shoulder. He said: ‘But you are of those who can live with a sword in their hearts – who can go on and smile -‘
Henrietta looked up at him. Her lips twisted into a bitter smile. ‘That’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it?’
‘It is because I am a foreigner and I like to use fine words.’

Feminist

To demonstrate how Christie was using the word ‘feminist’ in 1946.

In the consulting room Inspector Grange faced the cool, belligerent glance of Beryl Collier. It was belligerent, he noted that. Well, perhaps that was only natural. Plain bit of goods, he thought. Nothing between her and the doctor, I shouldn’t think. She may have been sweet on him, though. It works that way sometimes.
But not this time, he came to the conclusion, when he leaned back in his chair a quarter of an hour later. Beryl Collier’s answers to his questions had been models of clearness. She replied promptly, and obviously had every detail of the doctor’s practice at her fingertips. He shifted his ground and began to probe gently into the relations existing between John Christow and his wife.
They had been, Beryl said, on excellent terms.
‘I suppose they quarrelled every now and then like most married couples?’ The Inspector sounded easy and confidential.
‘I do not remember any quarrels. Mrs. Christow was quite devoted to her husband – really quite slavishly so.’
There was a faint edge of contempt in her voice. Inspector Grange heard it.
Bit of a feminist, this girl, he thought. (p.170)

Self-referentiality

Right from the start Christie’s books have had characters saying that all the events, or characters, or mystery itself, all feel like they come from a murder mystery novel. One of the effects of this is to lower your sense of critical realism, and accept the fact that the whole thing is a silly entertainment, welcome you into the world of fandom. Another is, maybe, to head off and defuse criticism of its use of clichés. But maybe describing how a text reminds its characters of the clichés of crime fiction, is itself, one of the clichés of crime fiction. Maybe it was already a convention when she start in 1920, which she just continued…

‘Yes. Don’t they usually leave one standing in the hall? Or perhaps he’s watching the front door from the shrubbery outside.’
‘Why should he watch the front door?’
‘I don’t know, I’m sure. They do in books. And then somebody else is murdered in the night.’ (p.135)

‘You know, I’d never thought about murder before.’
‘Why should you? It isn’t a thing one thinks about. It’s a six-letter word in a crossword, or a pleasant entertainment between the covers of a book. But the real thing -‘ (p.236)

Oh, no, thought Midge, it can’t be true. It’s a dream I’ve been having. John Christow, murdered, shot – lying there by the pool. Blood and blue water – like the jacket of a detective story… Fantastic, unreal… The sort of thing that doesn’t happen to oneself… (p.144)

‘I was analyzing my reactions to murder.’
‘It is certainly odd,’ said Midge, ‘to be in one.’
David sighed and said:
‘Wearisome…’ That was quite the best attitude. ‘All the clichés that one thought existed only in the pages of detective fiction!’ (p.155)

‘She mightn’t know about our being able to identify the gun used from the marks on the rifling.’
‘How many people do know that, I wonder?’
‘I put the point to Sir Henry. He said he thought quite a lot of people would know – on account of all the detective stories that are written. Quoted a new one, ‘The Clue of the Dripping Fountain’, which he said John Christow himself had been reading on Saturday and which emphasized that particular point.’ (p.210)

In fact in books about murder, in detective stories, more often than not the murderers get their ideas or insights from reading other detective stories. In this sense, it’s an incredibly incestuous, self-referential genre. Thus Gerda got some of her ideas about how to behave in a detective story from reading a detective story.

‘But then I’m not really as stupid as people think! If you’re very slow and just stare, people think you don’t take things in – and sometimes, underneath, you’re laughing at them! I knew I could kill John and nobody would know because I’d read in that detective story about the police being able to tell which gun a bullet has been fired from.’

If you read the accounts of actual real-life murders, most of which relate to arguments among drug addicts and dealers, or horrible ‘domestics’, nobody gets their ideas from detective stories. The whole idea is as remote from reality as ‘Lord of the Rings’.

A moral objection

Criticism of literature for centuries, maybe for millennia (back to the Greeks and Romans) attributes literature a moral purpose. Being very literal-minded, I’ve always struggled with how reading about murder can be classed as any sort of entertainment. Surely it only works, in moral terms, if you discount the murder, if you accept from the start that it has little or no psychological meaning, is little more than a counter on a board of a game of Cluedo.

There is hardly anywhere in any of Christie’s novels, any real sense of how devastating it would be, traumatic and wrecking, to have someone you know and love, be murdered. No hint at all. Instead here, as in all the other novels, the guy is killed and everyone else accepts it pretty quickly and, by the next day at the latest, have gotten back to their chatty, gossipy lives.

‘Cheer up, Midge,’ said Henrietta. ‘You mustn’t let murder get you down. Shall we go out later and have a spot of dinner together?’ (p.242)

Same in ‘Towards Zero’ where I found the killing of nice old Mr Treves dismaying, but the horrible brutal murder of old Lady Tressilian genuinely upsetting. I couldn’t concentrate on the increasingly ludicrous revelations at the end of that book because I was transfixed by the horror of her gruesome death, and a little disgusted at a genre which brutally, horribly butchers people for our ‘pleasant entertainment’.

For all the effort that goes into lovingly supplying the plausible character profiles and the wealth of social detail, from a really grown-up psychological point of view, I find the entire genre – which treats murdering human beings as a charming game – weird, almost bizarre.

