Death Comes as the End

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A suggestion by a friend, Professor Stephen Glanville, inspired Agatha Christie to set a mystery in ancient Egypt, basing the title on an ancient inscription. Published when she was 55, this novel treats readers to a richly-researched rendering of a family of ancient Thebans as they evolve through the seasons of the Nile: inundation, winter, and summer.

Widowed while still young, Renisenb returns with her daughter Teti to live in the house of her father Imhotep, a prosperous mortuary priest. Sentimentally, she observes the familiar family squabbles among her brothers and their wives, and prepares to settle back into the innocence that preceded her marriage.

But all is not well in the household. Though her two older brothers are grown men who work tirelessly for the family, Imhotep fails to recognize their contribution, or entrust them with appropriate responsibility. Instead, he orders them around, criticizing and threatening them while he spoils his immature teenage son, the baby of the family.

The wives of the brothers — one shrewish and the other oblivious of anything that does not concern her own children — quarrel frequently. Adding fuel to the fires or discontent, Imhotep’s mother has no respect for her foolish and egotistical son, and his fawning servant delights in causing trouble among the members of the household.

Renisenb’s dream of returning to an innocent past is dashed when her father returns home with Nofret, a beautiful young concubine from the north. Then Hori, her father’s assistant priest, frightens her by letting slip his fear that the family is rotting from within.

Oblivious of the evils of jealousy and ill-feeling he has caused within his own walls, Imhotep sets out once again on business. Before leaving, he enjoins his family not only to take care of Nofret, but to cater to her whims. He even appoints a relative newcomer to the household, a young male scribe, to write to him if anyone fails to extend every courtesy the rude young woman demands. It isn’t long before Nofret “falls” from a cliff, and before Renisenb and Hori can work out whether her death was an accident, more bodies begin to pile up.

In this serious novel, Christie goes far beyond the Mousetrap-style puzzles she presents in many other works. Here she grapples with serious and enduring themes that apply as much to Christie’s contemporary milieu as they did in ancient Egypt and as they do now. First and foremost, the novel concerns itself with right relations between parents and children. Here the healthy relationship between Renisenb and Teti stands in stark contrast to the warped and damaged ones between Imhotep and his sons. The reader witnesses Renisenb’s moment of realization as she meets her daughter Teti’s friendly and confident smile. Much as she loves her child, she concludes that Teti “is alone, as I am alone, as we are all alone. If there is love between us, we shall be friends all our life, but if there is not love she will grow up and we shall be strangers.” Once again, Christie contrasts the mature daughter’s moral character with that of her frivolous and foolish father. Knowing what we do about the culture in which Christie was raised, we sense the author questioning the beliefs and practices of her own society.

Likewise, at a societal level, the assumed alpha male privilege that allows Imhotep to lord it over his family rather than respecting and communicating with them is by no means exclusive to ancient Egypt. Such social mores are still as common as they are damaging.

Renisenb and Hori are seekers of philosophical insight, as when she tells him that “even if Nofret did hate me, her hate cannot harm me…And anyway if one is to live always in fear it would be better to die — so I will overcome fear.” Again, her wisdom contrasts sharply with that of her father, who is “forever preoccupied with his own narrow gains and losses,” and thus incapable of appropriate moral choices. Imhotep’s “fussy pomposity” is repeatedly shown in opposition to Renisenb’s thoughtful and courageous effort to create inner peace. Recognizing her character, Hori says that in the future, when the upper and lower kingdoms re-unite, “Egypt will need men and women of heart and courage—women such as you.”

As the tension ramps up, Renisenb broods over the nature of evil and the damage done by the rottenness that works from within. “It may be,” she theorizes, that there must always be growth, and “if one does not grow kinder and wiser and greater, then the growth must be the other way, fostering the evil things.” Or, she wonders, does evil arise out of a narrow existence, a life “too folded in upon itself.” Evil may be contagious, and she and Hori agree that once the heart is opened to evil, it can “blossom like poppies among the corn.” We must look into our own hearts, and we must also look into others deeply, as people are not always what they seem.

The story also touches on the consequences of our daily actions as well as of the larger paths we choose in life. The squabbling wives and the troublemaking servant soon lose control of the nastiness they unleash. And When Renisenb’s most important choice presents itself to her “in the simplest terms, the easy life or the difficult one,” she finds the courage to choose the hard one, hoping it will afford her deeper satisfactions and fewer regrets. Knowing that “courage is the resolution to face the unforeseen,” she wisely seeks to cultivate that bravery.

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The Last Resort by Alison Lurie