Category: Fiction

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

In Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery, published in 1964  Miss Marple is on holiday, arranged for her by her nephew Raymond West after her doctor had prescribed sunshine. Whilst staying at the Golden Palm Hotel on the fictitious island of  St Honoré, she is listening to Major Palgrave droning on about his life, reliving days when he’d been happy. He was about to show her a photo of a murderer when he stares over her shoulder and sees someone, stops his story and hastily returns the photo to his wallet. Then hours later he is found dead. Miss Marple suspects he didn’t just die in his sleep and investigates his death, involving old Mr Rafiel, a man who looked on the point of death himself, and who delighted in contradicting anything anyone else said.

She also wants to find out about the murderer the Major had mentioned. The question she needs answered was who was it the Major saw that disturbed him so much. Once again it is her knowledge of human nature, gleaned from living in peaceful St Mary Mead that leads her to uncover the truth. She considers the other guests at the hotel in turn, and not sure whether the murderer was a man or a woman everyone is a suspect, from the elderly Canon Prescott and his sister, a thin severe-looking woman to the hotel owners, a young couple, Molly and Tim Kendal. There are plenty of misleading false trails and hidden relationships to discover before the murderer is revealed.

This is not my favourite Agatha Christie but it’s still an entertaining book, which I enjoyed. I didn’t guess who the murderer was until quite near the end, but that is not a bad point. I liked the descriptions of the island and Miss Marple’s thoughts and observations on human nature. At the beginning Raymond mistakenly thinks his Aunt Jane has her head buried in the sand, living in an idyllic rural life when it is real life that matters. Jane silently disagrees:

People like Raymond were so ignorant. In the course of her duties in a country parish, Jane Marple had acquired quite a comprehensive knowledge of the facts of rural life. She had no urge to talk about them, far less to write about them – but she knew them. Plenty of sex, natural and unnatural. Rape, incest, perversion of all kinds. (Some kinds, indeed, that even the clever young men from Oxford who wrote books didn’t seem to have heard about. (page 9)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

I wasn’t sure that I’d like Salmon Fishing in the Yemen as its title put me off. In fact I only read it because it was my face-to-face Book Club choice. It sounded far too quirky and I’ve never had much interest in going fishing – but I did like it. I even liked all the details about salmon and the conditions necessary for them to thrive. Of course, the conditions in the Yemen are completely wrong and that is the conundrum that Dr Alfred Jones has to solve when Sheikh Muhammad wants scientific advice on how best to introduce salmon fishing into the Yemen. The sheikh has an estate in Scotland where he pursues his great love of fly fishing.

I didn’t get on at first with the format of the book. The story unfolds through a series of diary entries, letters, emails, extracts from Hansard and reports, but after a few entries I found myself enjoying it and being entertained by the satire of bureaucracy and politics. The project is completely barmy, but once I thought of it as nonsensical tale I began to enjoy the book for what it is.

Dr Jones is dead against the idea at the start but is forced into considering it by his bosses and eventually by the prime minister who sees it as the ideal photo opportunity – one of him not only fishing in a wadi, but catching the first salmon in the Yemen. Alfred is not a happy man at home either. He and his wife Mary have been married for over 20 years. Their relationship is distant at the beginning and becomes increasingly estranged the more he gets involved in the project. They both come across as dull, boring and pompous.

His life begins to change when he meets Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, who works for the Land Agents acting for the Sheikh. Harriet is the opposite of Mary, young and attractive and Alfred noticed immediately that she dressed

… as if she was about to go out to lunch at a smart restaurant rather than for a hard day’s work in the office. Mary always says it is demeaning for working women to dress themselves up like that. She herself is a strong believer in sensible, practical working clothes which do not accentuate the wearer’s femininity. (pages 21 -2)

Indeed, as Alfred begins to warm to the project under the sheikh’s influence his life is changed completely. He becomes more human, and not so totally absorbed in his small world as a fisheries scientist where his main preoccupation was with the cadis fly larva. It is through his diaries that we see his world opening up and he moves from being an atheist to someone who believes in belief. He also begins to fall for Harriet, whose fiancé is a soldier missing somewhere in Iraq.

