Readthrough: The Thuggery Affair, Chapters 5-7

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for all your commentary so far on The Thuggery Affair. Here's the second post on the novel.



Lawrie's dissatisfaction with her appearance (excepting that rather super nose, which probably makes her quite photogenic?) is great fun, and her making up nicely prefigures the 'part' she'll later be playing. In re dept continuity, Lawrie seems to know the part of Caliban here, but is represented in Ready Made Family as discovering he's her sort of part for the first time. Peter's reaction to the made-up Lawrie (très 60s chick!) is interesting: skirting that uncomfortable territory of siblings recognising each other as sexual beings very gracefully.

The breakfast scene has some nicely judged moments of characterisation: Nicola's terse postcard (that she has really bought for herself!), Peter's speculations about whether Rowan is happy, Mrs Marlow's firm crushing of them, Ann's worthiness and Lawrie's insensitivity to it (Ann again seems to be lonely in this book, or perhaps just not keen to spend much time with her family: I doubt Forest had planned the conflict in Run Away Home this early, but it does follow naturally). Forest finds a typically emotionally meaty reason for Lawrie not to blab to their mother.

Does anyone know a film called Cobweb!? All I can find through an internet search is The Cobweb, which is nearly a decade too early, but ironically, might be the sort of thing that Lawrie, with her relish for character acting, might rather enjoy.

The Merrick Boy, quite endearingly to my mind, and like Nicola, has No Talent For Crime. I am also prepared to forgive him almost any of his many trespasses for that 'pained parenthesis' at Peter's misquotation of Browning. I wonder if there's a touch of Forestian parapraxis here: elsewhere, Rowan misquotes Surtees' Jorrocks 'there's nothing so queer as scent, 'cept a woman', and Karen corrects her, and here Jorrocks rides again in the context of misquotation.

I really like the motif of transistor radios and the clues they offer to timing later in the novel. I am puzzled by the prevalence of folk songs, 'swung', on Radio Forest, however: here, 'Strawberry Fair' and later 'Loch Lomond'. Does she mean Dylanesque interpretations of traditional music maybe?

Forest conveys class difference very nicely here: Peter and Patrick representing upper-middle-class scorn, Lawrie the potential for privilege to feel intimidated by its opposite.

The immortal line: 'Belshazzar it, herbert!' It's interesting that Peter, and not Patrick, spots this one; not so much because of their relative religiosity, but because Patrick in general seems the more alert to cultural reference. Though perhaps the story of Belshazzar is the sort of thing that turns up in Church of England Sunday schools and so on, and isn't so much part of a Catholic frame of reference? Peter's spoonerisms are fun too.

The backstory of Jon and Patrick's visit to Monks' Culvery! I would say this has been your regular scheduled fic prompt, but I think I may well inadvertently have landed myself with writing this...still, I'd love to see someone else's take. And Patrick is still not listening to Peter: the Merrick Boy is the ultimate mansplainer, isn't he? so much so he does it to other male persons...(though in my experience the truly dedicated mansplainer will happily practise his art on other blokes).

I'd really like to hear people's thoughts on the theme of honour and 'the integrity racket', and the layers of complexity this adds to its characterisation.





Patrick's condescension to Sellars is a lovely detail: the sort of thing at which Forest excels.

Peter finally gets to display his knowledge of pigeons and pigeon-racing. Forest seems to suggest that care of pigeons is immensely time-consuming (Selby having to make it his 'life's work'), which seems odd to me. But perhaps Scandaroons need a lot of looking after, which might explain the surely excessive and suspicious number of the Thuggery?

Patrick's mimicry of the 'posh' operator voice is another nice bit of 'bye-writing' in this novel preoccupied by class and language. Rowan's arrival is amusing too: Peter with the poker echoing Nicola with hers in Peter's Room. I wonder if he's holding the business end. Does anyone know how many wires would the Thuggery have to cut to isolate a small village like Westbridge from telephonic communication? They're keeping busy, aren't they, what with setting hymn-books alight and chucking glass into cowponds?

It's an interesting detail that abuse of animals--as Jukie's threat to Regina did Patrick--galvanises Peter, who in Chapter 4 was sceptical about 'sneaking', into the conviction that the Thuggery need to be reported. His shame at and angry response to Lawrie's timid apathy perhaps indicates his own fears.

Idiot plot time! I can see why Patrick didn't tell Lawrie he was putting the capsule into her pocket--she'd probably have balked, but it's still a bit daft--and is it really believable that he'd have forgotten where he put Exhibit A until this moment?

I enjoy Peter's suggestion of a prayer to St Anthony and Patrick's cheerful admission that he's already dispatched one heavenward.