‘C’est formidable!’ Poirot murmured. ‘You are one of the best antagonists, Mademoiselle, that I have ever had.’ (p.299)

As if killing people is much like a jolly game of tennis or a pleasant round of bridge.

Antisemitism

For no reason at all Christie makes Midge’s employer at the clothes boutique ‘a Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corncrake’.

Madame Alfrege was not a very easy person to explain things to at any time.
Midge set her chin resolutely and picked up the receiver.
It was all just as unpleasant as she had imagined it would be. The raucous voice of the vitriolic little Jewess came angrily over the wires.
‘What ith that, Mith Hardcathtle? A death? A funeral? Do you not know very well I am short-handed. Do you think I am going to stand for these excutheth? Oh, yeth, you are having a good time, I darethay!’
Midge interrupted, speaking sharply and distinctly.
‘The poleeth? The poleeth, you thay?’ It was almost a scream. ‘You are mixed up with the poleeth?’
Setting her teeth, Midge continued to explain. Strange how sordid that woman at the other end made the whole thing seem. (p.148)

Why? I thought by now, after everything the Jews had lived though in Nazi Germany and the revelation of the death camps, Christie would have abandoned the anti-Jewish sentiment which crops up in so many of her novels. But no…

Credit

‘The Hollow’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1946. Page references are to the HarperCollins 2017 paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 22, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Crime, Detective stories, Novel
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Posted by Simon on September 22, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/the-hollow-agatha-christie/

Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts by Noel Coward (1929)

ELYOT: Don’t quibble, Sibyl.

AMANDA: What’s so horrible is, that one can’t stay happy!
ELYOT: Oh, darling! Don’t say that!
AMANDA: It’s true! The whole business is a very poor joke!

Ah, les idiots!
(Louise, the French maid’s accurate assessment of the play’s four protagonists.)

Executive summary

‘Private Lives’ is one of Coward’s more popularly and regularly revived plays. It depicts a couple, Elyot and Amanda who divorced five years ago but who have both just remarried and who, on the first evening of their honeymoons with their new spouses (Sibyl and Victor, respectively), discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel.

The play is set on the connected balconies outside their respective hotel rooms where they first realise they’re staying next door to each other. First of all they each have bitter arguments with the new spouses who both leave the rooms in high dudgeon. Then they have the first of many bitter fights between themselves before, improbably enough, deciding to run away and abandon their new partners (on the first night of their honeymoons!).

The second act is set in Amanda’s Paris apartment and consists entirely of the pair alternately being lovey-dovey and trembling on the brink of having sex, then some tiny trifle sparks an argument, and next thing they are screaming abuse at each other and, in climactic moments, slapping and throwing things at each other. At the height of the fiercest argument their estranged spouses, having tracked them down to Paris, enter and witness their latest slanging match.

The third act is set the next morning as the foursome awaken (Sibyl slept on the sofa, Victor in an armchair), Elyot and Amanda treating everything as normal (which is was during their stormy three-year marriage) while the new spouses are puzzled and confused. A lot of banter takes us to a position where the new spouses offer to divorce the central figures but a supposedly civilised breakfast itself degenerates into a fierce argument, this time between Victor and Sibyl. Looking on, for once watching a different couple screaming their heads off, unexpectedly makes Elyot and Amanda feel moony and spoony again and, while Victor and Sibyl come to blows, Elyot and Amanda pack their backs and quietly sneak out the front door.

Act 1

The terrace of a hotel in the South of France.

Onto the balconies outside their rooms come first one couple then the other. First Elyot and his new wife, Sibyl. They’re all lovey-dovey at first but her persistence in asking fairly innocent questions about his first marriage several times makes him lose his temper but they manage to recover and go into their room to dress for dinner.

This clears the scene for the second couple, Amanda and her new husband Victor. Same thing happens. They are all lovey-dovey at first until the subject of her first marriage comes up and Victor dwells on how awful Elyot was to her. But they manage to recover. The parallelism is deliberately emphasised. For example both Sibyl and Victor ask Elyot and Amanda where they went on their first honeymoons and both reply St Moritz.

What for me is the central issue of the play, the conflict between the imaginative and liberated Elyot and Amanda, and the boring Sibyl and narrow conventional Victor, is first sounded.

VICTOR: Well, I’m glad I’m normal!
AMANDA: What an odd thing to be glad about! Why?
VICTOR: Well, aren’t you?
AMANDA: I’m not so sure I’m normal!
VICTOR: Of course you are, Mandy! Sweetly, divinely normal!
AMANDA: I haven’t any peculiar cravings for Chinamen or old boots, if that’s what you mean!
VICTOR: Mandy!
AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal, really… deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances.

Even Amanda’s very mild flight of fancy, mentioning Chinamen or old boots (!) is enough to freak Victor out. He just thinks of it as the kind of thing which shouldn’t be said out loud. ‘All stuff and nonsense.’ Exactly. That’s the mentality that Elyot and Amanda, and even more so the audience, come to realise they’re up against.

Victor goes in to have a bath i.e. give Amanda ten minutes alone on the balcony during which Elyot returns to his side of the balcony, lights a cigarette, waiting for Sibyl to finish putting on her make-up.

The orchestra down on the hotel dining room starts playing ‘Moonlight becomes you’ and Elyot starts humming along. Amanda, sitting on her side of the balcony, hears him and she starts singing along. Elyot hears her and they face each other across the partition of the two balconies. After a few polite remarks Amanda says she must go and goes into her room.

