Star Over Bethlehem: Poems and Holiday Stories

This is not a bit of Hercule Poirot about a murder or something. This is a little book of Christmas poetry and short stories, from Agatha Christie Mallowan. In the first story, Mary looks upon her babe and an angel says she is allowed to see into the childs future, and seeing that future, is told that God has said she has the right to say if the child will live or die....it is up to her, the conversation gets very interesting. Martyers are in another story, having suffered horribly they wonder, was it enough? Did they suffer enough for the Christ? The story of the Naughty Donkey, these will all tug at your heart.

Agatha Christie published the stories and poems of STAR OVER BETHLEHEM during her very late, in fact penultimate period, one which has been widely derided but one in which in my opinion, she was still capable of pulling off tremendous successes as well as the puzzling flops. Of all the different decades of her writing, the 60s is the one in which I would have liked most to have known her, and even though her development had taken a different direction, she was still very much at the top of her game at certain moments. She had long ago left off writing the Mary Westmacott novels, and the great days of her playwriting career had recently come to a halt with the superlative RULE OF THREE in 1962. And yet some of the mystical, as well as the shrewdly observant, the qualities we read "Mary Westmacott" to enjoy in bulk, still clings to the material of STAR OVER BETHLEHEM, and in fact in some ways it's Christie's most nodernist, fragmented, and yet far-reaching work. The poems aren't much, and really if these poems are new then she hasn't progressed much since her very first book of poems from back in the 1920s--a remarkable case of intellectual paralysis if you ask me. But the stories seem very much of a piece, and very much contemporary--even to such internal details as the talk about the "ban the Bomb" marchers, or the Japanese sci-fi structure of "In the Cool of the Evening," in which water contaminated by a nuclear power plant accident has mutated the animals and plant life of a small English village into innumerable new monstrous yet beautiful species. One story, "The water Bus," doesn't do it for me, it's a little too contained and foreshortened. A typically self-satisfied English bourgeoise, like Joan Scudamore in Westmacott's masterpiece ABSENT IN THE SPRING (1944). goes for a cooling ride in a London water bus and finds herself jostled by a variety of loud, shrieking lower class peasants. At first they repel her, then under Christ's influence she comes to accept them as wholly human. The remaining stories, from the Nativity themes of "The Naughty Donkey" and the title piece, all the way through to the modern pageantry of "Promotion in the Highest," are superbly satisfying, testaments to Christie's magnificent storytelling abilities. She was to write, as far as I know, only one story after these, the Mr. Quin adventure of "The Harlequin Tea Set." She was like Prospero, tempted to break her own rod, a master storyteller now giving it all up for the pleasures of silence. She is, I think, our very greatest writer, and this book a puzzling sidelight to her genius.