The Christie Affair

“I wonder now if Agatha had a plan. A writer, after all, she would have carefully considered every line of prose she wrote and every possibility to spring from her next movement. When I picture her at her desk, I don’t see a woman in a fugue state or on the verge of amnesia. I see the kind of determination you only recognize if you’ve felt it yourself.”

Much of Nan’s plotting comes from an intentional understanding of character. Several times in the book she revisits a line from Agatha’s fictional character Hercule Poirot: “One must respect the psychology” (79). Here we see not only how Nan has carefully analyzed Agatha’s psychology, but how that same psychology is reflected in Nan herself.

“Sometimes you fall in love with a place, as dramatic and urgent as falling in love with any person.”

At many points in the text, the narrator considers the nature of love and connection. Although they remain the same at their core, their appearance and circumstance can change. Here we see Nan’s blossoming love for Ireland and how that love will become the root of everything that happens throughout her story.

“You may well wonder if you can believe what I tell you about things that occurred when I myself was not present. But this is as reliable an account as you can ever hope to receive. […] There’s plenty we remember that we never saw with our own eyes, or lived with our own bodies. It’s a simple matter of weaving together what we know, what we’ve been told and what we imagine.”

This quote serves an important purpose in justifying the author’s unusual narrative choice: a constant yet fluid first-person perspective. Although the novel often veers away from the protagonist and takes on a third-person texture, it never truly leaves the first-person; we are meant to understand that the entire story is in one person’s voice and that any blanks she may have are filled in by her imagination.