Sibyl comes out onto their balcony and discovers Elyot in a flustered state. With no explanation why he tells her they must pack up and leave straightaway. She absolutely refuses and he goes into one of, what we will come to realise, are his psychotic rages, complete with really startlingly violent exclamations:

ELYOT: If there’s one thing in the world that infuriates me, it’s sheer wanton stubbornness! I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe!

Understandably, Sibyl goes into hysterics as Elyot turns and stomps into their room, and she follows him.

This of course leaves the stage clear for Victor and Amanda to come stomping out onto their half of the balcony. Amanda has clearly made the same demand of Victor, that they leave the hotel straightaway and drive back to her place in Paris.

To persuade him she has concocted an entirely fictitious story about this being the very hotel where her sister committed suicide (!) and her having to accompany the body back to England. Victor sees through this instantly and accuses her of telling a lie to which she straightaway admits.

This, like the passage about the Chinamen, should be flagging to Victor (it certainly flags to us) that Amanda overflows with high-spirited fancies and imaginings and so is a) utterly unsuited to blunt imagination-free Victor and b) addicted to the equally frivolous, fanciful Elyot. It is the quality of their free-associating, untrammeled senses of humour which binds them.

She then lies again, telling Victor they have to leave because Elyot is here but for some reason not telling the truth, that he’s in the next door room, but making up another lie that she saw him down in the street. In a white suit. Running. Victor, reasonably enough, points out that she’s lying again.

Victor refuses to leave and go to Paris, which triggers Amanda to a furious denunciation:

AMANDA: I see quite clearly that I have been foolish enough to marry a fat old gentleman in a club armchair! You’re a pompous ass! Pompous ass! That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant!

Stiff with dignity, Victor says he will be in the bar and stomps out. Over on Elyot’s side of the balcony, he and Sibyl come out just long enough for her to tell him it’s the unhappiest day of her life. She says she’s off to have dinner and Elyot hopes it will choke her.

Not the height of sophistication, maybe.

And so to the final part of the act, with Amanda and Elyot finding themselves alone on the balcony. She asks for a cigarette and joins him on his side of the balcony. At first they have a typical angry outburst, blaming each other for ruining things. But slowly they remember past happiness and end up mocking each other’s partners. The band down in the dining room starts playing their tune, ‘Moonlight becomes you’, and they both soften, and Amanda delivers one of Coward’s most famous quotes.

AMANDA: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

In this mood they remember all the good times and, implausibly but at the same time believably, suddenly admit that they still love each other. They are appalled at the catastrophe they’ve brought upon themselves.

AMANDA: No, wait! This is terrible, something strange’s happened to us, we’re not sane!
ELYOT: We never were.

He tells her to stop shilly-shallying, calls her idiotic and suddenly they’re having one of their rows. She stops it and says they need to have a safe word or phrase, something either of them can say and which will pull them up, make them keep a 5-minute, no a 2-minute silence, while they calm down. Jokingly Elyot suggests ‘Solomon Isaacs’ and a few minutes later when they flare up into another argument, says it, they are silent, calm down and are together again. On one level they think this little device will somehow obviate their addiction to flaring rows but, as the next two acts will amply demonstrate, it won’t.

And so they rush off, grabbing the bags they haven’t unpacked yet, heading down to the garage where her car is.

Leaving the stage empty for Victor and Sibyl to enter, call their partners’ names, look around and be puzzled by their absence. In reality there’d be calling Reception, running round upset. For the purposes of the play they both accept the situation very demurely and Victor invites Sibyl over to have one of the cocktails which he brought out for Amanda 15 minutes earlier.

And with a bitter-sweet wistfulness, he suggests a toast ‘To absent friends’, which is far more for the purpose of theatrical neatness, to neatly round off the act, than any attempt at psychological realism.

Act 2

Amanda’s flat in Paris, a few days later.

Elyot and Amanda have just had a little dinner and ponder their situation. They wonder if they’ll remarry. They agree to shorten their safe phrase from ‘Solomon Isaacs’ to ‘Sollocks’. (The ex-dustman in me thinks ‘bollocks’ might have been better.)

Almost every conversational gambit leads to the flaring of an argument, such as when they stray into listing other people they had affairs with after they divorced.

They have an attractive married habit of inventing surreal nonsense. ‘Did you notice Lady Bumble blowing all those shrimps through her ear trumpet?’ and the like. Or: ‘ It must be so nasty for poor animals, being experimented on! Well, not when the experiments are successful! – Why, in Vienna, I believe you can see whole lines of decrepit old rats, carrying on like Tiller girls!’

They kiss passionately but Amanda tells him to stop because it’s too soon after dinner, at which he breaks off in a huff. And so on. One minute he’s shouting ‘Don’t patronise me’ and they cry the safe word. Moments later he’s playing her favourite song on the piano and she softens etc. It ends for the umpteenth time for a full-throated kiss.

While Elyot and Amanda cannot live without each other, neither can they live with each other. They argue violently and try to outwit each other, just as they did during their stormy marriage.

The phone rings, someone asking for a Madame Duvallon, Elyot answers in his high surreal mode that Madame Duvallon has just left for Madagascar. Amanda is relieved; she thought it was them catching up with them. Who? Oh all the people who pursue you and pull you down. At which point there’s a little author’s message:

AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious!
ELYOT: You mustn’t be serious, my dear one! It’s just what they want!
AMANDA: Who’s they?
ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant! Laugh at all their sacred shibboleths! Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.
AMANDA: Darling, I think you’re talking nonsense!
ELYOT: So is everyone else, in the long run! Let’s be superficial, and pity the poor philosophers. Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school children.

