(With spoilers)
The most interesting thing to note first thing about Endless Night is Agatha Christie's own internal comfort with her own views. If we go back to And Then There Were None, and ignore the time marching on unfortunate implications of all the previous edits (poem dictated), then within the story itself, the racism of Vera Claythorne is immediately picked up as a thing not to be countenanced by Emily Brent. Brent is of course one of the more terrifying figures in all of Christie, but that doesn't detract from the point, and it is backed up by the murderer's view that the man who left locals to die for his own greed and safety in Africa was as equal bad as the child murderer. There are little moments all through her earlier works, as if the writer herself has to add in "yes, society and these characters have horrid views, but I am aware that these views are bad".
When we come to Endless Night, written at the end of Christie's career, there are some unsettling moments around the use of the old gipsy woman in the story, but this time, instead of adding some Author Avatar into the mix to reassure the audience, Christie carries on. She trusts that her audience will know there is a reason for it, and it comes with the reveal that not only is our narrator a horrible piece of work, but that he has used the societal everyday racism around to try and cover up his crimes. The book turns from being one which looked like an aging reactionary slipping, to one which asks pertinent questions about the society of 1967. We are a year off the Rivers of Blood speech but the underlying attitudes were already in place, and here we have Christie viciously telling her own readers that society would more easily believe in curses and the fear of the unknown traveler, than accept that a seemingly friendly man may plot to kill his own wife.
For the narrator is our killer. We return to the twist of forty years previously, but, arguably, it is not a twist. It is a mistake to read Endless Night as a Christie crime novel. True, there is a crime, but it occurs late in the day, and what we have up to that point is a slow moving feeling of foreboding. It is Christie as psychological horror, more Turn of the Screw than Murder on the Orient Express, and the elements which make the story a Whodunnit were added by editorial demand to the text near publication, and throw holes into the near seamless plot as a result.
The most interesting thing to note first thing about Endless Night is Agatha Christie's own internal comfort with her own views. If we go back to And Then There Were None, and ignore the time marching on unfortunate implications of all the previous edits (poem dictated), then within the story itself, the racism of Vera Claythorne is immediately picked up as a thing not to be countenanced by Emily Brent. Brent is of course one of the more terrifying figures in all of Christie, but that doesn't detract from the point, and it is backed up by the murderer's view that the man who left locals to die for his own greed and safety in Africa was as equal bad as the child murderer. There are little moments all through her earlier works, as if the writer herself has to add in "yes, society and these characters have horrid views, but I am aware that these views are bad".
When we come to Endless Night, written at the end of Christie's career, there are some unsettling moments around the use of the old gipsy woman in the story, but this time, instead of adding some Author Avatar into the mix to reassure the audience, Christie carries on. She trusts that her audience will know there is a reason for it, and it comes with the reveal that not only is our narrator a horrible piece of work, but that he has used the societal everyday racism around to try and cover up his crimes. The book turns from being one which looked like an aging reactionary slipping, to one which asks pertinent questions about the society of 1967. We are a year off the Rivers of Blood speech but the underlying attitudes were already in place, and here we have Christie viciously telling her own readers that society would more easily believe in curses and the fear of the unknown traveler, than accept that a seemingly friendly man may plot to kill his own wife.
For the narrator is our killer. We return to the twist of forty years previously, but, arguably, it is not a twist. It is a mistake to read Endless Night as a Christie crime novel. True, there is a crime, but it occurs late in the day, and what we have up to that point is a slow moving feeling of foreboding. It is Christie as psychological horror, more Turn of the Screw than Murder on the Orient Express, and the elements which make the story a Whodunnit were added by editorial demand to the text near publication, and throw holes into the near seamless plot as a result.
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