Customer Reviews

Ordeal by Innocence

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is my personal favourite of all Agatha Christie's books. For no good reason, though. It doesn't stand out particularly, but it is nonetheless a thouroughly brilliany mystery. I have long been of the opinion that Christie really came into her own when she ditched Poirot and marple. The books in which they do not feature are definitely some of her best. ("Towards Zero", "Death Comes As the End" "And Then there Were None" "Murder Is Easy" "The Pale Horse", to name but a few.)

Arthur Calgary is a really likeable character, as are several characters in this book. Which makes it even harder to read about what this opening up of an old wound is doing to them. It is hard to imagine how you would feel if, after several years of security, a stranger comes along and reveals that the killer of your friend/relative was not indeed the one imprisoned, but someone else. Someone who has been walking amongst you all these years, talked to you, eaten with you. And now all of you are under suspicion again. This book demonstrates that wonderfully, and it is a brilliant study of what the hunt for a kilelr can do to the people involved, the assumed guilt, the intrusion, the harassing of the innocent. All trying to find that one person who is guilty.

This book shines becuase it is actually rather realistic. It is full of human emotion and feeling, and some wonderful characters. they are not all of them incredibly likeable, but they are recognisable human, and you can empathise with all of them.

The story is told brilliantly, and the solution is typically unguessable and shocking. The climax is great. Fear permeates the atmosphere almost all through the book, leading to a great resolution.

One of her very very best books, if not her very best. Explores wonderfully issues of innocence and guilt, which raises it above the norm.

I just finished this book recently and would recomend it to anyone. I think this is my favorite Christie so far. The ending was so unexpected. I loved the characters because they were all so well developed and each one of them was different. There's always at least one character you can relate to. In my case, my two favorite characters were Philip Durrant and Tina Argyle. A cool thing about this book is that, even though you never come face to face with Rachel Argyle (deceased before the opening of the book), you can see a clear picture of her in the background.
If you like Christie, mystery, or just good characters and a good story, go to the top of the screen and order this!

What "improvements" have been made for the St. Martin's Minotaur edition? There are already major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. There are further additions still in the Signet, Bantam, Berkley, and Black Dog & Leventhal editions. For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

About once a year, I pull a book out of my box of 1960s-era Agatha Christie paperbacks for a read. And she never disappoints when it comes to clever, twisty, psychological, character-driven murder mysteries with stunning conclusions. Two years ago, Mrs. Argyle was supposedly murdered by her bad seed of an adopted son, Jack. But then, Doctor Calgary comes forward with an airtight alibi for Jack, who died in prison. Now the family--the husband and his new fiancé and the four other adopted children--begin to suspect each other and the family begins to break apart. Why would anyone kill the kind, benevolent woman who had devoted her life and money to the care of unfortunate children? Who is suffering the most: the guilty or the innocent? Christie's ability to capture character and psychology, motivation behind murder, is only matched by her ability to spin a great, surprising plot. Grade: B+

I liked the plot, although I was disappointed when the suspect I was plumping for turned out to be innocent. I thought the solution was a bit of a cop-out, but I liked it overall. The characters were interesting, especially the murder victim with her extreme need to be a mother. Christie offers some excellent observations on parent-child relationships that make this book memorable for me.

The book "ordeal by innocence" was very good because it plays with the personality of the caracters. It is interesting to see how they deal with the murder of Mrs Argyle. There are many interesting caracters with a "strange personality". The end of the book is very good, but for the fans of Agatha Christie they will see that is very easy to reach the final conclusions.

Jack Argyle is acquitted, two years after his death, of murdering his mother, and the revelation of his innocence casts new doubt upon everyone in the Argyle household. Thus begins this Agatha Christie whodunit. Though it cannot compare to her earlier, better works, ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE does hold its own.

ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE is most notable for the remarkable strength of all the characterizations, the dark, menacing atmosphere, and the fascinating themes of guilt and innocence that Christie brings up. The plot is not as intricate or complex as her masterpieces, but the clues are laid with absolutely impeccable skill, and the solution is both clever and surprising. One of her best late books.

ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE is one of the difficult Christies from her most controversial period, in which her novels grew longer and longer, while some argue her energies were primarily directed towards the stage where she was amazingly successful and the Queen of the West End for a few years. The novels of the same time grow ponderous, as though overswollen with social and moral anxiety, and this is one of the touchstones of the era, cited by Christie herself in her AUTOBIOGRAPHY as among her own personal favorites.

