Peter's Room, chapter by chapter read-through: Chapters 4, 5 and 6

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Note: Posting on behalf of legionseagle, to whom, many thanks.

--L.B.

Having left the last three chapters with Patrick about to kick off proceedings as the wicked Regent, we plunge directly into the narrative, with:



The italicised portion gives rise to the question "How do they do it?" That is, what process do the children use to produce the seamless and sophisticated narrative the reader sees on the page? They do act some bits, they do get to invent their own character's dialogue, and there are discussions about which way the overall events should go, but who actually "writes" (or tells) the linking narrative?

And it is a sophisticated narrative. Touches like "the traitor Glenelden" on the gibbet are hairs-on-the-back-of-neck stuff. With regard to individual portrayals, I agree with Lawrie; the Regent's smiler with the knife persona is brilliant.

The spat between Lawrie and Patrick about how much Jason knows – almost inevitably, Lawrie is the first to go "off-script"– suggests that the general outline of the current section of the narrative and, possibly, its role within the overall arc are sketched out in consensus. Individual character notes and how the overall requirements are delivered are largely left to the individual player. What Forest writes is a distillation of that process. It also foreshadows the inevitable scramble for "air-time" for specific characters and narratives.

Thoughts? Alternatives?

I've heard veteran players and organisers of role-playing games say, with respect to Peter's Room, that the Gondal here is pretty much a role-model in how not to do it. I understand the area of lack of direction – lack, indeed, of a games-master – is a key failing in the set-up. In particular, someone writing an overarching scenario with input (possibly private input) from each of the players could work the various private narratives that exist into the whole without the clashes that come from the various players' own agendas, so minimising the clashes that occur.

Not that I think things would have been better had, say, Tim-the-producer been staying with the Marlows over Christmas and taken a hand in events (please consider that a fic prompt) but they would certainly have been different.

Comparisons to Mansfield Park, both here and as the book develops? Peter's Room is a book about the Brontes but if there's ever been an examination of how a bored group of young people cooped up in a country-house built on the proceeds of slavery can turn play-acting into disaster, that's Austen.

Also, thoughts about how the players' every-day characters reflect their in-Gondal characters and vice versa? Noted without comment: Malise is the first to draw attention of the dangers of the goat-path behind the falls, but he leads the way along it nevertheless.

All my love: "I haven't got any lace all over," Peter said sadly. "Will you lend me one of yours?"

Also, Nicola, terrified of the "wild dark" in AT coming to relish the long trek to the hawkhouse and back across snow, which is very much her changing to suit her new environment (and she still doesn't care for it at Kingscote; it's here where she feels home and so safe.)





Another long chapter, with a lot going on, and the dangers of "Gondalling" very much to the fore. On this, while Karen may appear to be set up by Forest as the voice of authority, I'm disinclined to let her analysis pass unopposed. Quite apart from anything else, she's reading Classics, not Eng. Lit (and the Oxford Eng. Lit syllabus would not, in fact, have covered the Brontes at that time) and, as she herself points out to Peter in Chapter Two, one doesn't simply absorb facts through the stones, like. (So why does she know so much about them, having even read Branwell's letters?)

Incidentally, does anyone else suspect that Karen's retreating to the library (even when Madame Orly has gone) for every waking minute suggests less that she's an outstanding scholar and rather that she's having difficulty keeping up at Oxford?

Any views about whether what Karen says about the Bronte background reflects contemporary opinions of them? So far as I know it's out of step with later critical evaluation, particularly from a feminist perspective (Joanna Russ deals with the Brontes at some length in How To Suppress Women's Writing). For example, Karen's assessment of Charlotte as too mousy to communicate with anyone but the governess ignores (among other things) that the governess in question was the formidable Madame Poplowska, who subsequently decamped to Italy with the mistress of the house (Janet Kaye-Shuttleworth) and all the children except little Ughtred.

In fact, Karen's comments about creativity, Gondal and Angria and the Brontes in general leave me going "Karen, honestly?" (Other opinions are, of course, available.) In particular, Karen's characterisation of non-monetised writing is "the most tremendous waste of time and talent" annoys the heck out of me, speaking as a fanficcer.