Aunt Eulalia is a wonderful invention: you can sense Forest's delight in her prolix pastiche, which strikes me as a bit more 18th-century than 1834, but no matter. Forest knew John Moore's Columbarium, from which she derives her title for Chapter 2: perhaps she borrowed something of Moore's prose style too.

Idiot Plot strikes again! Admittedly the 'loss' of the capsule weakens their case, makes them look foolish and might perhaps even make the police suspicious, but not nearly as suspicious and foolish as trying to catch another drug-bearing pigeon does, one would have thought. Between the cigarette packet, the suspicious communication cut-off, the fire in the church, the glass in the cowpond, you'd have thought the police would be unlikely to dismiss them totally. Of course, there's no cast-iron evidence of the Thuggery's responsibility for any of this, but in my experience a lack of evidence doesn't tend to worry the police too much when they're suspecting working-class youth of being up to no good. Oh well. Disbelief is duly suspended. Oh dear, young Marlow volunteering for jobs involving heights again. You'd really have thought he might have learned by now. Patrick's response: catty or tactful?




This chapter has some great commentary on Lawrie's acting skills: her finding it unexpectedly difficult to counterfeit when she hasn't got an audience to play to, her putting on make-up so as not 'to feel like herself' (with disastrous result later), her over-clever, self-centred blind which focusses all attention on Peter (whose own response to nerves is to become impatient and easily angered). And on her fearfulness: her delaying tactics, her misgivings when Peter notices her conspicuousness. I think Giles's stained old mac must rather mar the 'Espresso chick' effect, though. You get the impression that the Thuggery, with their highly identifiable jackets, are a rather dandyish bunch, and at least one of the coffee-bar girls is rather natty (and make-up-less, as it happens). I remember older people in my own 80s childhood lumping together 'fashionable' clothes and 'scruffy' clothes in a way that seemed baffling to me--the two classes of apparel seemed quite distinct to me by the age of 9 or 10. Is that Forest's mistake here?



Enough from me. Over to you!

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think it would be this version of Strawberry Fare (http://youtu.be/FPFmLMT8iSY).

I thought the version of Loch Lomond might have been by Lord Rockingham's XI, but probably this Loch Lomond Rock (http://youtu.be/BKp7Z2tGNNo) by the Ramrods.

This would be some years before Dylan was really a thing outside rather limited hipster circles.

Cobweb sounds like a generic kind of 1960s horror movie, and may not be title of an actual film.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Blimey. That Anthony Newley thing is just scary. Makes the 'Loch Lomond' sound fairly tasteful.

"swung" music

[antfan.livejournal.com]

In one of Noel Streatfeild's there's a character who "swirls" music - I think it's Wolfgang in Apple Bough. He takes a tune and then modernises it somehow, to the horror of his classical musician family. Same thing maybe?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I don't read Ann as lonely in that breakfast scene, so much as secure in what she wants to do, and - and this really must indicate how much she wants to do it - wanting to spare her mother's feelings, but not sufficiently that she won't do her own thing (perhaps it is significant that it is Guides). But I do feel a bit sorry for Mrs Marlow, trying to come up with a holiday treat and realising as she does so that no-one is going to be interested. Still, she isn't disappointed enough to go with Ann herself.

breakfast/Mrs Marlow

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Mrs Marlow is missing London here - realising how difficult it is to come up with an exciting outing for the family, and how much easier it would have been in their previous home (reinforced of course by Nicola's postcard?) Could this account for her snappishness?

She does know Lawrie pretty well, doesn't she - as it happens, Lawrie's reluctance is not to do with Nick, but we know from chapter 1 that Lawrie's attitude to Nick is pretty much as her mother describes. Setting the scene for the decisions Mrs M has to make in Cricket Term.

plot detail

[antfan.livejournal.com]

"and, farther off, the clankings of the steam roller on the main road" p69. A nice little detail, to become more important later! It is very nicely plotted, Thuggery, even if the plot is daft probability-wise (I'm kind of agnostic on that, myself).

And speaking of plot, did anybody else miss for years that the whole book happens within a day?

Re: plot detail

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Yes: it's improbable (though, as ethelmay noted, drug-running pigeons have happened, and in a world containing suitcases made of cocaine (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8082189.stm) who knows?), and there are countless idiot plot moments, but it isn't careless.

I first read it as an adult, so I caught on with the unity-of-time thing, as it happens; it's one of my favourite things about it, though.

Re: plot detail

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

You are right. I had misjudged the time frame when I got impatient with them for being so hopeless about telling people.

