Absent in the Spring (and other novels) by Agatha Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott
My two all-time favorite authors are Haruki Murakami and Agatha Christie. While I'm always happy to sing the praises of Christie's mysteries, her non-mystery novels (originally published under a pseudonym) are arguably her best work. They've been repackaged in two collections, each of which contains three standalone novels. I read the first collection late last year and enjoyed it, but Absent in the Spring etc. left a much stronger impression on me. Every single one of the novels included in it is equally powerful, equally devastating, and reminded me just how brilliant and underrated a writer Christie is.
Absent in the Spring
A complacently well-to-do middle-aged woman gets stranded between trains on her way back to England from the Middle East. After running out of reading material and ways to amuse herself, she finds it harder and harder not to think about the uncomfortable truths that she's spent most of her adult life avoiding. Which sounds incredibly dull, right? But it's more suspenseful than most of Christie's whodunits--remarkable, considering that most of the story takes place in the protagonist's head via flashbacks.
One of Christie's greatest talents is how merciless, accurate and convincing she is when it comes to portraying characters whose conceptions of themselves go totally at odds with what they are really like. You can find examples of them in almost all her books, including the following two, but the main character of Absent in the Spring takes the grand prize as far as I'm concerned. There is an almost savage--yet disciplined--thoroughness in how Christie makes her unwittingly expose herself to the reader. Personally, I put her on suicide watch pretty early on, but the denouement Christie goes for is less sensational, and more believable for it.
Giant's Bread
Quite a few of Christie's mysteries include artist characters, usually in side roles (although she has few rivals when it comes to sketching a fully realized personality in a few plainspoken sentences). The male protagonist of Giant's Bread, however, is not just a composer but a genius, a revolutionary, the kind of person who gives meaning to the idea of being ahead of one's time. Structurally, both Giant's Bread and Yew Tree (below) are novels where the prologue gives away the end. This is a tired device, but Christie does right by it. In both cases, the structure is key and ultimately feels more active and important than a simple choice to arrange the story one way or another. And again in both cases, its full significance does not become clear until the final chapter (which is of course not the chronological endpoint)--perhaps not even until the final line.
The Rose and the Yew Tree
Christie goes some pretty dark places in her mysteries, but always with a clean, sensible, very British touch. None of her famous detectives are especially interested in Justice with a capital J. They solve mysteries because they enjoy being good at it or because they find murder distasteful. For her criminals, she favors petty motives--petty money, petty jealousy, emotions that everyone experiences once in a while, things that everyone would like to get a hold of. This book is different; it focuses on rarer kinds of passion and rage.
Unlike the other two novels in the collection, The Rose and the Yew Tree has a first-person narrator, a decent if somewhat self-centered man who was crippled in an accident. He serves as our navigator through dark waters. The story itself revolves around a man he hates, an opportunistic first-time politician, and a young woman named Isabella who is one of the most unusual, fascinating and opaque female characters in the Christie canon. The darkness of emotion shown here is more striking because it doesn't lead to murder.
When I finished Absent in the Spring, I thought, "Man, she isn't going to be able to top that." Then I finished Giant's Bread and thought, "Man, that was just as stunning in a different way, but there's no way she can do it for the third time in a row." Then I got to the ending of The Rose and the Yew Tree and was left pretty much speechless. You can probably tell by now that I'm a huge Christie fangirl. I've tried to keep the proselytizing somewhat restrained here, because these really are damn good books and don't need her name to support them. Reading up to the end of each one was like getting punched in the stomach (in a good way!). Doing that three times in a row in one day... well, I think I need to go watch some mindless anime or something...
