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A review by lirazel
Agatha Christie by Laura Thompson
3.5
I think I'm going to give this a 3.5?
I don't like feeling this conflicted about a book and being so torn about how to rate it. There's a lot to appreciate here--the research that went into it was clearly exhaustive, and you can find everything you ever wanted to know about Agatha Christie in this book. Thompson traces the whole course of her life in great detail and I really felt that I got to know her. In addition, I found Thompson's prose style very easy to read and also enjoyable.
But goodness, she wants to editorialize. Too much. She adds these very weird personal insights to things, making sweeping judgments about ideas or attitudes. Why am I supposed to care about her own personal feelings on things? I'm here for Agatha Christie, not Laura Thompson.
In addition, she makes specious ties between Christie's personal life and her fiction. Perhaps because Thompson is a writer of nonfiction and not fiction, she seems unable to understand that everything a fiction writer writes is not necessarily reflective of her own life. In practically every paragraph, Thompson compares some fact of Christie's life to some quote or scene from one of her books. A little of this might be fine, even effective, but Thompson takes it too far. Sometimes writers of fiction make things up. Sometimes they write things that have nothing to do with their own lives. Many of her comparisons seem a stretch, not to mention that the book as a whole could have been at least a hundred pages shorter if she didn't do this all the time. As a writer of fiction, the idea that someone might think that I'm constantly writing about my own life in my fiction when I'm not is horrifying to me. I can only imagine how Christie would feel about it if she knew.
She also attributes thoughts or feelings to Christie and other people that I'm not sure she could possibly know. Maybe she did indeed read them in letters or diaries, but they don't come across as paraphrased quotes but as pure invention or at least learned guesses. Sometimes she quotes without an endnote, and I can't tell if the quote is from a Christie letter/diary/other paper or from her fiction.
As is usual with my complaints about nonfiction books, most if not all of the book's problems could have been fixed by a good editor. Why do editors give in so much to their writers' self-indulgences? A good editor is a rare thing, apparently, but they make a great contribution.
So: excellent information, enjoyable prose, lots of extraneous editorializing. Your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you can put up with the latter.
I don't like feeling this conflicted about a book and being so torn about how to rate it. There's a lot to appreciate here--the research that went into it was clearly exhaustive, and you can find everything you ever wanted to know about Agatha Christie in this book. Thompson traces the whole course of her life in great detail and I really felt that I got to know her. In addition, I found Thompson's prose style very easy to read and also enjoyable.
But goodness, she wants to editorialize. Too much. She adds these very weird personal insights to things, making sweeping judgments about ideas or attitudes. Why am I supposed to care about her own personal feelings on things? I'm here for Agatha Christie, not Laura Thompson.
In addition, she makes specious ties between Christie's personal life and her fiction. Perhaps because Thompson is a writer of nonfiction and not fiction, she seems unable to understand that everything a fiction writer writes is not necessarily reflective of her own life. In practically every paragraph, Thompson compares some fact of Christie's life to some quote or scene from one of her books. A little of this might be fine, even effective, but Thompson takes it too far. Sometimes writers of fiction make things up. Sometimes they write things that have nothing to do with their own lives. Many of her comparisons seem a stretch, not to mention that the book as a whole could have been at least a hundred pages shorter if she didn't do this all the time. As a writer of fiction, the idea that someone might think that I'm constantly writing about my own life in my fiction when I'm not is horrifying to me. I can only imagine how Christie would feel about it if she knew.
She also attributes thoughts or feelings to Christie and other people that I'm not sure she could possibly know. Maybe she did indeed read them in letters or diaries, but they don't come across as paraphrased quotes but as pure invention or at least learned guesses. Sometimes she quotes without an endnote, and I can't tell if the quote is from a Christie letter/diary/other paper or from her fiction.
As is usual with my complaints about nonfiction books, most if not all of the book's problems could have been fixed by a good editor. Why do editors give in so much to their writers' self-indulgences? A good editor is a rare thing, apparently, but they make a great contribution.
So: excellent information, enjoyable prose, lots of extraneous editorializing. Your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you can put up with the latter.