There is also much in this book contrasting the secular western world with the faith-based societies of the Middle East. The sheikh contrasts the UK class system with the tribal system prevalent in the Yemen. He considers that there is a lot of snobbery in the UK  and people don’t seem to know what class they belong to with the result that the country is ridden with class prejudices, whereas in the Yemen there are many different ranks that are accepted without question – each person knows their own place and there is no fear of ridicule or restraint (paraphrased from pages 52-3).

However, he knows that the Yemeni are sometimes violent and quick to pick up a gun to finish an argument and this is one reason he wishes to introduce them to fly fishing. He has noticed that fishermen have patience and tolerance and fishing would change his countrymen’s nature.

This a light comic novel, much of it complete but enjoyable nonsense. Some of it such Prime Minister’s Question time and the interviews didn’t seem credible. Parts of it made me laugh – the ridiculous way politics and companies conduct their business for example. As it draws to it’s inevitable dramatic conclusion I was actually hoping the project would be successful and that salmon would run up the waters of the Wadi Aleyn in the heart of the mountains of Heraz.

Teaser Tuesdays – Gone To Earth

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading.

I’m currently reading Gone To Earth by Mary Webb. It’s an old book, originally published in 1917. My copy, a sturdy hardback, belonged to my mother and was published in 1935 and has an introduction by John Buchan (who was Lord Tweedsmuir, politician and author – his most famous book being The Thirty Nine Steps, a spy thriller). His introduction is masterly. He describes what he likes about the book, sets the scene, and discusses Mary Webb’s style of writing:

The style as in all Mary Webb’s books, is impregnated with poetry, rising sometimes to the tenuous delicacy of music, but never sinking to ‘poetic prose’. There are moments when it seems to me superheated, when her passion for metaphor makes the writing too high-pitched and strained. But no one of our day has a greater power of evoking natural magic. (page 9)

And here is a passage from the opening chapter of the book:

Between the larch boles and under the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb, a brilliance of tint, that few women could have worn without self-conciousness. Clear-eyed, lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight – a year-old fox, round headed and velvet-footed. Then it slid into the shadows. (page 11)

Gone To Earth is still in print, in a paperback edition published by Virago Press Ltd in 1992, with a longer introduction by Erika Duncan, including biographical details of Mary Webb’s tragic life.

Sunday Salon – Book Connections

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The Sunday Salon is the place to meet and blog about the books we’re reading.

This morning I read some more from Agatha Christie’s book An Autobiography. It’s now 1917 and Agatha is working in a hospital dispensary in Torquay and also studying to take her Apothecaries Hall examination so she could dispense for a medical officer or a chemist. As part of her training she had instruction from a proper commercial chemist – a Mr P, one of the principal pharmacists in Torquay. She described him as

… a rather funny-looking little man, very roundabout and robin redbreast looking, with a nice pink face. There was a general air of childish satisfaction about him. (page 261)

He once showed her a piece of deadly curare that he carried around with him in his pocket. Curare once it has entered the bloodstream paralyses and kills you. He said he carried it in his pocket because it made him feel powerful. Agatha often wondered about him afterwards. In spite of his cherubic appearance she thought he was possibly a dangerous man and years later used her memory in writing The Pale Horse.

I then picked up H R F Keating’s book A Detective at Death’s Door and started reading it, whilst drinking a cup of coffee. I had intended reading one of my own books but this library book was closer to hand than any of my own books. In this book Superintendent Harriet Martens is just recovering from a nearly fatal dose of aconitine. Her husband, John recognised the symptoms from reading their description in an imaginary Agatha Christie book, Twisted Wolfsbane – aconitine is also known as wolfsbane.  Then a few pages later I came across this coincidence – Harriet quoted the passage in Agatha Christie’s An Autobiography about the chemist carrying round a piece of curare – the same passage I’d read half an hour or so earlier.

Saturday Selection

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

A few ‘new’ books came into our house this week.

click to enlarge

Some came from Barter Books in Alnwick. For a while now I’ve been trying to make some space on the bookshelves. I find it very hard to let any books go, but as I have a large number of unread books I decided to be ruthless and think about the books I have read and whether I would I ever read them again. I managed to weed out 25 books and on Tuesday we took them to Barter Books, one of the largest secondhand bookshops in Britain. It is housed in a huge old railway station, built in 1887 and closed to passengers in 1968. Now it’s a bookshop that works on a swap system – you take books in and if they accept them you receive a credit and can then use that to get more books. You can, of course, just go and buy books as well. They accepted 22 of our books and I came away with just 6, so I have achieved a small amount of shelf space.

