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trennelsThanks for your comments on last week's chapters. If anyone is interested in doing a guest post on some of The Ready Made Family, do get in touch via pm. I'm planning on scheduling RMF from 21st Nov-13th Dec, after which we might take a holiday (cue for some of us at least to exit, pursued by Yuletide bears) and begin again with Cricket Term in the New Year? How does that sound?
I enjoy Patrick and Lawrie's less lucky escapades so much that I often forget how much I like this chapter too. We so often see Peter struggling with fear and not quite coping, but here, although he's plausibly terrified at points, he displays defiance and daredevilry as well. His scruples over Ann's bike are amusingly short-lived;'fine and magnificent velocipede' is a particularly gorgeous phrase, which makes me feel genuinely sorry about its demise.
The Thuggery's argument with the steamroller crew is nicely observed: 'This Valuable Machine and Writing to Their Solicitors' evokes teenagers' attempts to send up nonplussed adults very well, I think. 'Purple Streak's broken tooth, Black Check's heavy eyebrows and Yeller Feller's long pointed ears' provide slightly surrealistic further identification: the effect is impish and ogreish at once. And the bike embedded in the tar is a fantastic image, though I suspect that really, the steamroller crew would have seen the Thuggery off at the first sign of them playing chicken, rather than let it get to this stage. Peter's sympathy for the Thuggery 'surrounded by that grinning circle of men's faces' is rather touching, I think, reminding us of how hard Peter often takes humiliation. And also his pleasure at the thought of doing up his bicycle from scrap.
The Thuggery now produce an air-rifle (where did that come from? do they just leave it lying about while they're annoying Matt and the road gang?); Peter's unconvinced attitude to their murderous intent quickly becomes ironic in all sorts of ways.
The moment when Mr Luke and Peter come face-to-face is great, I think: rather as if Peter has confronted a Doppelgänger symbolising his fears, emphasised later by the thought that the chirping wren is braver than both of them. 'Yeller Feller' is of course, aptly named, since it's implied that his reluctance to harm Peter proceeds from cowardice and his silence about his whereabouts from shock. Kinky, however, is a more perverse character altogether: it's vital that he be the most unsympathetic of the Thuggery, given what happens later, but he's still economically characterised as pyschopathically ambitious but none too bright. The sliver of wood: ouch! Though oh, Peter doing almost everything he can to ensure he gets blood-poisoning.
Peter is still rather hard on himself in re courage: I don't think a cold sweat is a particularly contemptible reaction to overhearing someone plotting your murder, myself, but I'm not one of those handsome high-spirited Marlows, I guess. 'Since he was a small boy he had a secret conviction that the thing you most feared was the way you were going to die' which gives us another perspective on the Walls of Troy (incidentally, am I quite mad to see Antonia White's The Lost Traveller, and its disastrous walltop game, lurking distantly behind all this?) and indeed on The Marlows and the Traitor.
I've spent more time than I meant to with Swinburne this week, so I think I recognise one of Peter's characteristic misquotations: it's 'The Garden of Proserpine', and recte 'even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea.' 'Childe Roland' I'll believe, but Peter reading Swinburne seems a bit of a stretch to me. Perhaps Lt Bethune has a bit of a thing for high Victorian ardour.
Despite finding the canoe and it being a much better vessel for one rather than three, he's not out of the woods yet: I'm rather charmed by Peter's pessimism 'one more right and proper part of the disaster', and his frequent regrets at his evasive strategies (most of which work, it has to be said, out of sheer luck or others' stupidity.) There's some wonderful evocations here of the effects of exhaustion, pain and fear on the rational faculty--I like 'his last reserves of courage leaving him like the last grains of sand running through an egg timer' and 'something else which--which wasn't there like a hole in a sock wasn't there'. Peter's picking up some Thuggery slang to think of himself 'sapso had vamoosed' also indicates his curious sense of connection to them--it's interestingly different from his feelings about Foley as an antagonist. Peter loathes Foley for having betrayed his admiration; he's humorously detached from, but at the same time almost verges on sympathy with the Thuggery.
The scene in the lock is splendidly farcical: (can we spare a moment for the loveliness of 'the radio merseyed', which I now always think of when I hear the early Beatles). I'm quite amused that the Thuggery are lugging their soundtrack about with them throughout all this! So sensitive is Peter to humiliation that he even manages a moment of empathy for Kinky flailing in the mud, though he does withdraw it when he reflects on the gravel quarry; and rather compounds their ignominy with the insouciance of his instructions on how to pull them out. It's interesting I think to compare Peter's insolence here with Patrick's hauteur in the confrontations with Maudie earlier and the rest of the Thuggery later: both boys affect a sort of officer-class unflappability, but the effect is very different, and telling of their different personalities.
