Agatha Christie, young cads, and the breaking of my brain
It's been a while now since I re-read Taken at the Flood/There is a Tide (having previously read it in my teens and forgotten almost all of it), and I meant to make a post then, but I never did and I guess now is as good a time as any.
Simply put, this is where Agatha Christie's ideas of young attractive men broke my brain completely.
Now, reading Agatha Christie in general means having to ignore a lot of crap, ranging from her tics in storytelling (for instance, if someone says something in the line of "That bullet was meant for me!" they're almost always the murderer) to her creepy prejudices. And one of the things I've always sighed a bit about is her taste in men.
Of course, I'm not a shallow individual, so I take a shine to people of all sorts. :-) But to the extent that I have a preference, it's for people who are dark, saucy, and a bit on the fey side. And if there's a man even remotely like that in a Christie book (the women fare a little better) they're either the killer, or about to die a nasty death. Or they're Anthony Browne. I'm ever so grateful for Anthony Browne. But really, it got to the point where I read a short story and went, "Oh, I remember this one from TV. One of the men did it. But which one?" And I could tell from the physical description of those men.
TatF/TiaT is fairly predictable from that point of view. The young woman of the story, Lynn Marchmont, has been out in the war and is torn between her old fiancé Rowley Cloade, and the interloper David Hunter. Rowley is sturdy, reliable and not very adventurous. David is an Irish (dark!) ne'er-do-well whose sister married the Cloades' rich relative, who then died. David's mission in life is to keep the money and stop the Cloades from getting it. (Lower-class gold-digger keeping the upper-class from having what's rightfully theirs! Also, saucy!) In order for us not to get attached, Christie keeps reminding us, even as Lynn falls for David, what a Very Bad Man he is.
Thus it is no great surprise when David turns out to be a murderer (of course he is) while Rowley is a good guy who just happens to have punched a guy to death, which, sheesh, could happen to anyone.
No, the brain-breaking bit is this: When Lynn tells Rowley she's leaving him, he tries to strangle her, and is only stopped by Poirot showing up. Rowley is wrecked by guilt, but Poirot thinks nothing of it, and as for Lynn, she instantly changes her mind: why, Rowley is all kinds of dangerous now and not at all as boring as she'd thought! She can get married to him after all!
This is the part where I stared at the book and went, "Really, Agatha?" Because while I might have lamented her tendency to extrapolate evilness from character traits that aren't in themselves evil, this showed such a complete lack of understanding of what might make a man like David Hunter attractive in the first place.
It's like she went "But he's BAD!" about attractive men so often that, when that didn't work, she drew the conclusion that "Girls must like the bad!" Rather than taking into consideration such questions as, "Which man would be more likely to have read the Kama Sutra?" or "Which man would be more likely to say, 'hey, babe, forget about the dishes, let's go to Rome for the weekend'?" or even "Which man is physically more appealing?" she went straight to, "Look, the dull home-sitter could also kill you in a fit of rage, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?"
All I can compare it to is the parent whose child keeps eating ice cream and refusing spinach, no matter how much the parent complains that spinach is good for you and ice cream rots the teeth. One day, desperate, the parent soaks the spinach in sugar: "Look, now that rots your teeth too, will you eat it now?"
You took away the one advantage the spinach has over the ice cream: that it's good for you. That's not improvement.
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/620290.html and has
comments there.
Simply put, this is where Agatha Christie's ideas of young attractive men broke my brain completely.
Now, reading Agatha Christie in general means having to ignore a lot of crap, ranging from her tics in storytelling (for instance, if someone says something in the line of "That bullet was meant for me!" they're almost always the murderer) to her creepy prejudices. And one of the things I've always sighed a bit about is her taste in men.
Of course, I'm not a shallow individual, so I take a shine to people of all sorts. :-) But to the extent that I have a preference, it's for people who are dark, saucy, and a bit on the fey side. And if there's a man even remotely like that in a Christie book (the women fare a little better) they're either the killer, or about to die a nasty death. Or they're Anthony Browne. I'm ever so grateful for Anthony Browne. But really, it got to the point where I read a short story and went, "Oh, I remember this one from TV. One of the men did it. But which one?" And I could tell from the physical description of those men.
TatF/TiaT is fairly predictable from that point of view. The young woman of the story, Lynn Marchmont, has been out in the war and is torn between her old fiancé Rowley Cloade, and the interloper David Hunter. Rowley is sturdy, reliable and not very adventurous. David is an Irish (dark!) ne'er-do-well whose sister married the Cloades' rich relative, who then died. David's mission in life is to keep the money and stop the Cloades from getting it. (Lower-class gold-digger keeping the upper-class from having what's rightfully theirs! Also, saucy!) In order for us not to get attached, Christie keeps reminding us, even as Lynn falls for David, what a Very Bad Man he is.
Thus it is no great surprise when David turns out to be a murderer (of course he is) while Rowley is a good guy who just happens to have punched a guy to death, which, sheesh, could happen to anyone.
No, the brain-breaking bit is this: When Lynn tells Rowley she's leaving him, he tries to strangle her, and is only stopped by Poirot showing up. Rowley is wrecked by guilt, but Poirot thinks nothing of it, and as for Lynn, she instantly changes her mind: why, Rowley is all kinds of dangerous now and not at all as boring as she'd thought! She can get married to him after all!
This is the part where I stared at the book and went, "Really, Agatha?" Because while I might have lamented her tendency to extrapolate evilness from character traits that aren't in themselves evil, this showed such a complete lack of understanding of what might make a man like David Hunter attractive in the first place.
It's like she went "But he's BAD!" about attractive men so often that, when that didn't work, she drew the conclusion that "Girls must like the bad!" Rather than taking into consideration such questions as, "Which man would be more likely to have read the Kama Sutra?" or "Which man would be more likely to say, 'hey, babe, forget about the dishes, let's go to Rome for the weekend'?" or even "Which man is physically more appealing?" she went straight to, "Look, the dull home-sitter could also kill you in a fit of rage, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?"
All I can compare it to is the parent whose child keeps eating ice cream and refusing spinach, no matter how much the parent complains that spinach is good for you and ice cream rots the teeth. One day, desperate, the parent soaks the spinach in sugar: "Look, now that rots your teeth too, will you eat it now?"
You took away the one advantage the spinach has over the ice cream: that it's good for you. That's not improvement.
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/620290.html and has
comments there.