'A Pocket Full of Rye' by Agatha Christie

A handful of grain is found in the pocket of a murdered businessman!

Let us explain. Rex Fortescue, king of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his 'counting house' office when he suffered a sudden and agonising death. On later inspection, the pockets of the deceased were found to contain rye grain. What is that all about? It was a second incident, this time in the parlour at his home, which confirmed Jane Marple's suspicion that here she was looking at a case of crime by rhyme!

MY THOUGHTS:

Here is another nursery rhyme themed murder mystery by the queen of crime that made me hum along.

Rex Fortescue, the flabby financier, is first to die, suffering a convulsive fit in his office at work over a cup of tea. Strangely enough, somebody has tipped a handful of rye into his coat pocket. His young and attractive wife, Adele, is murdered next, eating scones and honey at home. In the very same hour, Gladys the maid is strangled out at the clothesline, and the murderer clips a peg onto her nose. 

Young Inspector Neele is on the case, but it takes Miss Marple, Gladys' former employer, to point out to him the 'Sing a Song of Sixpence' pattern in the triple murder.

'The king was in his counting house, counting out his money,

The queen was in the parlour, eating bread and honey,

The maid was in the garden, hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.'

A bit of probing reveals that Fortescue was involved in a scandalous investment with the Blackbird Mines, and may have seekers of retribution on his trail. Somebody pranked him a few months earlier, with blackbirds baked in a pie. It now appears to have been a herald of doom, rather than just a tasteless practical joke. 

Inspector Neele must figure out whether Rex Fortescue's children from his first marriage, who stand to inherit, are above suspicion. His two sons appear to be straight out of the Prodigal Son parable; miserly 'good boy' Percival and likeable, reformed 'bad boy' Lancelot. There is also a daughter, Elaine, two daughters-in-law, a cantankerous old sister-in-law, and Mary Dove, the serene, efficient and all-knowing young housekeeper. 

Miss Marple manages to piece together an audaciously wicked, far-fetched and twisted scenario. 'Wickedness is wickedness and must be punished,' is her refrain more than once, suggesting that Dame Agatha herself really meant it. The killer is definitely a total arse.

My favourite line is Inspector Neele asking Miss Marple, 'How do you think that I'm ever going to be able to prove all this?' Well may he ask. However, Agatha Christie sprinkles a light dusting of tiny clues for us readers, but they could simply be read over as descriptive writing. Especially since we have to sift them out of all the equally scattered red herrings. It was well done.

There are dated aspects evident about 1953, when this was published. It annoys me that if a girl is regarded as 'plain' (or rather doesn't have conventional beauty), then people assume the men in their lives must have an ulterior motive in pursuing a relationship. This is true of both Elaine Fortescue and Gladys Martin. It's insulting to the girls, possibly even more insulting to the guys, to be thought so shallow, and makes me cringe at the cynicism of any character who voices such a thought.

Hopefully we've moved on a bit.

🌟🌟🌟½

Some texts about living with abundance

Here are a couple more reviews in the spirit of Non-Fiction November.

The Art of Abundance by Dennis Merritt

For millennia, humanity's collective unconscious has been saturated with ideas of scarcity, and belief in not enough to go around. We see it every day when we scroll down social media, so we can't help getting ourselves infiltrated with ideas of lack and limitation. In Merritt's opinion, it's a short-sighted mistake. In actual fact, says he, the universe is generous, over-expanding and replenishing itself. If we take care to look for it when we venture out into nature, we'll see such evidence as sand grains comprising soft, lustrous beaches, droplets becoming gushing waterfalls, and clover leaves forming verdant green pastureland. Abundance is our birthright and we need to become comfortable with the notion of its availability for us too. 

He counsels us to stay focused and intentional, for a focused mind is like a laser and an unfocused mind is like a defuse, incandescent light. When our mind becomes our master rather than our servant, it can take us places we don't want to go. (My word, haven't I experienced that over the years!) We can't unthink thoughts, agrees Merritt, but we can mindfully identify and 'undo' them by choosing and superimposing new ones that neutralise them. It's a matter of challenging and changing them one at a time.

