Major Themes
This book explores the 1950s subject of defection to the Soviets, but it also demonstrates how the breakup of Christie's first marriage in the 1920s remained with her. Like her 1934 Mary Westmacott novel Unfinished Portrait, it starts with a youngish woman who has married, had a daughter and whose husband has replaced her with someone else. In both books, a young man displays remarkable perceptiveness in spotting her intention to end her life and defies convention to save her, not only in tackling a stranger on intimate matters but in spending time in the woman's hotel bedroom to talk her out of suicide. In this story he talks her into espionage instead.
Read more about this topic: Destination Unknown (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or themes:
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)