The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

I am trying to make up for lost time here! I cannot believe nothing has been posted on the blog since July (apart from Sunday's offering). I had such good intentions of keeping it going, but my husband got ill again, and life has been hectic with his latest round of hospital appointments. Anyway, as I've said before, this week is The 1962 Club, organised by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, so I'm doing my best to join in. 

Agatha Christie has featured in many previous Clubs, and the current one is no exception. Usually I really enjoy her Miss Marple books, but I struggled a bit with The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, and am not sure why. There are some very good things in it, but I don't think it will become one of my favourites. Like many people, I watched the old BBC dramatisation, with the excellent Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, and the more recent ITV version with Julia McKenzie starring as the spinster sleuth, but I don't think I've read the novel before - if I have, I've completely forgotten it.

It's quite slow moving, there are some loose ends that don't lead anywhere, and are never explained, and there's a lot of domestic detail that doesn't add anything to the plot - I normally like domestic detail, especially in 'Golden Age' crime novels, but this time there was too much. And I always feel Christie never quite adjusted to life in the 1960s, and the novels she wrote during that period somehow seem a little less real than her earlier work.

Agatha Christie

Anyway, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side centres on the death of Heather Badcock. organiser of the local St John Ambulance, who dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail at a fete held to raise money for the charity. Police assume the intended victim was American film star Marina Gregg, the new owner of Gossington Hall, where the fete is held - after all, who would want to murder Heather, a kindly woman who always wants to help people, even if her efforts are not always appreciated. Other deaths follow, along with mysterious telephone calls, death threat notes, and poisoned coffee. Is someone really trying to kill Marina? And if so, who? And why? Or, however unlikely, could Heather have been the target? 

There are plenty of suspects, including Heather's downtrodden husband; Marina's current husband the film director Jason Rudd; a wealthy movie mogul who was spurned by Marina, and his film star wife who was once married to one of Marina's ex-husbands. Scotland Yard sends Chief Inspector Dermot Cradock to investigate, and he enlists the help of the redoubtable Miss Marple, who is already trying to unravel the mysterious goings-on at the Hall and the nearby film studios.

She is particularly interested in her friend Dolly Bantry's account of a meeting between Heather and Marina Gregg, and the odd expression on the film star's face, which reminds Dolly of Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott, which is referred to several times throughout the book:

"Out flew the web and floated wide—

The mirror crack'd from side to side;

"The curse is come upon me", cried

The Lady of Shalott."

John William Waterhouse's painting of The Lady of
Shalott - I've included because I love it!

The Lady of Shalott, for those who don't know the poem, could only look on the world through the reflection in her mirror, and the tapestry she was weaving - otherwise she will die. There are parallels, I think, with Marina Gregg, who is also unable to face reality, and whose life is shattered when a long hidden event from the past reppears. Dolly, a former owner of Gossington Hall, is much more astute than I remember her being in The Body in the Library, and offers some useful insights into Marina's character.  She explains how the actress began to say all the usual things. "You know, sweet, unspoilt, natural, charming, the usual bag of tricks," she tells Miss Marple. Christie builds Marina's character bit by bit, seeing her through the eyes of staff, residents, her husband, people in the movie industry, and the police. She is insecure, craves love and affection, and adores being  the centre of attention. She can be sweet and charming when it suits her, but suffers mood swings with dramatic highs and lows - I guess these days she would be described as bi-polar.

Christie also paints a sympathetic picture of the ageing Miss Marple. In most of the books Jane Marple remains much as she was in her first appearance some 30 years earlier, and life in St Mary Mead (and elsewhere) doesn't seem to have moved on. But here Miss Marple and the world around her have changed. She is frailer than she was, and trips and falls while out on walk. She can't see clearly enough to find dropped stitches in her knitting, and can no longer do the garden - there is a man who drinks lots of tea and does very little work. There is no maid, but Cherry from the new housing estate comes in to cook and clean, and although her work is not quite up to the standard expected, she is cheerful and caring. Less caring is Miss Knight, employed by Miss Marple's nephew Raymond West to look after her following a bout of bronchitis. 

Since devoted maidservants have gone out fashion, people like Miss Marple have to rely on the Miss Knights of the world for help when they are ill. "There wasn't, Miss Marple reflected, anything wrong about the Miss Knights other than the fact that they were madly irritating. They were full of kindness, ready to feel affection towards their charges, to humour them, to be bright and cheerful with them and in general to treat them as slightly mentally afflicted children. 'But I,' said Miss Marple to herself, 'although I may be old, am not a mentally afflicted child.'" It did make me think about the way society treats the elderly, and people focus on what they think is good for pensioners, rather than considering what they actually want and enjoy.

If you want a slightly different view of the book, then read Karen's review here - she was much more enthusiastic than I have been.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

l’ve just re-read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is every bit as brilliant as it was first time around, and since it was published in 1962, I've re-posted my review for the 1962 Club, which is cheating really, but I’m sure organisers Simon and Karen. I raved about the book here when I was halfway through, because I was so surprised to discover how good Jackson is, and how much I liked this novel. I didn’t expect to enjoy it because I hated her short story The Lottery, and this slender novel is not my usual style at all. It’s bizarre, macabre, unsettling, disturbing – and utterly compelling. I was totally gripped from the opening paragraph to the last word. I just couldn’t put it down.

