Customer Reviews

Absent in the Spring

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Agatha Christie believed that a person is never truly alone when by themselves. There is always someone, a book, a song or an activity of some nature. She believed that absolute solitary, outside of the interference of any person or object, would lead to a profound reflection of who we really are. In absent in the Spring, she tells of the journey of self discovery of one woman which was brought on by an unexpected retreat in the desert out in the middle of nothing. This undesired reflection, which had been avoided at all costs, brings Joan, the main character, to great discoveries about her own life. Step by step, the veil, which shrouds a superficial and frivolous existence, is removed. This is a solitary, painful and transforming journey. This book, written more than 50 years ago, takes on an incredible relevance in our present world. This is a world that offers an excess of outside stimulus and very little of internal relevance. To wonder that Agatha Christie wrote this book before the advent of the television, computer, Internet, etc. is surprising and stands her out as an author of intuition, vision and definitely ahead of her time. This is a book that you simply cannot miss. It will make you reflect on your life and the way with which you view the world. In the very least it ought to save you a few trips to your therapist.

One of the most beautiful love stories ever told, ABSENT IN THE SPRING takes Henry James' donnee about an unreliable narrator, and brings it to a peak of perfection even James might have envied. Joan Scudamore, the unlikeable, ultimately tragic figure at the heart of the novel, is delayed coming home to England and stuck in a "rest house" in the desert outside Baghdad for what amounts to days on end, with nothing to read after finishing the life of Lady Catherine Dysart, and John Buchan's THE POWER HOUSE. With no one who speaks English toi chat with, and not even a deck of cards, she finds herself thrown back on her own devices, which grow increasingly threadbare until she begins reflecting, at first smugly and then with more self-awareness, on her own life as a young bride, mother, and suburban wife to Rodney, a successful county solicitor.

It soon becomes apparent to the reader that, unbeknownst to Joan, everyone in her life either pities or despises her. Her grown children can't bear to see her around, and her husband feels sorry for her apparently sociopathic inability to care for anyone else but herself. And little by little we realize, as Joan does, that in fact Rodney once had an affair that was the kind of thing great songs are written for, an affair with a married woman in their little town, not an exotic beauty, in fact rather a dowdy, plain woman called Leslie Sherston. As Joan becomes more and more shocked at what the depths of the subconscious are telling her, her walks outside the rest house into the desert become more and more perilous, for so strong are her memories that she loses track of where she is and threatens to get lose in the desert sand, under the implacable, cruel sun.

She feels God has deserted her completely. In the words of one of Shakespeare's sonnets, "From you have I been absent in the spring." Joan was absent in her marriage, absent from Rodney, because she only believed in a certain limited bourgeois way of knowledge. He in turn absented himself from her by falling in love with the charming, if doomed, Leslie Sherston. Rodney and Leslie are too "fine" as human beings to have actually slept together, but like Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in BRIEF ENCOUNTER, an erotic and romantic tension animates their every interchange.

Agatha Christie wrote six novels under the name of Mary Westmacott. At the end of this one, Joan's feverish memories begin to break down into sentence fragments.

Each paragraph is only a sentence long.

An emotional sentence.

A fragment, a piece of something.

Oh, God, Joan prays, make me a normal woman again!

Some people can never get it straight and still, even in 2006, they doubt that Christie is one of the greatest Modernist writers in the English language.

Fools!

They're blind, unseeing, fools, do you hear me?

This is a great story, told in a necessarily slow fashion, that will really make you think.

In today's purposefully busy world, there is very little time left or chosen to be alone and reflect. It seems to me that people go way out of their way to be so inordinately frantically occupied that it almost seems as if they are running away from themselves. That running away, and what happens when you are in a position from which you can no longer run away, is the subject of this book.

Joan Scudamore finds herself because of bad weather stuck in the Baghdad desert with no one to talk to except for natives with limited English, nothing to read, nothing to do, and for a woman who has always deliberately kept herself busy, this is an excruciating thing. Little by little, she begins to review her life, and increasingly, without wanting to, she begins to see not only what a narrow box she lives in, but what a narrow box she has ensured that the people she loves live in. Her husband Rodney, a farmer at heart, she has guilted into joining the family firm of solicitors; her daughters she has so strangled that they escape - one into a doomed and pointless affair and one into emotional agony - and her son Tony has chosen to get as far away from her as he physically can, all the way to the other side of the world. Since her train is unavoidably delayed for days, Joan can't escape the thoughts that, long denied, are finally rising up to claim her attention, and she becomes more and more upset.

What I found that particularly rang true is the end of the book. Joan goes through all this deeply uncomfortable soul-searching and reflection, and then - after making all these resolutions to herself to be different - goes home and doesn't change a thing. For most people, seeing things as they really are instead of as they insist on them being, is simply too painful and devastating to ever employ any real behavioural changes. For that reason, I find this book to be Agatha Christie's best non-mystery work.