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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
I only picked up this Agatha Christie (writing under Mary Westmacott) because it had 'spring' in the title and I needed to read it for the reading challenge I was doing. The blurb was not one that caught me but the book really did.
In this book, Joan Scudamore is coming back from visiting her daughter in Baghdad when she gets stranded at an isolated resting place due to the train lines flooding. With nothing to do but think, she turns back over her life and her relationship with her family and her husband, along with remembering the advice of her old headmistress.
This book hurt. Joan is blind to the feelings of her husband and her children, thinking she knows what is best for them and feeling uncomfortable when they prove otherwise. She has labelled herself as 'mother' and 'wife' and thinks she is exemplary in these roles, although as the book carries on, we see her children and husband think otherwise. Joan is very isolated even back home, emotionally more than anything, and she slowly starts to realise it as the book carries on and it is heartbreaking to listen to. She wants the best for her husband and her children but as she slowly learns, she doesn't actually know them enough to know what this is. And ouch.
The most heartbreaking thing is the very end.Joan chooses to ignore the knowledge she has gained about herself and the lives of people around her and continues on without saying anything to her husband or her children. How it was done was masterful because it makes complete sense for Joan's character. It's not that she is ignoring her epiphany to make her life easier, although that is a part of it, but because she can't come to terms with how much she hurt the people she was supposed to love all these years. When she is turning over Rodney's pain in her mind, she talks about how it is worse because she loves him, and asking Rodney for forgiveness, not only leaves her open for rejection, but also forces her to come to terms with how much she has hurt the man she loves so dearly over the years and how he will never love her back in quite the same way. Joan's knowledge of herself and her life was there all the time but she pushed it to the back of her mind over and over again, to the detriment of not only herself but those around her. Her children clearly prefer their father over her and she is all the more worse for it.
We see a chapter in Rodney's point of view right at the end of the book as we learn his true feelings about his wife. He talks about hoping his wife will never know how alone she truly is but doesn't seethat she knows the fact well and if she was forced to confront it in any real manner, it would most likely destroy her as she is. Or rather he does know what would happen if Joan knew and doesn't want that to happen to her.
This is not a book I probably would have picked up without the reading challenge and I would have been all the worse for it.
5 stars!
In this book, Joan Scudamore is coming back from visiting her daughter in Baghdad when she gets stranded at an isolated resting place due to the train lines flooding. With nothing to do but think, she turns back over her life and her relationship with her family and her husband, along with remembering the advice of her old headmistress.
This book hurt. Joan is blind to the feelings of her husband and her children, thinking she knows what is best for them and feeling uncomfortable when they prove otherwise. She has labelled herself as 'mother' and 'wife' and thinks she is exemplary in these roles, although as the book carries on, we see her children and husband think otherwise. Joan is very isolated even back home, emotionally more than anything, and she slowly starts to realise it as the book carries on and it is heartbreaking to listen to. She wants the best for her husband and her children but as she slowly learns, she doesn't actually know them enough to know what this is. And ouch.
The most heartbreaking thing is the very end.
We see a chapter in Rodney's point of view right at the end of the book as we learn his true feelings about his wife. He talks about hoping his wife will never know how alone she truly is but doesn't see
This is not a book I probably would have picked up without the reading challenge and I would have been all the worse for it.
5 stars!
can't beleive my first full book of the year was so boring and stupid ughhh
like I get what was intended here but it was too much rich, white people drama for me to be impactful. wouldn't really recommend tbh
like I get what was intended here but it was too much rich, white people drama for me to be impactful. wouldn't really recommend tbh
Quite different from the Agatha Christie whodunit, this is her writing under her pseudonym and is more of a look back at life of the main character Joan. As Joan is stranded due to a cancelled train, she begins a period of self-reflection and becomes uneasy about the person she has been. Great portrayal of coming to terms with yourself in middle age.
First published at Booking in Heels.
Alrighty then. So, Joan Scudamore is on her way back from visiting her daughter in Baghdad when she gets stuck in a resting house in the middle of nowhere. She is the only guest, with no books or puzzles, and nowhere to go and nothing to see. She ends up turning inside her own head, chewing over her life choices and attitudes which had previously been the topic of a mild smugness. Now she begins to realise that perhaps she hasn’t been the perfect wife and mother that she had assumed.
To begin with, she fixates on the fact that her husband had been quite relieved when she had left him to go on this trip. She can’t get the sight of him walking away from her out of her head. Then she considers the true role that a close female friend had played in their lives, as well as her children’s attitudes towards her as they matured. She looks at the choices she made on behalf of the whole family, and whether she was always quite so selfless as she had always assidiously made out.
This book is brutal, there’s really no other word for it. The reader has to sit idly by whilst Joan Scutamore performs a vicious character assassination on herself. It’s actually quite hard to read, in parts. Not because of the prose or the structure, but because it apparently struck a raw nerve for me.
The tone is completely different from Agatha Christie’s detective novels. It’s chattier and less formal. We’re inside Joan’s head for all but the epilogue, and parts of it are almost stream of consciousness. It honestly flies past, despite the slow build nature of the topic. Also, whilst her Poirot and Marple books tend to be quite monotone (I love them, don’t get me wrong) and steady, Absent in the Spring is nothing but emotion.
