Though I think I'd been picturing Jon as in his thirties, some sort of sense that he must be closer than that to Geoff in age might account for my immediate and unshakeable conviction that he's Not The Marrying Kind.
I suspect the relevant gap might actually be between Forest's putative setting, and her actual writing in 1954: she's imagining Jon and Geoff as in their mid/late-40s at the time of writing, so of the generation born around 1910, and forgetting that at the time of setting that gives them birthdates a few, but significant, years earlier. Does that make any sense? I've done something like it myself.
I suppose I had assumed that Jon had joined the RAF before the war, perhaps in the expectation that by the time he inherited Trennels his active career might be largely over and he could settle to relatively hands-off gentlemanly farming with Mr Tranter doing most of the day-to-day management? Jon strikes me as a rather less earnest about there being Marlows up the hill since Before The Conquest than Geoff is, perhaps because being NTMK, he knows full well the farm isn't going to descend in his direct line anyway: it's going to Geoff whether he comes a cropper or survives into ripe old age. Jon's canonically a bad businessman, too--not just the overdraft, which mightn't be his fault given postwar financial pressures, but the investments in his friends' hare-brained schemes that are mentioned later. Lawrence mightn't have been happy about him not taking his inheritance terribly seriously, I suppose, which might add another layer of conflict to Geoff and Jon's relationship. But, anyway, as the 30s wear on it becomes increasingly clear there's going to be a war, which upscuttles everything for a few years more. I'm not sure how likely all that is, come to think, but I think it was the notion floating around my head.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-07-21 10:33 am (UTC)I suspect the relevant gap might actually be between Forest's putative setting, and her actual writing in 1954: she's imagining Jon and Geoff as in their mid/late-40s at the time of writing, so of the generation born around 1910, and forgetting that at the time of setting that gives them birthdates a few, but significant, years earlier. Does that make any sense? I've done something like it myself.
I suppose I had assumed that Jon had joined the RAF before the war, perhaps in the expectation that by the time he inherited Trennels his active career might be largely over and he could settle to relatively hands-off gentlemanly farming with Mr Tranter doing most of the day-to-day management? Jon strikes me as a rather less earnest about there being Marlows up the hill since Before The Conquest than Geoff is, perhaps because being NTMK, he knows full well the farm isn't going to descend in his direct line anyway: it's going to Geoff whether he comes a cropper or survives into ripe old age. Jon's canonically a bad businessman, too--not just the overdraft, which mightn't be his fault given postwar financial pressures, but the investments in his friends' hare-brained schemes that are mentioned later. Lawrence mightn't have been happy about him not taking his inheritance terribly seriously, I suppose, which might add another layer of conflict to Geoff and Jon's relationship. But, anyway, as the 30s wear on it becomes increasingly clear there's going to be a war, which upscuttles everything for a few years more. I'm not sure how likely all that is, come to think, but I think it was the notion floating around my head.