Passenger to Frankfurt is not exactly Christie’s most beloved novel. It’s a thriller, rather than a straight-up detective mystery, for one thing. In my recent quest to read all her novels, I discovered that she peppered a fair few thrillers in with the mysteries. She was never as good in this genre, but I can appreciate her need to change things up to keep her writing and imagination fresh.
That’s not the only problem with PTF, though. It came out in 1970, toward the end of her life and career, and it’s beyond question that her powers were waning at that point. (However, in all fairness, I think her silliest thriller of all was The Big Four, which was published in 1927, right as she was hitting her stride.) Christie fans know full well that she was of a conservative turn of mind, very irritable about high taxes, and generally unhappy at the drift of things, socially and culturally. That really shows through in PTF. But this too should be qualified: a novel like Third Girl reckons with what has become of “young people these days” and takes them at face value. It’s not all invective.
You can read a very thorough description of what passes for PTF’s plot on Wikipedia. The opening sequence in which the protagonist trades places with someone who is convinced that she will be killed if she takes her flight is one of the best in Christie’s work—it’s a shame the rest of the book didn’t follow through on the initial premise.
But here’s where it gets interesting. For one thing, the titular city is Frankfurt. An obvious choice for an international flight hub, but I can’t help but wonder if more lies behind it: namely, the so-called Frankfurt school, which unleashed Critical Theory in all its corrosive glory on the world. That would be utterly speculative on my part—except that in this book Christie actually mentions by name Herbert Marcuse (the leading proponent of the Frankfurt school)! Who knew that she was keeping up with, at that time, arcane philosophical movements? (By the way, for a more comical take on the matter, see Marcuse’s cameo on the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar!, in which George Clooney attempts to apply the cui bono principle to weird behavior at a Hollywood bash.)
The über-villain of the novel is a terrifying old German broad who has dreams of revivifying Nazism or any other handy fascist variant. A lookalike Hitler or possibly a hitherto unknown offspring stands at the ready to seize power. But the only way this insanely impractical plot will work, as the novel unfolds, is because the world is absolutely chock full of young people who yearn not to build, but to destroy.
Again, this could be easily dismissed as the paranoid fantasy of a cranky old lady. Such as:
“Something is going on—something is brewing. Not just in one country. In quite a lot of countries. They’ve recruited a service of their own and the danger about that is that it’s a service of young people. And the kind of people who will go anywhere, do anything, unfortunately believe anything, and so long as they are promised a certain amount of pulling down, wrecking, throwing spanners in the works, then they think the cause must be a good one and that the world will be a different place. They’re not creative, that’s the trouble—only destructive. The creative young write poems, write books, probably compose music, paint pictures just as they always have done. They’ll be all right—But once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.”
And this:
“They want violence and they like violence. They don’t like the world, they don’t like our materialistic attitude. They don’t like a lot of our nasty ways of making money, they don’t like a lot of the fiddles we do. They don’t like seeing poverty. They want a better world. Well, you could make a better world, perhaps, if you thought about it long enough. But the trouble is, if you insist on taking away something first, you’ve got to put something back in its place. Nature won’t have a vacuum—an old saying, but true. Dash it all, it’s like a heart transplant. You take one heart away but you’ve got to put another one there. One that works. And you’ve got to arrange about the heart you’re going to put there before you take away the faulty heart that somebody’s got at present.”
And most poignantly, showing Christie’s sympathy for the young misled by the destructive impulses of the old, this:
“But in a way this whole business is rather like the Children’s Crusade. Starting with idealism, starting with ideas of the Christian world delivering the holy city from pagans, and ending with death, death and again, death. Nearly all the children died. Or were sold into slavery. This will end the same way unless we can find some means of getting them out of it…”
A year ago I would’ve dismissed all this as rather ridiculous. I mean, you have to come up with a worldwide conspiracy to pull off a good thriller, right?
But then I read Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public.
It is a compelling and disturbing work on recent history, and one I can’t recommend highly enough. In brief, Gurri argues that a strong perception of disorder and injustice in our contemporary societies has driven a desire for revolutionary destruction—but one that is entirely devoid of a meaningful, thought-out, and feasible alternative to put in its place. He attributes this absence to a number of things, not least of all a distorted sense of “democracy” that abjures any leadership whatsoever. The result is protest without progress, as seen variously in the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring.
I have to admit that Gurri’s book made me impose a check on myself. I’m always trying to understand what has gone wrong in all kinds of things and have been free in my criticisms… but always with the caveat, “Not that I know how to fix it.” Until now, I took that to be a form of epistemic humility. Hopefully at root it is: my critiques are not paving the way for my own dictatorial takeover or flogging my bespoke solution to all woes.
But, for all that, critique can become cheap pretty fast. What good is it knowing what’s wrong if you have absolutely no idea what’s right? Or taking apart a working (however imperfectly) system if you have zero to put in its place?
I still abhor grand solutions of all kinds, and more than ever. But the alternative is not no solution, and certainly not destruction accompanied by a wicked naïveté that assumes someone else will come along and make it right after. My mind turns more and more now to very local, specific, and personal solutions. We do have to deal with matters of scale, populations of billions, and interlocking systems. Someone has to come up with specific proposals and test them out. But the way to get there is local experiments and personal interactions, not grand schemes (involving Hitler’s spurious son, for example) or top-down impositions.
The weirdest part of all about PTF is that I can’t tell where Christie herself lands. At the very end we discover that a doctor has been working on a drug called “Benvoleo” that will produce “artificial goodness”—chemically induced benevolence. He refuses to proceed when he finally recognizes the staggering unintended consequences that may emerge from drugging the human population into niceness. (I was reminded of “Firefly” and its version of this chemical solution—90% of the population lost the will to live, but 10% turned into murderous maniacs.) The doctor concludes: “There is no benevolence on tap.”
But then, at the very end, through a slightly ridiculous turn of events, the doctor reverses course and thinks maybe his great discovery might just be worth it after all:
“Benevolence has its dangers just like everything else. What it will do is save a lot of suffering, pain, anarchy, violence, slavery to drugs. Yes, it’ll save quite a lot of bad things from happening, and it might save something that was important. It might—just might—make a difference to people. Young people. This Benvoleo of yours—now I’ve made it sound like a patent cleaner—is going to make people benevolent and I’ll admit perhaps that it’s going to make them condescending, smug and pleased with themselves, but there’s just a chance, too, that if you change people’s natures by force and they have to go on using that particular kind of nature until they die, one or two of them—not many—might discover that they had a natural vocation, in humility, not pride, for what they were being forced to do. Really change themselves, I mean, before they died. Not be able to get out of a new habit they’d learnt.”
Um, really? C’mon, Agatha. You’ve given your whole career to studying the incorrigibly ugly aspects of humanity and laughing off those who blame it on “glands.” Did you really think in the end that we could drug humanity into goodness?
Like I said, it’s hard to tell whether she endorses this or not, but letting the novel end there tilts it toward approval.
I emphatically disagree. But there is a weird prescience about this strange thriller all the same: foreseeing the self-righteous longing for destruction without constructive alternatives, and the ongoing unjustified belief in pharmacological solutions to the complexity of human nature. That, at least, Christie’s long study of humanity prepared her to get right.
And now to conclude, apropos of nothing, here’s my favorite line from the book:
“They say she was mixed up in the Czechoslovakian business. Or do I mean the Polish trouble? Oh dear, it’s so difficult, isn’t it. All the names, I mean. They have so many z’s and k’s. Most peculiar, and so hard to spell.”