Endless Night – Agatha Christie

I have always loved Agatha Christie’s books. I first started reading her mysteries in my teens and she is one of those few authors whose books I can read even now when I’m well into my forties. I started with Hercule Poirot back then, was not interested in “old” Miss Marple at the time but have begun to love the books featuring her now, and have also very much enjoyed some of her standalone works such as Crooked House, Ordeal by Innocence, The Man in the Brown Suit and of course, the brilliant and rightly famous And Then There Were None.

I’m planning to delve into her work again with a particular focus on the Miss Marple mysteries, the Tommy and Tuppence books, and some standalone novels that I hadn’t read before beginning with Endless Night. Its theme of a house strongly appealed to me now particularly since I just moved into my new home. This is the first time I’m writing about an Agatha Christie book and will keep this write-up short without venturing into spoiler territory.

Agatha Christie’s Endless Night is a haunting, ominous, artfully crafted tale of greed, love, ambition, and deception. It’s unlike her usual mysteries featuring the drama-inclined Hercule Poirot and the psychologically astute Miss Marple in the sense that the tone feels more noirish as it culminates in an ending that reeks of despair.

Michael Rogers, our narrator, is an aimless drifter never sticking to a job, seeking new adventures, and refusing to settle down in the conventional sense.

I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that’s it, I want to find something.

Having held an assortment of jobs completely different from one another, Michael’s latest stint involves driving hired cars for the rich and the moneyed, the kind of wealthy people he despises for their lack of imagination and continuous bickering.

During one such stint, he finds himself in the English village of Kingston Bishop where a sign for a house on sale catches his attention. Turns out the house is called The Towers, situated on a lonely stretch of land called Gipsy’s Acre, unoccupied for a long time and almost in ruins. Michael learns that Gipsy’s Acre is cursed, some unexplained accidents having occurred on the winding road, lined with fir trees, leading up to the house.  He hears rumours of deaths within the last family who resided there, but that was a long time ago, and the details are incredibly hazy. The eerie atmosphere and sense of menace surrounding the place is only heightened when an old gypsy woman called Mrs Lee, residing in its vicinity, warns Michael of the evil likely to befall him at Gipsy’s Acre. Displaying a penchant for fortune-telling, Mrs Lee vehemently tells Michael to stay away from the house.

Michael is, at first, disconcerted but that feeling of disquiet quickly transforms into disbelief and later into anger. Michael doesn’t care for superstitions and he is certainly not going to let a seemingly mad old woman deter him from his vision of building his dream house on the land sometime in the distant future. Indeed, there is something in the air of Gipsy’s Acre that makes him want to buy it, find a girl he loves, and settle there.

The house only isn’t enough, you see. It has to have the setting. That’s just as important. It’s like a ruby or an emerald. A beautiful stone is only a beautiful stone. It doesn’t lead you anywhere further. It doesn’t mean anything, it has no form or significance until it has its setting. And the setting has to have a beautiful jewel to be worthy of it. I take the setting, you see, out of the landscape, where it exists only in its own right. It has no meaning until there is my house sitting proudly like a jewel within its grasp.

Michael has also settled on the architect he would approach should that dream ever turn into reality – the mysterious Rudolf Santonix, a genius architect with a flair for designing beautiful homes on expanded budgets. There’s a catch though – Santonix is suffering from a terminal illness, and his days are numbered, although Michael remains an eternal optimist believing that Santonix will somehow pull through.

One day while walking on the road leading to The Towers, Michael is struck by the presence of an innocent, delicate woman standing under a fir tree. The woman, Ellie, is enamoured by Michael too, and the two tentatively strike up a conversation. It appears to be love at first sight, and gradually Michael and Ellie begin to see each other, albeit in secret. Michael conveys the oddity of their earlier conversations – they clearly enjoy each other’s company and yet their talks seem superficial, they are wary of opening up to the other.

One of the topics of conversation is Gipsy’s Acre. Ellie is also entranced by the place, but Michael knows that he can never afford it; he has no money and prospects, and certainly no inclination towards holding on to a steady job that could possibly help him get there. Attempts to find a buyer for The Towers have proved futile – even with a significantly marked-down price, there aren’t many takers save a few interested parties who are still not willing to pay the asking price. An auction held for the place, and attended by Michael out of curiosity, turns out to be a desultory affair with the bidders unwilling to pay even the reserve price.

Meanwhile, in terms of background and upbringing, Michael and Ellie could not have been more different. Michael has no family or relatives save his mother, a no-nonsense hardworking woman with conservative values and one who has endured the struggles of daily life. Thoroughly disapproving of the reckless path chosen by her son, it’s not surprising that she and Michael are barely on speaking terms. Ellie, in contrast, has led a protected, enclosed life until now and she yearns for freedom, escape, and a chance to broaden her horizons. Against all odds, they tie the knot, find a way of settling down at Gipsy’s Acre, and are happy in their married life, until in typically Christie-style things begin to go awry – Mrs Lee reappears and confronts Ellie with dire warnings that increase her sense of dread, and then some accidents happen out of the blue…

“Nobody shall drive us away,” I said. “We’re going to be happy here.” We said it like a challenge to fate.”

As the story unfolds, a stream of characters is introduced – the unfathomable but all-seeing Santonix; the disturbingly efficient Greta Anderson, Ellie’s friend, who has an unhealthy influence over Ellie and who Michael despises; the kindly and helpful Major Phillpot looked upon as the God in their village who welcomes the young couple; Ellie’s shrewd lawyer Andrew Lippincott who perhaps discerns more than he lets on; Michael’s mother Mrs Rogers who unnervingly understands her son in a way that unsettles him.

Told entirely from Michael’s perspective, there is a melancholy, dreamlike quality to the narrative, an all-pervading sense of doom that makes itself felt from the very beginning, of things not likely to end well, but we don’t yet know how or why. Some red herrings are thrown along the way, some loose ends not tied up but they seem unimportant in the bigger picture as the novel hurtles towards its conclusion. The big reveal when it came, wasn’t entirely surprising to me, but what stood out was that aching sense of loss, of unexpected regret, of hopelessness, and maybe a wish for things to have turned out differently. Very much recommended.