Love - The most frightening word in the world.
No! That’s not my opinion but that’s the opinion portrayed in the book Nemesis by Agatha Christie where the “nemesis” herself thinks that love is the most frightening word that ever existed.
If love can be the cause of happiness then it can also be the cause of sadness; if it can imbibe in one selflessness, it can also give rise to selfishness; if love can be the cause of birth, love can also be the cause of death…So love is really the most powerful thing in the world that can change you for better and sometimes even for the worse. And when it changes a person for the worse it can prove to be a frightening word…It can turn you to a maniac and then it is called Obsession not Love
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Coming back to the book, Nemesis belongs to the Marple Series where we see the “funniest scatter-brained old ”, that is, Miss Jane Marple, the amateur old detective playing the role of Nemesis, the Goddess of Vengeance.
One of Agatha Christie’s most famous creations, Miss Marple in this book shows her excellence as the avenger of crime, the upholder of justice, her powerful gift of deduction, her gift of “sensing evil in the atmosphere”, her fussiness, her acting skills, her scatter-brains(oh yes!), her sense of humour, her old-maid-like inquisitive nature, her knowledge about gardens, her ruthlessness, her observance of human nature and above all her flair for crime…
The story of Nemesis is quite unique as compared to the stories of the other murder novels in this series. Generally these series show stories where there’s always a murder committed and then we see Miss Marple entering the crime scene, solving the mystery with her extraordinary powers of deduction and taking away all the “well-done” and “good job” tags…but here the difference is that Miss Marple knows that she has to solve a crime but doesn’t exactly know what the crime is that she is supposed to solve…She knows that she is the Nemesis but doesn’t know what the injustice is that she is supposed to be avenging…
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The story goes like this: Miss Marple comes to know from the lawyers of the late Mr.Rafiel(a rich, crippled and “bullying” man whom Miss Marple had met in the West Indies and where they both had acted as allies to solve A Caribbean Mystery) that Mr.Rafiel had left for her a large some of money which she is entitled to claim if she can complete a mission on his behalf. But the problem is nobody knows what it was that Mr.Rafiel wanted Miss Marple to do…Mr.Rafiel had also arranged for Miss Marple on a tour with the Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain. All Miss Marple can guess is that: she is to solve a murder crime. Well soon enough she makes some discoveries:
On the tour she finds Miss Elizabeth Temple(a fellow traveler) who says she knew a girl who had been engaged to Michael Rafiel(Mr.Rafiel’s son) but couldn’t marry him because she died. When Miss Marple had asked Miss Temple the cause of the girl’s death, Miss Temple had replied that it was “Love”.(She gets a link to Mr.Rafiel but isn’t sure whether her mission has anything to do with Michael!)
Then Miss Marple is invited to The Old Manor House(on the way of the tour) by the three sisters(Clotilde and Anthea Bradbury-Scott, and Mrs.Lavinia Glynne, all three of whom seem to be living in a shadow of unhappiness and fear).Miss Marple knows that since Mr.Rafiel had also arranged for this invitation so it must be her next clue. And sure enough she comes to know that these three sister especially Clotilde had been the guardian of the girl, Verity, who was Michael’s fiancé. She also comes to know that Michael had been arrested some seven years ago on charge of the girl’s murder, that the girl’s body was found six months later in a ditch and her face had been badly disfigured, that another girl of Verity’s age had also disappeared during the time when Verity had disappeared and her body hadn’t yet been found but that Michael was also suspected of the disappearance of the other girl. Then there was a strange mound in the garden of the Manor House which was the remains of the Greenhouse they had once had and which was covered with a kind of flowery creeper which is generally grown on ruins of buildings to hide any ugly feature. Anthea, one of the three sisters, who seemed mentally disturbed, was afraid of this particular mound and somehow seemed to be scared of it.
And suddenly there comes the bad news of Miss Temple’s accident which looks more like a murder. Then finally Miss Marple is enlightened as to the crime she is to solve by a fellow traveler Prof. Wanstead who has also been sent on the tour by Mr.Rafiel to help Miss Marple solve the crime. Prof Wanstead, who was Michael’s official psychologist, had been sure that Michael wasn’t the murderer. Then Miss Marple is shown another light in the form of an Archdeacon who tells Miss Marple the whole story of Verity and Michael. He also says that Verity “hero-worshipped” Clotilde and loved Clotilde in an “almost romantic way” but when Michael came along Verity had wanted to escape this over-burdening love that Clotilde provided her with…Moreover the Archdeacon was sure that Verity and Michael had a bond of true love between them, but he didn’t know why Verity and Michael didn’t appear on the day their secret wedding was to take place.
So Miss Marple has to solve a crime which was committed some seven years ago and find a murderer who is still roaming free and is yet to commit some more murders to hide his/her evil face and one thing Miss Marple is sure of is that like Elizabeth Temple had said the cause of Verity’s murder had been “love”…She has to find out verity, another name for the truth, behind the murders and do what Mr.Rafiel described to her in his letter as:
“**Let justice roll down like waters.
And righteousness like an everlasting stream**.”
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Well Nemesis is just as intriguing as the other Agatha Christie books or maybe its even more fascinating and interesting but the reader might get just(just, not more than that!) a little bored reading the same lines over and over again, hearing the same love story of Verity and Michael over and over again from different characters in the novel, one might also get irritated at the way the plot had been stretched in the initial stages of the novel without any connection to the crime…Nevertheless the book can keep you glued to itself with the fact that someone(Miss Marple of course!) goes on to detect a mystery which one has no idea about, Miss Marple’s humour, her own line of thoughts and the idea of the old-pussy in the pink fluffy scarf calling herself “Nemesis” and saying that “Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end” are just the things to attract the readers to this book if nothing else seems satisfying.