trennels | Falconer's Lure readthrough: Chapters 1-3 (Reply)

Thanks to all contributors for a very informative and engaging discussion of The Marlows and the Traitor. We're on to #3 in the series, Falconer's Lure.

It always faintly surprises me that Nicola is a sun-worshipper, though it's steadily attested in quite a few of the novels. She seems an Arctic Circle type to me somehow...

We find that Trennels was commandeered during the war as a Commandos training school HQ. (I always think Anquetil and Foley must have trained there: this has been an early incidence of your regularly scheduled fic prompt.) But we don't see a lot of evidence of the re-purposing and perhaps damage that it must have undergone, even if it only became offices: people rarely treat their workplaces with the same care as they do their homes, and I somehow envisage quite a lot of institutional grey paint involved in a Commandos HQ. One more pressure on the Marlow family finances, though, setting all the scuffs and scrapes to rights?

Forest does her infodumping nicely in this chapter, I think. The reader is presumed to be as ignorant as Nicola about hawking, to begin with, but we're given a lot of jargon and detail in the course of Jael's rescue from the tree, without a sense of it being laid on with a trowel. I wonder what people thought of this first encounter with Patrick? I first ran across him in End of Term, where he's a rather more suave person than the querulous and lofty one we see here (though still, you might argue, querulous and lofty), and have had a lingering fondness for the little twirp ever since.

I enjoy Patrick's 'mews voice', used to rather devastating effect later in the novel, of course; and his splendidly callous reaction to Nicola having her thumb laid open by a maddened goshawk. Nick's a very good sport about that, isn't she? I'd have clocked him. The early hints of Patrick's introversion, in him shying away from meeting the extended Marlow family, are subtle enough to go almost unnoticed, I think. More obviously, there are indications of Patrick's freedoms and privileges, as an only child, that the Marlows don't enjoy. (Though Patrick's consistently maintained selfishness with limited supplies of hot water is probably a Patrick Thing rather than an only child thing: Misuse of the Immersion was a crime capital in my childhood household, worse even than Misuse of the Telephone--hang on *grin*). As an only child, I often felt that children's fiction stigmatised only children, treating them as spoilt brats who were, if essentially Good Sorts, tamed by contact with a large rambunctious family, or if not Good Sorts, destined for villainy and comeuppance. While Forest consistently delineates the differences in perception between only children and siblings, they are presented as differences, advantages and disadvantages, rather than moralised values. I loved her for that as a child.

The contrasts between town life and country life--characters' unexpected or nuanced preferences for one or the other, are unobtrusively established here. I also very much like the set-up of uneasy familiarity epitomised in Karen and Rowan's 'But I remember this...': instead of the Marlows being entire newcomers, they're placed in the perhaps even more awkward position of having some local ties and claims, but still being essentially urban blow-ins. I'm also unreasonably charmed by little Peter and Patrick playing explorers, and furious tiny Nicola wanting to join in, and stomping off when they wouldn't let her.

I find the deferential-comic servants in Falconer's Lure a bit hard to take: later in the series they do take on a bit of personality, but here I feel Mrs Bertie is very much a patronising stereotype, and I always want to move swiftly along. Or read fic from her point of view. (This has been your regularly scheduled, &c.)

But the breakfast setpiece is a delight. Coming to Falconer's Lure late, after I'd read all but three of the other books, I was surprised quite how towny the Marlows are at this stage: they've a lot to learn, as Geoff later remarks. Lawrie being endeared by piglets and not knowing what game is; Peter's fascination with agricultural machinery; perhaps most pitiless of all, Rowan's mild indifference, remarking on the bull as a 'respectable animal' and still not really knowing what one does with hawks.

I like Ginty 'thinking thoughts': at first perhaps (especially if you come to it as most people probably do, in ignorance of Traitor) she's just conspicuously being fifteen, but the mentions of her introspection are dropped regularly but subtly enough to cause a build of tension before her explosion. Jon's account of Patrick's fall from the cliffs and prolonged absence from school resonates very neatly with that.

I enjoy the glimpses of Geoff and Jon's boyhood, too (this has been your regularly, &c.); the sense that they might not really have got on (and mightn't still, for all the bluff joshing here?) And though it might be a touch obvious, I do like the fact of Jon, falconer, ending up in the RAF, and Geoff, angler, in the Navy.

The perfectly batty things that people say in inconsequential conversation with those with whom they have few inhibitions: Lawrie's 'I shall be a hawk in future' (a long memory and excessive pride: what could be less Lawrie?); and Karen's deep, hedgehog-knows-one-thing voice.