Trouble is every one of these moments of silliness and closeness spirals, trips a switch, turns on a sixpence about a squabble about something trivial and then they’re in full throttle insulting rage within seconds. ‘You’re quite intolerable.’ ‘Ridiculous ass.’ ‘If you insist on being so boorish and idiotic.’ ‘You disagreeable pig!’ ‘You spiteful little beast!’

She puts on a record, he turns it off saying it’ll wake the neighbours, he turns it off again and scratches it, so she takes it off the turntable and smashes it over his head at which he slaps her in the face making her burst into tears, ‘hate you, I hate you!’ and then slaps him: ‘You’re a vile–tempered, evil–minded little vampire!’

They throw things at each other and roll around on the floor hitting each other with pillows, shouting this is the end and ‘I hope I never see you again in my life’, before storming off to their separate rooms.

For some unexplained reason, it is at precisely this moment that the spouses they abandoned in the South of France, Sibyl and Victor, walk in.

Act 3

Amanda’s flat the next morning.

Next morning the French maid arrives and is appalled by the mess everywhere, then discovers Sibyl on the sofa and Victor sleeping in a chair.

Once woken up, Victor and Sibyl agree they must see this thing through. They have somehow tracked the errant couple to Amanda’s flat in Paris. Amanda emerges from her room fully dressed, calmly accepts their presence and announces that she’s leaving immediately. When Sibyl knocks on Elyot’s door he tells her to go away and she bursts into hysterical wails.

Elyot evades the situation with studied flippancy, while Amanda brightly behaves as if they’re welcome guests on a lovely Paris morning. When Elyot speaks Amanda tells him to shut up and accuses him:

AMANDA: I have been brought up to believe that it’s beyond the pale for a man to strike a woman!
ELYOT: A very poor tradition! Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.

Amanda takes Sibyl off to a bedroom to freshen up and Victor challenges Elyot to a fight. But Elyot manages to outwit him with his flippancy, ending up by accusing Victor of not being a proper man.

Sibyl and Amanda emerge from the bedroom and themselves have a fight ending with insults.

AMANDA: Heaven preserve me from nice women!
SIBYL: Your own reputation ought to do that!
AMANDA: Oh, go to hell!

If you enjoy watching middle class people argue and insult each other, this is the perfect night out for you.

Victor and Amanda squabble about whether they’re in love with each other. The real issue here, the dichotomy, isn’t between men and women, it’s between the imaginative – those who enjoy absurdist flights of fancy (Elyot and Amanda) – and the dim and unimaginative (Victor and Sibyl).

It’s the same basic dichotomy as between Larita and the dim Whittaker family in ‘Easy Virtue’ in fact Sibyl ends up hurling exactly the same accusations at unimaginative Victor as Larita does in the earlier play, they read like leftover lines from the earlier, far more powerful, play.

VICTOR: Making stupid rotten jokes!
SIBYL: I thought what Elyot said was funny!
VICTOR: Well, all I can think is, is that you must have a very warped sense of humour!
SIBYL: That’s better than having none at all!
VICTOR: I fail to see what humour there is in incessant trivial flippancy!
SIBYL: You couldn’t be flippant if you tried until you were blue in the face!~
VICTOR: I shouldn’t dream of trying!
SIBYL: You must be awfully sad, not to be able to see any fun in anything!

The end of the play portrays a stiff and tense breakfast, as Louise brings in a tray with coffee and brioches. Predictably this also degenerates into an argument, surprisingly, between Victor and Sibyl as Elyot and Amanda look on in silent astonishment. It brings them together to watch another couple behaving like them, and they kiss and canoodle and then agree to sneak out while the other pair are distracted.

And so they sneak out while the other couple are completely absorbed in their fierce arguing, which reaches the same level as theirs the night before, the play ending with Sibyl slapping Victor and screaming at him.

She slaps his face hard, and he takes her by the shoulders and shakes her like a rat.

THE END

Thin

Like all his early plays Coward wrote it at lightning speed, sketching the plot in two weeks and actually writing it in four days. The result is entertaining but, as countless critics observed at the time, thin.

It has been described as ‘tenuous, thin, brittle, gossamer, iridescent and delightfully daring’. Allardyce Nicoll called it ‘amusing, no doubt, yet hardly moving farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bathtub’. The Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Mr Coward certainly had not flattered our intelligence. The play appears to be based on the theory that anything will do provided it be neatly done.’ The Observer also thought that the play depended on brilliant acting but thought the characters unrealistic.

When the text was published, The Times called it ‘unreadable’ and The Times Literary Supplement found it ‘inexpressibly tedious’ in print but acknowledged that its effectiveness on stage was ‘proved by the delight of a theatrical audience.’

You’d have thought none of them had seen or read a Noel Coward play before. Surely they’re all like that, aren’t they?

Mirrors and pairs

I’m starting to notice Coward’s recurring techniques. An obvious one is structural pairing or doubling. All I mean is that ‘Fallen Angels’ portrays two couples, as does ‘Private Lives’. ‘Fallen Angels’ has two almost identical scenes where the naughty women tell the other’s husbands that the other has gone off to have an affair with the mystery Frenchman. In ‘Private Lives’ the doubling or mirroring of scenes between each of the divorced pair and their respective spouses is obvious.

