trennels | Readthrough: The Thuggery Affair: Chapters 1-4

lilliburlero.livejournal.com posting in

Thanks to all who have contributed to the discussion so far, and to all our guest posters. I’m back in harness for The Thuggery Affair, which happens to be one of my favourite Marlows novels (possibly a minority opinion). It’s probably the most Marmite of the series, anyway. Prepared to be polarised.

This novel has the most threatening dedication that I think I’ve ever read: ‘To Anthony C./who asked for it/(in more ways than one).' Lawks. I’d start running, now. Anyone know who Anthony C. was, and if he survived to tell the tale?

The Acknowledgements seem to express some dubiety over the authorship of ‘I saw a man this morning.’ I’ve never seen it attributed to anyone other than Shaw-Stewart. Tim Kendall has a nice little blogpost about him here. Written into his copy of A Shropshire Lad! Proposing non-penetrative sexytimes with Lady Diana Manners (in the classical tongues)! Adorable.

Forest’s note on the temporal flexibility of the series raises more questions than it answers, I think. Published in 1965, The Thuggery Affair is the first novel in which the setting has notably shifted from a vague late 40s/50s to (rather self-conscious) contemporaneity with publication. Though End of Term and Peter’s Room were published in 1959 and 1961 respectively, there’s nothing very much stopping readers seeing them as essentially continuous with the 1948 in which Falconer’s Lure is explicitly set. Thuggery, however, is fairly emphatically situated in 1964: it’s set at spring half term, and the Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ (released August 1963) is playing on the radio. Forest’s note is dated September 1964.

This effect will be a substantial feature of the series from here on, and I’m interested to hear what people think of it. On the other hand, the setting of the series heretofore has not been all that rigorously accurate, something to which Forest (inadvertently?) draws attention in her note to Thuggery: ‘(who cares that clothes and sweets still had to be rationed in 1947?).’ Well, as several people pointed out in the discussion of Autumn Term, sweets aren’t rationed in that novel’s version of 1947 (Tim is first seen munching chocolate), and though there is mention of Kingscote’s navy uniform being a utility measure in the early novels, clothes rationing (as opposed to Marlow ‘poverty’) doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in the Marlows’ sartorial lives. Is there even one mention of coupons? In my experience of grandparently Second World War (and immediate postwar) reminiscence, coupons loom very, very large. So in a sense, the Marlows have always existed in an alternate universe. Slightly oddly, to my mind, Forest seems to see Peter’s continued attendance at Dartmouth as a major difficulty: I find that relatively easy to accept as a fudge, whereas (for example) Nicola and Lawrie’s birthdate shifting from 1935 to 1951 requires for me a larger suspension of disbelief. Peter will be relieved to know that his author thinks his expulsion from Dartmouth is ‘unlikely’, though. She seems more confident about the matter than he is.

This blog post about Thuggery is well worth a read, for its thoughts about language in the novel, and also for the priceless reflection that

Online reviews bear this out by talking constantly about how difficult the language of the “thuggery” is—to the extent that this particular quirk of the book has almost overshadowed the fact that the book is about drug-running pigeons.

For so it is, and any implausibilities in its portrayal of youth culture do rather pale beside the fact that this is a novel about drug-running pigeons.

It’s also the first and only book in which Nicola does not appear, and I wonder how that affects people’s reading of it? Anyway, here goes.

The economy of the opening is fantastic, I think, establishing the novel’s interest in language--‘Lower Fourth’s Word of the Month’--the change of cast occasioned by Nicola's and then Ginty’s absences, referring to the unstable friendship dynamics between the Lower Deck Marlows and That Merrick Boy. Even the canoe itself seems to allude by omission to the Gondal. How long were those Christmas holidays, though, if Peter and Patrick had time to build a canoe after the Gondal had collapsed?

Lawrie’s fantasy of tragedy and heroism is a comic gem, and it ironically foreshadows her less-than-heroic part in the drama to come.

Peter’s desire to shoot one of everything seems to be shading it close to a reference to Jael, but instead the conversation swerves into more hazardous territory yet, with Patrick’s mention of Jon.

The chapter swithers beautifully between tension and release, with all three characters sometimes more anxious, fearful or disappointed than they’re letting on. Lawrie seems better than heretofore at controlling emotion, though it’s interesting that she largely does it with fantasy or a determined obliviousness. It’s a nice touch that at one moment she’s more observant than the boys, spotting the fallen sapling, and the next getting so excited over the swans that she forgets to bail.