Well, we said we'd discuss the aftermath of Traitor, and here it is. The Marlows seem to have handled this one magnificently, I must say. The secrecy about the events themselves is enjoined upon them by His Majesty's Government, and there's little they can do about that, though one does feel the profound imbalance of Peter, Nicola and Ginty having to remain silent about more traumatic experience, while Lawrie gets to be honest about her accident. (The punishment of 'Jabberwocky', by the way, is priceless.) As Jon, in his ignorance, rather contrives to point out, Nicola and Peter have better 'morale', presumably because they were the more active participants in foiling Foley: they did more potentially traumatic things--Nicola in Talisman, Peter actually killing someone--but also have a sense of having acquitted themselves well, which is presumably helping their recovery. (I wonder if Peter's giggle when Jon mentions enemy agents is actually pure hysteria, rather than any sense of comic irony, though.) Ginty, meanwhile, feels guilty and weak, one presumes, at not being more active and decisive. Keeping her back from school rather magnifies her own sense of her delicacy and incompetence, and she begins to build an identity around sensitivity, which is then bolstered by the malign influence of Unity Logan. The incorrigibles in Forest seem not, one notices, to be subject to the same hygiene standards one assumes Matron usually enjoins: both Dobson, M. and Logan, U have grubby necks, I think: and lank hair seems to be another Forestian indication of poor character. Nicola's ' "She writes poetry too" ', I rather like; and that it's correctively challenged by Karen, suggesting that Unity may have some talents invisible to Nicola and Rowan's more brusque sensibilities. (The 'Threnody for Icarus' joke has always struck me as almost too sophisticated for the books' original target market, by the way: I don't think I would have seen why that's so very ghastly until I was rather older than Unity herself.)

Nicola and Peter's disagreement over Patrick's friendship prefigures a lot that Forest will later develop. What is it about the Merrick Boy, honestly?

I like to note last words, and Jon's are splendidly, impeccably mundane.

The juxtaposition of Nicola and Patrick's conversation as Sprog stoops to the lure with Jon's crash is actually very movingly handled, I think (one is hyper-aware of sounding like Unity Logan here): Patrick's dismissals of Nicola's observant forebodings tell us a good deal about both of them, as well as tying into a theme of slightly irrational guilt at losses and injuries that are not really those characters' faults at all. For all that this novel is lazy and sunlit in some ways; episodic rather than plotty or pacey, it's still rather haunted.

Never was chapter more aptly named. I can imagine that Geoff and Pam are rather poleaxed by first Jon's death and then the new responsibilities that it brings them: but you might have thought that they'd manage to tell their children about such an enormous change to their lives.

Forest is deeply unsympathetic to affectation: I think sometimes excessively so. Certainly I enjoy the comedy of Ginty's overwrought but banal letters and Unity's 'Threnody for Icarus' (I think alternately it should probably be left to the imagination and someone really should have a go at writing it: this has been your much less regularly scheduled poetry prompt) but I also consider that maybe persons of 15 or so need to be allowed some affectation so that they can winnow out their true feelings from those that are merely conventional. It's always difficult to know how to respond to the death of a family member to whom you weren't close, even if you're not 15 and traumatised by a recent kidnapping incident during which you on several occasions came close to death. I suppose the point here is that Ginty already knows she feels no true grief for Jon, and so her attempts at sensibility are merely fake. But she, of all the younger members of the family, might feel an odd sort of guilt at his death: her last exchange with him was fraught, where the rest of the siblings at least can remember him cheerful.

The Trennels entail? How likely? I think there has been discussion before, and the consensus was not awfully, but informed opinion would be much welcomed.

Geoff, you feel, really is quite grief-stricken by Jon's death; perhaps because their relationship was never quite as cordial as it might have been; certainly because of his envy of Trennels and the careful-what-you-wish-for effect, here further complicated by the fact that what 18-year-old Geoff ardently desired means (he supposes) 40-something Geoff hashing his Navy career when he's just been promoted Captain. His 'odd look' as Ginty expresses her delight at living in the countryside, grief for Jon suspended, brings into brief contact the two Marlows who might have the most complex and irreconcilable reactions to their cousin's death. I get the feeling that we're supposed to judge harshly Ginty's mid-skip recollection of the circumstances that have brought them the stroke of good fortune, in comparison with Nicola's sudden access of disinterested grief, but I'm slightly disinclined to do so: confusion and instability at not feeling grief in approved ways, and the discomfort of trying to perform a sombre mein, is just as valid an emotion as being surprised by grief one didn't know one felt.

Nicola and Patrick's conversations are always a delight, I think: as a child I wished I had a companion who would discuss historical and literary fanlife as they do, to which we shall recur in the discussion of End of Term. But for now: Patrick's Ricardianism is a superb touch; yes, and there is our catchphrase: 'Tudor propaganda'. The little foreshadowing of Regina's loss: despite its episodic qualities, this really is a very studied novel, full of delicate echoes. And finally, Lawrie's quite, quite bonkers, but somehow very touching, concern for the the Inner Lives of Inanimate Objects.

It's goodbye from me for a bit, as