Hive Book Club: "Elephants Can Remember" – Agatha Christie 01.10

Kickstarting 2025 with a new book tally! What better way to start than with a second Agatha Christie to follow the first...

I’ve realised something important: any long journey I embark on now must be accompanied by a Christie novel. It’s practically a survival strategy. They’re just such gloriously uncomplicated, delightfully twisty reads - perfect for distracting yourself from screaming babies, endless layovers, or that one guy in 23B who insists on taking his shoes off.

Travelling home to the Netherlands after spending Christmas and New Year’s in New Zealand, I naturally found myself longing for something light yet intriguing to pass the hours. Inspired by the simple nature of Death on the Nile - my final book of 2024 - I turned to another Agatha Christie classic: Elephants Can Remember. In a way it’s kinda fitting to start the year with another of her works, diving into the comforting formula of crime and clever deductions - haha.

The two flights back were... daunting, to say the least - especially the six-hour layover in Shanghai, which tested both my patience and my caffeine tolerance, haha. But honestly? That was a spa retreat compared to the four-stop nightmare of the trip over: 27,45hrs in the air, plus a soul-crushing 19,5hrs of stopover time. Never, and I mean never, again will I subject myself to that level of travel chaos. If I ever get the bright idea to book something like that again, someone please confiscate my laptop. Thankfully, having Elephants Can Remember tucked into my bag made the ordeal (almost) bearable. Poirot’s calm, methodical deductions were exactly the grounding force I needed while my brain melted in a jet-lagged haze.

I finished the book mid-flight, somewhere over Europe, about six hours out from Amsterdam. Unlike Death on the Nile, which dealt with the immediacy of murder and its unravelling in the present, this story took a different approach. Hercule Poirot and his friend Ariadne Oliver delve into a decades-old mystery, piecing together the faded recollections of those involved. This backward glance into the past added a different perspective to the storytelling, one that was slower but equally rewarding.

I found the plot itself a little repetitive, lacking some of the polish and sharpness of her best-known works. Still, the unveiling of the truth - layer by layer, memory by memory - kept me pretty engaged. It’s a quieter mystery in comparison with Death on the Nile, and perhaps not one to hold every reader’s attention… but for me, it was the perfect companion on my marathon journey home. It made the endless hours in transit feel – oh, I don’t know – purposeful, if that makes sense.

Looking back, Elephants Can Remember wasn’t just a distraction from my travels; it was a bridge between two worlds. It allowed me to hold onto the warmth of New Zealand just a little longer while preparing to return to my everyday life in the Netherlands. Agatha Christie, as always, proved a reliable companion... her story was a balm - for both restless hours in the air and the bittersweetness of leaving family and lush landscapes behind.

Anyway, I'd best be off.

Happy reading, Hivers. 📚

The challenge remains the same as last year... One down, nine to go.

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Photographs: unless otherwise noted, all images were taken by me with an iPhone 8 Blogger: @actaylor