The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie)

No one writes crime fiction like Agatha Christie. Whenever I feel in the mood for a mystery, I pick up one of her novels. Rarely does she disappoint.

Widely referred to as ‘the Queen of Crime’, it’s easy to understand why — I daresay any one of her detective novels will sufficiently demonstrate her ingenuity in creating engaging, complex mysteries that have you turning the pages and trying to work out what happened before the dénouement. And, more often than not, the endings surprise me (in the impressed ‘oh, why didn’t I think of that’ way, as opposed to the derisive ‘that nonsense came out of nowhere’ way).

I like her better than Arthur Conan Doyle, much to the horror of some faithful Doyle followers. To each our own!

One of the reasons I like Christie better is purely a preference for her character Hercules Poirot over Sherlock Holmes. An eccentric Belgian detective who is all about thinking rationally and putting everything in its logical place, Poirot makes his first appearance in Christie’s debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Set and written during the First World War, The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a first-person narrative by Lieutenant Hastings, on leave from the war, documenting his stay at the Styles country estate and the mysterious events that transpired there. At Styles, Hastings is reunited with his old friends, John Cavendish, his brother Lawrence, and their stepmother, Mrs. Cavendish, now Mrs. Inglethorp following her recent new marriage to the much younger Alfred Inglethorp. They are joined by a whole host of new characters, such as John Cavendish’s wife, Mary, Mrs. Inglethorp’s friend and paid companion, Evelyn Howard, and Mrs. Inglethorp’s protegé, Cynthia. All seems relatively merry until disaster strikes — Mrs. Inglethorp dies suddenly from poisoning, and suspicion falls in all directions. Who did it?

Enter Poirot, Belgian detective extraordinaire, and watch him work methodically from the strangest of clues: a crushed coffee cup, a bed of newly-planted begonias and a piece of green thread, to name a few. Can you, dear reader, work out what happened before he tells you?

Granted, there are a few details in the dénouement that the sharpest reader could not possibly pick up on because they are not mentioned prior to the conclusion (my commonest complaint about Sherlock Holmes); nevertheless, Christie does give enough hints to get you going and to guess the gist of the truth. I, for one, couldn’t work it out the first time I read it as part of the story relies on a knowledge of English law and medicine that I didn’t have. It remains an intriguing ending to me in the way that Christie manages to take a well-worn formula and turn it on its head while still making sense.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is by no means perfect, nor the best of her works, but it is an impressive first novel that showcases her talent and really entertains you at the same time. No wonder that I just reread it for the third time!

The Inheritance (Louisa May Alcott)

As a child, I grew up with Louisa May Alcott, reading and rereading Little Women, Good Wives, Jo’s Boys and Little Men. I devoured Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom and An Old-Fashioned Girl. Little wonder, then, that I picked up this particular work when I saw it at the summer library book sale.

And really, if it wasn’t for my old loyalty towards Alcott, I probably wouldn’t have read it at all.

Written at seventeen, The Inheritance is, in Alcott’s own words, her ‘first novel’. The red-bound manuscript was carefully preserved through the years, though there is no evidence it was ever submitted for publication; no mention of it exists in her family letters, and it lay forgotten in the archives until 1988 when Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy rediscovered it. The manuscript was subsequently published in 1997. (Ellen Marsh’s ‘Louisa May Alcott’s Long-Lost Novel’ has a little more detail on the background of the novel.)

The novel itself follows beautiful, dark-eyed Italian orphan Edith Adelon and her trials and tribulations within the Hamilton family. Edith has been with the Hamiltons since the late Lord Hamilton plucked her out of an Italian orphanage and brought her home to serve as companion and governess to his young daughter, Amy. Now seventeen themselves, Edith’s beauty and purity of soul shine, making her a good role model for the lighter-hearted Amy. Not everyone appreciates Edith’s finer qualities, however — Lady Ida, cousin to the Hamiltons, is jealous of Edith’s beauty and is determined to make her life a misery. When handsome, wealthy Lord Percy comes to visit for the summer, the question of who will capture his heart is put forward — and really, quite easily answered.

