It was recently announced that the 1944 novel Towards Zero will be the next BBC Christie adaptation... It is, in my view, one of Agatha’s very best (I say this a lot).
It falls within what I identify as her personal ‘Golden Age’, which I was delighted to write about for
, and which arguably reached its hyper-peak during World War Two. Throughout much of that time, Agatha was living alone in London - also working as a dispenser at University College Hospital - and perhaps, who knows, because she was living with the threat of imminent possible death, she entered a zone of heightened, almost frenzied creativity: of which Towards Zero is a supreme example. The plot is almost alarmingly contingent, solved by a series of guesses and coincidences (neither Poirot nor Marple feature, although Miss Marple was crowbarred into a 2008 television adaptation). Implausibilities abound. But Agatha sweeps the reader along, in her most grandly casual manner, because what is really being solved is the human dynamic, which grips like a fist.Apparently Claude Chabrol was attracted to the idea of filming the book - how brilliant would that have been? - and there is a 2007 French film, L’Heure zèro, whose character list includes a Commissaire Bataille, ie Agatha’s police detective Battle. Which suggests an admirable, and dare one say rare, fidelity to the original.
Not that one expects absolute replication from an adaptation. But with Agatha, who really did know what she was doing, one does crave a grasp of the essence of what is being adapted. For instance: the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express caught the horror and grief at the heart of the book, together with the urgent need for their purgation; the BBC Joan Hickson Marples held the calm consolation of omniscience within a recognizable human figure, the elderly village spinster, who knits and observes and whose virtuous wisdom dispels evil; the And Then There Were None that I saw on stage last year, directed by the brilliant Lucy Bailey, had the expressionist nightmare quality of the book. All while preserving the Christiean formalities.
And with Towards Zero one wants - what? Darkness. The real thing, not a stylized confection. Not posh people striding about and quoting Oswald Mosley, which is often the tone taken in contemporary adaptations, and which - by making everybody frightful from the first - misses the point of the exercise: the tension between the civilized, respectable, often pleasing facade, and what potentially lies beneath. The fact that one may smile and smile and be a villain is so much more interesting than being a villain.
Of course Agatha dealt in murder, therefore darkness is always logically present, but in Towards Zero she directly acknowledged the bleak hell that lives inside certain humans. The ones who are born, as another of her novels has it, to endless night.
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