by Mary Westmacott (aka Agathie Christie)
Star Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Quick Take: Absolutely stunning. A provocative meditation on life, love, worry, what it means to be a person in the world, and whether there are new possible ways to navigate it that we’d never considered.
Favorite Quote: “You really loved her. You loved her enough to leave her alone.” (p. 245)
After hearing that Agathie Christie wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, I immediately checked out one of these books: The Rose and the Yew Tree, first published in 1947 by Arbor House.
It’s definitely not a romance, but I’m still including it in my romance recommendations because it is about love and obsession and relationships, subjects I imagine interest many romance readers.
I was truly surprised by how much I loved this book—it’s one of the best I’ve read in the past few years. I didn’t really know what to expect going into it, having only read Christie’s detective novels. While I enjoyed many of them, they never truly captivated me, and they certainly never moved me the way The Rose and the Yew Tree did.
This novel gripped me pretty much from the beginning, with its acerbic wit juxtaposed with stunning insights on love, life, and death. It somehow manages to be incredibly funny as well as beautiful and tragic. It has everything.
HarperCollins (which later republished the book) provides this synopsis: “Everyone expected Isabella Charteris, beautiful, sheltered and aristocratic, to marry her cousin Rupert when he came back from the war. It would have been such a suitable marriage. How strange then that John Gabriel, an ambitious and ruthless war hero, should appear in her life. For Isabella, the price of love would mean abandoning her dreams of home and happiness forever. For Gabriel, it would destroy his chance of a career and all his ambitions!”
To me, this synopsis fails to capture the book’s essence. It completely leaves out the narrator, Hugh Norrey, who himself becomes enchanted by Isabella. Hugh relocates to the country with his brother and sister-in-law after a terrible car accident destroys his ability to walk, have sex, or do much of anything for himself. Hugh is drowning in self-pity and despair when he meets Isabella, but as he gets to know her, he rediscovers his will to live again. Through him, we get provocative meditations on what it means to be a person in the world and whether there are new possible ways to navigate it that we’d never considered.
It was Hugh’s experience and reflections that stuck with me and stood out more than any romantic encounter between Isabella and John Gabriel. While they both feature prominently in the book, it’s primarily through their respective relationships to Hugh. Their own tryst doesn’t even come up until the book is nearly over.
What captivated me most about The Rose and the Yew Tree were Christie’s incredibly vivid, specific, and authentic character portraits. It was these portraits that propelled the book forward more than plot, which I believe categorizes the book as literary fiction more than anything else.
For me, so much of this book is a meditation on worry—the futility and perhaps even the self-indulgence of it. It’s not just that worry can prevent us from enjoying life; worry can also impede us from really seeing the world around us and the people in it. We instead see them filtered through our own experience rather than their own, putting ourselves at the center of other people’s lives.
The book is also a mediation on love and what it means to truly care for someone. It’s not about obsession or passion or lust. It’s about seeing them for who they really are and not just accepting them, but appreciating them for it. Allowing them to live their life the way they see fit, even if that means that you’re not a part of it. And in the world of The Rose and the Yew Tree, loving someone so purely can bring its own kind of happiness.
I can’t remember the last time I flagged so many quotes from a book. Here are a few of my favorites:
“I’ve always suspected that a sense of humor is a kind of parlor trick we civilized folk have taught ourselves as an insurance against disillusionment. We make a conscious effort to see things as funny, simply because we suspect they are unsatisfactory.”(Arbor House first edition, p. 175)
“We, all of us, use imagination and speculation as a means of escape—a way of getting outwards, away from ourselves. Isabella doesn’t need to get away from herself. She can live with herself—she’s in harmony with herself. She has no need for a more complex way of life.” (p. 119–120)
“Is there any bitterness like the bitterness of a fool’s paradise? All that communion of mind with mind, our thoughts that leapt to complete each other, our friendship, our companionship: illusion—nothing but illusion. The illusion that mutual attraction between man and woman breeds. Nature’s lure, Nature’s last and most cunning piece of deceit. Between me and Jennifer that had been the attraction of the flesh only—from that had sprung the whole monstrous fabric of self-deception. It had been passion and passion only, and the discovery shamed me, turned me sour, brought me almost to the point of hating her as well as myself. We stared at each other desolately—wondering each in our own way what had happened to the miracle in which we had been so confident.” (p. 27)
Melissa Rose 