"AGATHA CHRISTIE - RADICAL CONSERVATIVE THINKER"


It is only here, in her homeland, that Agatha Christie has not been given the respect she deserves. Europeans as eminent as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco describe her as "brilliant" and "extraordinary" without a blush; Americans as distinguished as Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder viewed her as one of the most exciting novelists of her time. The King of the self-consciously highbrow French literary scene, Michel Houllebecq, write a hymn of praise to her in his latest novel, ‘Platform’. He lauds in particular her 1946 work ‘The Hollow’ as "a strange, poignant book; these are deep waters [she writes about], with powerful undercurrents." Yet the English insist on seeing her as fodder for the tourists and perhaps the regions; a writer of elaborate crossword puzzles, not literature.

The verdict of the late novelist Anthony Burgess accurately summarises the English intelligentsia’s view of Christie. "She put people off reading the higher art of detection – from the Moonstone to Gaudy
Night – by setting a lower standard and making it somehow canonical," he wrote in the 1980s. "If she was the queen of the whodunit, she used her royal rank to condone flimsy characterisation, plentiful cliché,
implausibility, and verbal vacuity… All we have [in her novels] is an abstract puzzle minimally clothed in the garments of upper middle-class morality."

The literary critic Edmund Wilson once famously sniffed, "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" (The obvious retort to this is – err, about a billion people, which is rather more than will ever care about your writings, Mr Wilson.) One small fact reveals the nature of much of the Christie-bashing lit-crit pack: Wilson had not even read the famous 1926 novel when he wrote his essay. Indeed, he only ever looked at one of her works, the rather atypical ‘Death Comes As The End’, a strange, not entirely effective story set entirely in Pre-Dynastic Egypt.

There seems to be no limit to English academic’s haughty contempt for Christie. Critic Peter Lennon claimed that "her dialogue is tinnitus to the ear", and that her dénouements were ineffective because "you are not shocked that one of the pieces of cardboard has committed a felony nor do you rejoice that a brown paper bag with a perm has not."

It would be easy to join in this sneering – but for one problem. How, if Christie wrote such rubbish, can we explain the fact that her works have resonated even at the farthest extremes of geography and history? In Buchenwald concentration camp, Jewish inmates acted out an amateur production of ‘Ten Little Niggers’, and several later claimed that this helped them retain their will to live. The Tupamaros guerrillas, who kidnapped the British ambassador to Uruguay Sir Geoffrey Jackson in 1970, adopted Miss Marple as their honorary leader. They believed that she embodied justice. Christie’s works sold over ten million copies in the Arab world alone in the 1990s. Something interesting is going on here, and it is not a universal taste for rubbish.

The answer cannot be found in Christie’s straightforward biography. She was born into an uber-Victorian family in the uber-Victorian coastal town of Torquay in 1890, as the triumphant Victorian era was sailing peacefully towards the Somme. Other than her famous disappearance – which has been analysed to death elsewhere – and her extensive world travel, Christie’s life was rather uneventful. She loathed and avoided publicity in a way that would be unimaginable to contemporary populist authors. She was so cripplingly shy that when she arrived at the Mousetrap’s tenth anniversary party at the Savoy, she
uncomplainingly allowed a doorman who didn’t recognise her to turn her away. She returned home, downcast, and cried. In her twenties, she was once returned to her mother at a dance by a gentleman who explained, "Here is your daughter. She has learned to dance. You had better teach her to talk now."

Her famously timid nature has, however, left a false impression of Christie as a woman who retreated from the world and then made up stories based on a constricted, upper-middle class world view. Far from
it: this is a woman who, after she was dumped by her husband, took her daughter on a world tour where she taught herself how to surf and bagged herself a notoriously dishy man 15 years her junior. When she became engaged to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, he asked her if she minded marrying a man whose profession was "digging up the dead." She placed her hand on his and replied, "Darling, I adore corpses and stiffs."