The books I ‘bought’ were three Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus books to complete our set (I have read these already), and an early novel of his, Watchman, which I haven’t read. The other two books were gardening books:

  • Ground Force: Practical Garden Projects by Tommy Walsh. This was published to accompany the TV series – as long ago as 1997! I remember it well, as it was one of those programmes that actually demonstrated how to do things.
  • Collins Outdoor DIY Projects in a Weekend by Albert Jackson and David Day.

Both these books were my husband’s choice. They are full of practical things to do and make such as making a bird table, building a cascade, making a compost bin, laying paving stones and decking etc.

And he  found this book on Amazon, The Stream Garden by Archie Skinner and David Arscott, all about creating and planting your own natural-looking water feature. The reason behind his choice is that we want to improve the little stream that runs through our garden. I posted a video of its current condition on my other blog Margaret’s Miscellany last Sunday. I’d love our stream to look something like this:

Books to read next:

I finished a couple of books this week – The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe, which I wrote about earlier and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday, which I’ll write about soon. Reading Coe’s book reminded me of Mary Webb’s Gone To Earth, so I got that down off the shelf and I’m thinking of reading it this week. I read it several times as a young teenager and loved it. I’m curious to find out what I think of it now.

I had to move all my to-be-read books out of the living room this week because we’re having a wood-burning stove installed and I didn’t want the books to get covered in brick dust etc. This got me looking at what I have in waiting, as it were, and I think I’ll choose one of these books to read next:

The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe: Book Review

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

These days I seem to be choosing books by their titles as well as by their authors. And  it was a combination of both that drew me to The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe. I knew of the author, although this is the first book of his that I’ve read and I couldn’t imagine what the title means, which seemed a good enough reason at the time to borrow the book from the library.

I wasn’t disappointed. The Rain Before It Falls is full of description, which for me is a good thing; descriptions of people, places and events. It is a story within a story as Gill discovers family secrets she never knew before, after her aunt Rosamond died. Rosamond left half her property to her cousin’s granddaughter Imogen and half to Gill, but no one knows very much about Imogen or her whereabouts. Rosamond has recorded tapes for Imogen telling her about her mother and grandmother through describing a number of photographs (Imogen is blind) and asked Gill to find her.

It’s a story of tragedy as Rosamond describes the relationship she had with her cousin, Beatrix, who had abandoned her own daughter, Thea and the effects this had on all three of them and subsequently on Imogen. The predominant theme is of the inevitability of impending tragedy, although there are moments when happiness seems within reach. At one point the child Thea states she likes the rain before it falls, even though Rosamond points out to her that there is no such thing. Thea responds that, that is why she likes it, saying,

Something can make you happy can’t it, even if it isn’t real? (page 162)

Gill looks in vain for a pattern that makes sense of their lives but realises that it never existed – it was like the rain before it falls , a ‘figment, a dream, an impossible thing.’ (page 278)

There is much that appealed to me in this book, not least the little philosophical thoughts, such as the reflection on watching children squabble over simple things like where to sit at the dinner table or in the back of the car (so true to life):

Endless, small-minded territorial disputes. You could understand the whole, sorry history of human warfare just by observing their behaviour for half an hour. (page 182)

I also like the references to the novel Gone to Earth. Rosamond and Beatrix were extras when the book was filmed in Much Wenlock near to their family home in 1950. Rosamond describes the book as

… an overheated rustic melodrama …  the story of an ignorant country girl who marries the village chaplain but meanwhile gets caught up in a torrid affair with the local squire, while quite sensibly preferring her pet fox to either of them. … at the time I loved it, for being rooted in the Shropshire landscape, saturated with the colours and contours of its hills and the author’s feeling for nature is still what I remember best. (page 102)

I too, had read and loved Gone to Earth by Mary Webb, many times as a young teenager, completely absorbed in the story and loving its descriptions of the countryside. I’ll read it again one day.