She believed in the love you learn from bad books and moralists: eternal, possessive, rigid and unchanging. She married a dashing young cad named Archie Christie and travelled the world with him and wrote five moderately successful novels. When she was a young woman she believed passionately in a particular idea of love.
I often think of Agatha Christie, third-highest selling author of all time after Shakespeare and the gang that wrote the Bible. If you believe there are as many loves as there are people to do the loving, and that two lovers' ideas of love ideally smoosh together to form a third version, that is obviously a big fat lie. If stories are journeys, and the best ones are, that's when it begins.Įveryone talks about romantic love as though we all agree on what it means and how it plays out, which implies there's really one kind of love with its own rules and prohibitions and perhaps some local variations.
I like love stories but they tend to end just as they get interesting: when the lovers get together. It was Valentine's week so there has been a lot about love, and love is a good thing, obviously, but I don't always recognise what people mean by it.