The Christie recorded by history seems likeable, dry and clever: but this cannot account for the fact that she is the best-selling author in human history after the team who complied the Bible. The obvious explanation is her capacity for finding every possible permutation of the conventional detective story twist: indeed, she was so successful in this pursuit that almost nobody tries in the genre any more. To give just a few examples: she created mysteries where the narrator was the murderer (Roger Ackroyd), the entire cast were the murderers (Murder on the Orient Express), nobody was the murderer (it was suicide in Elephants Never Forget), and even where Poirot was the murderer (the extraordinary Curtain, Poirot’s final appearance). If you are ever tempted to imagine that writing plots like Christie’s is an easy activity, try adapting one of her novels for the stage, as I did a few years ago with my colleague Sarah Punshon. If we tampered with one plot device in ‘The Secret Adversary’, all the others untangled: her works are a delicate ecology where every line feeds off every other. We soon realised we needed some kind of visual chart showing the progress and location of the main characters. Three days later, the walls of my kitchen were literally hidden behind a massive chart worthy of Steven Hawking’s physics equations. I received rather strange looks when a plumber arrived and had to peel back large pages marked ‘Plan now to kill Jane! Take her to house in Soho and drug her.’

But the plots alone do not explain Christie. No: I believe that the great unappreciated aspect of her work is that she was an intensely and relentlessly political thinker. No, don’t throw your copy ofProspect to one side in derision.

The first non-family member to read Christie’s fiction was the novelist Eden Phillpotts. He told her to "try and cut all moralisations out of your novels; you aremuch too fond of them." He missed the point. Christie – a genius when it came to narrative – did not write, as is so often supposed, solely to tell fabulously intricate stories. Moral and political instruction is at the core of every Christie novel. In the Middle
East at the height of the Second World War, Graham Greene approached her to ask if she would be prepared to write pro-Allied propaganda. She declined – at least in part because she was already propagandising expertly for her own causes.

Hmmm, you may be wondering – I missed the novel where Miss Marple offers her interpretation of ‘Das Capital’. You can’t quite recall the book where Poirot leads a revolution in a South American country. This is fair enough, but there is a sustained political analysis in Agatha’s novels, and it is explicitly discussed in almost every text. To some extent, the genre itself is conservative. The film critic Peter Canby has argued that "whodunnits are politically conservative, being artefacts of a well-ordered world where all questions have answers, all debts are paid and all crises rise and fall with tidal predictability… [it] soothes the readers and helps to put him to sleep at the end of a day spent in a very different world." But Christie took this further: she had, as Houllebeq argues, "a radical theoretical engagement" with Burkean conservatism. At a time of massive social transformations in areas as fundamental to individual identity as gender, family and class, Agatha offered the soothing balm of Burkean conservatism. She offers an eternal England, a natural order that will always act spontaneously against evil to restore its own rural sense of calm. There is a clear natural order to Christie’s world, and – in true Burkean style - it is only disrupted by greed, wickedness or misguided political ambition. The world is not – as it seems so often – chaotic and terrifying. No, as Poirot explains in ‘Appointment with Death’, "the absolute logic of events is fascinating and orderly."

Her work conforms to Burkean conservatism in every respect: justice rarely comes from the state. Rather, it arises from within civil society – a private detective, a clever old spinster. Indeed, what is Miss
Marple but the perfect embodiment of Burke’s thought? She has almost infinite wisdom because she has lived so very long (by the later novels, she is barely able to move and, by some calculations, over 100). She has slowly – like parliament and all traditional bodies, according to Burke – accrued "the wisdom of the ages", and this is the key to her success. From her solitary spot in a small English village, she has learned everything about human nature. Wisdom resides, in Christie and Burke’s worlds, in the very old and the very ordinary.

The novels are shot through with a Burkean fear of enlightenment rationalism. There is a persistent fear of the young and those with grand Archimedean social projects. Christie’s greatest anxiety, she once
explained, was of "idealists who want to make us happy by force." The minute a character is described as an idealist in one of her novels, you’ve found your murderer. Any rational attempt to supersede the
‘natural’ order is terrifying for her: she could have scripted Stanley baldwin’s comment about David Lloyd George that he "is a dynamic force, and a dynamic force is a very dangerous thing." In ‘They Came to Baghdad’, a rational plan for a New World Order is revealed to be a veil for absolutist fascism. In ‘They Do It With Mirrors’, a plan to establish an island which would be administered by (and eventually
rehabilitate) young offenders degenerates into psychosis. In ‘Destination Unknown’, a communistic scientific community turns out to be a veil for a crazed megalomaniac. This list could go on for a very
long time.

