Reverse chronological order this time because I want to start with the positive :) Happy March, dear reader!
Crooked House by Agatha Christie
Ummm…!? How have I never read anything by Agatha Christie until a week ago? That ain’t right! My inspiration to pick up this book was one of the various newsletters I subscribe to, and I am ashamed to say that I can’t remember which one it was or find it in my email. Nonetheless, I’m so grateful to the author of the lost to me newsletter where Agatha was mentioned because this delightful read was JUST what I needed after my previous read (see below). I’m sending my gratitude out into the universe hoping it gets to the right person.
Agatha wrote an astounding 66 detective novels in her day, and the Strand had maybe 20 of those in stock, which was a great selection to choose from. I wanted to start with a standalone because I’m kind of weird about a series (read: I’m anal about going in order and nervous about the commitment), so that ruled out the Hercule Poirot books. When I pulled Crooked House off the shelf and saw on the back that it was one of “the Queen of Mystery’s personal favorites,” my choice was made.
Our narrator is Charles, son of the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. While abroad in Egypt during WWII, Charles meets Sophia Leonides and falls in love with her. Before they part ways, he tells her that he’s going to ask her to marry him as soon as they’re both back in England. That turns out to take about 2 years, and when he makes it back and invites her out to dinner, he finds out that her grandfather (very rich grandfather) has died - and they think it was MURDER dun dun dun by POISONING dun dun dun.
The whole Leonides family lives together under the same many-gabled roof, and everyone is a suspect! There’s the young second wife, the two sons who both stood to inherit, the abused tutor, the cold & scientific wife of one son and the melodramatic actress wife of the other. Oh my my. Not to mention Nannie, and Sofia’s younger siblings who are just a bit off each in their own way. I can’t say more!
At least not on the plot. What I can say is that Agatha is the bomb! Not that I’m the first person to figure that out. Her writing is clean, simple and easy to read while still being artful. Her characters are lively and unpredictable. I genuinely did not know who the murderer was until the reveal, but as soon as I did know, I knew I should have known. Isn’t that exactly what one wants out of a murder mystery? The bait and switch. They “solve the case” and put the “murderer” in jail, but then someone else dies! Delicious. Since this was my first waltz with Agatha, I was content to be carried along without really trying to crack the case, but I could see myself becoming addicted to reading these novels and trying to figure out who did it before the reveal.
Finally, I feel it is worth noting that I am unsurprised by my enjoyment of this novel and unsurprised by the fact that I now want to read MORE. Romances and mysteries (detective novels, whodunits, whatever you want to call them) are birds of a feather. Happy, low-stakes, genuine goodness - like a cheeseburger, medium with American cheese after a 10 course fancy meal that leaves you hungry (I watched The Menu last night, which means that metaphor isn’t random - if you know, you know).
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
The more I think about this book, the less I have to say about it. Or something like that. I picked it up at the Strand (different trip, but where else?) because the cover intrigued me. We love to judge a book by its cover. This novel is also translated from Japanese, and I love a book in translation because the language is so intentional - there are two layers of intention, the author and the translator, instead of the normal one. I was even more intrigued! Then I read the back blurb (see footnote on this post for my stance on back blurbs), and I was sold.
The basic premise is that somewhere on an unnamed island, things are disappearing. One day there are ribbons, and then next day there are none. Not only that though, the memory of the ribbons is also completely gone from the minds of this island’s inhabitants. And so it goes, from ribbons to perfume to birds, ferry boats, roses and so on. However, there are some people who don’t forget. Those people are hunted down by the Memory Police, the foot soldiers of whatever totalitarian regime is in charge on this island. It is the job of the Memory Police to ensure that disappeared things stay disappeared.
Our narrator is an unnamed woman who cannot remember. Or I suppose who forgets like she’s supposed to - depends on how you look at it. Her mother could remember, and kept a great many disappeared items hidden in the house. She would show them to our narrator when she was a little girl and try to explain what they were with little effect. This early education, however, primes our narrator to help when her friend and editor (she’s a novelist) reveals that he can remember. That’s a bit of a spoiler, but it’s fine. He needs a place to hide from the Memory Police who have become increasingly brazen in snatching rememberers (and anyone harboring them) from their homes, never to be seen again.
At the core, this is a dystopian novel, set in a surveillance state, where no one tries to find out or understand what’s happening to them or why - where no one tries to resist, except in very small ways. Not that small resistances can’t build up to something more. I know they can, but in this book they don’t. I found it depressing. Then on top of the unsettling moments that felt like distorted reflections of what our world has been at times and could become again, there was a metaphysical layer that disturbed me. The disappearing and the imposed forgetting. How can you defend against something like that, when your own brain is being controlled by forces beyond your control, causing memory, one of its central, not entirely understood functions, to malfunction? The characters in this novel seem to know that you can’t defend against it, and the way Ogawa writes suggests that she wants to convince you, the reader, of the same thing.
Aside from our narrator and the aforementioned remembering editor, there is one other central character who completed our central trio: an also unnamed old man who lives on a ferry boat (out of commission because the ferry was disappeared). He was the husband of our narrator’s childhood nurse and therefore a friend of the family. A bond forms between these three characters, and in that bond the strength of the human spirit that is so absent from this book as a whole can be detected here and there.
Ogawa gives no answers, no options for salvation, no hero with a will to live free or die trying that we can root for. Maybe I missed something or maybe it went over my head, but aside from those small glimmering moments of friendship and connection, stolen comfort and happiness, this novel was cold and off-putting. Not terrible, but not for me.