Учебно-методическое пособие по работе с книгой А. Кристи «Избранная детективная проза»

The English undervalue Christie because they're so patronisingly fond of her. When I saw Death on the Nile in Westcliff, the suburbanites chuckled in agreement with the play's snobbery – its contempt for common socialists and funny, gesticulating foreigners – and smiled indulgently when the murderess's gun did not go off (which required her victim to keel over and die without the saving grace of a bullet).

Bumbling amateurism is at home in the staid, ancestral England Christie has come to represent. Her admirers forget that it was her habit to uncover corpses in Arcady. Tabulating alarmist headlines in 1970 – gutted phone boxes, muggings of pensioners, race riots – she asked "Can this be England?" Today, outside the theatre in Westcliff, a sign points to the Southend mosque, a kebab joint jostles a Tandoori caff and a TexMex cantina, and a tattooing saloon exhibits shamanic art in its window, with a display of grimacing voodoo masks. The England recreated on stage is already defunct.

Christie made an initial foray to Baghdad in 1929, and returned to Ur in 1930, where she met her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. He took her to visit a Sumerian ziggurat; they got to know each other underground, and even before their marriage she was anxiously asking "Where shall we be buried?"

She accompanied him on annual trips to Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and took up photography to document his finds. She caught on camera a chain of men at Nineveh handing up baskets from deep inside a 90ft pit that might be the declivity of death itself, or a digger at Nimrod curled up as if in his own tomb as he scraped away the enshrouding soil. She also made herself useful by teaching the expedition cook to make chocolate eclairs (filled with cream whipped up from buffalo milk) and dosing sick workers with bicarbonate of soda.

When Mallowan apologised for his grubby profession, Christie declared with gruesome zest "I adore stiffs". She was fascinated by the necrology of Egypt, whose pharaohs invested all their wealth in a post-

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mortem life inside their sealed pyramids. A young freethinker in Death on the Nile admires Egyptian fatalism, which considers death to be "a mere incident – hardly noticeable", and teases Poirot's fussy concern with culpability by accusing him of having written a monograph entitled

Death, the Recurring Decimal.

Poirot often turns up in Christie's Oriental novels (by contrast with the parochial Miss Marple, who had to make do with a single tropical jaunt in A Caribbean Mystery), and he recurrently likens his investigations to archaeological disinterments. Nefertiti in Christie's 1937 play Akhnaton recites an anathema against disturbing a burial chamber. It is a taboo that Christie and her detectives consistently outraged.

Visiting the site of a dig, the antiseptic nurse who narrates Murder in Mesopotamia is disgusted to find nothing but mud. When she warns an archaeologist against infection, he replies: "Nasty germs are my daily diet." Finally she admits an attraction to ordure and the guilty, putrescent past: "After all, perhaps dirt isn't really so unhealthy as one is brought up to believe!"

Mallowan's sketchbooks record a skeleton he uncovered, "knees sticking up, legs flexed"; at Ur, his team found a pit containing the remnants of 74 women, slaughtered during a royal funeral. No wonder Christie came to think of the Orient as one great crime scene. But the victims she singled out were not ordinary and expendable, like those women bundled into the pit.

In Appointment with Death she kills off one of the "mother goddesses" whose totems the archaeologists often dug up: a malevolent matriarch called Mrs Boynton, who squats like "a monstrous swollen female Buddha" in a red, uterine cave at Petra. At the same time, the earth disgorged pots and pans, which reminded Christie, as she puts it in They Came to Baghdad, of "the things that mattered – the little everyday things". Wasn't civilisation about cooking for your family, rather than conducting a conceptual quarrel with God?

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She found, as she said, the beginnings of culture in the Orient, but she knew that culture depends on sacrifice and the ruthless, lethal intrepidity of the intellect. God – as she suggested to Mallowan in 1930 after reading a treatise by the physicist James Jeans – lay in the future: he did not create man, but man might eventually create him, arriving after all the travail of evolution at "some complete and marvellous Consciousness".

