Elephants Can Remember


Elephants Can Remember is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in 1972. It features her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the recurring character Ariadne Oliver. This was the last novel to feature either character, although it was succeeded by Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, which had been written in the early 1940s but was published last. Elephants Can Remember concentrates on memory and oral testimony.

Plot summary

At a literary luncheon Ariadne Oliver is approached by a woman named Mrs Burton-Cox, whose son Desmond is engaged to Oliver's goddaughter Celia Ravenscroft. Mrs Burton-Cox questions the truth regarding the deaths of Celia's parents. Fourteen years before, Oliver's close school friend Margaret Ravenscroft and her husband, General Alistair Ravenscroft, were found dead near their manor house in Overcliffe. Both had been shot with a revolver found between their bodies, which bore only their fingerprints. The investigation into their deaths found it impossible to determine if it was a double suicide, or if one of them murdered the other and then committed suicide. Their deaths left Celia and another child orphaned. After consulting Celia, Mrs Oliver invites her friend Hercule Poirot to resolve the issue.
Poirot and Mrs Oliver proceed to meet elderly witnesses associated with the case, whom they dub "elephants", and discover that Margaret Ravenscroft owned four wigs; that the Ravenscrofts' dog was devoted to the family, but bit Margaret a few days before her death; that Margaret had an identical twin sister, Dorothea, who had spent time in a number of psychiatric nursing homes, and was believed to have been involved in two violent incidents in Asia, including the drowning of her infant son after the death of her husband; and that a month before the couple died Dorothea had been sleepwalking and had died after falling off a cliff. Later Poirot learns the names of governesses who served the Ravenscroft family, one of whom, Zélie Meauhourat, travelled to Lausanne after the couple's deaths.
Poirot soon turns his attention to the Burton-Cox family, and learns that Desmond was adopted and knows nothing about his birth mother. Through his agent, Mr Goby, Poirot learns that Desmond is the illegitimate son of a deceased actress, Kathleen Fenn, who once had an affair with Mrs Burton-Cox's husband and who bequeathed a considerable fortune to Desmond, to be held in trust until he was of age or had married, and which would go to his adoptive mother if he died. Poirot suspects that Mrs Burton-Cox wants to prevent the marriage of Desmond and Celia in order to maintain the use of the money, but he finds no suggestion that Mrs Burton-Cox wishes to kill her son. Eventually he begins to suspect the truth about the Ravenscrofts' death and asks Zélie to return to England to help him to explain it to Desmond and Celia.
Poirot reveals that the woman who died with Alistair was not his wife but her twin, Dorothea. A month before the deaths she had fatally injured Margaret and Margaret had made her husband promise to protect her sister from arrest. Alistair had Zélie help him to conceal the truth of his wife's death by planting her body at the foot of a cliff and fabricating the story that it was Dorothea who had died, then having Dorothea take the place of his wife. While she fooled the Ravenscrofts' servants, the family dog could not be deceived and thus bit her. A month after his wife's death Alistair murdered Dorothea to prevent her from injuring anyone else, making certain that she held the revolver before she was killed, and then he committed suicide. Knowing the facts, Desmond and Celia can face the future together.

Characters

The "Elephants"
Maurice Richardson in The Observer of 5 November 1972 called the novel "A quiet but consistently interesting whodunnit with ingenious monozygotic solution. Any young elephant would be proud to have written it."
Other critics were less kind. Robert Barnard called the novel "Another murder-in-the-past case, with nobody able to remember anything clearly, including, alas, the author. At one time we are told that General Ravenscroft and his wife were respectively sixty and thirty-five; later we are told he had fallen in love with his wife's twin sister 'as a young man'. The murder/suicide is once said to have taken place ten to twelve years before, elsewhere fifteen or twenty. Acres of meandering conversations, hundreds of speeches beginning with 'Well, …' That sort of thing may happen in life, but one doesn't want to read it." According to The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, this novel is one of the "execrable last novels" in which Christie "loses her grip altogether".
Elephants Can Remember was cited in a study done in 2009 using computer science to compare Christie's earlier works to her later ones. The sharp drops in size of vocabulary and the increases in repeated phrases and indefinite nouns suggested that Christie may have been suffering from some form of late-onset dementia, perhaps Alzheimer's disease. This could have also been done purposefully, to reflect the fickle nature of memory.

Adaptations

Television

The novel was adapted into a TV film with David Suchet as Poirot, as an episode in the final series of Agatha Christie's Poirot. It was broadcast on ITV on 9 June 2013, and later on the Acorn TV website on 11 August 2014, over a year later. Zoë Wanamaker returned to the role of Ariadne Oliver, marking her fifth out of six appearances on the show in total. Greta Scacchi, Vanessa Kirby, Iain Glen and Ferdinand Kingsley were also among the cast.
The adaptation is generally faithful to the novel, but includes some significant additions to the plot. Most notably, there is a gruesome present day murder for Poirot to solve, which raises the tension and allows for a suspenseful ending. The plot of the novel, involving delving into the past, is reduced to background information leading to the present-day murder. Characters such as Mr Goby, Miss Lemon, George, Marlene Buckle and ex-Chief Superintendent Spence were removed from the story, whilst the characters of Zélie Meauhourat and Mme Rouselle were combined.
Instead of immediately helping Mrs Oliver with the Ravenscroft case, Poirot instead chooses to investigate the murder of Dr Willoughby's father, which is a subplot that is not in the novel; as a consequence, Dr Willoughby's character is greatly expanded. When Poirot realises that Dr Willoughby and his institute have a connection to the Ravenscrofts, Poirot decides to solve both mysteries. This subplot also includes an original character named Marie McDermott, an Irish-American girl who works as Dr Willoughby's filing clerk and turns out to be his mistress. The character is ultimately revealed to be Dorothea Jarrow's daughter, who is avenging her mother for the cruel treatments she experienced at the hands of Professor Willoughby, and also for her mother's murder by trying to kill both Celia and Desmond. Zélie spirited her away to Canada after the tragedy, and she had to wait thirteen years before she could earn enough money to travel to England and exact her revenge. Also, in keeping with the other episodes, the story is moved from the early 1970s to the late 1930s. This leads to an anachronism when there are references to chemotherapy as a cure for cancer.

Radio

Elephants Can Remember was adapted for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2006, featuring John Moffatt as Poirot and Julia Mackenzie as Ariadne Oliver.

Film adaptations

The 2007 Thai movie Alone is loosely inspired by Elephants Can Remember.

Publication history

The novel was serialised in the Star Weekly Novel, a Toronto newspaper supplement, in two abridged instalments from 10 to 17 February 1973 with each issue containing the same cover illustration by Laszlo Gal.