The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

No actual spoilers to follow, fear ye not.

 I read a rather large number of Agatha Christie novels in my pre-teens and teens, but stopped well before I came of age. My memory of my teenage self's impressions is a feeling of being very impressed with the ingenuity of the plotting, but much less so with the prose and character- and of a certain irritation with what seemed to me to be a rather arrogant sense of class in a world of servants and cap doffing.

So, after reading this, not only Christie's first by my first read as an adult, have my impressions changed? Well... yes. Rather a lot, actually.

The plot is impressive. Not, perhaps, one of Christie's best, but early days. I don't usually correctly predict the villain in a whodunit but I did so here, basically by thinking metatextually. Still, the plot architecture was clever. 

More surprising was that I was rather impressed, if anything, by the prose and character. Christie is no Jane Austen, but she is superb at subtle insinuations and characterisation via lean and economical prose. She's great using the first person perspective of Hastings, both narratively and in those nicely humorous moments between him and Poirot which make it clear that the esteemed sleuth is patronising his somewhat thick colleague.

Finally... this is the young Christie, a young lady in her twenties, so she may have changed with age but I detected no class-based arrogance here- or at least not in terms of the authorial voice. Characters, of course, would naturally exhibit attitudes common to people like them in 1916, but we can't blame Christie for that. Indeed, I was rather impressed by the restraint of her authorial voice, allowing characters to define themselves. It's a subtlety of style that my teenage self perhaps failed to appreciate.

Plus, of course, the period of the novel has now receded thirty years further into the past, which may perhaps influence me to be less quick to judge the attitudes of the time but simply accept that this is an increasingly distant past.

Overall, then, a highly impressive novel. I'm left wanting more... 

 

Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

One may perhaps assume, from the fact that I am going through a particular phase for science fiction and fantasy at the present time as I have just begun to blog novels, that it's what I've mainly tended to read. That isn't really true, although I've read a fair amount of said genres. I shall go through other phases, and indeed have done in the past. Like most people, I have my comfort authors as I have my comfort songs. One of those is Aldous Huxley.

Yet the Huxley is not the Huxley of Brave New World or The Doors of Perception: it is the younger Huxley, he of the novels of ideas of the Twenties and Thirties, which are suich fascinating records of the lives and the thinking of that fascinating period between the wars- war-scarred, Bohemian in a way, at least for a certain class of people, and replete with new ideas- of Freud, of Modernism, of the motor car- and new anxieties- of technology, of another war, of class conflict.

This, Huxley's first novel, which I've just reread after many years, is a shocking hundred years old and feels instantly modern. This may be far more comedic than its successor novels, but it perfectly captures the tenor of the time, where youn twentysomethings (such as Huxley himself) could be no less pretentious in their angsts and solipsisms than you or I were, or perhaps in your case are, at that age.

The pretentious Denis, the Freudian Anne, the determined introvert Henry Wimbush, the authorial mouthpiece (complete with predictions of the main concept of Brave New World...) Mr Scogan are all splendid comic creations, expressing the ennui and humanity of people who have abandoned God but not, despite their Freudianism, able to escape the extraordinary sexual repression of their society. This may be a novel in which literally nothing happens, but it is no less fun, and no less instructive, for that.