Nice appearance from Ann, here (but can anyone believe in a nine-year old reading Mrs Gaskell's Life, even given Marlow reading habits?)

People in comments on the earlier thread mentioned later moral panics about Dungeons and Dragons and I'm wondering if there was any contemporary kerfuffle this could link to? Drugs as drugs are dealt with in later books, but I think Karen's attempt to link Gondal to opium addiction/alcoholism is pushing it a bit. Thoughts?

Dress issues, for people to pick up on (personally, I think there's something faintly sad about Rowan, wearing what seems by Pam's standards a conservatively-cut evening gown, drawing Nicola's admiration as looking like "Mum in the Malta snaps." Pam was obviously a knockout in her day and it's a shame Rowan hasn't her chances.)

I'm amused by the inversion of the trope that girls going to the bad become obsessed with their appearance, in the scene with Ginty and the Bridesmaid's Horror. What do people think of Ginty and Patrick and their respective private narratives and how they're handled?

Finally, I note Peter behaving as a complete dick with a gun again – I'd be inclined to say whoever purportedly taught him gun safety should be shot, except that I've a suspicion he already has been. And it's noticeable that Peter pushes the pistol's muzzle in the small of Nicola's back ("that unloaded it should be/matters not the least to me") immediately after she's inadvertently annoyed him by mentioning Lieutenant Foley.





Miss Forest, how could you?

Comments

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

If there's a better chapter in children's literature than Chapter 6, I'd like to read it. (Or any literature.) How many re-wrires to get it perfect, one wonders?

[schwarmerei1.livejournal.com]

I'm a first time reader -- it is utterly devastating.

I wonder if it's one of those things that came to her with perfect clarity and was actually easy to write.

As a mother, the idea of a child internalising all that pain, determined not to show distress to the outside world, chills me to the bone.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

It is amazing, isn't it?

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, yes, it's absolutely perfect, in a way that makes it almost able to stand on its own as this tiny little gem of a short story. There are a few moments like that in Peter's Room - Nicola walking Buster home from the hunt is another, I think - and to me that's what makes the book so striking, these brief passages, more or less separate from the main plot, that are so beautiful and so wrenching and have a kind of emotional immediacy that you very rarely encounter even in the best fiction.

Ann & Mrs Gaskell

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

Maybe it depends on the number of books in the household to some extent - though in view of the number of books they've read, there doesn't seem to be a shortage.

My mother was born in 1933 so would be about Ann's age (!), and came from a household with few books. She always complained that you could only get one book per day from the library. But because of the sheer lack of reading matter in her house, she had read "The Home Handyman's Guide" (or something like that) before she was 9. Maybe Ann found herself, possibly due to the exigencise of war, with nothing else to read?

Re: Ann & Mrs Gaskell

[buntyandjinx.livejournal.com]

Agreed. There was little else to do except read and play the piano (and Gondal). I was fascinated by the Brontes around the age of 9 and would certainly have read CY's Life, had it been to hand though I am less sure I'd have understood it. As we know, the Marlows are an extremely literary bunch. On which note, I also don't think Karen's long stints in the library show she's an unexceptional scholar, just again that there's little else to do it, the weather's bad and, with their short terms, Oxford students always have a lot of "vac" work to complete.

Re: Ann & Mrs Gaskell

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

Do we know where the Marlows were during the war? Miranda got evacuated to Kingscote Junior Side but Marlows from Ann down didn't. Were they not at home in Hampstead but in some sort of lodgings for naval wives with five children under ten, with nothing but their (elderly?) landlady's book collection (it sounds like hell)? Ann's read The Daisy Chain at nine too. If I'd been the eldest child at home with four younger siblings, I'd have read anything I could get my hands on.

Re: Ann & Mrs Gaskell

[antfan.livejournal.com]

It's not just Ann and Karen, either - Patrick is able to quote verbatim from Charlotte's Bronte's letters, FFS. And the non-academic Ginty has taken in a heck of a lot than most fourteen year olds would from a school project.

I think we just have to accept that the Marlows and Merricks are a LOT cleverer than any of us.

