The Box

I wrote:

In Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold there’s a good bit of concern about something called The Box:

This Box was one of many operating in various parts of the country. It was installed, under the skeptical noses of Reginald Graves-Upton’s nephew and niece, at Upper Mewling. Mrs. Pinfold, who had been taken to see it, said it looked like a makeshift wireless-set. According to the Bruiser and other devotees The Box exercised diagnostic and therapeutic powers. Some part of a sick man or animal — a hair, a drop of blood preferably — was brought to The Box, whose guardian would then “tune in” to the “life-waves” of the patient, discern the origin of the malady and prescribe treatment.

The Box becomes one of the foci of Pinfold’s paranoia.

It also plays a significant role in Agatha Christie’s 1961 novel The Pale Horse, and in his book on Christie Robert Barnard says of the novel, “Also makes use of ‘The Box,’ a piece of pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus fashionable in the West Country in the ‘fifties….” But what the hell is this thing? Because it’s simply called “The Box” it’s impossible to search for on Google … have you heard of it?

I might add that my interest in all this is twofold:

The Box as an amalgam of Science and Magic (an old theme of mine, borrowed of course from CSL): when three “witches” place a curse on someone in The Pale Horse, they use (a) old rural magic, the sacrifice of a white cockerel, (b) modern spiritualism, and (c) The Box to accomplish their ends. As one of them says, “The old magic and the new. The old knowledge of belief, the new knowledge of science. Together, they will prevail…”

In both The Pale Horse and Pinfold The Box is presented as something techno-magical, but it turns out to be mere jiggery-pokery, obscuring for a while the ultimate and thoroughly disenchanting explanation: people are being poisoned. (Pinfold accidentally by habitually taking medicines that shouldn’t be used in tandem, and various people in Christie’s novel intentionally by someone who knows how to use thallium.)

Pinfold is maybe the worst Waugh book I’ve read, but The Pale Horse is one of the best Christies — interesting more as a novel of ideas than as a tale of detection.

Yours with curiosity,

Defeated

And the indefatigably resourceful Adam Roberts replied:

I believe this is the Dynomizer, the invention of the curious Dr Albert Abrams, who believed the basis of all life was electrons. There were plenty of electrical therapeutic devices around in the 19th and early 20th century (devices of no actual medical benefit) but the Dynomizer is the piece of kit where you bring a piece of hair or a drop of blood, put it in the machine and it diagnoses what’s wrong with you.

It’s great to have Adam as a friend. I’ll be writing more about The Box in due course.