Cover art for On the Blue Train by Kristel Thornell courtesy of Allen & Unwin.
Kristel Thornell has previously co-won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award for Night Street in 2011.Here she re-imagines what might have happened in the famous missing twelve days of the prolific crime writer Agatha Christie’s disappearance in December 1926. All she left behind was a note to her secretary saying she was going to Yorkshire. Her disappearance even made the front page of The New York Times. There was pressure from politicians and a national search ensued (even involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers) a reward was offered but no one could find the woman who would go on to become the best-selling novelist of all time. Doctors said she was depressed and suffering from amnesia: she was overworked, her mother had died earlier in the year, and her husband Archie was having an affair. What happened in those eleven days no one really knows. The missing days were not mentioned in Christie’s autobiography Ever since, Christie biographers, readers and assorted investigators and psychiatric experts have speculated about what happened and what Christie thought and felt.
Thornell has stuck close to the established facts: Christie was mourning her beloved mother’s still recent death when her husband Archibald asked for a divorce – there was a brouhaha – Christies’s car was found abandoned near a quarry so murder or suicide was suspected; she vanished and was discovered ten days later, using the surname of Archibald’s lover, Teresa Neele , at a spa hotel in Harrogate. Christie decides to create a South African background and widowhood as her cover story. Christie was also struggling with unfamiliar writer’s block, unable to continue what she was working on, a book about the famous ‘le train bleu’ from Calais to the Riviera. Perhaps this eventually led to Murder on the Orient Express?
On the Blue Train is exquisitely, elegantly written at times with a lyrical, dreamlike atmosphere while other sections are very focused and practical.The book is mostly divided into the numbered days that Christie was missing but also jumps fluidly back and forth in time with the various character’s memories and dreams.
After a brief London visit to grab clothes for a trip north, Christie moves to the health spa resort of the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, which is described as ‘’a dignified hotel, congenially discreet behind scrawls of ivy’. Leaving her wedding ring behind, lying to her fellow guests about the death of a husband and child, ‘Teresa’ becomes lost in the anonymity she seeks, struggling to cope with her blocked creativity and her grief. Soon Teresa becomes involved in the society, routines and waiters of Harrogate. While at the Hydro Teresa beats an admiring Russian at billiards, and is eventually cajoled to sing in the Winter Garden Ballroom (one of Christie’s possible careers was relinquished when she was told she would ‘only make a concert singer’).Teresa also meets and befriends an elderly couple, the Jackmans, who are regular spa patrons , as well as the Australian-born widower Harry McKenna, who suspects ‘‘women could smell despair on him’’. There is also a wonderful description of Harry’s landlord in London ‘a frame so slender and protracted as to seem desiccated, a vanilla pod‘. Harry is still emotionally battered from the end of his own marriage and asks her to dance. The depictions of her hotel companions Harry and the Jackmans are charismatic, sympathetic and captivating. They hide caustic, melancholy secrets which they confide to Teresa. Eventually – separately – they guess Teresa’s real identity.
The twelve days from Christie’s disappearance to the arrival of her aggrieved and scandalised husband Archibald (Archie) amidst a furious paparazzi bombardment are interwoven in Thornell’s book with flashbacks of opportunities taken in which the results turned out to be uncertain, or long lost forfeited chances.
Christie/Neele is created vividly and sympathetically .At one point she ponders more about her husband than what didn’t occur with a young man during a tropical storm, and considers that ‘her sensual impulses, it appeared, had been diverted into a deep place, where they had bided their time’. Christie is appealing and imperious and Thornell vividly brings to life an exceptional woman who is ruthless in her judgment of herself and of others – including that of the real Ms Neele – whom Christie envisions with ‘her small hand on an intact stomach that had never had to house a child or comfort itself through the slow going of marriage’. We flash back in Christie’s memory to the wedding night in 1914 as the bride and groom rather unromantically consumate the marriage before Archie, the husband, is off to fight in The Great War. Twelve years later she has to face the possible death of their marriage and the acrimonious divorce.
This is a book of moral dilemmas, exploring the choices that demand more from those who have made them as time goes on and the sometimes devastating consequences. Fact and fantasy are eloquently interwoven by Thornell to create what Christie was unable to write.
Rating: 4 1/2 stars out of 5
On The Blue Train by Kristel Thornell
Category: Literary fiction
ISBN: 9781760293109
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Pub Date: October 2016
Page Extent: 348
Format: Paperback – C format
Subject: Literary fiction