[schwarmerei1.livejournal.com]

In fact, Karen's comments about creativity, Gondal and Angria and the Brontes in general leave me going "Karen, honestly?" (Other opinions are, of course, available.) In particular, Karen's characterisation of non-monetised writing is "the most tremendous waste of time and talent" annoys the heck out of me, speaking as a fanficcer.

Yes, well you've hit on the point that I am finding most personally interesting about PR thus far. My spouse and I actually met via fandom and partly due to the fanfic she wrote. Over 10 years later I am the one now writing fic. There has definitely been tension over the fact that I retreat into my constructed fic brain fantasy world. I also get frustrated about how little time two kids under four leave me to write. I'm finding the book quite painful to read in terms of self-recognition. On the other hand, writing has been a wonderful thing for me personally in terms of confidence, self-esteem, and enjoyment. I've also made many genuine personal connections with people as a result of my participation in fanfic writing.

I have skipped ahead with my reading, but don't know the outcome of all this malarky -- I imagine it ends badly!

Karen on creativity and non-monetised writing

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Karen's characterisation of non-monetised writing is "the most tremendous waste of time and talent" annoys the heck out of me

Fan fic is written for an audience, though, isn't it? I think Karen is criticizing a form of writing that she seems as purely self-indulgent, and simply not of very good quality - whereas if Emily Bronte had been writing for an audience she would have forced herself to up her game. It's not the money that's the crucial thing.

[chiasmata]

Incidentally, does anyone else suspect that Karen's retreating to the library (even when Madame Orly has gone) for every waking minute suggests less that she's an outstanding scholar and rather that she's having difficulty keeping up at Oxford?


It rather suggests to me that she finds family life (or the thought thereof) too much / otherwise unappealing after her term at Oxford.

[serriadh.livejournal.com]

She may also have found that 'studying' is the one cast-iron and respected excuse for not doing $familything. She wouldn't be the only one to have spent her first Christmas vac 'working'!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Given later developments in future volumes, might she be writing letters under cover of that dictionary?

Karen, honestly?

[fengirl88.livejournal.com]

I'm finding it fascinating to return to this book, which I hadn't reread since becoming involved in fandom activities. I think the first time I read it I was much more in sympathy with Karen's views, though that may have been partly because of the Mansfield Park parallels. Gondal has also become a much more interesting place for me since that time, mostly because of this series (http://archiveofourown.org/series/7681).

I don't know whether to love or shudder at the idea of an AU in which Tim is the Gondal gamesmaster, so I'll settle for doing both.

seconding this: All my love: "I haven't got any lace all over," Peter said sadly. "Will you lend me one of yours?"

and yes indeed, Miss Forest, how could you?

Re: Karen, honestly?

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I don;t read it as Karen having troubles at Oxford at all - in fact, she seems a natural academic, not only impressively well read, but with a thought-out theory about it all (whether or not you agree with it). And Forest - who I don't think entirely admires academics - has her taking Nicola's question in an academic, not personal, way too.

I suppose she might have made a wrong subject choice, though. Or it might be the girls' schools of the time didn't prepare their pupils as well in the classics as the boys' schools so she had catching up to do (I was speaking to someone recently who told me this was definitely the case when she was doing maths in the 1960s).

With the Austen thing in my head, perhaps, I found this chapter very Elinor/Marianne - with the very unromantic, analytical sister instructing the starry-eyed, romantic younger one...

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

I am convinced that Karen is having trouble with Oxford, though not sure whether it's the work or just the transition from Kingscote where she has been, with the same rules and the same people, since she was nine, and is getting to the point where she is absolutely desperate for any face-saving fire to escape from her frying pan into.

Karen did a Kempe project on the Brontes too. Perhaps she read all of the letters when overdoing things while researching Bronte Ancestry. Karen naturally can't cope with drama and is one of the stuff-and-nonsense Marlows but you wonder whether her views are coloured by having had to listen to the Gondal bit of the project being enthusiastically reported on by whoever her year's equivalent of Unity Logan was (Kempe does seem to be allocating topics by character as if casting a Kingscote play).

I love small Ann cheerfully killing off the siblings who didn't fit the narrative.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

If I were Ann, I think I'd have an inner life in which large quantities of my siblings died of movie TB (no pain, only symptoms looking pale and interesting)

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I have run and played in both tabletop and live action RPGs for over twenty years! Ask me anything. :)

As far as Tim the GM goes, let me shudder in appreciative horror. If anyone would ever construct scenarios to upset and annoy her players just for the fun of watching it...

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Well, obviously what I'm going to ask first is if there's any chance of you writing the Tim-the-GM horror story, pretty please with sugar on top?

And, secondly, I'd like any thoughts you've got on how your experience interprets the various "private" Gondal elements we've seen to date in terms of their likely effect on a collaborative RPG. It appears to me that there are two (at least) things going on. Lawrie and to a degree Ginty have fleshed out their characters with backstory - the younger Jason, Crispian the sculptor - and that seems to me to be perfectly reasonable and acceptable. However, both Ginty (in her "we have been here before" confirmation bias stuff) and Patrick (in developing the different and parallel Rupert narrative) seem to be going further in a way which strikes me as a non-RPGer as more problematic. Peter, too, in that he's not playing Malise Douglas but Malise Marlow, is nearer to the latter than the former, with an added element of the degree to which he's invested in MM.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I am inclined to see the Gondal play as doomed from the start, because everyone goes into it with a different agenda that naturally (the protagonists being Marlows) they don't tell anyone else about. So they aren't actually all playing the same game. Any activity is liable to go horribly wrong under those conditions.

Why does Lawrie make Jason brave and heroic? (And Patrick choose treachery?)

[antfan.livejournal.com]

After all she usually likes her parts (Tom Canty, Shepherd Boy, Caliban) cowardly and unheroic. And Forest hasn't forgotten this aspect of Lawrie-as-actor either - because she says if they ever do the play about the Brontes, she'd like to do the brother who drinks himself to death.

And Jason is not only heroic, Lawrie makes an enormous fuss to resist any notions to the contrary.

So I guess it came to me on this read though, that though Lawrie's initial incentive to Gondal is her love of acting, the role-playing they are doing is actually a very different thing. And rather than using her own fears to play a part better for the audience (as in End of Term) this is all about wish-fulfillment. [Is this true of role playing games generally?] So Lawrie who isn't brave at all wants to be heroic (as does Ginty) while Peter wants to rebel.

It also really stuck out at me this time why Patrick wants to play at traitors - that scene with all the repressive female relations, and his dad and uncle (in the foreign office, natch) discussing government matters - Forest really has pointed up what a very Establishment background it is, and maybe hardly surprising that Patrick might fantasise about going against it. Definite shades of Foley there.

Re: Why does Lawrie make Jason brave and heroic? (And Patrick choose treachery?)

[intrepid--fox.livejournal.com]

Foley and also Philby, perhaps?

Moral Panic and Abbey Girl Precendent (Yes, really!)

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if there was any contemporary kerfuffle this could link to?

Not contemporary, but I was remembering the bit in Elsie J Oxenham's Abbey Girls series where Mary Devine confides to Jen that she escapes to a fantasy world when the real world gets too much. And the answer turns out to be for Mary to write novels (school stories, actually!) though she still needs to be strong so as not to relapse into her fantasy world at times of stress.

It's much the same as Karen's argument - writing novels a good outlet for otherwise dangerous and self-indulgent fantasising - and I wonder if it's an idea that's generally out there in early twentieth century female literature? Or has some kind of root in religious writing? Or is something that both Oxenham/Forest experienced themselves as writers (Oxenham's writing characters are rather based on her, I think).

Re: Moral Panic and Abbey Girl Precendent (Yes, really!)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Is this - bizarre to think it! - a place where the Chalet School is more liberal? Con Maynard may get told off for being dreamy/moony when she's away making up stories in a fantasy land, but that's only when she does it when she ought to be concentrating on something else instead (like in maths). The fantasy itself isn't criticised.

Conversation about TMATT

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Does anyone else find the conversation between Nicola and Peter about him shooting the admiral very odd? Nicola seems to ask him in such a cheerful, casual way, while being horrified that Peter would think she would remind him about Jael. As if killing a person is something one does everyday, whereas killing jael was serious? And Peter thinking that was one of the bits of the weekend he had forgotten.
Is Peter being stupid with guns some sort of subconscious re-enactment of repressed memories?

Re: Conversation about TMATT

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I don't see Nicola as being cheerful; certainly direct, though. Taking a rare opportunity to talk about something which she can't talk about otherwise, perhaps? I do think there's a distinct TMATT legacy over Peter's Room - perhaps foreshadowing why Patrick/Rupert playing at treachery is going to hit buried nerves he can't possibly know are there at all?

But also the German bloke was killed in self-defence and he was an enemy of the state, whereas Jael was killed in a horrible great cock-up, so I can see why Nicola might see reminding Peter of one is to blame him, whereas reminding Peter of the other is about reminding Peter of a shocking incident out of which he emerged with credit?

Nicola's dress.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Poor Nicola gets stuck with a dress in which she feels awful simply because she is too sensible to make a fuss. If she had wailed and complained would Mrs Marlow have offered to take her into Colebridge to buy something new, or even go up to London - as she does for Ginty when Ginty is afraid Doris' dress will be awful. Is this yet more favouritism? Or does Mrs Marlow not like the idea of her prettiest child not looking her best?

Re: Nicola's dress.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

I wouldn't be in the least surprised at either explanation; comments in later books suggest the former, but both could well be true.

Why are they all male characters?

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling this might have been discussed on Trennels before? But why do all the girls automatically choose to be male characters in Gondal?
Other books of the period, and earlier, have female children pretending to be female explorers/adventurers so it's not as simple as saying, well, women couldn't do as much in those days. It seems to me to be part of the Marlow ethos of boys are better than girls - boys were Mme Orly's favourites, girls can't be in the Navy etc.
I think Gondal needed a good dose of Nancy Blackett telling them what to do, not Tim Keith!

Re: Why are they all male characters?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Well, Nicola was imagining six sons, all in the Service, a few books earlier, so maybe she's thinking along those lines still. It can't be carry-over from the original Bronte Gondal, which had female characters rushing around starting revolutions and escaping from dungeons all over the place, including in some earlier versions a RPF expy of the young Queen Victoria.

Timing quibble

[bridgetblood.livejournal.com]

Towards the end of chapter 4, Lawrie watches from a window as Nicola makes her way towards Marriot Chase to see to Sprog. Then she imagines herself as Jason facing the wicked Regent, gets spooked, and rushes back to the living-room to find Nicola setting up a game of chess with Peter. Even though Mrs Marlow says "What were you doing all that time?" surely she wouldn't have been upstairs long enough for N to get back?

Re: Timing quibble

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

It does seem very unlikely, but it would be even stronger evidence of the effects of Gondalling if both Lawrie and Patrick, when "away" really were "away" for an hour or more at a time.

AF not really a fan of Ann, again?

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

Obviously AF wants the older ones out of the way, (though it is entertaining imagining how a slightly younger Rowan would have stridden round Gondal being all practical and bracing), so Karen is confined to the library for the duration studying and Rowan is out and about working, and Ann is....not interesting enough for us to know. We see her tidying, and we hear of her making Nicola's bed, but there really is no hint about what Ann gets up to for all those solitary hours. A lot of the time in the whole canon Ann is just presented as terminally dull: in Falconer's Lure, she is KIND OF an accomplished pianist, but in a competition she is 'commended for her fingering', surely the lowest imaginable praise.

When Karen says how odd it is that Elizabeth was the 'quite unknown Bronte', I imagine her as being the Ann of the Brontes (not Ann Bronte, how confusing), ie the one no one was ever interested enough to write about.

Re: AF not really a fan of Ann, again?

[buntyandjinx.livejournal.com]

I think that's true re Ann being the Elizabeth character, but also fascinating Ann views herself as a Charlotte figure - shows how we all place ourselves in the centre of the narrative. I don't think she's presented as "terminally dull" exactly, more as good to the point of saintly - and AF likes to show us how hard it can be to like such people.