Is it a plot she cooked up, then abandoned, for her contemporaneous drama THE UNEXPECTED GUEST? It seems like it, right down to the gloomy, Stygian opening in which a mystery man crashes into the closed society of a wealthy family grieving over a recent loss.

As usual, Christie studs the novel with references to all sorts of high and low culture. As many have noticed, the character of Jacko Argyle seems borrowed from the real life "Let Him Have It" case of Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig, while she makes much of the famous line from Racine's PHEDRE that goes, "C'est Venus toute entiere a sa proie attache" (She is Venus, now indistinguishable from her prey) and the beautiful Jean Ingelow ballad for which Arthur Sullivan wrote the music,

Ah, maid most dear, I am not here,
I have no place, no part,
No dwelling more by sea or shore,
But only in thy heart!
O fair dove! O fond dove!
Till night rose over the bourne,
The dove on the mast as we sailed fast,
Did mourn, and mourn, and mourn,
Did mourn, and mourn.

Most curious of all, from our point of view, is Christie's reference to WAITING FOR GODOT--Hester Argyle and Donald Craig are said to have attended an amateur production of the play in a tiny suburban town two years before the action of the novel proper begins. Indeed, seeing this play turns out to be Hester's alibi during the slaying of her mother! GODOT was then a very new play in English, though it had premiered in French three or four years before the writing of ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE. We don't expect to find Beckett in Agatha Christie, or vice versa, but a case might be made that the two playwrights and modernists had much more in common, and the bizarre comedy and overweening sadness of Vladimir and Estragon find weary analogues in the plight of the Argyle family, a collection of misfits who are all sitting around waiting for something to make their miserable lives meaningful. They don't know their salvation lies in the unlikely form of Arthur Calgary, a geophysicist whose temporary amnesia led to the crackup of the strange, totally convincing plot behind Rachel Argyle's murder.

All the characters speak of the "calamity of the innocent," but Christie's theme here is really forgiveness. How do the children she adopted forgive Rachel Argyle for tearing them away from their blood kin? How does the polio-stricken air ace Philip Durrant forgive the fate that condemned him to a wheelchair? How does Calgary forgive himself for letting Jacko perish in prison? Though it has its longueurs and dead patches, ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE is amazingly beautiful, reflective, yes, and suspenseful. It's not easy to see who did it, and the ending is a classic surprise. Christie's plots are Apollonian and worked out with a clinician's perfection, but her storytelling is surprisingly intuitive, moving sideways, working by allusion and rhyme.

The three love stories in the book, too, are all gracefully done. One forgets how much Christie knew about love (and betrayal). And how about that child ruining Tina's alibi by reporting the landing of a sputnik! (That turns out to be Tina's much-bruited "bubble car," a sensation of the 1956-57 period that were the closest contemporary design has come to sn actual spacecraft-inspired mass-produced car.)

This is a fairly good mystery, the characters are interesting, Christie tries to keep you guessing, but the bottom line is, that this mystery is just not as good as her others. Although there are some interesting twists towards the end, the murderer's identity does not seem that surprising, and some details (one in particular) just seem sort of tacked on. This causes one to feel somewhat unsatisfied with the ending. Still, it was enjoyable for a light read, and it has some worthwhile aspects. One of the interesting things about this mystery is that it does not involve any of her usual detectives (Poirot, Miss Marple, Parker Pyne -- any others? I'm a hard core Poirot fan myself). You might try to find at your local library before you buy it, however, since you probably won't want to read it again.

De acordo com a justiça, Jacko Argyle matou sua mãe.
A sentença foi prisão perpétua, mas quando o Dr. Arthur Calgary chega com uma prova que confirma sua inocência, é tarde demais. Jacko morreu atrás das grades, de pneumonia.
As revelações trazidas à tona reabrem velhas feridas na família, deixando a impressão de que o verdadeiro assassino atacará novamente.
Este é um livro em que os detetives famosos de Agatha Christie não aparecem - nada de Poirot nem Miss Marple. Mas, Arthur Calgary é um personagem muito interessante, uma pessoa comum, alguém que poderia ser um amigo nosso.
Este livro mostra de forma muito sagaz, como a caça de um assassino afeta as pessoas envolvidas, suspeitas ou não, culpadas ou inocentes. Todos tentando descobrir o criminoso. Explora os limites da culpa e da inocência.