Elephants Can Remember
49. Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 224 p.
This definitely isn’t one of my favourite Christies, although it was entertaining. The truth is, I’m not fond of any of the books Christie wrote after 1965’s At Bertram’s Hotel (although that one remains one of my favourites.) I find them mostly vague and confusing, and this one is no exception, although I enjoyed it more than most.
At a literary luncheon, a woman called Burton-Cox confronts Mrs. Ariadne Oliver about an old tragedy. Mrs. Burton-Cox’s son is involved with Celia Ravenscroft, one of Mrs. Oliver’s goddaughters, and may be contemplating marriage. Mrs. Burton-Cox wants to know whether it was Celia’s mother who killed her father, or the other way around…
Although she firmly resolved not to pass on information to such an odious woman, Mrs. Oliver does become interested in the case. Teaming up with her old friend, Hercule Poirot, she goes in search of “elephants”—people who may remember something, however inaccurate, about the fifteen-year-old case.
This book strained my credulity in a few ways. Fifteen years isn’t a particularly long time, and it seems absurd that it would be difficult to find people who remembered a murder-suicide case. Even in the book, the difficulty wasn’t so much finding people who remembered, as much as finding people who had ever known anything in the first place. Both Mrs. Oliver and, very uncharacteristically, Poirot, were unbelievably vague about dates and sequences of events, and even sometimes about names—so much so that I had a hard time figuring out what was supposed to have happened to who, and when.
There was also Desmond Burton-Cox’s total dismissal of his mother who, although she wasn’t his birth mother, adopted him as a baby. I really don’t buy into Christie’s idea that adopted children feel and think so differently from their adoptive parents that they don’t truly love them, unless that love is inspired by gratitude. I shouldn’t let this get me riled up, since I already knew that in Christie’s world, adoptions are always bad news, but for some reason it particularly annoyed me here.
I suppose the main problem I had with this book is that there was no sense of urgency about it. The deaths were in the past, and there wasn’t really any question of further danger to anyone investigating the crime, or to anyone else involved with the case. The only reason for the investigation was curiosity, and I found I didn’t much care what the solution was. Even when it was revealed, it just wasn’t very interesting to me.
All this isn’t to say that Elephants Can Remember is a bad book, because it isn’t. Ariadne Oliver is always entertaining, and the writing was good. I might even have liked this more if I hadn’t just read so many Christies that, in my opinion, are much, much better.
Pages read: 13,627
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Ariadne Oliver, Poirot
