I like the detail of Peter leaving the window and making the bed all crumby: very much a certain sort of 14-year-old boy, perhaps one enjoying the the break from naval discipline. (Giles, one senses, is Bristol-fashion by nature.) I enjoy the Marlows' propensity to dufferdom, actually, being a bit of a duffer myself.
It's certainly convincing! Forest has an art for the unflatteringly realistic even though she writes within a compass that can hardly be called "gritty." I don't know that I'm any less a duffer than the Marlows but perhaps I like to imagine that I would be.
I think the long dash isn't her imagination failing her so much as her not having the vocabulary to say to her brother, 'I think the officer who you've got a bit of a rave for might have been trying to sexually abuse your best friend.' It's surely significant that it's explicitly placed in the context of Peter's poor judgement of character.
The point about Peter's poor judgment of character is a very good one; it does add extra weight to this interpretation. It's hard for me to read how far Nicola's imagination actually goes: she obviously knows that her suggestion is insufficiently adult to make sense in this context but does she actually manage to confront in her mind what adult misdeeds might possibly involve? The counterargument of course is that adult misdeeds and prefectly misdeeds are often the same thing (as Frank Maddox or Ralph Lanyon could tell you), but I wonder whether Kingscote would have given her knowledge of that sort of abuse of power.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-06-20 11:02 pm (UTC)It's certainly convincing! Forest has an art for the unflatteringly realistic even though she writes within a compass that can hardly be called "gritty." I don't know that I'm any less a duffer than the Marlows but perhaps I like to imagine that I would be.
I think the long dash isn't her imagination failing her so much as her not having the vocabulary to say to her brother, 'I think the officer who you've got a bit of a rave for might have been trying to sexually abuse your best friend.' It's surely significant that it's explicitly placed in the context of Peter's poor judgement of character.
The point about Peter's poor judgment of character is a very good one; it does add extra weight to this interpretation. It's hard for me to read how far Nicola's imagination actually goes: she obviously knows that her suggestion is insufficiently adult to make sense in this context but does she actually manage to confront in her mind what adult misdeeds might possibly involve? The counterargument of course is that adult misdeeds and prefectly misdeeds are often the same thing (as Frank Maddox or Ralph Lanyon could tell you), but I wonder whether Kingscote would have given her knowledge of that sort of abuse of power.