Book Shelf. - Review - book review

National Review, Nov 6, 2000 by Mike Potemra

Probably the most taxing choice facing any book lover has always been the most basic one: What to read next? Since 1986, a mail-order book company called A Common

Reader has been making strong recommendations in its very selective catalogues. It is now also a publishing company, with its own line of Common Reader Editions, and has just begun a very promising imprint called Rediscoveries l London, whose purpose is "to see returned to print favorite books that have been undeservedly neglected-20th-century classics and near-classics to be read with pleasure in the 21st." Advising this imprint is a stellar convocation of English writers, chaired by John Train and including historians John Julius Norwich and Thomas Pakenham.

The first offering in the series is Come, Tell Me How You Live (207 pp., $18.95) by Agatha Christie Mallowan, the noted mystery writer. The book was selected by David Pryce-Jones, a member of the advisory group who is well known to readers of National Review as the author of discerning articles on international affairs. Christie's book is a thoroughly charming memoir, first published in 1946, of her experiences on an expedition to Syria with her husband, the prominent archeologist Max Mallowan. Her enthusiasm is infectious, from the very beginning-when she is asked to apply her bulk to the purpose of closing suitcases ("'If you can't make them shut,' says Max ungallantly, 'nobody can!'")-to her final "El Hamdu Lillah" ("We all praise God together").

Christie writes that archeology is the process of asking the past: How did you live? "Occasionally there is a Royal Palace, sometimes a Temple, much more rarely a Royal burial. These things are spectacular. They appear in newspapers in headlines, are lectured about . . . Yet I think to one engaged in digging, the real interest is in the everyday life-the life of the potter, the farmer, the tool-maker, the expert cutter of animal seals and amulets . . ."

This joy in everyday life animates the whole book. "The light is lovely-a very faint soft rose softens the browns and greys. From the top of a mound one looks out over an apparently deserted world. . . . Here, some five thousand years ago, was the busy part of the world. Here were the beginnings of civilisation, and here, picked up by me, this broken fragment of a clay pot, hand-made, with a design of dots and cross-hatching in black paint, is the forerunner of the Woolworth cup out of which this very morning I have drunk my tea. . . ."

Christie portrays, in her anecdotes about the members of the expedition, the very different ways in which one can play the role of "an Englishman abroad." She herself is a much more winsome figure than the patronizing English matron of colonial stereotype; she indicates that she is aware of the type, and positions herself against it-but not in a manner so self-conscious as to risk alienating the reader.

Fans of her mysteries will be agreeably reminded of one of her most memorable settings; even as she came to view the Orient Express as "an old familiar friend," its "thrill . . . never quite died down." Her love for the Orient Express is clear, and quite endearing. The second book in the series, the 1932 novel Peking Picnic by Ann Bridge (320 pp., $19.95), has an equally exotic setting. These books are not available in bookstores, but only from A Common Reader, 141 Tompkins Ave., Pleasantville, N.Y. 10570 (tel: 800-832-7323), and the website commonreader.com. Their catalogue makes good reading in itself.