As much as I enjoy Alcott’s later novels, this one reads very much as a seventeen-year-old’s first serious effort at writing. There is much more telling than showing, with characters speaking and acting in certain ways for the reader’s benefit, and the plot is a little haphazard — events often pop up out of nowhere as if Alcott thought, ‘I need something new happening now!’ and the pace is irregular. Characters are two-dimensional, paper-thin figures who never step out of the page and breathe life. Most noticeably, they all speak in exactly the same tone and diction, from the highest-born to the most uneducated commoner, which seriously detracts from the novel’s believability. The overarching romantic plot is, like the stock twists thrown in the middle, very predictable. I’m not sure why it’s so surprising that Alcott didn’t (seem to) submit this for publication — The Inheritance is really not engaging to read, and if it weren’t for her literary status now, I doubt it ever would have been published. Of course, this is not to say that she should have discarded it — if I had finished a whole manuscript at seventeen, I would also have preserved it through the years as a testament of my own efforts.

The Inheritance is only recommended for Louisa May Alcott fans who are curious about how her mind worked at seventeen and who aren’t expecting works as polished as her later ones.

As for my copy, I am going to write a message on the flyleaf and pop it in the books donation box for someone out there to cherish!

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)

Who hasn’t heard of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Within the English-speaking world, at least, The Chronicles of Narnia is a household name along with the likes of The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series. (And each with their own film adaptations, too.)

In the midst of working through a number of heavy books for school, I felt like a children’s classic would make a nice breather and good breakfast reading. (Breakfast is boring on your own, after all.) Also, I wanted to write about something on here again — I’ve let my reading log slide because of all the other things that have lately been on my mind. This is as good a choice as any, and it’s certainly one of my childhood favourites.

The first published book in The Chronicles of Narnia, a fantasy series for children, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is perhaps the best-known Narnia novel and one of the best-loved.

Set during World War II, the four Pevensie siblings — Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy — are evacuated from London to escape the Blitz. Sent to live with an eccentric old professor in his giant country house, the four children find themselves with a lot of time on their hands and plenty of places to explore. On one such exploration, Lucy looks inside a wardrobe and ends up walking into an entirely different world. In this magical place, she meets a Faun called Tumnus who explains that she is in Narnia, and who tells her about the enchantment that the White Witch has placed over the entire country, making it everlasting winter. There is a prophecy, however, that the appearance of humans in Narnia will cause her downfall — making Lucy and her siblings sudden, important figures in the coming battle between good and evil.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is littered with delightful details bringing Lewis’s fancies to life. Take, for example, the description of Lucy’s first tea with Tumnus the Faun:

And really it was a wonderful tea. There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake. And when Lucy was tired of eating, the Faun began to talk. He had wonderful tales to tell of life in the forest. He told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the Fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk-white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him; about feasting and treasure-seeking with the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor; and then about summer when the wood were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.

I do love it when authors describe food. As a child, these were the details that made the magic more real, and as an adult, I still enjoy imagining mealtimes.

It is different reading your childhood favourites when you’re grown up, though: The Chronicles are rife with Christian allegories that I obviously never noticed as a child, but which get rather in my way when I read them now. It’s a conscious effort to switch off the part of my brain that notices the religious symbolism and it doesn’t always work. (Same goes for the feminist part of me that notices the sexist attitudes of the time and becomes mildly irritated, no matter what I tell myself about it being back then.)

Still, the genius of C. S. Lewis is that The Chronicles of Narnia are an excellent series to read at any age. For children, it’s a lovely adventure story, and for adults, it’s fairly fascinating to see how Christianity is interpreted through fantasy.

The Crow (Alison Croggon)

For comments on previous installments, please read:
1. The Gift
2. The Riddle

The third book in Alison Croggon’s captivating fantasy series, The Crow continues the quest for the mysterious Treesong from a different point of view to previous installments: that of Maerad’s brother, Cai of Pellinor — or Hem, as he likes to be called.

Having parted from his sister in Norloch, Hem rides hard with Saliman to Turbansk, the great city of the south. Here, Hem is initiated into the School for Bards and joins classes with children half his age. Bored with his lessons, unable to speak the local language and not knowing a single person in the city aside from Saliman, Hem’s loneliness is compounded when Saliman begins to disappear regularly on scouting missions for Turbansk. War looms heavy on the horizon and is at the centre of every conversation; the Dark forces dismissed as idle whispers by the rest of Annar are, for the Suderain, a reality of blood and smoke.