This mirroring or patterning is pretty obvious. You can see how it helped Coward organise and construct his entertainments, and also how it provides pleasure to the audience, consciously or unconsciously savouring the comic patterning. (Probably consciously, it’s pretty damn obvious.)

(Incidentally, Elyot claims to have a ‘presentiment’ of disaster, which echoes the way Julia and Jane at the start of ‘Fallen Angels’ claim to have had presentiments.)

And Elyot and Amanda sneaking out at the end is the same as the four guests sneaking out of the Bliss house at the end of ‘Hay Fever’. The ‘sneaking out’ theme.

Shouting

Coward has this reputation for sophistication, and his characters are certainly pukka middle class types, they dress for dinner and drink cocktails. But one of their most striking features is how quickly the characters all resort to shouting. The climax of ‘The Vortex’ is an extended confrontation between mother and son packed with tears and shouting and recriminations. The two women in ‘Fallen Angels’ get drunk and shout and accuse each other. I was surprised that the alleged comedy ‘Hay Fever’ consists of quite so many arguments between the misnamed Bliss family and their disconcerted guests.

And frankly shocked that, after a deceptive opening five minutes, this play consists of two couples having extended filthy shouting matches, first with their new spouses, and then the two protagonists getting locked into this pattern of lovey-dovey kissy-kissy which every time degenerates into another shouting match, a grim cycle which lasts for the whole of the rest of the play.

ELYOT: If you don’t stop screaming, I’ll murder you.

Shouting and screaming abuse, threatening to kill your new wife… that’s pretty much the opposite of sophistication, isn’t it? Quite a few of these scenes could come out of Eastenders at its chavviest.

Wife-beating, battery and assault

If this was a new play being touted around now, in 2025, I doubt if it would find a backer. Nowadays we call things like this ‘domestic abuse’, ‘wife-beating’ and ‘assault’. The neighbours would call the cops to the scene of a ‘domestic’ and both parties would be arrested. Not so easy to make a comedy out of that. And yet the play is as popular as ever and celebrated for its light, charming wit.

1976 TV version

Starring Penelope Keith and Alec McCowen as the leads.

I don’t like Alec McCowen, he’s ugly isn’t he, in no way the stylish, debonair figure you associate with Coward and cocktails? And creepy. When he’s being lovey-dovey to Amanda I could feel my flesh creep. Although I suppose his jokey, tricksy manner suits the character of Elyot, with his mad flights of fancy and his imaginative subversion of pompous, unimaginative Victor.

Penelope Keith isn’t really an actress, more a cartoon caricature of herself. My generation entirely associate her with the sitcom ‘The Good Life’ in which she was always prim and controlled, so it’s disconcerting to see her a) shouting her head off and b) planting big-mouthed kisses on ugly Alec. Both are rather disgusting and certainly not entertaining. It felt like watching your parents smooching at a party, toe-curlingly embarrassing.

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by Simon on May 26, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 26, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/26/private-lives-noel-coward/

Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley (2005)

439K
(The rebel army id number carved into the bare skin of 8-year-old boy soldier, Citizen’s, back, Moses, Citizen and Me, page 163)

Delia Jarrett-Macauley (Fellow of the Royal Society) is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her first and, to date only, novel, Moses, Citizen & Me, won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize.

Stats

Moses, Citizen and Me is 226 pages long, with 3 pages of acknowledgements. It is divided into a 2-page prologue then 12 chapters of narrative.

It tells the story of a family coping with the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991 to 2002). The book’s protagonist, London-based academic Julia (Julia/Delia, kind of similar sounding names), receives a disturbing phone call from the neighbour of her Uncle Moses back in Sierra Leone. This neighbour, Anita, tells Julia that Moses’ wife, her Auntie Adele, is dead and begs her to return to her homeland.

When Julia arrives in the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown, she discovers that during the civil war, her Aunt Adele was killed by a child soldier who is none other than Adele’s own grandson Citizen. Now the deeply damaged 8-year-old boy is back from the war living with Uncle Moses – the man whose wife he killed – and Julia finds herself joining this troubled household and trying to help all concerned deal with the terrible situation.

There’s no suspense about it: Julia is on the flight by page 5 and confronting Moses on page 7. The interest or motivation is not in finding out whodunnit but, I think, is meant to be in savouring Jarrett-Macauley’s sensitive emotions and the healing bonds of the women and girls (Julia, Anita and the latter’s two young daughters) who help Moses and Citizen.

Style and attitude

I didn’t like Jarrett-Macauley’s attitude or style. It came over, to me, as self important and entitled. Here are the opening sentences.

It was late November, crisp and chilly, but I was dressed lightly and wore no tights, to avoid discomfort on the flight. I had arrived at the airport in good time, no thanks to the minicab driver who sat in the traffic on Lavender Hill, stubbornly refusing to U-turn. (p.3)

1) ‘Crisp and chilly’ struck me as a cliché, the first of many throughout the book (‘Grandma Sara, a slender gracious woman with vivid eyes…’ p.13)

2) Why does she want to tell me that she was wearing no tights? It establishes that she’s the kind of narrator who thinks the reader needs to know absolutely everything about her, down to the state of her undergarments.

3) Why does she think I need to know about her argument with her taxi driver? She’s the kind of privileged, self-absorbed international traveller who finds drivers and hotel staff annoying. ‘Out of my way riff-raff, don’t you know who I am? I am a writer.’

