But Christie took this further: she had, as Houllebeq argues, "a radical theoretical engagement" with Burkean conservatism.
At a time of massive social transformations in areas as fundamental to individual identity as gender, family and class, Agatha offered the soothing balm of Burkean conservatism. She offers an eternal England, a natural order that will always act spontaneously against evil to restore its own rural sense of calm. There is a clear natural order to Christie’s world, and – in true Burkean style - it is only disrupted by greed, wickedness or misguided political ambition. The world is not – as it seems so often – chaotic and terrifying.
Her work conforms to Burkean conservatism in every respect: justice rarely comes from the state. Rather, it arises from within civil society – a private detective, a clever old spinster.
Indeed, what is Miss Marple but the perfect embodiment of Burke’s thought? She has almost infinite wisdom because she has lived so very long (by the later novels, she is barely able to move and, by some calculations, over 100). She has slowly – like parliament and all traditional bodies, according to Burke – accrued "the wisdom of the ages", and this is the key to her success. From her solitary spot in a small English village, she has learned everything about human nature. Wisdom resides, in Christie and Burke’s worlds, in the very old and the very ordinary.
The novels are shot through with a Burkean fear of enlightenment rationalism. There is a persistent fear of the young and those with grand Archimedean social projects. Christie’s greatest anxiety, she once explained, was of "idealists who want to make us happy by force." The minute a character is described as an idealist in one of her novels, you’ve found your murderer.
Any rational attempt to supersede the ‘natural’ order is terrifying for her: she could have scripted Stanley baldwin’s comment about David Lloyd George that he "is a dynamic force, and a dynamic force is a very dangerous thing."
In ‘They Came to Baghdad’, a rational plan for a New World Order is revealed to be a veil for absolutist fascism.
Her protagonists stand, novel after novel, against those who seek to disrupt the natural order and interpret the world with a misleading ‘rationalism’.
(...)
The Burkean conservatism that Christie loved is now officially dead. Nobody seriously espouses it any longer, and when John Major tried to play some of its tunes a decade ago he sounded ridiculous. There are a few isolated people – Roger Scruton, the Salisbury Review and Prince Charles spring to mind – who try to revive it, but they are an eccentric fringe. I am not a conservative, or anything like it, but the closest I have ever come to seeing its appeal was when I read Christie. She is a political propagandist and literary figure of remarkable power.
The philosophy she espouses – of a world stable and ordered if only these pesky progressives wouldn’t make such an unseemly fuss – remains across the world a far more powerful force than many of us on the left admit. Some people will always resist the appeal of Enlightenment optimism in favour of a mythical Burkean natural order that they believe we tamper with at our peril. If the neoconservatives and Wilsonians (I bunch myself in the latter category) who today are trying to restructure the Middle East want to understand why this is, then the novels of Agatha Christie are a very good place to start.
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