Krishna
This author is another one of our favourite authors for review but this book is unlike her most other books. This is not a murder mystery and her writing such a novel is a surprise. Unfortunately, it turns out to be an unplesant surprice. Read on to find out why.
Vernon is a little boy in a rich house, looked after by the Nurse, her assistants and the only other people he knows are important are God (because the Nurse brings Him into conversation often) and the nebulous Mom and Dad, who are seldom there.
Father leaves after being caught ‘kissing Winnie, the maid’ and Mother is devastated.
But Father comes back and his sister, Nina runs off with multiple men. She is very pretty. Father says that he needs to take care of them. Mother and Father always have a fight.
Mother is neuritic and vengeful. Vernon mentally sympathises with the father whenever Father and Mother fight but “has to admit that mother is always right”.
They make friends with a rich Jewish boy called Sebastian.
When Vernon is a bit more grown up, his father goes to South Africa for the War against Boers. He gets killed there and Mother moves to another apartment. Joe and Vernon study in London and Vernon realizes that the irritating Nell he had been ignoring has blossomed into a golden curled beauty and is smitten hard. Her mother Mrs Verekar knows that he is penniless and cannot afford to keep his castle Puissants and is dead against Nell marrying him. But she is in love with him and he with her and they steal kisses and meet in secret. (Come on, is this the type of story Agatha writes? She wrote it in pseudonym, but still….)
OK, the story trundles on. Nell and Vernon breakup after she realizes that she has to live in foreseeable poverty if she trusted Vernon. Vernon gives up his work to focus on music, ruining any chances of steady income and oscillates between despair and euphoria – almost as if bipolar. Jane likes Vernon but Vernon is obsessed with Nell until she leaves. Joe has eloped with a singer, submerging Sebastian into despair. (Yes, I yawned multiple times through this too. This is probably the worst story written by the Dame of Mystery, Agatha Christie. She probably quickly realized that the social genre is not her thing.
Now Nell comes back and says she is in love with Vernon who is living with Jane. But he goes away and marries her. (Yes, more yawns). Joe, too, who had run away with a musical type writes back to Sebastian.
There is a tedious amount of description on the hospital volunteer service Nell has enrolled to, after Vernon shuffles off to join the army. Really, it is a pain to read.
Then Vernon gets killed in the war. George Chetwynd comes back in her life, all kindness, and as a previous suitor who was spurned, asks Nell to marry him. She accepts.
We find (a touch of the usual Agatha here) that Vernon is alive and was imprisoned by Germans. He manages to escape into Netherlands, and reads the news of the marriage of Nell in the papers and is extremely shattered. When he runs out, he is hit by a car and faints. Thinks that he is dying.
And the insipid dialog Nell with Jane and others! Tries your patience. I do agree that some of it is in the style of Agatha’s mystery novels but at least you have the central puzzle to overlook the drag – but not in this story, of course.
The accident causes amnesia in Vernon and he thinks that he is George Green. Jane and Sebastian confront him, making him agitated. Jane saw him as a chaffeur for a rich American called Biebert and that is how she suspected that Vernon was alive. With Nell married for four years now, this is very awkward for all concerned. (Still a crappy story, even with the twists and turns in them – in my personal view).
The weird and illogical behaviour is sprinkled throughout the book. Sebastian is very successful – intelligent and wealthy but Joe does not reciprocate. That is fine, but she thinks that being wealthy is not rational and she is love with poor struggling artist types and runs away with one and then switches to (at least) one other. Jane takes in Vernon (for a sexual relationship) out of pity for his pathetic moaning after Nell refuses to marry him. OK, then when Vernon was “dead” she comes to visit Nell and her husband George and says impossibly horrible things to Nell. Why? Who knows? Then why did she come? “To see the house”. Then she says that ‘I should not have said that. I should not have even come’. Really? Where is her common sense?
Then when she realizes that Vernon is “George Green” she runs to Sebastian and both of them insist that George is Vernon, confusing him and then convincing him. After that? Jane says that “He was so happy. Perhaps we should not have told him the truth”. You go “Is there even one character in this story that behaves credibly or rationally or even understandably? What the hell is going on with all of these weirdos?”
And then James comes ‘to be hateful’ to Nell. Tell her that if she drops Vernon again, he will “go straight to her, Jane”. But “she wants him but wants to do the best for Vernon and so Nell should take him back”. What a piece of rot!
And the ending has a couple of twists. Especially Joe falling ill and Sebastian visiting her first and then Vernon and Jane (living together for years in Russia) coming on a steamer to meet her and what happens to them.
Unfortunately, none of this works for me. One thing I know : Agatha Christie is not good at ‘social drama’ and I think that this could be the worst book she has written – ever.
And what does the title signify? Giant’s Bread? I know it is an allusion but for the life of me I can’t get it.
1/10
— Krishna