As I said in my previous post, Jackson writes like a dream, but the tale she tells has a nightmarish quality. Gothic horror doesn’t even begin to describe it and it’s impossible to categorise or find a comparable author. Angela Carter, Barbara Comyns, and Alice Thomas Ellis have all written strange, unconventional novels with a dark edge, and some of the short stories penned by Margaret Atwood, Sara Maitland and Sylvia Townsend Warner are very odd indeed, but I’m not sure any of them quite match Jackson when it comes to weirdly wonderful.

It’s well nigh impossible to write about We Have Always Lived in the Castle without giving the plot away, but it’s become something of a cult classic, and elements of the story seems to be so well known that perhaps spoilers don’t matter. If you don’t want to know what happens then stop reading!

Basically the narrator, Merricat (Mary Katherine Blackwood), and her sister Constance live with their Uncle Julian in a run-down family mansion. Six years ago the girls’ mother, father, aunt and brother all died when someone put arsenic in the sugar bowl. Uncle Julian survived, with his mind and body irreparably damaged; Merricat escaped poisoning because she had been sent to her room for a misdemeanour, and Constance never took sugar. However, she prepared the meal and washed the sugar bowl before the police arrived – there was a spider in it, she claimed. She was tried for murder and acquitted, though local people remain convinced of her guilt. It’s obvious that bad feeling between the Blackwoods and the villagers goes back a long away – well before the murders, but it’s never explained. Once a week Merricat runs the gauntlet of hostile, staring, jeering villagers to change library books and buy groceries, because her sister never ventures beyond the confines of house and garden.

Everything changes when Cousin Charles arrives, seeking the fortune he believes Mr Blackwood has left. He beguiles Constance. And Merricat, excluded from her sister’s new relationship, seeks a way to banish him and restore their usual way of life, but things don’t go according to plan. She sets fire to Charles’ bedroom in the hopes that he will leave, but the flames spread – and the fire brigade, having extinguished the blaze joins the crowd of villagers in systematically smashing the Blackwood home and possessions to piece. It’s every bit as terifying as the mob that stones a woman to death in The Lottery.

The girls clad themselves in table cloths and drapes (their clothes have been destroyed), and barricade themselves in the ruined house, while the villagers, ashamed of their actions, take to leaving gifts of food on the doorstep.

The past unfolds slowly, there is a feeling of unease from the outset, and the tension just keeps on rising, highlighted by the juxtaposition of everyday normality with the weird. It’s told from Merricat’s perspective, her internal musings, which are frequently very unpleasant, but always entertaining, and it soon becomes apparent that she is not merely a little odd, but deeply, deeply disturbed, and that it is she, not Constance, who is the poisoner. Yet there are times when I wondered if the sisters were complicit in the murders, and it is strange that Constance tells the police her family deserved to die. 

Merricat’s life is dominated by her protective charms and rituals – words that she mustn’t say, a buried doll, a book nailed to a tree – that go hand in had with her self-imposed rules on what she can and can’t do. It’s like some kind of instinctive sympathetic magic, but I think there’s more than that; it’s like some obsessive behavioural pattern taken to extremes. 

This all sounds very dark and chilling, and it is, but We Have Always Lived in the Castle also has one of the funniest scenes I have ever read in any novel. An old friend of the sisters’ dead mother comes to tea, accompanied by ‘little Mrs Wright’, whose avid curiosity about the murders overcomes her good manners – she can’t bring erself to drink tea or eat any of Constance’s cakes and sandwiches, but she takes a ghoulisjh interest in the details of the crime. And Uncle Julian rises to the occasion magnificently. He is a showman, displayimg his exhibits – the house, its inhabitants and their possessions - and he does it with outrageous charm, old-fashioned courtesy, and a wry sense of humour. 

“Would you like to view the dining room?” he asked. “The fatal board? I did not give evidence at the trial, you understand; my health was not equal, then or now, to the rude questions of strangers.”

“Madam.” Uncle Julian contrived a bow fron his wheel chair, and Mrs Wright hurried to reach the door and open it for him. “Directly across the hall,” Uncle Julian said, and she followed. “I admire a decently curious woman, madam; I could see at onceqq that you were devoured with a passion to view the scene of the tragedy; it happened in this very room, and we still have our dinner in here every night.”

He continues with great relish:

“The sugar bowl on the sideboard, the heavy silver sugar bowl. It is a family heirloom; my brother prized it highly. You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine. Is it still in use? you are wondering; has it been cleaned you may very well ask; was it thoroughly washed I can reassure you at once. My niece Constance washed it before the doctor or police had come.”

Amidst the horror and oddities everyday concerns loom large. Gardening, cooking, clothes are all important, as are good manners – at the end, despite everything that has happened, when villagers leave food Constance is concerned about what people would think of them if they sent the dish and cloth wrapping back dirty.

And nothing is ever explained. When terrible things happen, in fiction, as in life, we like to know why. We look for reasons, justifications, attributions of blame, anything that will make it easier to accept and understand. But Jackson offers no clues. We never know why the family were murdered or what has caused the bad feeling between the Blackwoods and the villagers, but you can see how fear, rumour and suspicion feed prejudice in small town America.