Being in a flow of abundance means trusting what he calls the Law of Circulation. We are both givers and receivers, and in order to let abundance flow into our lives, we must let it flow out of our lives. Holding onto physical things we no longer need or ever use blocks the flow. In the same way, we need to keep our emotional pipelines free of such sludge and clutter as regret, jealousy, envy, resentment, greed, selfishness, and pessimism, which are also different variants of fear, the master sludgemaker. 

'Do what is truly yours to do,' we are told in yet another chapter. We arrive on this planet predisposed with certain unique gifts and innate talents. When we align our passions with these gifts and talents, then we've discovered the thing which is ours to do. This is connected to being of service, which needn't be as grandiose as we often imagine it should. 

'Be Blessed!' he exhorts us toward the end. Since our collective unconscious leads us to focus on things that are wrong or lacking, our minds get bogged down with all that seems missing in our lives. It's difficult to feel blessed when we're always looking at what's wrong. Instead, by focusing on our blessings, we initiate a centrifugal force. It's helpful to picture it as a gravitational pull that draws increasingly more good toward us. 

Perhaps these visual pictures just may help us remember to practice this counter-cultural way of looking at things.   

A Piece of Chalk, by G.K. Chesterton 

Legendary novelist and theologian, G.K. Chesterton, describes how he set off on an excursion armed with brown paper and coloured chalks, to do some nature-inspired drawings. He regrets forgetting his white stick of chalk but discovers to his vast amusement that he can improvise. A chunk of rock makes a fair substitute for white chalk. 

He makes lots of beautiful landscape observations and discusses how nature may inspire artists to create original material without reproducing precisely what they're seeing. It includes Chesterton's conviction that white, like virtue, is a pure color, rather than being the absence of other colors. He concludes with a lovely epiphany that our world is generous to anyone open to discovering abundance in unexpected places. 

I believe one great central theme is summed up near the end of the essay. It is his joyful realization that when we use our imaginations to probe deeply enough, we may discover that the world is more generous and abundant than we give it credit for. Having forgotten his white chalk, Chesterton snaps off a piece of the rock he was sitting on to substitute for it on his brown paper. His willingness to think on his feet helps reveal the world to him as a treasure trove of resources. 

To people with more limited outlooks than Chesterton's, our world may appear meagre and deficient. When imagination and fresh perceptions lapse, then lack apparently abounds and good things seem in short supply. Yet as the divergent thinker Chesterton discovers, 'England itself could be regarded as one generous slab of white chalk.' 

His attitude is expressed most triumphantly in the final paragraph when he lets loose a string of analogies that remind him of his own situation. 'Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he has no sand for his hourglass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk.' It's his clear invitation for us to take time to consider unexpected places from which blessings might flow. 

To me, the most enjoyable quality about this essay is Chesterton's upbeat mood, bubbling over with simple joy. His playful disposition nudges him to choose a pastime that might strike others as relatively childish; sketching chalk drawings on brown paper. But Chesterton's colourful, enthusiastic prose builds my confidence that he'll convince me to reconsider this kindergarten activity I'd dropped decades ago. Essentially, I was challenging him as I read, to see if he'd convert me to begin chalk drawings on brown paper. 

I also love Chesterton's use of breathtaking analogies. He likens the 'soft and strong' features of the English countryside to other gentle but powerful phenomena, such as great carthorses and smooth beech trees. He introduces one other person, presumably as a foil for his own expansive point of view. This is his landlady (we assume), a generous but totally practical woman who cannot understand why he's asking for brown paper unless he wishes to wrap parcels. 

Although I wasn't convinced to rush out and buy coloured chalks of my own, I did resolve to begin looking out for unexpected ways in which the earth provides for us. 

'Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

THOUGHTS:

 Although I consider this novel comes under the umbrella of fan fiction, it's a huge stretch of the term. I'm sure Jean Rhys was too incensed to consider herself a 'fan' of Charlotte Bronte's. That indignation is what prompted her to write this prequel-cum-protest. It's the backstory of Bertha Mason, the doomed first wife of Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre. I expected a grim read but quite a significant one, which is just what I got.

Jean Rhys herself had common ground with Bertha Mason Rochester, being the daughter of a Welsh father and Creole mother from the Caribbean. As a teenager in 1907, she was reportedly horrified to read Bronte's masterpiece, and decided to someday become the voice for this character, who was denied a voice of her own within canon. 

It's an important novel within a historical context, prompting us to approach British classics and famous storylines with open minds, looking out for untold stories of marginalized folk. The fact that it cemented Rhys' name for her comes as no surprise. 

The main character starts off as a little girl named Antoinette Cosway, who lives with her mother and ailing younger brother in their dilapidated estate, Coulibri. Antoinette's slave-owning father has passed away, but many former slaves, now liberated, still regard Cosway's wife and kids with resentment. Antoinette grows up with this hostile background murmur. Her only friend, Tia, is more of a frenemy. The district natives practice obeah charms, a type of black magic or voodoo, which nobody takes lightly. 

In the course of time, Antoinette's mother marries Mr Mason, who has a son named Richard (whom we meet in Jane Eyre). The senior Mason assumes his wife is too sensitive and paranoid about the ill will of their neighbors. He discovers his mistake too late when they become the target of full-blown riot. So the only side of human nature Antoinette has experienced is malicious hatred, simply for being born into a particular family. 

Next is the part many of us know so well already. Antoinette/Bertha is used as a pawn in somebody else's game. Her stepfather (who was surely intended by Bronte as her biological dad, but never mind) bargains with a rich Englishman to marry Antionette to his younger son, for her dowry. 

This younger version of Edward Rochester expresses more of the same point of view he spouted in Jane Eyre. He considers himself to be a victim because he's a second son coerced to marry a stranger, who turns out to be in a far different headspace from his own. Rochester never takes time to reflect that Bertha is the ultimate victim, being presented by her male family members as a commodity to a stranger who is greedy to control her purse strings. 'I have not bought her, she has bought me,' is how he expresses it. 

Not cool, Ed.

Sinister cultural differences is partly what begins to wedge them apart, but he sometimes expresses frustration for nothing much at all. 'I watched her holding her left wrist with her right hand. An annoying habit.' Talk about finding the slightest thing to pick on. He does make an effort here and there, in his own way, to make the best of the hand life seems to have dealt him, but to mention any more would be flirting with plot spoilers (although we all know where the story is headed).

Anyway, the main theme is, of course, the fact that Antoinette/Bertha is consistently fobbed off and abandoned by those stronger than her, who have pledged to care for her. 'If the razor grass cuts my legs and arms, I would think, "It's better than people."'

 I didn't enjoy the story. It was a relief to finish and escape from all the mean, cutting, gloating, spiteful characters. There is not one single 'nice' person in the whole book. And from a structural perspective, some of the story's transitions between narrators seemed like a confused jumble at times, but if we know Jane Eyre well enough, we manage to latch on. 

The Cosways have a cynical family servant named Christophine, whose observation aptly summarizes poor Bertha's story. 'When a man don't love you, more you try, more he hate you. If you love them, they treat you bad. If you don't love them, they after you night and day, bothering your soul case out.' 

I googled the significance of the title, which turns out to be another symbol of poor Bertha's life. It seems there is a deceptively calm stretch of water near Jamaica where a type of seaweed named 'sargassum' lurks in tangled traps, ensnaring ships until they can only drift helplessly and hopelessly.  

