One thing we often justly credit older writers for is a precision in their use of language, usually based on etymologies drawn from their Greek or Latin roots. So when in the first sentence here the newspaper delivery boy is described as “whistling vociferously through his teeth,” I was a little put off. Can you whistle vociferously? The word is usually employed to describe people loudly expressing demands or opinions and it comes from the Latin vociferari, itself a combination of vox, meaning “voice,” and ferre, meaning “to carry.” So I’d say another way of describing someone being vociferous might be to call them “outspoken.” Does that apply to a kid on a bicycle whistling on his rounds?

The local paper he’s delivering – the North Benham News and Chipping Cleghorn Gazette – is the one that announces a murder, a notice that the villagers interpret as an invitation to a Murder Game. This makes everyone sit up in Chipping Cleghorn. And “what kind of place is Chipping Cleghorn?” you may ask, along with our old friend Sir Henry Clithering. Why, as the chief constable informs him, it’s basically Miss Marpleland:

“A large sprawling picturesque village. Butcher, baker, grocer, quite a good antique shop – two tea-shops. Self-consciously a beauty spot. Caters for the motoring tourist. Also highly residential. Cottages formerly lived in by agricultural labourers now converted and lived in by elderly spinsters and retired couples. A certain amount of building done round about in Victorian times.”

Gentrified, we might say. And if the word was current then they might have said the same in 1950, when this book was first published. A date that just doesn’t feel right. Christie’s cozies belong in a pre-WW2 era. When we hear about people who are returning vets we think they’ve seen action at the Somme, not liberated Europe from the Nazis. But this is in fact a post-WW2 world, as is evident by the prominence of “foreigners,” immigrants, or refugees/displaced people in the plot. Chief among these is the comic Mitzi, who is sure she is going to get taken away to the Gulag or a prison camp by the local constabulary, and who suspects one innocent local of being a Nazi because of “her fair hair and her blue eyes.” This is all a basket of red herrings, but timely.

I didn’t care for the book though. It has some nice moments where Miss Marple reflects on the evil people do, drawing on her copious knowledge of human nature. “Weak and kindly people are often very treacherous,” she tells us. “And if they’ve got a grudge against life it saps the little moral strength that they possess.” This last point is later repeated: “People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something.” That speaks a lot to our present grievance culture.

Unfortunately I had to toss my hands up at the complexity of the crime itself. Not only is there a convoluted back story with missing children and lines of inheritance and assumed identities to untangle, but the actual logistics of the first murder, who was standing where, the layout and furnishing of the room and the location of doorways, are impossible to visualize. Was Christie knowingly exploiting our basic inability to “see” what’s described in a novel, the immense ambiguity that always results when we try to imagine a character or a setting? Perhaps, but I just found it confusing. I had a sort of hunch as to the killer’s identity, but no idea how to get there, and the clues were impossible. The business with the lamp and the frayed wire I’m still not sure of. But one thing you can be sure of in a Christie mystery is that the killers spend a lot of time planning their crimes, which is why the big reveals at the end take so long. There’s a lot that needs to be unpacked and explained. Sometimes it works, but not when it’s this hard to follow. At the end here it seems like a comedy of revelations and it made me think Christie could fall into being too clever. And by the time she was writing this book I think that sort of thing had taken over.

Marple index

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

By Michiko Kakutani

Page I bailed on: 4

Verdict: Yes, page 4. But it’s not quite as bad as that sounds because there’s a seven-page Introduction with Roman numerals. So really I bailed on page 11. Which is still quick.

I hadn’t been expecting much. Michiko Kakutani was formerly a book reviewer for the New York Times and I didn’t think she was very good. Her writing didn’t have any spark and I don’t recall any original critical insights she’d drawn from what she read. Then she wrote a book called The Death of Truth, a topic that was fashionable in the Age of Trump. This is part of what I said about it:

Judged on its own it’s just another piece of wood on the pile, offering up an anthology of observations made by other authors, all saying similar things in different words, with little attempt at any deeper analysis or explanation.

Kakutani, who seems to have at least skimmed a lot of books, suffers from the curse of student writing, which is to quote a source or authority for everything she says, no matter how obvious or banal an observation it may be. Her conclusion, that truth is important for the proper functioning of democracy, is important, but a platitude. What we’re left with feels more like a research paper or review of the literature than a rallying cry.

The Introduction here left me feeling it was going to just be more of the same. There are the usual platitudes about the importance of the historical moment, a subject that has been examined in more depth by many other authors. In fact, I already have books on my shelf, good books too, with titles like A Decade of Disruption and The Rise of the Outsiders. Even if Kakutani made good on the promise in her Introduction to discuss these matters more fully I couldn’t see where she’d be saying anything new. This made me think of another book I relegated to the DNF files, Niall Ferguson’s Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. I called that one

nothing but a slapdash and glib collection of bits and pieces thrown at the reader only to let us know how widely Ferguson has read. Or browsed. Or had some research assistant browse. I wasn’t buying any of it. It just comes off as non-stop name-dropping and a cheap display of superficial learning in search of a coherent argument.

I skimmed through the rest of The Great Wave and got the sense it was cut from the same cloth. There’s no original thesis being argued, just a trudge through the usual headlines, with the usual bromides waiting at the end. I mean, this is how the Intro ends: “The stakes could not be higher: whether we surrender to the gathering chaos or find a way forward to protect democratic values and institutions and create a more equitable and sustainable future.” Yes, that is the question. The same question we’ve been asking for the last couple of decades. We’re aware of the problem. But Kakutani doesn’t have any answers or original thoughts to share.

The DNF files

This is so true. Back in the good old days moms could do anything. They were truly superhuman. Baking pies and cookies was the least of it.