Another 90-minute BBC radio adaptation of a Miss Marple mystery, this time The Body in the Library. As the title indicates, a young woman’s body is found on the library hearth of an old friend of Miss Marple’s. I wasn’t quite enjoying this one as we went along, because some of the characters exhibit class prejudices that really got up my nose (and I am not nearly as sensitive to this stuff as, say, Chad). The adaptation was also disappointing in that it not just failed to give an important clue, but gave me exactly the opposite impression of the relevant fact. Who’s editing these things?
I wasn’t quite enjoying this one as we went along, because some of the characters exhibit class prejudices that really got up my nose.
Interesting. Were they supposed to be sympathetic characters, and this prevented you from sympathizing appropriately? Or was it the mere existence of class prejudice?
If I may overgeneralize wildly, I think we Americans tend to underestimate the breadth of the class divisions in interwar Britain. That so much… feudalism should have survived into the 20th century seems absurd and distasteful, and we want to interpret the class attitudes of the time the way we would interpret such attitudes today.
Of course, it doesn’t help that this was a transitional period, where the Traditional Order ™ persisted in pockets, but alongside a growing mercantile beorgeoisie, labor unions, egalitarian movements, various religious reform movements, the collapse of land as a basis for wealth, the spread of merit-based education, etc.
As a benchmark, how do you feel about the class attitudes in the various Dorothy L. Sayers books?
I’m generally not too disturbed over class stuff in Sayers. Here, characters were being very nasty about the dead woman because of her lower class.
I’m trying to remember the story… is this the girl who was a professional dance partner at a hotel? If so, then snide implications that she was probably a prostitute are simply realistic. It generally went with the job, though one didn’t say so.
If you meant some other kind of nastiness, then I’ll reserve judgement.
Yes, it was, though I hadn’t gotten anything so specific out of their nastiness–but as it’s a radio play which I didn’t keep on the iPod, I can’t quote now.