Overall, it is not a fun read, but quite obvious why it became Rhys' magnum opus. Within this reasonably slim book, she's made herself an advocate for femimism, anti-racism, and mental healthcare all in one. Even though I didn't like it, I feel it deserves three stars for its originality and significance.

It's one of those books which is 'important' but unpleasant. A bit like taking literary medicine maybe. 

🌟🌟🌟   

'Gift from the Sea' by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

This month, a meme entitled 'Non Fiction November' is all over bookstagram. I thought I'd jump in on it this year, starting with this classic. 

MY THOUGHTS:

 For a long time I've seen this celebrated as an inspirational classic. Goodreads calls it 'inimitable and graceful.'  I realized not far into that I'd probably end up disagreeing. It's one of those cases, I feel, where the hype is misleading.

Lindbergh is the mother of a passel of kids and teens. She's taking time out by herself at a beach hut for a few weeks where she writes these reflections. As the book's framework, she compares various shells with corresponding stages of the generic woman's life. The two perfect halves of a double sunrise shell signify the shiny beginning of a romantic relationship; the rough, sprawling oyster shell represents those unglamorous years with kids living at home, when the mother's life seems to bulge in several different directions, and so on. 

For a book raved about by so many, the shell metaphors strike me as forced and simplistic, more like a school essay than celebrated inspirational literature. Yet this was the top nonfiction bestseller for 1955!

 What's more, Lindbergh's comparisons are sweeping generalizations, because women's lives don't follow the same trajectory. She also makes broad claims such as, 'females look inward and males look outward.' And she doesn't even collect all of those shells during this particular trip. 

Yet despite my disillusioned impression, she does make some points worth pondering, especially in the light of almost 70 passing years. 

It strikes Lindbergh that a short holiday is a bit like an ocean in time, and she expresses uneasiness at being alone. She says:

 'The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Our modern communication loads us with more problems than the human heart can carry. My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. Our grandmothers lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.' 

My reaction is, 'Wow, you've noticed this in 1955! Anne, you've no idea how crazy and teeming the world will turn with the introduction of the internet and social media.' She lived between 1906 and 2001, passing away just before our online era really took off. Now news from far and wide gushes onto our screens, we are mere finger clicks away from anybody in the world, who can rant about whatever pushes their buttons the instant they get triggered, and You-tubers are always asking us to 'like, share, and subscribe.'

I don't think Lindbergh has a real solution for this problem she'd already started to notice, because there really isn't a clear one. Her personal take-home is simply to focus on the precious small details of her life, the here and now, the drops that make up the ocean. If more people simply make it their goal to improve the things within their own domains, the world will have to get better.  

Lindbergh realizes that her regular life is cluttered with too many things and activities, and not enough margins or empty space. We spread our desks with an excess of shells, she points out, where one or two would perfectly suffice. So she plants down her own flag with the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Marie Kondo, sandwiched in the century between each of theirs. This indicates that minimalism is nothing new. Yet avid collectors of the world, like my own daughter, claim that their quests to stuff shelves to overflowing fill their lives with a type of delight these austere teachers of simplicity know nothing about. So at the end of the day, it has got to be each to their own.

In Lindbergh's opinion, the perfect shape of our days resembles a dance or a pendulum, swinging back and forth between the 'particular' and the 'universal'; the first being viscera that comprises our individual lives with all its chat and chores, and the latter being vast, abstract blessings, such as the beach and stars that we all have access to. I guess that's her fancy way of saying that anyone can take time out from our personal daily grind to notice the glory of nature. 

Finally, it begs to be said that Lindbergh and her husband, aviator Charles Lindbergh, were big celebs and media darlings of their era, both noteworthy for their multiple torrid extra-marital affairs among other things. I hardly feel she qualifies to address us in the guise of 'everywoman' or even as a person whose advice on marriage deserves attention.

I feel I might be expressing an unpopular opinion by panning this book, since it has received oodles of love over the years. 

Ah well, love it or hate it, at least we may all agree it's fairly short and easy to get through.

🌟🌟½