By Lucy Sussex
Fiction
On the Blue Train
KRISTEL THORNELL
ALLEN & UNWIN, $29.99
Novelists tend to lead boring lives – that is the literary biographer's tragedy. The long hours of crafting leave little time for shenanigans: they live more in their head and on the page than in the real, mundane world. Thus they present real difficulties as subject matter, particularly when chosen, perhaps rather too reflexively, for the novel form.
Award-winning author Kristel Thornell.
Kristel Thornell's first novel, the award-winning Night Street, concerned Australian Clarice Beckett, painter of atmospheric depictions of Melbourne. She was initially neglected by the art mavens, then posthumously celebrated. About Beckett little was known, but Thornell was able to take the sketchiest of details and fill a complete canvas. The achievement of Night Street was that it perfectly evoked the art. Nothing and everything happened within its pages, the prose as limpid and tonal as the paintings. The book represented a rare coincidence of subject and expression, art and words.
On the Blue Train is also focused on a creative woman's life, but one celebrated and rich: Agatha Christie. The Queen of Golden Age Crime is a daunting subject, without the quirks of Dorothy L. Sayers, with her illegitimate son, or Ngaio Marsh, colonial and probably not heterosexual. Christie got divorced, but otherwise led a blameless life. She herself does not possess the fascination of her spring-trap plots, or curiously engaging detectives – with one exception. In 1926 Christie famously vanished, to be found after 11 days of nationwide search at a Harrogate spa. The explanation given – of amnesia – convinced nobody.
On the Blue Train by Kristel Thornell.
What happened has already engaged various writers, and Michael Apted's film Agatha (1979) in which the crime writer intricately plotted her own demise. It infuriated the Christie estate. The truth was that she felt distraught, her mother dying and her husband wanting a divorce. At the simplest she sought a rest-cure, and hoped to shock her spouse into sense. The marriage proved irreparable, but the incident did change Christie significantly. The consensus is that it represented a turning point, where she decided to make writing her focus in life. Such is effectively depicted here.
Thornell's novel concentrates on the 11 days, a mood piece, its mystery that of a woman's psyche. She presents her subject as apparently commonplace, under-educated, but actually clever. It accords with the mask presented by Christie, of a serene, hard-working professional. Beyond the conventional surface can be glimpsed only hints of the anxiety and turmoil that disrupt the Mayhem Parva of her books. An ordinary woman would not have become the bestselling crime-writer, nor married an archaeologist 14 years her junior.
It might be wondered if On the Blue Train began as Christie in Australia, which she visited in 1922. Her visit to the Bell family station in Queensland provides a romantic moment of drama for Thornell, a fictionalised affair that might-have-been with a shy younger son. The incident is a template for a brief encounter at Harrogate with nice Australian Harry, whose wife has taken her own life.
Christie's own account of Queensland notes gluttony with oranges; and the songs and mimicry of Susan (Bunjoey), an Indigenous woman. Susan might have been too problematic for Blue Train: Christie did later write Ten Little Niggers. Similarly elided is Agatha's enthusiasm for surfing. The woman depicted here lacks such eccentricities.
There are some intriguing moments in the book. Harry is a would-be Great Australian novelist. Thornell's Christie reads his ms, finding it "all rather lugubrious, not her kind of thing". It begs the question what she would have thought of On the Blue Train. Possibly as an impertinence: the Dame fiercely guarded her privacy. Her autobiography elides the disappearance.
The best account of Christie's disappearance remains biographer Laura Thompson's economical depiction of a woman in a fugue state, distraught but calculating, staving off a nervous breakdown. A whole book devoted to the 11 days succeeds if the characters and the prose compel – and whether it does depends entirely on the perceptions of the audience.
On the Blue Train's subject and treatment do not coincide, as they did in Night Street. The mystery is not plotted, with major narrative momentum; the subject is no Marple, that human machine; and the prose aspires to the poetic, as opposed to Christie's simple yet effective words. It may please literary readers, but probably not Christie fans.