trennels | Readthrough: The Marlows and The Traitor Chapters 1 & 2

The Marlows and the Traitor takes place over four and a half days, and the chapters are arranged accordingly, so I thought the schedule might go something like this:

20th June: Chapters 1 & 2 (Wednesday)
27th June: Chapters 3-76 (Thursday) [addendum: the volume of commentary got a bit unmanageable, so I did four chapters instead of five]
4th July: Chapters 7-10 (Thursday Night (2), Friday and Saturday Morning)
11th July: Chapters 11-13 (Saturday Afternoon and Sunday Morning*)

(*wh. sounds like a little-known novel by a Mildly Miffed Young Man)

Author's Note: I took this to refer to the problem of Dartmouth changing its minimum entrance age from 13 to 16, then 18, which means that a 14-year-old Peter could not be a cadet at the time of publication in 1953. But on re-reading it, I was struck by Forest's comment "the happenings described must have taken place between September 1946 and May 1949". Well, the novel is very clearly set at the Easter holidays after Autumn Term, and in the next book, Falconer's Lure, we learn that it is summer 1948. So I haven't a notion what she's on about here. Anyone care to enlighten?

The opening paragraphs are wonderfully atmospheric, I think, and much of the success of Traitor relies on the creation of atmosphere above all.

Retrospective mortification is one of Forest's motifs, and 'the boat thing' is a splendid instance of it. She withholds the details from us--all we know at this stage is that there's been some incident at Dartmouth involving a boat, and he was thoroughly told off for it ('blistering ticking-off on the hard' is a great phrase). We don't even know by whom Peter was reprimanded yet. I think that works really well to suggest Peter's mental skirting around the issue: he keeps going over it, and yet it is also in a sense too painful even to be fully articulated to us, the readers, in his internal monologue.

"As a family, the Marlows were rather good at minding their own business." I'm not sure, objectively, how true this is, but they are certainly an unsentimental bunch. It is rather wonderfully echoed in the more deeply dysfunctional independence of the Foleys. I am at the same time, ineffably touched by Nicola's friendship with Robert Anquetil, and her general gift for friendships with adults (see also her détente with the rebarbative Edwin). But that is for another day.

Family liking: a fascinating subject in the series, I think. Forest is either nodding or being very subtle here: in Autumn Term Nicola says Rowan is "the nicest" after Giles, here we're told Nick "liked Peter the best" after Giles. There's perhaps a difference between "the nicest" (which Rowan, for all her many virtues, surely is not) and "liking someone best", or perhaps Forest just didn't check. Giles is Peter's favourite too, which strikes me as unlikely, and not just because of my well-documented feelings about Marlow, G.A.: I'd imagine that Peter feels rather as if he's got to live up to Giles, which isn't, in my (admittedly not first-hand) experience of sibling relationships, a recipe for cordiality.

Pam Marlow's tendency to slightly impulsive financial blow-outs is surely a reaction to the years of struggling on a lieutenant's pay with a growing brood of children, and I think it's a lovely character detail. In a discussion elsewhere I was reminded of the hostility of certain 1970s theorists of children's literature to the upper-middle-class values and milieu of the Marlows, and especially to the representation of a family that educates its children privately, and later, owns horses and so forth, as 'hard-up'. One does get the sense that Forest, like many authors of the mid-20th century, felt that there was a certain romance in being posh-but-broke, even perhaps a kind of make-do-and-mend moral superiority in it. But although the Marlows don't seem to know the grinding anxieties of actual poverty, their financial situation is sometimes represented as difficult enough to cause more than inconvenience. Any thoughts or feelings?

Related: the Thorpes are clearly Lower Middle Class and Nouveau Riche, as demonstrated by the tight, bright nether garments of the female members of the family. The Marlow children's recoil from Johnnie is unsentimentally and accurately done, I think but also reveals considerable snobbery.

Nicola's seasickness is a delightful detail, and I love the reference to Hornblower and Nelson suffering from the same ailment. To it, and to some interesting points about Marlow interactions which reflect rather poorly on the senior and naval members of the family, we will recur.

