I’m sure it will qualify as cozy British comfort viewing here. It remains one of the best-selling books of all time the latest miniseries has been an enormous hit in the UK. And the story-of people being confronted with secret crimes from their past, and punished for them-is otherwise identical. But if you do an image search for that original title, it jars, viscerally. In the widely known “And Then There Were None” version, we’re merely faced with fantastic amounts of violence, and a rhyme so macabre and distressing one doesn’t hear it now outside of the Agatha Christie context. This book is a work of exception and adds a feather to an already overflowing cap. This proves the calibre of Agatha Christie as a writer. Her book ‘And Then There Were None’ is premised on the poem ‘Ten Little Soldiers’ serving as the basic plot of the novel.
If her story suggests how easy it is to play upon such fears, it is also a reminder of how intimately tied they are to sources of pleasure and enjoyment. Agatha Christie is known as the ‘Queen of Mystery’. As the critic Alison Light has written, renaming the island actually did make a difference in its initial form itĬould be relied upon automatically to conjure up a thrilling ‘otherness’, a place where revelations about the ‘dark side’ of the English would be appropriate … Christie’s location is both more domesticated and privatized, taking for granted the construction of racial fears woven into psychic life as early as the nursery. Ten people, each with something to hide and something to fear, are invited to an isolated mansion on Indian Island by a host who, surprisingly, fails to appear. Of course, something that was considered racially problematic pre-1940 has not become less so with the passing of years. And then there are the figurines at the center of the table … And Then There Were None is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November. They’re constantly singing and reciting it. A copy of the rhyme hangs in each guest’s room. The remote isle where the characters are taken is now called Soldier Island-but you do the math. Even so, consider the sheer number of times the epithet is referenced in the novel.
Perhaps you’ve seen the BBC miniseries previewed above. “Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None,” is, of course, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians-which was originally, notoriously, released serially in the UK under the title Ten Little Niggers. (This was the British music-hall version of the minstrel song.) Even in 1939, this title was considered too offensive for American publication.Ĭhristie’s work is not known for its racial sensitivity, and by modern standards her oeuvre is rife with casual Orientalism. With all the controversy surrounding the renaming of problematic buildings, it seems fitting to draw attention to another bit of suspicious rebranding. By Sadie Stein FebruOur Daily Correspondent
0 kommentar(er)