Phone wires cut

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

Just from memory, although our side thought the wires had been cut, didn't the policeman say that it was a genuine (and coincidental) fault at the exchange? If so, that would certainly have the potential to cut off the village phones, without needing to cut any wires.

Re: Phone wires cut

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Yes--sorry, wasn't being clear. I was just speculating whether it might be possible to effect the sabotage that Peter suspects?

Idiot plot time!

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I can see why Patrick didn't tell Lawrie he was putting the capsule into her pocket--she'd probably have balked, but it's still a bit daft--and is it really believable that he'd have forgotten where he put Exhibit A until this moment?

I don't read this passage as he's totally forgotten until this moment, just that it isn't urgent to get the capsule back off her until she's leaving, when his memory is prodded.

As to the general plot craziness - yes they are a bit mad to try and steal a pigeon, but they are that type, aren't they? They've been brought up to be bold and adventurous types (at least Peter and Patrick) and not to expect other people to sort things out. And they are very young.

As to the police - I don't know about then, but I don't think of the police now as being especially eager to launch any kind of investigation if they don't have to. And the workingclassness of the Thuggery is counteracted by the extreme upperclassness of their sponsor, Maudie.

Re: Idiot plot time!

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

The idiot plotness of the thing is mitigated a bit by the fact that all three of the kids are in their different ways, idiots, I suppose. No wonder Forest put Nicola out of the way for the duration.

A death-threat against the local MP, however improbable, might get the police moving, though? And surely their initial assumption might be that Maudie doesn't know about it, given that she's too large to get into the dovecote and so on?

[occasionalhope.livejournal.com]

I love Aunt Eulalia. I think it quite probable that her Great Work was the culmination of a lifetime's antiquarian works, composed in her eighties, so her writing might well be in the style of her 18th century youth.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

You know, I bet Aunt Eulalia was one of Darwin's correspondents, sending him fascinating facts about pigeon-breeding - The Darwin Letters Project uncovered huge amount of correspondence he had with amateurs and hobbyists.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

her writing might well be in the style of her 18th century youth

Headcanon accepted.

Clothes

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Totally agree that AF was probably making an adult's mistake about the clothes. Lawrie herself would have known that her brother's old mac and jeans (that probably belonged to several sisters before her) would not make her look like the others in the coffee bar. Teenagers are painfully aware to the tiniest degree if their clothes are not 'right'.
In my (also eighties) childhood, my mother could never understand that hand-me-down baggy or straight jeans were not the same as the stretchy, very fitted jeans that my peers were wearing.

Re: Clothes

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

In Marlows and the Traitor Peter says something about his mother being the most easy-going mother in the world. But she really isn't. It seems plain odd to me that she orders Lawrie to put on a 'coat and skirt' (I think this is an old fashioned term for suit?) before going to the library, because she looks like the 'worst kind of teenager' in jeans and Giles's mac. The most you might expect is for her to order Lawrie to clean the makeup off. I guess I'm a few years younger than Lawrie would be if this book's timeline is used, but even so, a skirt suit to go to the library? Really?

The Dovecote

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I love Aunt Eulalia's description of the dovecote. Does anyone know of any real dovecotes built like this? It doesn't sound very well ventilated to me, to have that many birds in it?

Re: The Dovecote

[bridgetblood.livejournal.com]

In "The Marlows and their Maker" published by GGB, there's a photo of a dovecote at Athelhampton House, Dorset, which was apparently the model for Forest's.

[nnozomi.livejournal.com]

Two notes about Peter:
1) It seems to me that Peter's Room/Thuggery Affair mark the turning point when Peter stops the practice of doing stupid things because he's afraid to do them, if you follow. (He does more than one stupid thing in books to come, but not for the same reasons.) He seems to have come to terms a bit (grown up a bit?) regarding things he's afraid of and the way the world views them, cf taking Patrick's "you're not madly fond of heights" in good part and going along with the premise. That would make another nice fic prompt: Peter, perhaps in conversations with Selby, contemplating Malise, Foley, fear, stupid actions, and himself.
Allowing for the general madness of the whole thing, I think this book is one in which Peter comes off rather well; he keeps his head the whole time, which is more than can be said for either Patrick or Lawrie, pulls off his own part in the caper successfully, and seems to function well as Patrick's second-in-command with some independent authority, if you will.

2) I'm absolutely convinced that Peter's "smug-drugglers" is a bit of homage on Forest's part to Murder Must Advertise, in which his namesake makes an identical slip of the tongue.

Peter

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I agree - I really like Peter a huge amount in this book, and he seems a very natural and believable teenage boy (unlike Patrick, although relatively speaking, I do like Patrick in Thuggery too.) I think the always tackling his fears theme, in the earlier books, was getting a bit overdone.

