For those few who are still reading this blog (hello! you're all wonderful people and I cherish you), you know I haven't really written any real reviews in a while. This isn't going to be a real review either, not really, but it's closer to that. Basically I just finished listening to Agatha Christie's
Endless Night and I want to bitch about it. Which really, is what blogging is all about.
This is going to be very spoiler-y. But also the book is...not good so should be fine to read spoilers. Basically I'm saving you.
Before I get into that, I want to write out my defense for why I picked this up in the first place. It was the end of the year. I didn't think I was going to be doing any more book reading as I had mostly traded my audiobook listening for Christmas music. But the Christmas music ended and there were still a few days left in the year so without anything particular in mind I started browsing audiobooks from the library and I came across a Hercule Poirot Christmas story and that was fun. But then I finished it pretty quickly. I figured Christie stuff is pretty fun, the handful I've read. There's also a ton of it and tends to be readily available from the library so rather than think to hard about what to read next, I just browsed the Christie stuff. And I saw this one called
Endless Night. I skimmed the summary but was like "yeah yeah, marriage to rich person, land that may be cursed, sounds good" and also mostly picked it cos I liked the cover. Also it was only about 6 hours long so not too bad.
OK now to my complaints
Firstly, this is super boring. It's very slow and it's mostly just blue collar guy and rich girl falling in love and getting married and buying land with a g***y curse (it comes up a lot and it's part of the name of the house/land) and I want you to know that while it may sound interesting it is not. Not mostly. I mean, it's competently written (of course) but just...who cares.
Building on the boringness, no one dies until hour 4.5. Out of a 6 hour book. That's like 75% of the way through the book. And I'm not out for violence but one goes into a Christie book expecting certain things and one of those things is that someone is going to die under mysterious circumstances. And sure it happens here but it takes basically forever to get there. And also, did I mention the stuff that comes before it is not interesting?
Also, and I acknowledge that this is on me, but this isn't really a mystery. I mean, I guess it kind of is (who killed Ellie? - this is a spoiler area though you can prob guess pretty early on she's donezo) but mostly it's suspense. Or supposed to be. But I think you have to be more invested for it to be suspenseful.
But here is my, by far, biggest complaint. The book is told in the first person from the blue collar guy Michael Rogers. There's no framing device where he's telling this story to a particular audience. Instead a straight forward first person narration so we learn about how he fell in love with Ellie and all their work trying to get this house built. We learn Michael's thoughts about Ellie's relationship with her governess/chaperone/companion-you-pay Greta (he is suspicious - they seem very close and does Greta have some sort of control over Ellie?). We learn about Michael's insecurities about dealing with Ellie's family. We learn about Michael's grief in finding Ellie dead. All of this from Michael's first person point of view. And THEN (and another spoiler warning here) we learn that Michael and Greta actually orchestrated not only Ellie's murder but the whole marriage and everything and Michael is actually a sociopath who just married Ellie cos he wanted her money and that he's killed before.
Except, if this whole story is from his point of view, wtf wouldn't any of this have come up before? Who was he pretending for when we're in his thoughts? He talks about the times he and Greta pretended to hate each other but would meet up in secret except NOPE that didn't happen cos this was first person and shouldn't we, the audience, have seen that? How's a first-person narrator going to hide his thoughts from the audience when the whole thing is that we're seeing his thoughts?
I will say, in skimming through the Goodreads reviews of this book, most people don't seem bothered by this fact so perhaps it's just me.
Anyway, that's my sort-of-but-not-really review of
Endless Night. Maybe next time I'll write a real review that isn't just me complaining.