All this clutter about taxis, planes and tights is hurriedly swept out of the way so that she can arrive in Freetown, take a cab to Uncle Moses’ house, and confront the boy monster.

His colouring was mine. But his spirit was so far removed from anything I had ever met that I nearly wept. Suddenly I felt panic, separate and afraid. (p.7)

I realised I was in for a long haul. The first few pages suggested the book is going to be mostly about its narrator’s rare and precious feelings, subtle perceptions, deep emotions, wonderful insights and so on, with very little factual background or useful analysis.

It is written, at least to begin with, in what I’ve previously called the Numb Style. This is very common in modern novels. It’s where the narrative so completely lacks all colour, warmth, subtlety or sophistication, all distance, detachment, analysis, irony or humour that it’s as if the narrator has had a lobotomy. Instead, like someone with severe brain damage, the text just registers one thing. Then another thing. Then another thing. Then another thing.

Small pink apples lay on the plate and I ate one. I asked Citizen whether he would like one too. He did not answer. I didn’t know if he had heard me. Then I realised I had been whispering. (p.8)

E.M. Foster at the start of Passage To India gives us paragraphs of description which vividly bring to life the Indian setting. Closer to the subject matter here, Graham Greene in Heart of the Matter vividly describes the sights and sounds and smells, the people and buildings and noises of Freetown. Those novels’ descriptions invoke a kind of man-of-the-world knowledgableness, the adult ability to sift and judge, to select certain details and descriptions and order them into well-organised paragraphs in order to build up sophisticated word pictures.

Jarrett-Macauley has none of this. What she describes is herself. In the Numb Style.

It is essential to take this slowly. I don’t know whether other people were standing or watching me. I remember only the squawk that came out of my mouth: animal anguish. (p.8)

As you can see, the all-too-frequent corollary of the Numb Style is the narrator’s claim that they have undergone An Enormous Trauma. The style is so brain dead, flat and affectless because it denotes Huge Pain. It shouts at the reader Look at me! See how much I suffer! The Numb Style generally accompanies a sustained outpouring of self-dramatising self-importance which I always find very tiresome.

My feet were cold, so cold they were dying, and speech had deserted me. (p.8)

The midday sun was grilling the earth but my heart was seized with a terrible coldness indistinguishable from doubt. (p.216)

I was bored by page 10, not by the subject matter so much as by narrator’s self importance, self centredness, the relentless emphasis on self self self, by the narrator’s relishing of her own precious feelings and responses, all told with the dead-eyed numbness of a car crash survivor.

He had looked at his watch. It had stopped. He had shaken it. (p.11)

When Jarrett-Macauley is not doing the Numb Style, she switches to bad poetry. Centuries ago critics talked about the poetaster, ‘a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets with implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value.’ Same here. When she’s not saying Look at me how I’ve suffered she’s saying Look in awe at my poetic perceptions.

Anita was coming towards me, gliding, her movements liquid. She poured herself into a shape of love and wrapped it around my tense body. (p.8)

There’s a lot of background about how young Julia lived in Brixton and how Uncle Moses came to stay, there were parties at their house on Sunday afternoons, how one day her mum brought Adele home. Moses was instantly attracted to her and everyone knew they’d get married. And then they did get married.

At that moment Adele did not know and Moses did not know but we all knew that Adele would love Moses and Moses would love Adele. (p.29)

Maybe this is intended to recreate the mental impressions of her 7-year-old self. But a lot of the rest of the text is like this and comes over as the thought processes of a simpleton.

Incidentally, I’ve lived in and around Brixton for 20 years and nothing in Jarrett-Macauley’s numerous descriptions of the narrator’s girlhood upbringing there in any way bring it to mind or capture its swarming, polluted, shambling, vibrant, smelly, noisy, threatening aspects (I’ve been mugged there, twice).

Anyway, Julia and Moses go to visit the camp for ex-child soldiers at Doria outside Freetown, where the main thing that happens is she has a bad attack of the Numb Style.

I looked about to see what was familiar. Nothing was. There were no trees and no flowers. I looked up and the sky was without clouds and the sun was hidden from view. I looked down and the ground was solid yellow dirt with no life. I looked ahead and saw no women. (p.31)

This isn’t a description of an actual place but of a state of mind, the brain-damaged mental state of the Numb Style. And then we have passages of the magical lyrical style, particularly associated with women communing, sharing deep feelings as only women can.

Sally and I sat opposite one another and said nothing but exchanged thoughts. (p.33)

But mostly it’s about Julia and her reactions to hearing the stories of the child soldiers.

Inside I felt a hazy dark cloud and guessed I was about to pass out. I made myself concentrate hard (p.37)

I moved closer to him; I moved closer to myself, into a narrow space where every emotion was restored to its full essence. (p.38)

For three hours I lay in my room, my body moist with the apple’s juices, and for three hours life wandered through my limbs slowly and steadily, like nothing I had felt before. (p.39)

There’s a lot of this self-centred, self-important, self-promoting sensitivity on every page. It’s like taking a wrong turning at the gym and finding yourself in a mindfulness class. Everyone is being very sensitive. Everyone is in touch with their inner self. Everyone is fondling their chakras.