I like Peter's squeamishness reaction to even imagining Ann cleaning his hand, and his own preferred method of 'rest and quiet and a very very small bit of splinter removed at intervals and only then if it really felt like it' (ugh: some first aid classes at Dartmouth called for, I think; though I'd say, basing the opinion on 14-year-old boys I have known, very believable).
Finally, I can't help but be charmed by Peter's thinking of his last stand against the Thuggery in terms of conspicuous gallantry at sea, and by Sarah the Steamroller. Forest takes the time to characterise the Thuggery even here: Siberia, notably, has a bit of Jukie's coolth, though perhaps not as much as the self-aggrandising nickname would suggest.
Is this my favourite episode in this novel? I think the last two chapters pip it for me, with their strange distorted echoes of Patrick and Nicola riding through the dark in End of Term, talking about Life, the Universe and Everything, but it's a close-run thing.
Lawrie's presumption that adults are there to protect her takes gendered form here, in her preferring to travel with 'adult, active males': it's an ironic, subtle foreshadowing of the threat Red Ted/Rigid will present later in the chapter. Can we have a hoarse little shout of appreciation for slipping Rigid past all censorious and editorial eyes, by the way? Really, Miss Forest! It's also a nice Mockney or proto-Estuarial deformation of 'Richard', of course.
The process of Lawrie getting into character, moving from fear of Red Ted (the comparison with the bull terriers is unsettling in all sorts of ways) to an uneasy alliance with him over the radio, then finally slipping into 'Sophia', is priceless. I love the way Forest conveys Lawrie's fear and hope that Red Ted will approach her with a simple 'as she had been nearly sure he would': that strange momentum that flirtation seems to have, especially when you're a teenager. And Lawrie watching herself even as she inhabits 'Sophia' is just superb. 'Thinking how right she looked' is surely a delusion, in Giles's 'sordid mac'? Red Ted's gratifyingly sharing her opinion on the classiness of Sophia might recall the odd sense of connection that both Peter and Patrick have with other members of the Thuggery.
The coffee bar scene is a little marvel of economy, I think: the decor, the evocation of teenage crush in all its senses, Lawrie's growing confidence as Sophia and disdain for the chick with wonky false eyelashes. I do like the critique of clichés about badly-applied eye make-up: for someone so oblivious, Lawrie is stunningly observant. Lawrie thinking of the girls around her in terms of acting, 'amateurs' and a 'professional', quite ignorant of what those terms might mean in a sexual context, is hilarious and dismaying at once (really, Miss Forest!) The 'professional' has been mentioned in last week's comments as a brilliantly sketched minor character, and like that commenter, I'm avid to read fic from her point of view (this has been your regularly scheduled, &c.) Eight transistor radios: how would that actually sound? (And the songs playing on them allow us to cross-reference with what's happening to Peter at the same time.) And the look that the dark-haired girl gives Lawrie as she leaves--perhaps just Lawrie's hindsight?--but oh, splendid.
Lawrie ends up seeing Cobweb! after all. The bump of the music case against her leg restoring her partially to middle-class schoolgirl life ('preparation not yet done') is a nice touch, and I love the parenthetical '(she still had a few moments of life left)'. 'S'pose we was to take of for the Smoke and leave the mob guessing' interestingly foreshadows Patrick and Jukie's later flight, I think, though that may be my Particular Interests showing.
Her realisation of the threat presented to her by Red Ted is done with fantastic nuance, I think: her jolt of wounded amour propre at the recognition that he doesn't fancy her followed by the dim perception that that doesn't lessen the sexual threat. She has enough nous to stay Sophia for Red Ted's benefit and make her escape to the Ladies, though.
Her mixture of self-pity and vanity in the toilet cubicle is a wonderful Lawrie moment; as is her fear of the 'huge emptiness of the closed cinema' and her revelation as an inveterate reader of the yellow press, which she encounters 'laid over washed floors'. What with Foley as a fan of the Jane strip, Karen and Jon wrestling over the Times crossword and Edwin's Guardian there is surely a little Notes & Queries-style essay to be done on the semiotics of the newspaper in Forest.
Lawrie's climb out of the window, with unexpectedly long drop, echoes Peter's fall into the ditch; she manages, unlike her brother, miraculously not to injure herself (she also 'doesn't mind' dropping from a height). Oh, and the vestiges of her 'character part' remaining with her when she speaks to the policeman--beautiful.
