Summary:
An energetic young woman, Victoria Jones, who is a failed shorthand dictation typist, is fired from her job, but meets a charming young man, Edward, just before he embarks on a trip to Baghdad. Lacking any ties to London, she vows to follow after him and eventually makes the journey as a companion to Mrs Clipp, a wealthy American.
Once in Iraq, she makes an effort to find her young man, Edward, but instead gets entangled with a British intelligence officer, Mr. Dakin, who explains about powerful international forces at work to prevent a lasting peace in this post-WWII world. Dakin tells her of two great men who have uncovered evidence of these evil forces. Each are bringing some evidence of their activities to a peace conference in Baghdad.
That night, one of these great men, Carmichael appears at Victoria's hotel door, asking for a place to hide. She bundles him under the blankets while the police search the room, but when she returns to him, he is already dead from a stab wound to the heart. The other great man is Sir Rupert, a traveler of the Middle East and throughout the former British empire. He is staying at the same hotel as Victoria.
While Victoria and Edward go sightseeing in the ancient city of Babylon, Edward urges Victoria to make friends with his former girlfriend, Catherine. Catherine takes Victoria to have her hair washed, but while at the salon, Victoria is attacked with chloroform and kidnapped. She awakens to find herself a prisoner in a desolate Iraqi village in the middle of the desert. She escapes her unsophisticated captors and instead finds refuge in a nearby archaeological dig run by two Englishmen. Victoria stays with them while she recovers from her ordeal, and becomes special friends with Richard, the younger of the two academics.
There are three fundamental issues with this story as Agatha tells it, and then a few ongoing problems.
The first is the sheer impossibility and absurdity of the plot. The forced coincidences and improbably outcomes that could only be attributed to the hand of the author.
Second, the espionage side of the story seems inadequately told. For example, we spend great amounts of time and paragraphs describing how amazing are the three great men that wend their way toward this auspicious meeting in Baghdad. Each is described as a powerful force of nature. Carmichael is the Arab among Arabs, a man who can go anywhere, do anything, all unseen and fit into the local culture seamlessly. He is compared to Lawrence of Arabia. Sir Rupert strides the globe; no country, no continent barred to him. He is at home among the heights of the Himalayas or among the farthest reaches of the dark continent. Doctor Livingstone pales in comparison. And finally, Mr Dakin is the most consummate British spymaster that he makes George Smiley a mere amateur. He operates the British intelligence service in the shadows behind the mask of a shabby civil servant.
Both of the first two men are dead within hours of our meeting them. And master spy Dakin is powerless to prevent either of their demises. Looked at objectively, Dakin is an utter failure. We spend so much time building them up, but have nothing for them to do once they arrive.
In fact, most of the book sees very little action. Nothing of any consequence to the plot actually takes place for pages and pages. And when something does happen, such as when Victoria finds a thrilling escape from her captors in the remote desert village, walks all night and seeks shelter on the lee side of a Tell, she immediately tumbles into the refuge of the archaeologists and carries on as if nothing had happened after only escaping a few miles away. The entire kidnapping and imprisonment plot seemed nothing more than a deus ex machina to get Victoria to meet Richard.
Further, the entire action of the plot focuses on the great men bringing proof of the evil organization to the conference and so to expose them to the world. Victoria and Richard are successful in uncovering what that proof is, in the form of a knotted scarf and a leaf of notepaper. But when the moment comes to unravel these two clues and obtain the proof, all that happens off-stage while Victoria is asleep. She wakes up to find that quite a lot has happened in her absence for which she simply wasn't needed. In fact, if she had been alert at the initial meeting, she could have handed the scarf over to Dakin on the night of Carmichael's murder and the entire second half of the book would have been unnecessary.
A mere aside, here, is that Agatha Christie occasionally wanders off into banal descriptions of the countryside, giving extended narratives of Baghdad street life, or shopping at the market, or wandering the copper bazaar. She takes us on trips to the ancient ruins of Babylon, or a lushly planted grove of trees, or of her awkward attempt to walk around the edges of a river bay, but she makes very little effort to integrate them into the story she is telling. The copper market has no bearing on the story at all; nothing of interest happens there. We can tell that these passages are the result of Christie having actually visited those places on her various travels in the Middle East, but that is not enough to merit their inclusion in her adventure novel.
Finally, Victoria herself comes across as actually a very unlikable character.
By her own admission, she is a very poor employee, who is very bad at shorthand dictation, can't type and is an even worse speller. What's more, she wastes time, disrupts the office with her stories and makes fun of the boss and the boss's wife behind his back. Frankly, her firing from her job is well deserved and she admits as much.
However when she returns to her employment agency, in order to cover up her failure she outright suggests that her boss sexually harassed her at the office. Not only is this a complete lie, but she has savagely ruined his reputation at the employment agency, all for her spur of the moment joke to save face. It was here that the reader began to get the impression that Victoria could be a rather nasty piece of work.
Next, she finds a elder lady traveling exactly where she wants to go, and so she lies outrageously to get an undeserved position. Further, she hasn't been in her company for 10 minutes before she's complaining about how much of a chatterbox Mrs Clipp is and how unpleasant it is to be around her.
After having met the young man in the park on her lunch break for all of 10 minutes, she then proceeds to chase halfway round the world after him. Then, on the strength of a 10-minute conversation in the park, she turns up in Baghdad to find that Edward has no real interest in her, and in fact already has a girlfriend, Catherine.
She immediately demands that he drop Catherine and take up with her, for no particular reason other than that she is a good English girl, and Catherine is from Iran. Her jealous impulses are strong and immediate. Then she demands that Edward find her a job. Next she conspires to cheat the owner of her hotel out of paying for her meals and lodging. In the end, she actually dodges out on the bill, which we never see her pay, and in fact later borrows money from the same hotelier with brazen impunity, completely willing to trade her time so that the hotel manager will buy her drinks. At this point she is beginning to appear like a dance hall hostess.
No comments:
Post a Comment