Her protagonists stand, novel after novel, against those who seek to disrupt the natural order and interpret the world with a misleading ‘rationalism’. As one of her heroes explains, "We’re humble-minded
men. We don’t expect to save the world, only pick up one or two broken pieces and remove a spanner or two when it’s jamming up the works." Or, as another heroine asks, "Isn’t muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that’s imposed?"

In its ugliest moments, Christie’s conservatism crossed over into a contempt for Jews, who are so often associated with rationalist political philosophies and a ‘cosmopolitanism’ that is antithetical to the Burkean paradigm of the English village. There is a streak of anti-Semitism running through the pre-1950s novels which cannot be denied even by her admirers. ‘The Mysterious Mr Quinn’ has an ugly passage about "men of Hebraic extraction, sallow men with hooked noses, wearing flamboyant jewellery." ‘Peril At End House’ has a character referred to as "the long-nosed Mr Lazarus", of whom somebody says,
"he’s a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one." Against this, it is worth pointing out that her novel ‘Giant’s Bread’ (written under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott) features an extremely sympathetic portrait of the Levinnes, a Jewish family who suffer from anti-Semitism in England. Christie’s hostility to Jewswas, I suspect, more political than personal (and noless reprehensible for that).

The other aspect of her conservatism which seems most unsavoury today is her hostility to feminism. She believed that Victorian women had a privileged place which women’s liberation – another rationalist
movement tampering with the natural order – threatened to undermine. In the 1960s, she was sent a questionnaire by an Italian magazine investigating the attitudes of prominent women towards feminism. In
response to a question about the cause of women’s increasingly active role in the workplace, Agatha attributed it to "the foolishness of women in relinquishing their position of privilege obtained after many centuries of civilisation. Primitive women toil incessantly. We seem determined to return to that state voluntarily."

Christie’s ouevre up until, say, ‘Cat Amongst the Pigeons’ in the late 1950s is an intriguing – if conventional - study in Burkean philosophy. What makes her more than that – what pushes her work into a
higher realm – is that she was a clever enough woman to realise that the Burkean order she loved was becoming less and less tenable as social change accelerated. Often, the novels she wrote as an old
woman from the 1960s until her death in 1974 are dismissed as inferior to the more famous early works, and it is undoubtedly the case that the plots are less sharp and imaginative. But I have always believed that they are the most intriguing: they chart the nervous breakdown of Burke’s England, and the intellectual bankruptcy of a conservatism derived from Disraeli and Baldwin, better than any other writer I know.

The best way to illustrate this is to look at two novels which almost book-end her oeuvre: her second novel, ‘The Secret Adversary’, written in 1921, and her penultimate work, ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’,
written in 1970. Both are explicitly political works, yet the calm, certain conservatism of Adversary has, by 1970, disintegrated into a chaotic, trembling fear of change.

‘The Secret Adversary’ is an irresistible, bizarre reactionary fable written at the height of public anxieties about a general strike and the possibility of a British revolution. Tommy and Tuppence – Christie’s most under-rated recurring characters – are a sprightly young couple recently demobbed from the First World War forces and in search of a distraction from their tedious new lives. Gradually, they begin to investigate a powerful man "who lives in the shadows" known only as ‘Mr Brown’. He is a figure at the heart of the English establishment who is seeking to destabilise the nation and forment anarchy so that he
can seize absolute power for himself. Gradually – in a politically outrageous development – it emerges that Brown is secretly controlling almost every progressive force in Britain: the trade unions, Irish nationalism, the Labour Party and others. It is even implied that he was behind the Russian Revolution.

In several brief, lucid passages, Christie dramatises the bourgeois fears of social disorder in a way that has yet to be bettered. One young thug fantasises about "diamonds and pearls rolling in the gutter," an
image which is central to the novel as the ultimate signifier of the breakdown of all that is decent. Mr Brown is, of course, apprehended and English order restored by the last page. What is striking in relation to the later works is the confidence with which Christie imagines social order can be restored: Britain is brought to the brink of revolution, but the apprehension of one man (who turns out to be a King’s Counsel and close friend of the Prime Minister) puts all those social anxieties back in the box. It is not hard to see why this would have been reassuring to a 1920s middle class readership: it applies the same model for extirpating evil to the political sphere as Christie applies to the world of the English village. Miss Marple catches the murderer and the world goes back to the way it was before the awful act took place; Tommy and Tuppence catch the revolutionary, and the world goes back to the way it was before the political troubles began. Burke’s principles are again central: the natural order is only disrupted by malice; society tends towards a benevolent stasis which is only interfered with by the wicked.

