The Rose and the Yew Tree

Product Information

Lady St. Loo and entourage] were, you see, exactly right to have come out of St. Loo Castle. They were pure fairy story. The Three Witches and the Enchanted Maiden.

The last thing you want in an election is a lot of people who think things out and really use their heads.’ (Spoken by a candidate for office) It opens with the narrator, who seems to have some kind of physical disability, being called to the deathbed of a man he professes to hate. But why would be invited to the deathbed of such a person? What is the relationship between these two men. Is there a woman?! Oh the mystery. So, Mary Westmatcott is the pen-name Agatha Christie used when she wanted to get away from writing mysterious and write ... romances? Well, romances in the broad sense of "stories about people have emotional reactions to things and each other, some of which may be love" rather genre romance sense of "happy ever after." With a lot of artists moving to the coast, competing with the established upper class in population, the Conservative Party is in danger of seeing this district swing to the Labour Party. The charismatic, liked-by-women Gabriel desires a political career, so he agrees to run for the seat, and the Conservative Party agrees to let him – they are strange bedfellows, but both stand to gain. Modern readers might see a parallel to the Trump-GOP pact.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-04-24 18:06:05 Boxid IA130001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor Ultimately, this novel is a robust and believable portrait of the two main male characters, but it leaves the female love interest mysterious. This is a common trait of romance stories written by men, but it’s notable here because it’s written by a woman. Isabella’s cipher nature could be a ding against the book.

Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.9 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19742 Openlibrary_edition urn:lcp:roseyewtree00agat:lcpdf:0902b112-df91-486a-bdcd-58e84d759cb4 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier roseyewtree00agat Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t37125h2n Isbn 0515093815 The prologue introduced the narrator, Hugh Norreys, who was physically disabled. The main body of the story consisted of Hugh's memories of the summer of 1945 during his convalescence with his family. Southern England was relatively isolated from the still raging battles of WWII. Although his emotional equilibrium hadn't recovered its earlier footing, Hugh was a solid chap of good manners and conventional values, including a chivalric (occasionally patronizing) attitude towards women. His morés prevented him from recognizing all of the events which transpired during that eventful summer.

The people who seemed to have had only the good fairies attend their christening were the inhabitants of St. Loo Castle, which dominated the county's skyline. As expected, the Castle's residents supported the Conservative Party and thus interacted with John, someone normally outside their milieu. But arguably, Christie is not going for false mysteriousness; she’s saying that this is how Isabella is. Her simplicity is confounding to the more complex thinkers, but the explanation is simply that: She’s simple. (That’s not to be confused with being dumb, at least in this story.) Gabriel is in this for personal gain; he has no allegiance to Conservative ideology. It’s a core conflict of the book, but something that will not strike modern readers as unusual. But in the olden days, putting one’s self up for election to Parliament was a moral duty of the upper class; a way of giving something to society – not vice versa. In the original set-up, officeholders were not paid, so it truly was a noble act of voluntarism. What an unexpected surprise from Agatha Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott! I would strongly advise avoiding or ignoring the blurb which puts the emphasis in all the wrong places (this is not a romance) and, simultaneously, is full of spoilers - all very misleading and the book is far better than it sounds. Christie nicely pairs the Theory of Mind theme with a related theme: a robust exploration of political gamesmanship via this small-town election. In other words: Why do people vote for who they vote for?