Despite the overaching Point of the book, Joan Scudamore isn’t actually unlikeable. Yes, she’s smug and a bit judgemental, but it’s in a gentle 40s housewife kind of way. She’s not unkind; she strives to be quite the opposite. It’s therefore really quite difficult to read her slow descent into self-awareness. At points I found myself making excuses for her behaviour, and wanting to have a stern word with her family for being so harsh and apathetic towards her.
I wanted to give it a five star rating, based on how it completely altered my mood for the day. Only the best written books can make you see your world in a different way, even if it’s just for a short period. However, the ending knocked it down by a star. It’s not that it’s terrible, but I think it would have been better if Absent in the Spring ended as the train pulled away. It’s probably a realistic ending, but it would have been better not to know.
And that last sentence just punched me in the heart. Jesus. Brutal, much?
In short, Absent in the Spring is a masterpiece and I don’t use that word lightly. I pulled down her Autobiography to check what Agatha Christie had said about it, which was ‘(It was) the one book that has satisfied me completely… the book that I had always wanted to write, that had been clear in my mind. It was the picture of a woman with a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was completely mistaken.’ She wrote the whole thing over three days, calling in sick to the hospital dispensary where she worked to do so. Honestly, this book is incredible. It’s very honest, unsparing and brilliant.
Alrighty then. So, Joan Scudamore is on her way back from visiting her daughter in Baghdad when she gets stuck in a resting house in the middle of nowhere. She is the only guest, with no books or puzzles, and nowhere to go and nothing to see. She ends up turning inside her own head, chewing over her life choices and attitudes which had previously been the topic of a mild smugness. Now she begins to realise that perhaps she hasn’t been the perfect wife and mother that she had assumed.
To begin with, she fixates on the fact that her husband had been quite relieved when she had left him to go on this trip. She can’t get the sight of him walking away from her out of her head. Then she considers the true role that a close female friend had played in their lives, as well as her children’s attitudes towards her as they matured. She looks at the choices she made on behalf of the whole family, and whether she was always quite so selfless as she had always assidiously made out.
This book is brutal, there’s really no other word for it. The reader has to sit idly by whilst Joan Scutamore performs a vicious character assassination on herself. It’s actually quite hard to read, in parts. Not because of the prose or the structure, but because it apparently struck a raw nerve for me.
The tone is completely different from Agatha Christie’s detective novels. It’s chattier and less formal. We’re inside Joan’s head for all but the epilogue, and parts of it are almost stream of consciousness. It honestly flies past, despite the slow build nature of the topic. Also, whilst her Poirot and Marple books tend to be quite monotone (I love them, don’t get me wrong) and steady, Absent in the Spring is nothing but emotion.
Despite the overaching Point of the book, Joan Scudamore isn’t actually unlikeable. Yes, she’s smug and a bit judgemental, but it’s in a gentle 40s housewife kind of way. She’s not unkind; she strives to be quite the opposite. It’s therefore really quite difficult to read her slow descent into self-awareness. At points I found myself making excuses for her behaviour, and wanting to have a stern word with her family for being so harsh and apathetic towards her.
I wanted to give it a five star rating, based on how it completely altered my mood for the day. Only the best written books can make you see your world in a different way, even if it’s just for a short period. However, the ending knocked it down by a star. It’s not that it’s terrible, but I think it would have been better if Absent in the Spring ended as the train pulled away. It’s probably a realistic ending, but it would have been better not to know.
And that last sentence just punched me in the heart. Jesus. Brutal, much?
In short, Absent in the Spring is a masterpiece and I don’t use that word lightly. I pulled down her Autobiography to check what Agatha Christie had said about it, which was ‘(It was) the one book that has satisfied me completely… the book that I had always wanted to write, that had been clear in my mind. It was the picture of a woman with a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was completely mistaken.’ She wrote the whole thing over three days, calling in sick to the hospital dispensary where she worked to do so. Honestly, this book is incredible. It’s very honest, unsparing and brilliant.
At first I kind of kept waiting for the murder I thought was about to happen, but as I realised (spoiler alert) that this is not that kind of a book, it started growing on me more. Such a sad book in many ways, as well as a bit creepy somehow? Definitely makes you nervously reflect on your own actions and attitudes towards people, as well as your understanding of emotions and reactions in others.
My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2018/10/18/review-absent-in-the-spring-agatha-christie-mary-westmacott/
Mary Westmacott was a pseudonym used by Agatha Christie when she wrote six novels that did not feature her typical detective plots. This story occurs almost entirely in the mind of Jane, a middle-aged woman who is stranded at a way station while taking the train from Baghdad back to her home in England. She reviews her decisions in life and begins to understand the selfishness that drove her to control her husband and children.
The delight comes in Christie's always-sharp observations about motivation and the human condition.
The delight comes in Christie's always-sharp observations about motivation and the human condition.
I remember finishing this book and then sitting there for some time, absorbing it in. This makes you uncomfortable, but it's so worth it. BEAUTIFUL.
Absent in the Spring might be a perfect book. It might also be one of the most discomforting novels I have ever read. No blood or bodies, but neither Jane Marple's case studies nor Hercule Poirot's psychological profiles have ever hit as true or as hard as the singular examination of Jane Scudamore's character in Absent in the Spring.
Joan's self-reflection is rather refreshing. So few characters these days wonder whether they're a good person and whether their actions, which they had thought were the right thing to do, was actually the best thing to do.
I had higher hopes for the ending, though.
I had higher hopes for the ending, though.