I am a voracious reader of the most convoluted and lexiphanic texts -
yet, there is one author I prefer to most. She gives me the greatest
pleasure and leaves me tranquil and craving for more when I am through
devouring one of her countless tomes. A philosopher of the mundane, a
scholar of death, an exquisite chronicler of decay and decadence - she
is Dame Agatha Christie. I spend as much time wondering what so
mesmerizes me in her pulp fiction as I do trying to decipher her
deliciously contorted stratagems.
First, there is the claustrophobia. Modernity revolves around the rapid
depletion of our personal spaces - from pastures and manors to cubicles
and studio apartments. Christie - like Edgar Ellen Poe before her -
imbues even the most confined rooms with endless opportunities for vice
and malice, where countless potential scenarios can and do unfold
kaleidoscopically. A Universe of plots and countervailing subplots
which permeate even the most cramped of her locations. It is nothing
short of consummate magic.
Then there is the realization of the ubiquity of our pathologies. In
Christie's masterpieces, even the champions of good are paragons of
mental illness. Hercules Poirot, the quintessential narcissist,
self-grooming, haughty, and delusional. Miss Marple, a schizoid
busybody, who savors neither human company, nor her inevitable
encounters with an intruding world. Indeed, it is deformity that gifts
these two with their eerily penetrating insights into the infirmities
of others.
Then, there is the death of innocence. Dame Agatha's detective novels
are quaint, set in a Ruritanian Britain that is no more and likely had
never existed. Technologies make their debut: the car, the telephone,
the radio, electric light. The very nature of evil is transformed from
the puerile directness of the highway robber and the passion killer -
to the scheming, cunning, and disguised automatism of her villains.
Crime in her books is calculated, the outcome of plotting and
conspiring, a confluence of unbridled and corrupted appetites and a
malignant mutation of individualism. Her opus is a portrait of our age
as it emerged, all bloodied and repellent, from the womb the dying
Victorian era.
Christie's weapons of choice are simple - the surreptitious poison, a
stealthy dagger, the cocked revolver, a hideous drowning. Some
acquaintance with the sciences of Chemistry and Physics is
indispensable, of course. Archeology comes third. But Christie's main
concerns are human nature and morality. The riddles that she so
fiendishly posits cannot be solved without taking both into account.
As Miss Marple keeps insisting throughout her numerous adventures,
people are the same everywhere, regardless of their social standing,
wealth, or upbringing. The foibles, motives, and likely actions of
protagonists - criminals as well as victims - are inferred by Marple
from character studies of her village folks back home. Human nature is
immutable and universal is Christie's message.
Not so morality. Formal justice is a slippery concept, often opposed to
the natural sort. Life is in shades of gray. Murders sometimes are
justified, especially when they serve to rectify past wrongs or prevent
a greater evil. Some victims had it coming. Crime is part of a cycle of
karmic retribution. The detective's role is to restore order to a
chaotic situation, to interpret reality for us (in an inevitable final
chapter), and to administer true and impartial justice, not shackled by
social or legalistic norms.
Thus, nothing is as it seems.
It is perhaps Christie's greatest allure. Beneath the polished,
petite-bourgeois, rule-driven, surface, lurks another world, replete
with demons and with angels, volcanic passions and stochastic drives,
the mirrors and the mirrored, where no ratio rules and no laws obtain.
Catapulted into this nightmarish, surrealistic landscape, like the
survivors of a shipwreck, we wander, bedazzled, readers and detectives,
heroes and villains, damsels and their lovers, doomed to await the
denouement. When that moment comes, redeemed by reason, we emerge,
reassured, into our reinstated, ordered, Before Christ(ie) existence.
Her novels are the substance of our dreams, woven from the fabric of
our fears, an open invitation to plunge into our psyches and
courageously confront the abyss. Hence Christie's irresistibility - her
utter acquaintance with our deepest quiddity. Who can forgo such
narcissistic pleasure? Not your columnist, for sure!