Poirot, a superhuman intelligence housed in a pudgy, moustachioed Belgian body, was perhaps her symbol of this immanent universal brain. And though Poirot solves crimes rather than committing them, the evolutionary avant-gardists are the people who disobey commandments and test the limits of human power.

As the crime writer Martin Edwards pointed out at the NFT, in her novels murders are committed by bluff majors and starchy spinsters, the very emblems of English rectitude. Keating added that in one whodunit the malefactor is a child, and said "That's going rather deep". In Apted's Agatha, Dustin Hoffman, as a journalist tracking the fugitive heroine, asks Vanessa Redgrave why she is obsessed by violence. We won't begin to understand the deceptively comfy, apparently harmless Christie until we force her works to give us an answer.

1. Find in the text of the article the English equivalents to the following Russian words and expressions:

1) пересмотр (взглядов и т.п.), 2) несовременный (2 words), 3) предшествовать, 4) несогласие / разногласие, 5) святыни, 6) при- хожанин / прихожанка, 7) смертельный / вызывающий смерть, 8) свидетель / очевидец, 9) задатки, 10) опознание торговой марки, 11) житель пригорода, 12) виновность / вина, 13) эксгумация, 14) гниющий, 15) неустрашимость / смелость, 16) трактат / научный труд, 17) честность / добродетель.

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2.Find in the text of the article the words matching the following definitions:

1) to struggle roughly, 2) difficult to comprehend, 3) determined and courageous in the face of difficulties, 4) to encourage or stir up (violent or unlawful behaviour), 5) relating to or dealing with the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems, 6) murder of a mother by her son or daughter, 7) extremely unpleasant, 8) a method of transforming a text in order to conceal its meaning, 9) understood by few; mysterious, obscure, 10) revealing something, 11) assisting or intended to assist memory / relating to memory, 12) (especially of a woman) unfashionable and dull in appearance, 13) very worried and upset, 14) to kill by electric shock, 15) a supposition or guess, 16) a region or scene of simple pleasure and quiet, 17) no longer living, existing, or functioning, 18) a brief excursion or attempt especially outside one's accustomed sphere, 19) an ancient Mesopotamian temple tower consisting of a lofty pyramidal structure built in successive stages with outside staircases and a shrine at the top, 20) confined or restricted as if within the borders of a parish / provincial, 21) excrement / dung, 22) a female who rules or dominates a family, group, or state, 23) work especially of a painful or laborious nature, 24) being short and plump.

3.Answer the following questions:

1)Is Agatha Christie considered to be a modernist?

2)What did the author of the article mean by saying that "Christie is an export industry"?

3)What is the usual attitude to Christie's works?

4)What do you think about the definition of modernity given by one of Agatha Christie's characters?

5)Is there any connection between Christie's books and the "mental revolt" of her time? If so, what is this connection?

6)How did Freud's ideas influence Agatha Christie?

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7)What according to the article does Agatha Christie have in common with the modernists?

8)What did the author of the article say: "It is the highest, the most amorally Nietzschean of compliments" about? Comment upon this sentence.

9)What did the novelist H.R.F. Keating say about Christie? Does the author of the article agree with this opinion? Why?

10)Why does the author of the article say that "Christie herself was a mystery"?

11)What is peculiar about the writer in some of Christie's books?

12)Why in the author's opinion do the English undervalue Christie? What do they see in her books?

13)In what connection did Christie ask "Can this be England?" What does the author of the article think about it?

14)In what situation did Christie say "I adore stiffs"?

15)What influence did the Orient have on Christie's books?

16)What do you think was Christie's attitude to death? (to prove your opinion use the information from the article)

17)What was Christie's attitude to God? Which of her characters is to be mentioned in this connection? Why?

18)When according to the author's opinion will we begin to understand Agatha Christie?

For those who are interested:

An Agatha Christie society operates at the following address Agatha Christie Society

PO Box 985, London SW1X 9XA

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