It's a cliché to talk of how comfortable Ms Christie's murders are. Even when the envelope is being pushed a little, as with Hastings absolutely being prepared to do away with someone in cold blood (to protect his daughter, of course) the reader doesn't have any sense of the solid ground of good old social reality trembling over much. (After all, the blighter in question would have deserved it had it taken place which it assuredly didn't.)
We need that sort of comfort in our reading occasionally - at least I do. But even as I'm being comforted by things nicely as they are, or should be, I detect a faint longing to be reminded of things disturbingly as they could be, and perhaps are, when the blinkers are off.
That's what Sylvia Plath has to offer, and in her final poems (end of 1962, beginning of 1963), which I'm currently staggering through, I find myself with some reluctance joining her, at moments, in that place in which the very act of existence is one of extreme discomfort. Is this how things really are? Not for me, I'm thankful to say, but for SP the reader recognises a breakthrough into chilling, uncompromising, absolute truth.
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