Patrick's unintentional snubbing of Peter is quite funny. Patrick shown at his most annoying - "That all sounds terribly sensible and it really is the most complete nonsense" - I'd want to slay Patrick too. Though Patrick is right. But his complete oblivion to Peter and Lawries' responses is very typical of his character.

codes of honour

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I'd really like to hear people's thoughts on the theme of honour and 'the integrity racket'

The main thing I notice is that there are a lot of codes of honour, often in conflict with each other.

- Patrick's scruples about inspecting the harness in the first place (which I find hard to believe)
- Jukie's sense of honour about keeping his "parole" (which I find endearing)
- Peter's scruples about reporting the Thuggery to the police "musn't sneak, msutn't rat" - (which I find believable)
- Lawrie's inclination to abandon the whole thing at first sign of danger (very believable!)
- all the stuff about Maudie.

Re Maudie - they obviously don't like Maudie but sympathize with her scruples, and the question is whether it's all a front, I guess.

By contrast, the treatment of the moral issues around drug smuggling itself seems a bit simplistic. But then I guess AF wasn't writing in a period where drug legalisation was even remotely considered, and certainly never watched The Wire (all that Baltimore slang, nuanced characters, mixture of humour and tragedy and moral dilemmas - can't help feeling she'd have really enjoyed it!)

Re: codes of honour

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Patrick's thoughts about privacy are really nicely set off by the business around Nicola's 'market box'. I think his ethical qualms about reading what at that stage he thinks is a message in the capsule are quite in character. (I suspect he's thinking about how he'd feel if a near-stranger read one of his 'Rupert' letters to Ginty?) But he doesn't at all get the complex sibling dynamics of invading a particular space (the 'market box') in a household where so much is held in common.

I'm endeared by Jukie's honour code as well, and as for Maudie--well. I love the way it's never quite resolved whether she is making an elaborate play of being a blue-blot Tory with over-scrupulous feelings about pigeon shows while being in up to her eyes in a drugs ring, or whether she's quite genuinely a blue-blot Tory with over-scrupulous feelings about pigeon shows who's up to her eyes in a drugs ring. She's in her sixties in the 1964 of the novel, meaning she probably remembers the criminalisation of cocaine possession, which I think was a 1920s thing? *going off to research...*

Spin, the slick chick

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

What an Antonia Forest character she is, though her part is so small. "Her black hair flopped exactly on the shoulders of her black shiny jacket, her black pullover had the proper bulkiness, and her short skirt and kinky boots revealed black lace knees. She wore no make-up and her grey eyes, neither friendly nor hostile, watched Sophia: Sophia, unobtrusively copying the way she held her cup in both hands, the handle pointing to the centre of the table, also copied her look; and after a while the chick smiled faintly and gazed into her cup...Afterwards Lawrie had a distinct memory of the black-haired chick watching her leave as if (so Lawrie interpreted the look then) she hoped Lawrie knew what she was doing."

Then..."Spin...The slick chick in the black altogether. She's the slickest with the mostest but she don't give nuthin -"

Does anyone else want to know more about the ultra-cool Spin, and what she really thought of Lawrie?

Re: Spin, the slick chick

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

YES! I think the world needs this fic...

And all the minor Teds

[intrepid--fox.livejournal.com]

I love the way that AF carefully builds a tiny but clear portrait of each of the Teds: Catholic 2 i/c Kinky, ubercool and sexy Rigid, etc, etc. In typically AF style, she steers past cliché, even given her clear ignorance of real Teds/delinquents/drug dealers.

And I love some of their names as well. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely that all of them would have had gang names in real life, she's clearly put a lot of thought into them. As well as Rigid, I'm particularly fond of Dipso and Spin, and of Mr Luke, which sounds as half-hearted as one might expect for this weedy and weepy specimen. No-one's likely to spend a lot of time coming up with a cool name for him.

Re: And all the minor Teds

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

Espresso is fascinating to me -- I probably shouldn't say too much since it would take us right to the very end of the book and jump ahead of the readthrough,* but I couldn't agree with you more about AF's portraits of the Teds. It's very cleverly done indeed. I love that she can transfer over those skills of differentiation so effectively, from the school environment to such an apparently alien one. I'm not saying it's necessarily accurate as to details, but as writing? Fabulously enjoyable.

*I was behind, then I finished the book yesterday.

super-pious types

[buntyandjinx.livejournal.com]

Very struck by this line from Patrick - about the "types in church ... who say their Rosaries very slowly .." and are paying a pensioner gardener a bob-an-hour. Could I be wrong, or do I detect an AF observation here or has PM a new and hitherto unexplored sense of social justice?