Speaking of, all I actually know about swans and the misusage thereof can be handily compressed into a limerick that was probably doing the rounds at Cambridge when Milton was a Lady, but I have a vague notion that they are not fair game under any circumstances, so Lawrie is clueless as well as heartless? Still, Peter’s moment of involuntarily half-expressed sentiment is touching.

Ain’t t’internet grand? The title of this chapter alludes to a folk poem describing a willow pattern plate, apparently. Here are some variants. Its relation to the chapter seems rather distant, if intriguing: pigeons there are certainly, the little vessel has just been abandoned, there are three (or maybe four) people involved in the main confrontation, though more are present. The point seems to be an ironic contrast between the twee and harmless world of the willow pattern plate and a dispute that escalates quickly and alarmingly.

Though the village’s distrust of the Thuggery is in the end amply justified, it’s notable that when they are first introduced, Forest seems to allow that the prejudice might be unfounded: ‘there had never been anything tangible against them in the absence of even one village mystery.’

Peter’s ‘dialect’ is very bogus here, isn’t it? with elements of Scots, Hiberno-English, Yorkshire, and the Mummerzet it settles into, with disastrous result, in Ready Made Family.

Forest means, I think, to make Maudie Culver so unsympathetic here that I can’t help but like her: hardy, ugly, unconventional spinster who looks after former Borstal boys and doesn’t take any crap from snooty Catholic-recusant gentry with Parliamentary pretensions or the lackadaisical squire who fancies himself as some kind of flying ace? In a different--maybe a better--sort of book she would have been the heroine.

I don’t know how likely the scene of Regina’s return is--perhaps people with some knowledge of falconry could comment? But Patrick’s enraptured approach to her is I think quite moving. And I have to confess I enjoy his hauteur in dealing with Maudie: her misinterpretation of his inability to look her in the eye is a fine touch. There is an irony amounting to hypocrisy in his rebuking her for her firearms safety practice, mind you.

Jukie, we might note, already stands apart from the rest of the Thuggery: their organisation as a pack around Maudie, and the less organised presentation of Patrick, Peter, and Lawrie, makes a superb tableau: back to the willow pattern plate?

Miss Culver’s softening when she recognises Patrick’s elevated social position foreshadows the rather later treatment of Lawrie by the police: for all it might in some ways be politically unsavoury to those of us of a leftish bent, the novel is remarkably unflinching about acknowledging privilege.

Peter’s tactless propensity further to antagonise an already hostile party is here to be observed in full flight, as it will be in Ready Made Family. Lawrie’s puzzled reaction to an adult’s aggression is another sort of privilege--it’s unlikely that any of the Thuggery managed to get to 13 without encountering a grown-up who had no interest in taking care of them. But perhaps it is just Lawrie's obliviousness: if she thinks that all adults have a pastoral capacity, she can't have been paying much attention during the bits of Traitor where she was conscious.

Finally, Patrick taking Regina on his bare fist. Ow! But indicative of his physical courage, ferocious love for the hawks and his faintly scary propensity for total absorption; albeit it’s usually self-absorption, here it’s self-forgetting.

I love the oscillations Lawrie goes through here: from cluelessly gawping around, to perspicaciously instructing Peter on how convincingly to fake having spotted something, and back to daftness in having been so absorbed in her playacting that she forgets to look for Jukie trailing them. And her odd strategy for courage in Nicola’s presence: babbling her fears so that Nicola will reply contemptuously--this being impossible however, with Peter.

Oh, the ‘perilous happiness’ of Patrick’s face, and the touching detail that Peter notices it: they seem close in this book, which doesn’t follow from the Gondal, but presumably some détente occurred over the canoe. This has been your regular &c.

Patrick’s incomprehension of the baffling family rules concerning privacy and property is enjoyable; as are the little hints that Peter (via Selby, as we discover) knows a good deal about pigeons, only the haughty Merrick Boy keeps interrupting.

And Jukie, oh mercy, mercy me. I love Lawrie’s observations of his good looks, her dismay that she appears to be beneath his notice, her unerring identification of his accent. I find a mixture of ‘true north-country’ (to me that means Northumberland, though I’m not sure what it means to Forest) ‘sham Yankee’ and Miss Culver a bit tricky to imagine, though. But he’s a superb portrait of cagey menace, rather vulnerable in himself, I think.