Visions

At the narrative progresses Julia starts having visions which leads us into imaginative recreations of what Citizen the child soldiers must have gone through. She imagines a procession of child soldiers marching up her neck, she imagines her head is a map of Sierra Leone, she talks repeatedly about trying to come down to earth, trying to ‘control her mind’ (p.51), as these visions become more powerful and last longer.

She imagines herself joining the band of child soldiers, being with them when Citizen is abducted, seeing what he sees, watching the stolen children being whipped and crying, hallucinatorily entering ‘another world’ (p.54).

Suddenly the narrator is in the rebel camp, at their base, watching the child soldiers cry and fight and beat each other, being terrorised into undertaking another attack. Citizen is 8 years old. He is a member of the Number-One-Burn-House-Unit led by ‘Lieutenant’ Ibrahim. His friend is Abu, recently abducted from a village the unity burned down. Abu cries for his mummy. Ibrahim whips him with a 6-foot whip. When Abu’s brother gets up to go Ibrahim simply shoots him in the head.

Later she finds herself, in sleep, transplanted to Gola Forest where, apparently, the child soldiers had their bases. In her dream she encounters a mathematician, Bemba G, who entrances the boy killers with the delights of maths. She describes the entire visionary experience as a ‘multidimensional event’.

Among women

These kinds of intense visions alternate with passages from the ‘real world’, where Julia has got involved in helping old Uncle Moses with his collection of rare photographs by native Leonean photographers (because, we learn, Moses was himself at one stage a professional photographer), or spends a lot of time with Anita, a single mum her own age (late 30s) with two daughters, Elizabeth who is just discovering boys, and 9-year-old Sara (p.91).

These scenes are consciously very female, dwelling on the restful healing routines of female chores (cooking and washing and hanging out to dry) and female chat (about men and children and school and clothes). Julia sits on a stool in the yard and lets Anita redo her cornrows.

These quiet feminine times are very obviously designed to be at the opposite pole from the pure destruction of the child soldiers sent to burn down entire villages and murder everyone which Julia increasingly hallucinates.

Thus, in ‘homely world’, Julia cooks chicken groundnut for Moses and Citizen, and for Anita, Elizabeth and Sara. It is a recipe taught her by her mother who in turn had it from her mother, Sally. So it is not just a meal, it is an invocation of the matriarchy or, less grandly, female family traditions.

It is also, like all the dishes cooked in all of these books (by Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) delicious. None of these characters is capable of bad cooking. (Aunt Ida comes to visit and remembers how Auntie Adele’s baking was always ‘perfect’, p.141.; ‘We stopped for lunch. Everyone helped with the preparation, even the children.’ p.221) In much the same way that they are all wonderfully articulate, speak in perfectly rounded sentences, are full of inventive and creative thoughts, are always kind and considerate.

Also, none of them have jobs. Julia the narrator lazes round all day, reading, dozing, day-dreaming, or helping Uncle Moses in his photography studio or chatting to neighbour Anita or cooking up delicious meals.

We sat quietly for most of that afternoon – Moses, Anita, Elizabeth, Olu, Citizen, Sara, and me. Elizabeth began to sing. (p.222)

The book is marketed as a novel about atrocities, but it’s also a depiction of a pretty cushy lifestyle. Made me jealous.

In the perfection of their characters (and their cooking), and the way nobody seems to have a job, the characters are quite unlike most of the people I’ve ever met. There is a novel-ish perfection to every aspect of the book.

Love and peace. The love is in the taste of the food. The peace I took to bed. I undressed and laid my body on the white sheet. Here I am again, black on white, ready to dream tonight. (p.83)

One day Olu came early, before Elizabeth had laid plans for the day. He invited us out to Lumley Beach where we spent several pleasant hours. (p.222)

I appreciate the way Delia Jarrett-Macauley creates this feminist cocoon, this women’s swoon, a calm, undramatic oasis of homeliness, and I know lots of women who live this life and it’s lovely. But it’s not my life or my view of the world. My world is full of hard work and rare breaks and horrifying news. Unlike:

When we had enough prepared vegetables, we put on a pot of rice and retreated into the lounge with our drinks….I leaned my head back on then lounger, balancing my glass on my stomach, and closed my eyes, an interlude before dinner. (p.224)

Aaaah. Sunday supplement perfection. It’s no accident, or it’s entirely apposite, that the novel ends with the narrator imagining herself, Citizen, her friend Chloe and her young daughter going to a burger place in Lavender Hill (not, interestingly, to any of the ethnic restaurants and cafes overflowing Brixton Market) and, after a burger and fries, having rich apple pie, the image of apples one of innocence and wholeness and linking back to the pink Leonean apples she tried to share with the numbstruck boy Citizen right at the start of the story. It’s a happy ending. Citizen has been cured by the love of good women, family and cooking.

The child soldiers’ production of Julius Caesar

Slowly the dream visions take over the text. By three-quarters of the way through Julia is spending nearly all her time in the forest. On page 143 she appears to leave ‘reality’ altogether and magically transport into the bush. Here she rejoins Bemba G and the community of child soldiers at a place called Black Rock, a geographical which changes shape to create various settings (p.169).

Citizen and all the other child soldiers are there and new ones arrive every day. Bemba G organises a daily routine, organises periods for play and sessions of storytelling where they either recount stories of their true experiences or are encouraged to make up stories the others can relate to.

I think this is all in her head. I think these longer and longer ‘visionary’ passages are where the narrator has completely crossed over into an otherworld of fantasy and fulfilment. Here, in this imagined camp, she befriends child victims like Victor with letters carved into his skull or Miriam with her baby, with Hina, KT, Peter, 6-year-old Isata and many others, 35 in all (p.159).

