rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2023-10-04 10:34 am
rachelmanija) wrote2023-10-04 10:34 am
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Absent in the Spring, by Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott
"I wonder," she paused, "if you'd nothing to think about but yourself for days and days I wonder what you'd find out about yourself--"
One of six non-mystery novels written by Christie under the Mary Westmacott pseudonym. This is the first I've read. Christie wrote it in three days and thought it was one of her best novels.
Middle-aged wife and mother Joan Scudamore is passing through Iraq on her way back from a visit with her grown daughter when a flood strands her at a rest stop for a week with absolutely nothing to do. There's no other guests, she hates the food, she's hardly going to converse with the staff, there's nothing to see but desert, and she only has three books. With no other alternatives, she looks back on her life and slowly begins to realize truths about it and her that she refused to see or admit to before.
Joan, who we see at the beginning is very self-satisfied with her successful husband and excellent grown children and the marvelous way she brought all her awesome relationships about and how much better her life turned out than her former classmates' did, has in fact spent her entire life making everyone around her miserable with her controlling ways that she refuses to admit are controlling or a problem. Her children fled home they instant they were able to and dread her visits. While she was able to pressure her husband into a career he never wanted, his actual epic love was with Leslie, a married woman with a loser husband. They never had a physical affair, but they did have an emotional one. While Leslie had a very hard life and died before her time, she was kind and brave and full of vitality and the opposite of straitlaced, conventional Joan.
When Joan comes to realize that her life and self and relationships are nothing like she's believed/made herself believe, she has a choice to make about how to go forward. On the cusp of upending her life and starting a new one, beginning with apologizing to her husband for pushing him into being a lawyer, she chooses to ignore everything she's learned, push it out of her mind, and go on exactly as she has been. It's a real gut-punch, and upsettingly in-character.
While not a genre mystery, Absent in the Spring does have a central mystery - what is the truth about Joan? - and a sequence of reveals. It's very technically accomplished. It's not a fun book like a lot of Christie's mysteries as Joan is so awful and we're relentlessly inside her head, but it's interesting and I can see why Christie herself liked it. It was a very difficult concept to pull off and she pulls it off.
Christie scale: A single but HAIR-RAISING bit of anti-Semitism. A single but HAIR-RAISING bit of "rape: it does a woman good." MEDIUM amounts of racism.
One of six non-mystery novels written by Christie under the Mary Westmacott pseudonym. This is the first I've read. Christie wrote it in three days and thought it was one of her best novels.
Middle-aged wife and mother Joan Scudamore is passing through Iraq on her way back from a visit with her grown daughter when a flood strands her at a rest stop for a week with absolutely nothing to do. There's no other guests, she hates the food, she's hardly going to converse with the staff, there's nothing to see but desert, and she only has three books. With no other alternatives, she looks back on her life and slowly begins to realize truths about it and her that she refused to see or admit to before.
Joan, who we see at the beginning is very self-satisfied with her successful husband and excellent grown children and the marvelous way she brought all her awesome relationships about and how much better her life turned out than her former classmates' did, has in fact spent her entire life making everyone around her miserable with her controlling ways that she refuses to admit are controlling or a problem. Her children fled home they instant they were able to and dread her visits. While she was able to pressure her husband into a career he never wanted, his actual epic love was with Leslie, a married woman with a loser husband. They never had a physical affair, but they did have an emotional one. While Leslie had a very hard life and died before her time, she was kind and brave and full of vitality and the opposite of straitlaced, conventional Joan.
When Joan comes to realize that her life and self and relationships are nothing like she's believed/made herself believe, she has a choice to make about how to go forward. On the cusp of upending her life and starting a new one, beginning with apologizing to her husband for pushing him into being a lawyer, she chooses to ignore everything she's learned, push it out of her mind, and go on exactly as she has been. It's a real gut-punch, and upsettingly in-character.
While not a genre mystery, Absent in the Spring does have a central mystery - what is the truth about Joan? - and a sequence of reveals. It's very technically accomplished. It's not a fun book like a lot of Christie's mysteries as Joan is so awful and we're relentlessly inside her head, but it's interesting and I can see why Christie herself liked it. It was a very difficult concept to pull off and she pulls it off.
Christie scale: A single but HAIR-RAISING bit of anti-Semitism. A single but HAIR-RAISING bit of "rape: it does a woman good." MEDIUM amounts of racism.