Soon, Hem finds his daily hurts disappearing in the midst of a greater, widening pain as Turbansk sends its people to safer cities elsewhere and begins preparing itself for battle against the Nameless One in his second rising. There are no illusions that Turbansk will survive: the Nameless One’s forces are even larger than when he first held sway over Annar. Nonetheless, the Turbanskian army steels itself to fight for its home and to cause enough damage so as to buy a little time for the rest of Annar.

Allowed to stay in Turbansk when no other children are, Hem makes himself useful in the House of Healing. On a walk through largely deserted streets, however, he discovers another child who has managed to hide herself within the city — Zelika of the House of Il Aran. A refugee from Baladh, Zelika watched her entire family slaughtered and her home destroyed by the Nameless One’s forces. Her only desire now is for revenge in the upcoming battle against the Dark.

Saliman takes her into his home and an antagonistic friendship develops between the two children, even as they are forced to flee Turbansk and travel by hidden paths in the depths of enemy territory. When Zelika is captured by the Dark, however, Hem is forced to decide whether this friendship is worth his life: to abandon her or to follow after her into the very heart of the Dark lands of Dén Raven.

Of the Pellinor quartet, The Crow is undoubtedly (to my mind) the most exquisitely crafted. Painstakingly shaped and carefully paced The Crow demonstrates the horror and grief of war, even as Croggon writes of the courage of the human spirit. In the face of such devastation, the determination of people to carry on protecting their homes — to eat, drink, laugh, live and love — shines with a beautiful poignancy that carries us through the darker pages. The Crow is a bildungsroman of children who are forced to grow up at a time when everything around them seems to be breaking apart, a story that brings tears to my eyes with every reading, and a tribute to the fragile strength of our human world.

The 52nd State of Amnesia (Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta)

Here is another one of those books that I would like to own that is very much out of print (published in 1993) and very much out of my budget on AbeBooks (currently going at $130!). Alas — and the library is demanding it back.

Ah, well.

In much the same vein as pappaji wrote poetry in a language i cannot read by Rajinderpal S. Pal, Krisantha Bhaggiyadatta gives voice to the experience of being an ethnic minority in Canada, of moving across countries, of racism, classism, (neo-)colonialism, and the West’s belief in its superiority. ‘These are,’ as the preface points out, ‘political poems and Krisantha Bhaggiyadatta is not squeamish about what he says. He is not afraid to be political.’

I’ve been thinking lately that nothing I say in my thesis is really new, as poets like Bhaggiyadatta and Pal have been saying for years what I’ve only just been understanding: that the US and Canada are built from the blocks of their own amnesia; that everything that is owed, that has been owed in the last five hundred years, is not just now coming to light; that there have always been people who recognised and spoke about this debt.

What to do about it all, though? I’m not sure.

—

An excerpt from the opening poem, ‘The Discovery of Amnesia’:

—

5.
Between 1987 & 1989: tens of thousands of people in sri lanka in the space of five years were systematically kidnapped and slaughtered by forces trained by the west who trained death squads for south africa, colombia, and sri lanka somewhere in the caribbean

when i tried to explain to people what i’d learned in sri lanka my tongue gagged. ’cos how could people who do not know what is/has been happening here actually understand
what’s happening miles a continent and an ocean away

which brings us to 1992:

they say forget history
and i’ve just started to remember

For the Love of Chocolate (Margaret Brownley, Raine Cantrell, Nadine Crenshaw, Sandra Kitt)

I picked this collection of short stories up at the Vancouver Public Library’s most recent book sale, with visions that it would be something like Chocolat (a most excellent movie if ever there was one). Alas, it seems that my expectations of my VPL purchases are doomed to crumble into the dust: this disappointed me even more than Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella.

