Esa paused and said slowly: “Nofret is beautiful. But remember this: Men are made fools by the gleaming limbs of women, and lo, in a minute they are become discolored carnelians…”
Her voice deepened as she quoted: “A trifle, a little, the likeness of a dream, and death comes as the end…”
It’s commonly known that Agatha Christie accompanied her archaeologist husband (Sir Max Mallowan) on digs throughout the Middle East; and while those settings served as inspiration for some of her more famous novels, Death Comes As the End is the only mystery that Dame Christie actually set in antiquity. This makes for an interesting tradeoff: the reader doesn’t get the familiar experience of watching Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple unravel mysteries, but we do get an insider’s view of a wealthy functionary’s domestic life in Ancient Egypt (maids are forever counting the linens; scribes catalogue the granaries; the bodies pile up on the banks of the silver Nile). There is quite a lot of domestic melodrama here — the sons of an ageing Ka-priest have their prospects diminished when their father brings home a beautiful young concubine who has ambitions of her own — and I wasn’t necessarily invested in the mystery itself, but as always, Christie makes astute psychological observations about her characters, proving here that people (and their self-interested motivations) haven’t changed at all in four thousand years. An enjoyable read; a little different than the typical Christie mystery and a perfect Mother's Day present from Mallory in anticipation of an upcoming trip to Egypt.
From her early childhood Renisenb could remember hearing these elder brothers of hers arguing in just those selfsame accents. It gave her suddenly a feeling of security…She was home again. Yes, she had come home…Yet as she looked once more across the pale, shining river, her rebellion and pain mounted again. Khay, her young husband, was dead…Khay with his laughing face and strong shoulders. Khay was with Osiris in the Kingdom of the Dead — and she, Renisenb, his dearly loved wife, was left desolate. Eight years they had had together — she had come to him as little more than a child — and now she had returned widowed, with Khay’s child, Teti, to her father’s house.
As the novel begins, recently widowed Renisenb returns to her childhood home and is comforted by the bustle of her brothers and their families. The eldest brother, Yahmose, performs their father’s rituals during his frequent absences — and is assured of inheriting the position of Ka-priest at his death — but two other brothers (the cocky and handsome Sobek and the young and impetuous Ipy) both believe that they deserve to one day assume their father’s role. When their father, Imhotep, eventually returns home from his estates in the north in the company of a beautiful and haughty concubine, Nofret, Renisenb’s sisters-in-law will begin a back-of-the-house “women’s campaign” against the upstart that will come back to undermine their own positions. And after several characters say that they would like to see Nofret dead, her body is discovered at the bottom of a cliff: was it an accident or a murder? And why is her spirit spotted on the nights of other deaths?
“What persecution — what vindictiveness — is this! My concubine whom I treated well, to whom I paid all honor, whom I buried with the proper rites, sparing no expense. I have eaten and drunk with her in friendship — to that all can bear witness. She had had nothing of which to complain — I did indeed more for her than would have been considered right and fitting. I was prepared to favor her to the detriment of my sons who were born to me. Why, then, should she thus come back from the dead to persecute me and my family?”
There’s a large cast of murder suspects (and, as seems to be Christie’s usual schema, the list gets shorter as the bodies pile up), but again, the mystery aspect wasn’t the most interesting part of this novel for me. I did like the setting and the way that Christie used it, and I did like the psychological observations (even if I didn’t love that Renisenb was so naive that other characters needed to be constantly explaining to her how people and the world really work), and overall, this was a worthwhile entertainment.
Mallory gave me this book for Mother's Day — knowing that we were planning a trip to Egypt and that I have developed a penchant for posing with books in interesting locations — and, yeah, I pulled it out in King Tut's tomb:
