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

[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'!

[fengirl88.livejournal.com]

I was thinking much the same...

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

She most certainly wouldn't be. But she does seem to be working, as opposed to 'working'.

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Was she doing Greek translation? Or was it Latin? I'm just thinking it's unlikely she'd have learned Greek even at Kingscote, so maybe she's finding that quite difficult to pick up (or just time-consuming).

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

She can't, surely, have got to the point of reading Thucydides in the original if she only started Greek eight weeks earlier, even with a dictionary?

I'd be prepared to believe Kingscote started it as an option in Upper IV or Lower V, mind, so she might well be finding it harder than boys from public schools who've been doing it since age 13 or earlier.

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

No probably not... I don't have the book in front of me so I was just speculating, really.

[intrepid--fox.livejournal.com]

My brother went to a minor public school and even in the seventies Ancient Greek was an option from age 14 or so. I can't imagine Kingscote offered any less.

[(Anonymous)]

in the discussion of Karen's "chest", Rowan says that it ranges from the prefectly strata of Greek poetry down to the kindergarten strata of raffia napkin rings, so it sounds like she did do Greek at Kingscote at some point.

-res23

[occasionalhope.livejournal.com]

She did.

Autumn Term, ch.11: Karen and Margaret Jessop are in the library "with a Greek lexicon apiece"; and then there's a bit saying that for Margaret, "unlike Karen, Greek prose was a burden".

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

And actually, in Cricket Term when Nicola chooses her prize (Homer in the original), she speculates that she might learn Greek when she's older in order to read them. Since she's not planning on university, she must mean higher up the school.

Oh well.

[liadnan]

At the time she couldn't have got in to do Classics at Oxford without sitting a demanding Greek paper. It wasn't until the 1970s that "mods-b" was introduced allowing for students with no Greek (and the early 90s before similar provision was made re Latin)

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Even for History (or any subject for which one might sit the entrance in History eg Law) you had to do a general translation paper in two languages. Slightly weirdly, the Latin offered was a choice between a passage of Caesar which was a doddle and a chunk of Bede, which was impossible.

[mainerobin.livejournal.com]

As I recall, coming home from college for first vac, I felt so out of place sort of the opposite of Nick's half-home/half-school.I haven't read RMF yet, so maybe it's in there, but am wondering about fic about Karen's first term at Oxford.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

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

[chiasmata]

Indeed she might!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Sneaky, but very plausible.

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Or writing surreptitious alternative signatures to see how they look?

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Karen Dodd. K. Dodd. Katie Dodd.... Mrs. E Dodd. Katie 4 Edwin....

Like that, you mean? :)

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

You might speculate, but I couldn't possibly comment.

[carmine-rose.livejournal.com]

Karen seems so down-to-earth and unromantic... I'd love to think she was really spending Christmas in the library wrapped in pink and rosy reveries of Edwin!