Skip, then, to ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’. Again, a normal person (this time an English civil servant, Sir Stafford Nye) is slightly bored and begins to stumble upon an occluded, ideologically-driven political force that seeks to destabilise the world and seize control (in this novel, they are a strange cult who worship the bastard son of Adolf Hitler). But even before the chaos begins, there is a sense that we are no longer
in Miss Marple’s England. Sir Stafford notes to himself as he reads his newspaper, "No child has been kidnapped or raped this morning. That was a nice surprise."

The simple binary division of the world in ‘Adversary’ – you are either with Mr Brown or with us – is gone too. There were the political idealists – power hungry and wrong-headed – and then there was the great mass of humanity, who sought clam and order. Yet in Frankfurt, the characters themselves see that the world has become so complex that Manichean simplicity is no longer possible. Of a secret agent, one character asks, "Is she ours or is she theirs, if you know who ‘theirs’ is?… What with the Chinese and the Ruskies and the rather queer crowd that’s behind all the student troubles and the New Mafia and the rather odd lot on South America." The conservative stability of the earlier novels has collapsed; Christie herself saw that, the further her stories travelled from the English villages of the 1930s, the less credible the belief system of that world became. Forced out into a complex urban environment – or, increasingly, an international one – she saw that Burke’s thought had no real application any longer.

Yet she obviously misses it like a lost limb. She cannot quite accept that bad things can happen without a malicious human agent standing somewhere behind them. Social change is still regarded as the result of
a bad person: she seriously suggests repeatedly in the novel that drug use is being promoted among the young to make them unthinking and therefore susceptible to the charms of a new fascistic leader. Whereas in ‘Adversary’ she ties up all the loose ends neatly, she feels unable to in ‘Passenger’ – the world she has created or, as she saw it, reflected is so inherently unstable that the old conservative resolution is no longer possible. The novel’s narrative simply peters out, and her readers are left simply with a pervasive fear and the suggestion that Christie’s – and their – nexus for understanding the world, small-cconservatism, is not longer tenable.

The journey from Adversary to Passenger was a gradual one. The rural England she loved slowly dies in the novels as the years pass. In ‘Nemesis’, written in the late 1960s, Miss Marple laments that her natural habitat is vanishing when she says of St Mary Mead, "It used to be a very pretty old-world village but of course, like everything else it’s becoming what they call ‘developed’ these days." Another character adds, "Nothing is like it used to be – it’s all spoilt – everywhere."

The death of the old conservatism has been confusing for the right across the world. Stanley Baldwin took it for granted that his conservatism would rule his party forever, but now the Tory party advocate the
rationalist politics he loathed: in her recent book, ‘Statecraft’, Margaret Thatcher explicitly endorses the US constitutional model over the evolutionary Burkean constitution of Britain. She sees that her old
conservative world is dying, and so is the way she understood it, and she would, I suspect, have recoiled from the neocons.

The Burkean conservatism that Christie loved is now officially dead. Nobody seriously espouses it any longer, and when John Major tried to play some of its tunes a decade ago he sounded ridiculous. There are a few isolated people – Roger Scruton, the Salisbury Review and Prince Charles spring to mind – who try to revive it, but they are an eccentric fringe. I am not a conservative, or anything like it, but the closest I have ever come to seeing its appeal was when I read Christie. She is a political propagandist and literary figure of remarkable power.

The philosophy she espouses – of a world stable and ordered if only these pesky progressives wouldn’t make such an unseemly fuss – remains across the world a far more powerful force than many of us on the left admit. Some people will always resist the appeal of Enlightenment optimism in favour of a mythical Burkean natural order that they believe we tamper with at our peril. If the neoconservatives and Wilsonians (I bunch myself in the latter category) who today are trying to restructure the Middle East want to understand why this is, then the novels of Agatha Christie are a very good place to start.


By Johann Hari ( the Independent On Sunday, October 2003).







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