And: yes! This is a novel, let us not forget, about drug-running pigeons. The plot thickens.

The title of this chapter, as far as I can see, is from an 18th-century treatise on pigeon-keeping, the Columbarium, by John Moore. No doubt to be found in the Mariot Chase library, and a favourite of Aunt Eulalia’s.

Spies are still the first thing Peter thinks of, naturally, and Lawrie nearly lets on. Jukie has a good bit in common with Foley, one reflects.

Is Maudie’s Toryism the only explicit mention of a political affiliation in the series? I have never assumed that Anthony Merrick could be other than a Conservative MP, and there are various clues to Edwin’s political loyalties, but I can’t think offhand of another instance of overt political allegiance mentioned. There could be loads, of course, because I’m a dozy reader.

I’m equally delighted by Peter’s unexpected pigeon expertise and Jukie’s phrase for it, ‘comprehending the flutter culture like it’s ridiculous.’

Patrick’s confrontation with Jukie is a rather electrifying moment, prefiguring the last few chapters. Its notable that it’s a threat to Regina that brings Patrick to the pitch of his fury.

Lawrie’s terror and her subsequent reimagining of herself as courageous and resourceful is a perfectly Lawrie moment, and the contrast with her adventuresome acceptance of an excursion to the priest-hole. (I can’t help thinking about Patrick proposing to show the latter to claustrophobic Ginty. This has been your regular &c.)

Though it’s probably just a good old-fashioned retcon, explaining why Patrick has never mentioned this bolthole to any of the Marlows before, I cannot help being thoroughly delighted by the thought of a tiny Patrick obstinately convinced that the Penal Laws were still in force and the ‘brutal soldiery’ (lovely phrase) was going to burst through the door at any moment. His lack of fear (‘I had it worked out how madly heroic I was going to be’) echoes Lawrie a few minutes earlier, and, ironically, the Rupert of the Gondal.

Peter and Patrick’s awkward joshing about girls and the latter’s inchoate feeling that he’s somehow transgressed a sort of incest taboo by even thinking about Ginty is a nice little moment, I think, before we get back to drug running pigeons, which, as you might recall, are what this novel’s about.

Anyone with more experience of narcotics than I care to hazard what the drug is meant to be? I don’t see how drug-running pigeons could possibly be made to pay in any realistic sense, but am amply prepared, I find, to suspend my disbelief for the sheer daftness of it.

I enjoy the reference to Sayers, and it’s nice how very much of their detective work the Marlows and Patrick do out of novels. And if I recall correctly, Patrick’s idea of drug dealing as a form of blackmail has its origin in one of the Lord Peter novels (Murder Must Advertise?) Or perhaps that was a common argument of the mid-twentieth century?

Patrick’s judgement that the Thuggery are only ‘semi-Teds’ is interesting, I think: even though the plot is implausible in the extreme, Forest tends to avoid hyperbole by making her villains slightly amateurish--Foley being the model of the amateur spy--while no less dangerous.

The Jukie/Junkie intuition, which does, at 50 years distance, come across as rather hilarious (did Patrick just pick it up in the café, or does his reading list include William Burroughs* as well as Dorothy L. Sayers?) is also, we’ll discover later, wrong.

*OED lists US usages from 1923, but I think Burroughs’ novel of that title popularised the word in British usage.

That's it from me: have at it!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

bookwormsarah.livejournal.com

I am enjoying Thuggery far more than my first read. The initial chapter was a bit Swallows and Amazons gone wrong, and I loved it, from Lawrie's romancing to Peter's concern after the sinking. It sets the awkward family links and politics very well. I wonder whether Peter wanted Lawrie because Patrick's Gondalling had been very intense, and he wasn't completely comfortable with him?

It felt completely implausible to me that the conversation about wanting to bag one of everything was not terminated by an icy 'one falcon?' Stiff silence and uncomfortable journey home would have ensued, followed by Patrick kicking the sheets about it, and Peter spending half term on his own. Nicola's mind would have gone there instantly and she would gave sat in miserable silence going hot and cold at the thought.

Edited Date: 2014-10-24 07:30 am (UTC)

From:

scarletlobster.livejournal.com

I think it is interesting it says that Lawrie would have been in bed if Nicola had not been away. It suggests that Nicola fills an 'adventurous, outdoor child' role in the family, and if she is away, Lawrie is perfectly willing to step into the vacancy.

From: (Anonymous)

Yes, I totally expected Patrick to say something along those lines.