The Fancy Dress Dance is rather marvellously postwar austerity amusement. My grandfather (b.1919) retained a taste for this sort of fun well into old age, much to the exasperation of his juniors, so I associate it with the War Generation. But Peter and Ginty are notably unkeen (it's a beautiful detail that Peter even manages to relate this to his possible failure to be a good naval officer, joining in 'festivities in foreign ports') while Lawrie, of course, delights in the opportunity to act and show off. Cant you just see her doing this to her siblings' total mortification?

Peter's poor taste in friends likewise delights me--and is of course related to his rave for Foley. What do people make of Foley's offer of a lift to Selby? [ETA content warning in re: the comments: discussion of possible grooming for sexual abuse]

Peter's fear and Nicola's nonchalance as the storm begins to get up in neatly done, I think: Peter's fears and his overcoming of them (not always successfully) is another motif. This brings us to a continuity error, which I was not competent to diagnose, but which was pointed out to me by

legionseagle. Foley simply doesn't, it seems, have time to moor Talisman and be sauntering along the prom by the time he is depicted as doing so. And where exactly has he left Talisman, given that he takes her out again that afternoon? Nor does he seem to have been made very damp by the storm he's just been at sea in. They must be super oilskins he's got. In some ways that's a shame, because had Forest noted it, Peter might well have explained away Foley's behaviour as a matter of pride--not wanting to acknowledge a pupil when he's in a state of considerable dishevelment, when, of course, the real reason is both exactly that and rather more sinister. There's also the question of where exactly St Anne's-Byfleet is, to which we shall also recur. There is something uncanny about Foley, though, as if Peter's account of 'the boat thing' has summoned him from the sea: and perhaps the unsettling effect of that is worth a small sacrifice of realism.

That Foley's failure to acknowledge Peter is related by Nicola to The 39 Steps always puts a smile on my face.

Mrs Marlow's worries are very realistically sketched, I think: she's normally unflappable, but the tensions of managing the eight of them do sometimes explode into the anger of fright.

I also greatly enjoy Ginty's adolescent discomfort at the thought of drawing attention to herself, despite her somewhat oddly-described good looks: greeny-blue eyes tilted like a squirrel's sound spooky, and her teasing her mother by calling her Momma (presumably American, and thus vulgar?)

The family's horror at Peter's outright rudeness to Johnnie Thorpe seems a little hypocritical, given that he is only saying directly what they have all more or less made clear to Johnnie they think. But it's a great piece of social observation nonetheless.

Lawrie's borrowing Nicola's knife as a good-luck charm is a nice little point (it must work on a principle of magical inversion, since that knife has not conspicuously brought luck in the past) and there's surely a little submerged verbal joke on the name of Foley's cutter there. Talismans might after all, be evil.

Nicola and Peter's discussion of Foley possibly having a twin creates further resonance between the Foley family and the Marlows, but also with The Prince and the Pauper.

I enjoy the little episode with the pony, and Nicola's reflection on Peter's prep school master's comment on his diving. I do sometimes feel that in re: bravery, Forest is extraordinarily tough on her characters. If you funk, you feel the full weight of authorial disapproval, but if you attempt--as Peter sometimes does to the point of foolhardiness--to confront fear (and Peter's of heights is close to phobia rather than just normal trepidation in the face of danger) you also earn a sideswipe.

The Mariners passage is a favourite of mine: I love the atmospherics of discovery, the differences between Nicola and Peter's reactions to the crows' nest (I sympathise with both!) Nicola's eerie intuition when she sees Talisman.

I'm struck again by the glimpse of Pam Marlow's character: having been furious at Peter and Nicola's irresponsibility earlier, she now thinks nothing of waltzing off and leaving them under Ginty's supervision for days. Obviously this is mainly for Plot Purposes, but it chimes interestingly with the story of Geoff and Pam's engagement and marriage in the face of opposition from her mother (which Forest invents rather later on). It implies a marriage that's still rather impulsively passionate (perhaps long separations help here) after twenty-odd years. I'm rather touched. Still, it doesn't show very good judgement--there are plenty of 15-year-olds who could be trusted to look after their younger siblings, especially in the controlled environment of a hotel, but Ginty might well not be one of them.

Finally, Lawrie's sending up of Nicola's wanting to see the ships at Farrant is deliciously barbed and squirmy, playing beautifully on that separation of home and professional/school life that is such a nice feature of the books. And of course Lawrie's sending-up 'voice' is yet another nod to her talent for acting.

Well, that's it from me. Looking forward to your comments--have at it.