‘Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut’ by Margaret Brownley opens the collection up fairly reasonably. Holly Brubacker, owner of the Certified Nuts and Chocolate Factory in Santa Monica, California, is pulled into investigations when a local art thief starts leaving one of her nougats at every crime scene. Mark Spencer is the private investigator for Woodon-Meyers Insurance Company and is in charge of finding out who the thief might be. Careful, methodical and predictable, he has no time or understanding for Miss Brubacker’s lighthearted, whimsical ways — or so he thinks.

This is perhaps the second most realistic story out of the collection due to the fairly ordinary characters and the localized, low-profile mystery. Sadly, the ending descends entirely into sentimentality, inserting weak, sudden additions for the sake of a happy ending that are far too tidy and, consequently, not enjoyable because they’re not believable.

The next story, set in seventeenth-century London, was the story I thought had the most potential and which also irritated me the most. London is celebrating the return of Charles II to his throne and Judith, a strictly-raised Puritan with a rebellious streak, is caught in the midst of jubilant crowds, unable to return home. She and her chaperone take refuge in a chocolate shop where she meets the hardworking employee, Evan Dugdale, and life changes. Evan and Judith begin trysting in secret; when the consequences of their passion become clear to Judith, she must work out a way of surviving without Evan’s help.

‘The Chocolate Shoppe’ by Nadine Crenshaw makes delightful references to well-known seventeenth-century Londoners (Samuel Pepys, Sir Davenant), showing an evident interest in the time period. The narrator’s gender stereotyping and Evan’s hypocrisy as a man who simultaneously ruins his lover’s future and accuses her of not being faithful to him simply because she’s betrothed unwillingly to someone else annoys me to no end, and I can’t decide which character I dislike the most.

Sandra Kitt’s ‘Sweet Dreams’ does at least have likable, realistic characters. This story is interesting and different in that it follows the growing romance between two African-American characters in Chicago: the reliable, handsome engineer MacKenzie and the late-widowed, single mother Jill Corey. After befriending Jill’s small son Shane, MacKenzie is increasingly present in the Coreys’ lives as he takes Shane out along with his nieces and nephews, and helps Jill with the chores she can no longer do, being pregnant with her late husband’s second child. Given that a relationship with an already pregnant woman is usually considered taboo, Kitt handles the growing affection between these two adults fairly well. There is an awful lot of moralizing and judging going on about what one ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do that interferes with the story quite often, but otherwise, this was perhaps the most believable romance.

The final story, ‘The Secret Ingredient’ by Raine Cantrell is one of those tongue-in-cheek romances with slapdash characters that you just have to accept because they wouldn’t exist any other way. Halimeda Pruitt is a spinster living out on a rickety ranch in the Old West who has a habit of taking in animals and people that no one else wants anymore. Her latest addition to the menagerie is Cade McAllister, a cowboy beaten up so badly he was left for dead before Hallie rescued him. Stubborn, determined Hallie insists on feeding Cade with chocolates as part of the ‘healing process’; irritated beyond belief, stubborn Cade determines to de-burr this particular spinster and discover the real woman underneath the layers. Although the writing is a little choppy and things pop up suddenly all over the place, this was the story that did come closest to making me laugh.

Perhaps the problem lies with me and how sudden happy endings have a tendency to confuse me. Even though I expect that romances will have happy endings, I like them to be well-explained within the universe in which the story takes place, and sudden leaps of faith into the arms of love are more likely to alienate me than not. At any rate, I’m rather glad I only picked this up for 75 cents and will be happily passing this book on to a friend whom I know enjoys romances a lot more than I do!

Twenties Girl (Sophie Kinsella)

I’m beginning to write my recent reads out of order (not including the ones I neglect to write about at all, because I read at a much faster pace than I write), because I’m planning on giving a couple of books to a friend and want to comment before I pass them on:

Having read a few Sophie Kinsellas before and enjoyed them — Can You Keep a Secret, Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Undomestic Goddess — I curled up with Twenties Girl on one of those days when you’re worn out and hoping that some light reading with lift you from your mood. And perhaps I was also hoping that I might relate to a thing or two, being in my twenties myself.

Sadly, I was disappointed on both fronts.

Twenty-seven-year-old Lara’s life is not going well: her business partner and main headhunter of their new company, Natalie, has just done a bunk on the business; the love of Lara’s life dumped her two months ago; and oh, she’s seeing her great-aunt Sadie’s ghost at said great-aunt’s funeral. Can things really get any worse?

