The Problem of Kay

[owl]

The thing that I'm least convinced about of anything in the books is Karen's marriage. As of Peter's Room, the future she seems destined for is to stick around Oxford gathering up qualifications, and eventually settle down, producing sound if obscure research in a hair-pin-losing way, never being able to organise people, giving erratic tutorials and failing to notice her students' personal problems even when they're waving them under her nose. The one constant about her is that she's not really a people person.

If there was even an indication that she couldn't cope with Oxford, or that Classics had turned out to be as dry as dust...but in one book she's being scornful of Gondal and working away happily in the cold, and in the next she's landed with Edwin and the tiny, tiny tots. And I can't quite buy 'love conquering all desire for an intellectual life', seeing that Edwin's still mourning wife #1 in RMF, and Karen doesn't even seem to have the same sort of sense of humour—she goes practically Ann-like when he's laughing at the children's pantomime in RAH. People do do stupid things at nineteen, but I can't see her divorcing Edwin and going off to be an archaeologist. The thought of her in that farmhouse, making baked apples and sewing pantomime costumes until the steps leave home, is just too depressing for words. Anyone else feel the same?

Comments

[owl]

I suppose that is partly Nicola being 13 and not much in tune with Karen at the best of times. Actually it would work better in a book set in the 50's, not in the sliding setting of the later books.