Agatha Christie’s emotional side

Under a pseudonym, the queen of whodunnits explored relationships in families and among friends – with nary a criminal mastermind in sight.

DIEHARD fans of Agatha Christie may already know the full extent of her writing. Others will be surprised to learn that her repertoire extended beyond the “whodunnits” for which she is so renowned.

Writing under the pseudonym of “Mary Westmacott”, Christie explored the world of human relationships between close friends and family members, and the way those are influenced and shaped by events and other people – situations where love is absent from relationships where people expect to find it, or where the underlying love has become a resented duty, leading to the many everyday wrongs human beings perpetrate on each other.

She tells us of mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, lifelong friends – characters who often love each other deeply or are pulled together by a sense of shared personal history. However, love and history do not always equate to liking or respect.

Christie’s characters’ inability to deal with their relationship conflicts lead some to simmering resentments and secret hostilities, while others manage the situations by becoming masters in the art of self deception. Hurt and betrayal are strong undercurrents in the lives of her characters, most of whom are the victims as well as the perpetrators of the “crimes”. Imaginary friends people the lives not only of the lonely child characters, but also of the adults.

It occurred to me while reading these books that the stories are now of additional interest as a historical social commentary of middle class England in the 1950s. The social class framework of the time is captured in multiple themes, such as houses that need tending by a multitude of servants – or at least one for those living in genteel poverty – and evoke a recurring common decorative theme of mauve irises.

The importance of hierarchy is referred to subtly, eg, servants being called by different names if their given ones were considered unsuitable for their station in life, or being addressed as “Mrs” if employed in senior staff roles, regardless of marital status.

Some readers will find it hard not to be offended, as I was, by the characters’ casual use of the accepted racist terms and misogyny of the time.

Despite Christie’s implied acceptance of such inequalities, she was ahead of her time in viewing the emotional cruelties of our key relationships as “crimes”. The books were published in the 1950s, years before Britain had addressed domestic violence in legislation, and only now, over 60 years later, is legislation being passed to address emotional and psychological cruelty within the domestic sphere.

The series comprises of six titles, three of which are included in this review.

A Daughter’s A Daughter

This is a poignant and beautifully told story of the love between a mother and her daughter, and the sacrifices “good” parents make for their ungrateful and self-preoccupied offspring. Anyone who has been a carer for the person they love most in life will recognise the ugly potential for martyrdom that can create an unequal balance and poison even the best of relationships.

This story describes many years in which the mother and daughter are lost to each other, both lacking the insight to make the changes required to bring their relationship into harmony again. So deep are their struggles to cope with the loss of other that years go by with their unresolved hostilities damaging subsequent relationships along the way.

It takes the wisdom of some of the very likeable minor characters to help Ann and Sarah to find their way back to each other, with the story ending on a note of hope rather than conclusion.

Unfinished Portrait

I felt that the title of this book reflected the impression it left me with, because the story felt unfinished. Celia is a colourless character whose life is controlled by men to such an extent that she fails to recognise the petty tyrannies of her husband until the end of her marriage – something over which Celia has no control.

Her planned suicide, one of the few decisions she makes independently, is taken out of her hands by a stranger whose preoccupation with his own heroic rescue of her preclude even asking her name. Thus we know her as Celia, the name he bestows on her.

However, despite the unsatisfactory conclusion, and her exasperating weaknesses, Celia comes over as a very believable character, which may be explained by the generally held view that Celia’s life is based on Christie’s own experience. The book retained my involvement throughout and left me looking forward to the next one.

Giant’s Bread

This is an intriguing title for a book that, in the main, I found to be long drawn out and tedious, although the second half was more enjoyable than the first, mainly because it focused more on the female characters, who were slightly more interesting.

We follow the story of the lives of four people who grew up together, and remained connected through adolescence, adulthood, and maturity. The extent to which their lives remain connected seems a little unbelievable, as their closest friendships, and deepest and most unrequited love in life, remain within the foursome.

The sudden and erratic swings in direction, of life and love, for main character Vernon are equally unbelievable, reminding me of stories written by children where they suddenly realise that they’ve led their story down an impossible path without a conclusion, and end it with “... and then they woke up”!

I was left feeling that this book was one which might have been livened up with some of Christie’s traditional crime and mystery approach.

Who would like them?

Are those books for regular Christie fans? If you read Christie for her firm handling of characters and events, and her no nonsense writing style, you’ll love her emotional crime writing. As with her original crimes, her characters are quirky, but essentially ordinary people living out their lives, with never a gangster or obvious villain in sight.

If, on the other hand, you want a mystery to solve, or you’re really more of a fan of Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, you might be disappointed with the unresolved nature of many of the relationships, and the lack of regular characters in the series.