This chapter begins with a pitiless delineation of privilege: Lawrie's lifelong conviction of the friendliness of the police, which is bafflingly withdrawn when she no longer bears the markers of middle-class identity in physical appearance and behaviour. (The Inspector's hopes for his daughter Angela is nice bit of bye-writing.)
The mix-up with the library books adds a touch of farce, but also further shades the commentary on class: it feels very odd to hear Lawrie addressed as Doris, and the thought of the Marlows' exclusive couturier, in turn, being mixed up with the Thuggery! WPC Sutton's attempt to be down with the kids is a thing of beauty.
Lawrie's tears burst out at last, and rather devastatingly, it's made clear that she's learnt very little from her hair-raising experience: 'her mother was at the end of the telephone and all would now come right'.
Mrs Marlow's self-contained entrance, with her voice and expression not matching the words, again seems to comment on middle-class reserve. Though one reflects that given the frequency with which her children are involved in semi-criminal escapades, her manor-house address and cut-glass accent are probably the only things standing between them and Social Services intervention. The idiocy of the Idiot Plot is at least acknowledged--but immediately upstaged by the discovery of the body at Monks' Culvery. More commentary on names, with Peter remembering the strangeness, to a C of E mind, of one of Patrick's given names being Mary. And then him not being able to say Patrick.
There's a return to semi-farce with the hole in Lawrie's pocket--connected via Harry Belafonte to the sinking canoe at the beginning of the novel. This might be a very implausible book, but it's a wonderfully well-constructed one, with motifs and resonances at every turn. The finding of the capsule underlines the futility of each of the missions--already indicated by the adults' exasperation: the trope of the child detective-hero nicely demolished, I think.
We turn to Patrick's narrative, on a first reading, at least, with the possibility that it may end in his death. Given the Inspector's commentary on the illegality of his actions, his self-justification of them as assisting the police is a nice bit of irony.
What do people make of his earworming by 'I saw a man this morning'? Here's the whole poem. The ambiguous ontological identity of the speaker of that poem (is he dead already or isn't he?) is certainly ominous for the first-time reader of the novel, who doesn't know whether Patrick gets out of this one alive. He shares his given name with its author, who didn't get out of his trench alive. Any ideas on how the evocation of Achilles' furious and violent grief for Patroclus might resonate here?
Only Patrick Merrick would bring his eighteenth-century roué ancestor's knife to a pigeon heist. I'm always a little endeared, though the endearingness wears off pretty fast in the next chapter.
I enjoy the account of Patrick's climb of the Dovecote, it seems believably tricky. And the 'feathered stirring and soft disturbed throaty noises' are rather marvellous, or incredibly creepy, depending on how you feel about pigeons. The vulnerability revealed by Patrick's little snooze is exasperating, or adorable, depending on how you feel about Patrick. (I always picture him as one of those skinny, lanky boys who is perpetually 'outgrowing his strength' as my granny would have put it). He has been up since four and he's had rather a trying day, but even Lawrie managed to stay awake for all of it, for chrissakes. The description of the disturbed pigeons' heads emerging from the walls as Patrick investigates is gorgeously uncanny.
Espresso/Mike is another well-drawn character, I think: his tender, intimate care for the pigeons, his 'hungry upbringing', his 'blank, beautiful' face, his propensity to give things away: I confess, I'm rather gone on Espresso. This has been your regular scheduled fic prompt.
'Why so much try to decorpse this one flutterlet?': immortal. Skidskid's 'Trees is weirdies'. 'Onstercreep'. I've been enjoying the argot more than ever during this readthrough.
The chilling backstory of Dipso and Napoli (was Dipso, who wired the signalling system, around when Jon and Patrick visited?) also seems ripe for fic.
Leaving you on a cliffhanger this time: quite enough from me. Looking forward to your commentary!
I enjoy Patrick and Lawrie's less lucky escapades so much that I often forget how much I like this chapter too. We so often see Peter struggling with fear and not quite coping, but here, although he's plausibly terrified at points, he displays defiance and daredevilry as well. His scruples over Ann's bike are amusingly short-lived;'fine and magnificent velocipede' is a particularly gorgeous phrase, which makes me feel genuinely sorry about its demise.
The Thuggery's argument with the steamroller crew is nicely observed: 'This Valuable Machine and Writing to Their Solicitors' evokes teenagers' attempts to send up nonplussed adults very well, I think. 'Purple Streak's broken tooth, Black Check's heavy eyebrows and Yeller Feller's long pointed ears' provide slightly surrealistic further identification: the effect is impish and ogreish at once. And the bike embedded in the tar is a fantastic image, though I suspect that really, the steamroller crew would have seen the Thuggery off at the first sign of them playing chicken, rather than let it get to this stage. Peter's sympathy for the Thuggery 'surrounded by that grinning circle of men's faces' is rather touching, I think, reminding us of how hard Peter often takes humiliation. And also his pleasure at the thought of doing up his bicycle from scrap.
