The Hollow (Agatha Christie)
4
There is something inescapably striking, compared to most of Dame Agatha's mystery books, about THE HOLLOW. It is unusually rich in three-dimensional characters, it touches with real distinction upon issues of people of different classes and temperaments, of the varying perspectives of the wealthy, the struggling gentry, the working-class, the servant class. You feel deeply for both the aspirations and disappointments of its characters. Even among the distinguished company of Christie's high standard, it feels different, quieter, subtler, more observant.
Poirot is almost superfluous here, and it's not surprising to read that he was not a character in Christie's original play from which she adapted this novel.
But given the theatrical source material, the real surprise is that some of the most memorable and haunting aspects of this book are the explorations of people's interior dialogue, as best exemplified by provocative early scenes, impossible in a play, where we are allowed to spend a long time inside the minds of a strangely ill-suited married couple: first to see how the driven, accomplished and intelligent husband perceives and processes the world, his profession, other women and his own wife, and then to be shown the contrast of how his rather subservient and befuddled wife perceives the very same things. In moments like their automobile drive together to the Hollow, Christie fascinates us with the details of their perceptions of each other. This is psychologically ambitious writing by any standard, and John Christow, who has traits both aspringly noble and insensitively selfish is a curious character in her output -- he fascinates us, and we understand why various women love him, but do WE like him?
Several other of Ms. Christie's characters in this book are drawn with the same three-dimensional vividness, most notably the sculptor Henrietta (stepping almost out of Ngaio Marsh) and the young cousin Midge, who struggles to make a living in the demeaning surroundings of a London dress shop while haunted by joyful childhood memories of the family estate.
Poirot, as observed elsewhere, indeed needn't have been in the novel at all. While a few of his customary traits are thrown in to establish the familiar ground of his character, for the most part he is strangely pensive and more an observer than an active participant. The two best arguments for the value of his inclusion in the narrative are three strange, langorous scenes where he speaks and listens at length, and with a rich sense of conflicting motives and reactions, to two of the women in the story: twice with Henrietta and once with Veronica Cray. These quiet, understated yet fraught-with-implication conversations represent a second highly unusual component of this book, along with the early interior monologues of John and Gerda and later internal struggles of Henrietta's.
The actual elements/aspects of the mystery itself are, as mentioned elsewhere, a bit perfunctory, and you arrive at the strange final scenes of this book with a sense that this is novel not about murder at all, but about interesting people, passions or life motivations both fulfilled and unrequited, about the deep sense of emotional vulnerability which runs though people in all walks of life (which even touches Poirot in this book, which is probably what makes it feel so odd to people) and about striving to do something great in this world, whether it be to create art, to discover new medical breakthroughs (and save lives), or just to treat people with compassion and a positive spirit. Several of the final scenes are very moving indeed.
It's a quiet book, enclosed almost entirely in a microcosm of a handful of interesting people in a single large house and its neighboring cottages and landscape. It's more a study of those people than it is a murder mystery, and if you know that going in, I doubt that you'll be disappointed, because while it's neither the most exciting nor suspenseful of her novels, she certainly rarely wrote much better than her elegiac, persuasively observant and thoughtful tone in THE HOLLOW.
