Christie, Agatha -- Elephants Can Remember (1972)
Review by Nick Fuller
2/5
Christie’s penultimate novel and last readable book is a very vague affair. The telling consists of paragraphs lasting 1 ½ pages, riddled with inconsistencies, which are unwanted and dangerous in an investigation into the past, especially when no one is quite sure whether the fall of the psychotic twin sister over a cliff and the ensuing suicide pact took place ten, twelve, fourteen, fifteen or even twenty years ago. For this reason, neither author nor reader have any idea of how old the characters (all of whom are very flat) actually are. The detection consists of serial interviewing of tenuously linked witnesses (the “elephants”) by Mrs. Oliver, who is as forgetful as the elephants are not. Poirot plays the armchair oracle rôle of Dr. Priestley, whom, speaking pedantic but natural English and shorn of both foreign phrases and character traits, he resembles. These obscure the plot, which, as always with Christie, is interesting, if imperfectly realised. Had she fleshed out the characters, rather than leaving them as skeletons in the closet, and if more work had been put into it, it could have been one of the most interesting late Christies, with a genuine sense of tragedy about the book. As it is, let the book limp its way to the elephants’ graveyard.
Query: have women worn wigs for fashionable reasons since the 18th century?
Comments (1)
Jon said
at 9:07 am on Jan 27, 2010
Blurb: Hercule Poirot was expecting a visit from his friend Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, the novelist. There was something, it seemed, that she wanted to ask him. He wondered why she sounded so doubtful about what she was doing. Was she bringing him some difficult problem? Or was she acquainting him with a crime? As Poirot knew well, it could be anything with Mrs. Oliver! The most commonplace things or the most extraordinary things were all alike to her.
His mind ran back over the years—the various happenings in which she had embroiled him. A murder hunt for a Charity which had unexpectedly included a real murder. A girl who had once interrupted his breakfast to tell him that she thought she had committed a murder but wasn’t quite sure about it. Mrs. Oliver had identified the girl, but had then managed to get herself knocked on the head with a near escape from getting herself killed.
Would this visit entail danger—or merely a dilemma? He had no idea that what was going to be laid before him would be a double suicide that had taken place twelve years ago and been satisfactorily dealt with by the Police Force of Great Britain.
He did not foresee that, at first unwillingly, he would become enmeshed—not in crime as crime—but because of two young people who loved each other and wanted to marry. He was not to suspect that this girl and boy would matter to him. The places he would go, the questions he would ask, the activities in which he would engage, the pity he would feel, the depths of tragedy he would plumb…
None of these things did he foresee as he replaced the receiver on the telephone. All that was in his mind was that Mrs. Oliver was coming to see him after dinner and that she had a problem of some kind—about which she wanted his advice. Oh well, he didn’t expect there would be any difficulty about that.
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