The Thuggery now produce an air-rifle (where did that come from? do they just leave it lying about while they're annoying Matt and the road gang?); Peter's unconvinced attitude to their murderous intent quickly becomes ironic in all sorts of ways.
The moment when Mr Luke and Peter come face-to-face is great, I think: rather as if Peter has confronted a Doppelgänger symbolising his fears, emphasised later by the thought that the chirping wren is braver than both of them. 'Yeller Feller' is of course, aptly named, since it's implied that his reluctance to harm Peter proceeds from cowardice and his silence about his whereabouts from shock. Kinky, however, is a more perverse character altogether: it's vital that he be the most unsympathetic of the Thuggery, given what happens later, but he's still economically characterised as pyschopathically ambitious but none too bright. The sliver of wood: ouch! Though oh, Peter doing almost everything he can to ensure he gets blood-poisoning.
Peter is still rather hard on himself in re courage: I don't think a cold sweat is a particularly contemptible reaction to overhearing someone plotting your murder, myself, but I'm not one of those handsome high-spirited Marlows, I guess. 'Since he was a small boy he had a secret conviction that the thing you most feared was the way you were going to die' which gives us another perspective on the Walls of Troy (incidentally, am I quite mad to see Antonia White's The Lost Traveller, and its disastrous walltop game, lurking distantly behind all this?) and indeed on The Marlows and the Traitor.
I've spent more time than I meant to with Swinburne this week, so I think I recognise one of Peter's characteristic misquotations: it's 'The Garden of Proserpine', and recte 'even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea.' 'Childe Roland' I'll believe, but Peter reading Swinburne seems a bit of a stretch to me. Perhaps Lt Bethune has a bit of a thing for high Victorian ardour.
Despite finding the canoe and it being a much better vessel for one rather than three, he's not out of the woods yet: I'm rather charmed by Peter's pessimism 'one more right and proper part of the disaster', and his frequent regrets at his evasive strategies (most of which work, it has to be said, out of sheer luck or others' stupidity.) There's some wonderful evocations here of the effects of exhaustion, pain and fear on the rational faculty--I like 'his last reserves of courage leaving him like the last grains of sand running through an egg timer' and 'something else which--which wasn't there like a hole in a sock wasn't there'. Peter's picking up some Thuggery slang to think of himself 'sapso had vamoosed' also indicates his curious sense of connection to them--it's interestingly different from his feelings about Foley as an antagonist. Peter loathes Foley for having betrayed his admiration; he's humorously detached from, but at the same time almost verges on sympathy with the Thuggery.
The scene in the lock is splendidly farcical: (can we spare a moment for the loveliness of 'the radio merseyed', which I now always think of when I hear the early Beatles). I'm quite amused that the Thuggery are lugging their soundtrack about with them throughout all this! So sensitive is Peter to humiliation that he even manages a moment of empathy for Kinky flailing in the mud, though he does withdraw it when he reflects on the gravel quarry; and rather compounds their ignominy with the insouciance of his instructions on how to pull them out. It's interesting I think to compare Peter's insolence here with Patrick's hauteur in the confrontations with Maudie earlier and the rest of the Thuggery later: both boys affect a sort of officer-class unflappability, but the effect is very different, and telling of their different personalities.
I like Peter's squeamishness reaction to even imagining Ann cleaning his hand, and his own preferred method of 'rest and quiet and a very very small bit of splinter removed at intervals and only then if it really felt like it' (ugh: some first aid classes at Dartmouth called for, I think; though I'd say, basing the opinion on 14-year-old boys I have known, very believable).
Finally, I can't help but be charmed by Peter's thinking of his last stand against the Thuggery in terms of conspicuous gallantry at sea, and by Sarah the Steamroller. Forest takes the time to characterise the Thuggery even here: Siberia, notably, has a bit of Jukie's coolth, though perhaps not as much as the self-aggrandising nickname would suggest.
Is this my favourite episode in this novel? I think the last two chapters pip it for me, with their strange distorted echoes of Patrick and Nicola riding through the dark in End of Term, talking about Life, the Universe and Everything, but it's a close-run thing.
Lawrie's presumption that adults are there to protect her takes gendered form here, in her preferring to travel with 'adult, active males': it's an ironic, subtle foreshadowing of the threat Red Ted/Rigid will present later in the chapter. Can we have a hoarse little shout of appreciation for slipping Rigid past all censorious and editorial eyes, by the way? Really, Miss Forest! It's also a nice Mockney or proto-Estuarial deformation of 'Richard', of course.
