Customer Reviews

Remembrance (Inspirational S)

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

 

 

Of all Agatha Christie's books this one might be the least well known. We all know AND THEN THERE WERE NONE and DEATH ON THE NILE, but who among us, even the collectors, keeps a copy of REMEMBRANCE on their shelves? The fact that I am apparently the first to review a book by one of the world's most popular authors is itself significant evidence of its rarity.

The publishers don't give a date for the writing of REMEMBRANCE but they do tell us that it was written in the wake of meeting archaeologist Max Mallowan and marrying him, which happened in 1930, so it must have been written in the thirties or so? Hard to pin it down any further. Richard Allen's period illustrations are largely squares, with a occasional fuzzy shape to correspond with a certain fuzziness and squishiness of diction. And they are of puzzling shapes, though a uniform loveliness, particularly if you, like Agatha Christie, are fond of wandering through the graveyards in the shadow of West English steeples. The man sits alone, like in a Beckett play, gradually forgetting the woman whom he once loved, and yet her love burns (in some unexpected place, though Allen gives as a tidy, literal hearth with a fire blazing high) to keep him warm even though he's onto someone else now.

It is an odd conceit, that the dead remember more than the living, and Christie seems to realize this by putting the whole thing in the conditional tense: if the woman dies first, and God willing this isn't so, then the man is bound to forget her. A single hawk makes a graceful parabola up through the clouds, a country road loses itself in the perspective of distant hills; a pair of swans faces different directions and glides across a pleasant stream in the rain, each drop forcing a perfect circle in the water's surface. The couple's love letters lie unfolded on a table, but they're too dim, too illegible, to read. Very Beckett indeed. "Ay! Rosemary--that's for remembrance!"