Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie – Book Review

There’s a kernel of a good mystery here that would probably make for an enjoyable short story, but this penultimate Hercule Poirot adventure feels both padded out and frustratingly short on substance.

I didn’t go into this book with high expectations from the octogenarian Christie. The best I can say about Elephants Can Remember is that, unlike Postern of Fate (the following and final novel), it was still passably readable and didn’t make me feel like my brain was about to collapse on itself. It still has the common failings of later-day Christie: conversations that go a-waffling and trail off into random and irrelevant tangents, a haphazard investigation that has no real flow, and information that gets repeated for no good reason.

In this story, Mrs Ariadne Oliver the mystery novelist joins forces with Poirot in order to unravel a cold case from just over a decade ago. A seemingly regular, happily married couple were found shot dead on a cliff top, either as a result of a suicide pact or a murder-suicide. Years later, Mrs Oliver, who happens to be the godmother of the couple’s daughter Celia, is accosted at a literary luncheon by Celia’s potential mother-in-law. Before she marries her boy, Mrs Burton-Cox would really like to know which one of Celia’s parents murdered the other, in other words, which side of Celia’s family might be mentally unstable.

Mrs Oliver’s rational side tells her to stay out of it and do nothing, but curiosity wins and she asks Poirot to help her solve the case. In the first half of the book, Mrs Oliver is actually the main sleuth, interviewing various people who knew the doomed Ravenscrofts and reporting back to Poirot, who compares the memories hoping eventually to see the truth. Between them, Mrs Oliver and Poirot refer to these witnesses as “elephants”, a nod to the popular saying about the elephants’ long memories. If I was to play a drinking game every time the word “elephant” was mentioned in this book, I’d probably get an alcohol poisoning midway through.

As far as cold case is concerned, Christie’s done a better job in Nemesis, another flawed later novel, not to mention Five Little Pigs, one of her true masterworks that’s directly referenced here along with a couple of other Poirot cases. The investigation feels repetitive, the big emotional ending falls flat and the mystery is extremely predictable; I more or less figured it out once a couple of facts are established.

What’s most frustrating is that, with the exception of Celia, none of the characters, living or deceased, ever amount to anything, not even the level of broadly drawn but still effective stock characters that often populate Christie’s novels. It’s a shame, because the story touches on interesting themes like mental health issues and what a family is supposed to do about them.

Because he has the same propensity to waffle along with everyone else in the book, Poirot’s characterisation feels very off throughout. At this point I’m pretty sure that I’m going to put off reading Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case until the very very end, but as achingly sad as that book is, I’m glad that Christie penned an ending where Poirot still sounds like his normal sharp self, until the bitter end.

Though I haven’t said many nice things about it, Elephants Can Remember is not a fundamentally terrible book. I haven’t seen the onscreen adaptation with David Suchet, but I suspect that the story could be much improved by trimming down the unnecessary rambling and bringing in good actors who could breathe in some life into the characters. Also, Christie’s writing may have deteriorated by this point, but her underrated sense of humour still shines through in places. I had a chuckle at the line in which Poirot for once doesn’t presume that everyone knows his name – because he’s well aware that most of those who did are now probably six feet under.

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P.S. Dame Agatha doesn’t exactly spoil Five Little Pigs, but she does effectively rule out one possible solution which might be unfair to anyone who’s yet to read that book.

P.P.S. I’ve only got seven Christie books to go before my re-readathon is complete. The end is near!