Emerging to dominate this fantasy is Bemba G’s notion of having the children act William Shakespeare’s plan Julius Caesar – which, in some way, overlaps with contemporary African playwright Thomas Dekker’s reworking of it in Krio as Juliohs Siza.

Preparations to perform the play are described at length, as is the way the children feel themselves deep into the roles, practice the assassination and the fighting, meld themselves into this 400-year-old narrative. Whether or not it’s ‘real’ in the same way as Julia’s grumpy taxi driver, flight and hanging out with Moses and Anita are ‘real’ is beside the point. It’s very powerful and develops into the best thing in the book.

In between rehearsals, Julia plays a sometimes central role in organising the children’s playtime, in listening to their individual complaints and nightmares and stories. Her familiarity with the processes involved in addressing, listening to and gently coaching children made me wonder whether Julia/Delia was a social worker. Or a theatre director, maybe. The 60 odd pages from 143 to 200 have more focus and running energy than the previous chapters of the book, which felt more langorous and episodic.

This final third of the text builds up to an actual performance of Julius Caesar for an audience of about 200, including tourists and British peacekeepers. It seems to be staged both out in the depths of the forest beside the shape-shifting Black Rock and in a compound in the capital city, Freetown, at the same time. This doesn’t matter, in fact it’s a positive, lifting the final third of the book into a peculiar dream-fantasy-haze environment which I found more gripping than the first two-thirds.

Did Jarrett-Macauley help produce such a production, of Julius Caesar, in Freetown or here in Brixton? It really feels like it because the text is packed with detail about the Shakespeare play, about particular lines and scenes and moments, and a deep understanding of how the actors approach their parts and different scenes, having sudden insights, matching themselves to their roles, watching the whole thing suddenly crystallise into focus. Right down to the way that, at the end, appreciative journalists throng the ‘green room’ and ask for interviews and photos of the children. Despite being on one level a fantasy, it’s completely gripping.

Futility

When she’s in the ‘real’ world, Julia is helping Uncle Moses sort out his huge collection of photos, many by him, but also snaps by local Leonean photographers, so there are passages about some of these photographers and their work. She’s particularly drawn to (the real life figure of) Alphonso Lisk-Carew who travelled up-country in the 1910s to photograph tribal peoples (pages 105 to 107). At other moments, Moses goes off into long reminiscences about his wooing of wife Adele in the 1960s. In both eras (1910s, 1960s) Julia imagines scenes and conversations, notes records and writings, observes how the people of those times were artlessly optimistic about themselves and the future of their country. How, Julia repeatedly asks herself, did they screw it up so badly? How did they let the country fall into civil war and then collapse into out-and-out barbarism?

In among these reminiscent passages are scenes where, at parties, at dinner, at clubs, Moses and his wife and friends discuss politics and what the country needs. There are extended flashbacks to a period (in the 1960s?) when Moses did some photography work for a politician named Harris (for election brochures and such). At one point this guy tells Moses: ‘We need to make our country a success. You can help.’ (p.115)

Well, here we are in 2024 and Sierra Leone is still one of the poorest countries on earth, ranking 182nd out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index (Action Against Hunger). It is on most measures a basket case, the majority of its population living in abject poverty, still suffering the repercussions from its ruinous civil war, with tens of thousands condemned to live out their lives without hands, arms or legs, chopped off by the rebels.

Set beside such barely comprehensible savagery, the trite vapourings of characters from the 60s and 70s about ‘building a better country’ seem mad.

Summary

This book is useless for factual information or analysis. For Sierra Leone’s civil wars read Martin Meredith, for a deep dive into the reality of child soldiers read The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski.

What this book is is an immersion in a particular kind of sensitive female consciousness, with lots of emphasis on the strength of women and the beauty of women, the quiet heroism of women doing the household chores and women cooking and women washing, women caring for their sons and daughters and their ageing parents, women healing the sick and rehabilitating the damaged.

I took her hand as a token of female affection: we are safe. (p.188)

A novel about a woman having dreams and visions which open up into an otherworld of alternative values and perceptions.

An invisible thread runs between the hungry empty ghosts and our earthly selves. As time passes, the veil between our worlds thins. I can feel these souls deeply. They are the same as us but without the blood. (p.185)

That’s what you’re getting into if you read it, and I know this kind of writing about strong sensitive woman and the depth of women’s community and the healing power of women is very popular and very successful. As I mentioned at the start, Moses, Citizen & Me won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to be awarded the prize. But, I’m afraid, although it gains a lot of power in the final quarter, the book was not, in the end, for me.

Recent news from Sierra Leone

Although the civil war ended in 2002 and the era of child soldiers is over, Sierra Leone continues to be one of so many African countries whose people struggle to rule themselves.

Uncle Moses peeked at me to check if I was ready. ‘This is what you people must do, do not be held back by as many rules as we were. Be free!’ I understood what he meant, yet what had we achieved with our freedom? War. (p.97)

Sierra Leone’s most recent (failed) coup took place on 26 November last year.

Child soldiers today

Guilty wish

You know that minicab driver the narrator was rude about in the very first paragraph of the book? I’d like to have heard his side of the story.

Credit

Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley was first published by Granta Books in 2005. References are to this Granta paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 2, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 2, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/02/moses-citizen-and-me-delia-jarrett-macauley/