Why, yes, they can. Great-Aunt Sadie — who appears as her twenty-three-year-old self complete in 1920s outfits — harasses Lara to stop the funeral until they give Sadie back her favourite dragonfly necklace. Unable to think of anything else, Lara claims that her great-aunt was murdered and has to deal with the police. Meanwhile, her search for the dragonfly necklace is proving fruitless as it’s mysteriously disappeared from the nursing home Sadie was in.

Oh, and business is still getting worse.

There are a lot of things about this book that almost sparkle: the mystery of who stole the dragonfly necklace and why, Sadie’s stories of her life in the twenties, and the growing friendship between Sadie and Lara.

But they don’t, because Lara’s narrative voice overwhelms the story so often with her naivete and her horrible obsession with Josh, her ex-boyfriend. Lara’s running commentary reminds me of nothing so much as an older version of Meg Cabot’s Mia from The Princess Diaries — and older only in age, not wisdom. Lara certainly has more in common with a teenager than the professional working woman that she is supposed to be; there were countless moments I found myself cringing, begging her not to say or do what I dreaded she would next. Is this really how Kinsella thinks women in their late twenties operate? If so, it’s a sad, sad world I’m entering.

Even worse is that none of these characters felt truly alive (except maybe the ghost, irony of ironies). They were flat, limpid, one-dimensional non-surprises in whom I held absolutely no interest — and we all know it’s hard to like a book if you don’t care about any of the characters. While the plot did have a slightly interesting twist, it was so predictable after the first real clue was given that the rest of the read was no challenge at all.

Sure, perhaps I’m being too demanding: Sophie Kinsella is meant for a light, humorous read, after all. But I don’t think that paperback romances are any less obligated to make their readers care about the characters — in fact, being a story about the relationships between people, it’s important for romances to have likable characters more than, say, a thriller or a crime novel. If you disagree, or if you’re a major fan of Sophie Kinsella, then by all means, go on and read this book. Otherwise, there are better, more engaging ones out there for light reading — there are even better Sophie Kinsella novels than this one. The ones I named already didn’t strike me as poorly as this one when I first read them (granted, I haven’t read any of them in a while), and I’ve heard good things about Remember Me?, though I haven’t looked at that one myself. Start there, if you’re going to start reading any Kinsella.

The Riddle (Alison Croggon)

Declared outlaws, Maerad of Pellinor and Cadvan of Lirigon are forced to flee the agents of both Light and Dark as they seek to complete a desperate quest. Heard of only in scraps of song and legend, the mysterious Treesong is the hinge upon which all their futures depend. Armed with little more than courage and a dream telling her to go north, Maerad must discover how she, fated as the Chosen One, is to overthrow the Nameless One in his darkest rising.

Whereas The Gift is the account of Maerad’s discovery and coming into of her power as a Bard, The Riddle finds her traversing great distances in an effort to understand both herself and her role in destroying Sharma, the Nameless One. Warned again and again of the darkness within her, it is not until tragedy befalls Maerad that she begins to understand the disastrous consequences of ignoring such advice. Never are Maerad’s flaws so clear in the series as in this installment.

The Riddle opens our horizons to the many lands and cultures beyond Annar, the country where the bulk of The Gift takes place. Alison Croggon masterfully builds up lush descriptions of both the rich landscapes and peoples populating her complex, diverse universe. The so-called Appendices to the book, full of notes on the cultures of Edil-Amarandh, help in creating the Atlantis-like illusion of wonderful, vibrant cultures now lost to us.

Although I enjoy this sequel, I personally find this the weakest installment in the Pellinor series: without elaborating and spoiling the book, there are two parts I had, on first reading, and continue to have, difficulty in believing because they happen so suddenly. Perhaps this is because Croggon repeats certain phrases over and over again, in a narrative attempt to convince us these sudden moments are the truth, rather than showing through sufficient build-up of narrative and motive that these can really happen. It’s unfortunate, as these two parts are both key plot points.

Nevertheless, The Riddle is still an overarching craft of beauty, and I never regret re-reading it.