I’m often a sucker for a yard sale, and I picked this book up, along with 4 other paperbacks for a buck the other week, and threw it in the trunk. Sometimes when I’m stuck in a long queue or need to kill time when I’m in my car, I’ll rummage about in the trunk for something to read. This was the case the other day when in dire straits for something to read when killing time between a wedding and the reception, and I was pleasantly surprised after reading the first chapter to keep on reading until I finished this the other night.
Elephants Can Remember is one of the Dame’s last literary efforts, and it’s a fun (and final) Hercule Poirot story of a different sort. One of his lady friends is a writer of mystery novels, Ariadne Oliver, a lady of certain years and living on her own. The two had been involved together in at least two previous mysteries together. The latter pulls in the world renowned consulting detective into a 12-year old family mystery of her own old involving her own god-daughter.
The trigger for everything is an odious nosy parker at a literary luncheon asking Ariadne Oliver if “…her god-daughter’s mother killed her father or if her father killed her mother?” This strange and rude question sets off a series of ‘elephant hunts’. The pachyderm hunts in questions are a group of older to quite elderly persons whose memory of events of long ago when interviewed by Ms Oliver is still quite ‘elephantine’ but with some gaps and spurious conjecture added on over the years thrown in for good measure. Both Poirot and Mrs. Oliver have to somehow fit together these overlapping and conflicting oral narratives (mixed together with far too much confabulation) and fading memories to ‘solve’ this apparent double murder-suicide to ensure the domestic happiness of her god-daughter Celia’s future life.
I enjoyed reading this because of the emphasis on the elusive sharpness of even long ago memories (which fits in with my experience with seniors) and the fact that most of the story was told in terms of fragmentary and often incorrect histories from variety of sources from which the truth is nonetheless triangulated. I was also interested to see that in 1970s UK someone in their 50s was thought to be ‘old’ and someone in their 70s ‘quite frail and elderly’, this in sharp contrast to the many sturdy elders I see in my day to day work.
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Tags: Agatha Christie, Mystery, Poirot