The process of Lawrie getting into character, moving from fear of Red Ted (the comparison with the bull terriers is unsettling in all sorts of ways) to an uneasy alliance with him over the radio, then finally slipping into 'Sophia', is priceless. I love the way Forest conveys Lawrie's fear and hope that Red Ted will approach her with a simple 'as she had been nearly sure he would': that strange momentum that flirtation seems to have, especially when you're a teenager. And Lawrie watching herself even as she inhabits 'Sophia' is just superb. 'Thinking how right she looked' is surely a delusion, in Giles's 'sordid mac'? Red Ted's gratifyingly sharing her opinion on the classiness of Sophia might recall the odd sense of connection that both Peter and Patrick have with other members of the Thuggery.
The coffee bar scene is a little marvel of economy, I think: the decor, the evocation of teenage crush in all its senses, Lawrie's growing confidence as Sophia and disdain for the chick with wonky false eyelashes. I do like the critique of clichés about badly-applied eye make-up: for someone so oblivious, Lawrie is stunningly observant. Lawrie thinking of the girls around her in terms of acting, 'amateurs' and a 'professional', quite ignorant of what those terms might mean in a sexual context, is hilarious and dismaying at once (really, Miss Forest!) The 'professional' has been mentioned in last week's comments as a brilliantly sketched minor character, and like that commenter, I'm avid to read fic from her point of view (this has been your regularly scheduled, &c.) Eight transistor radios: how would that actually sound? (And the songs playing on them allow us to cross-reference with what's happening to Peter at the same time.) And the look that the dark-haired girl gives Lawrie as she leaves--perhaps just Lawrie's hindsight?--but oh, splendid.
Lawrie ends up seeing Cobweb! after all. The bump of the music case against her leg restoring her partially to middle-class schoolgirl life ('preparation not yet done') is a nice touch, and I love the parenthetical '(she still had a few moments of life left)'. 'S'pose we was to take of for the Smoke and leave the mob guessing' interestingly foreshadows Patrick and Jukie's later flight, I think, though that may be my Particular Interests showing.
Her realisation of the threat presented to her by Red Ted is done with fantastic nuance, I think: her jolt of wounded amour propre at the recognition that he doesn't fancy her followed by the dim perception that that doesn't lessen the sexual threat. She has enough nous to stay Sophia for Red Ted's benefit and make her escape to the Ladies, though.
Her mixture of self-pity and vanity in the toilet cubicle is a wonderful Lawrie moment; as is her fear of the 'huge emptiness of the closed cinema' and her revelation as an inveterate reader of the yellow press, which she encounters 'laid over washed floors'. What with Foley as a fan of the Jane strip, Karen and Jon wrestling over the Times crossword and Edwin's Guardian there is surely a little Notes & Queries-style essay to be done on the semiotics of the newspaper in Forest.
Lawrie's climb out of the window, with unexpectedly long drop, echoes Peter's fall into the ditch; she manages, unlike her brother, miraculously not to injure herself (she also 'doesn't mind' dropping from a height). Oh, and the vestiges of her 'character part' remaining with her when she speaks to the policeman--beautiful.
This chapter begins with a pitiless delineation of privilege: Lawrie's lifelong conviction of the friendliness of the police, which is bafflingly withdrawn when she no longer bears the markers of middle-class identity in physical appearance and behaviour. (The Inspector's hopes for his daughter Angela is nice bit of bye-writing.)
The mix-up with the library books adds a touch of farce, but also further shades the commentary on class: it feels very odd to hear Lawrie addressed as Doris, and the thought of the Marlows' exclusive couturier, in turn, being mixed up with the Thuggery! WPC Sutton's attempt to be down with the kids is a thing of beauty.
Lawrie's tears burst out at last, and rather devastatingly, it's made clear that she's learnt very little from her hair-raising experience: 'her mother was at the end of the telephone and all would now come right'.
Mrs Marlow's self-contained entrance, with her voice and expression not matching the words, again seems to comment on middle-class reserve. Though one reflects that given the frequency with which her children are involved in semi-criminal escapades, her manor-house address and cut-glass accent are probably the only things standing between them and Social Services intervention. The idiocy of the Idiot Plot is at least acknowledged--but immediately upstaged by the discovery of the body at Monks' Culvery. More commentary on names, with Peter remembering the strangeness, to a C of E mind, of one of Patrick's given names being Mary. And then him not being able to say Patrick.
There's a return to semi-farce with the hole in Lawrie's pocket--connected via Harry Belafonte to the sinking canoe at the beginning of the novel. This might be a very implausible book, but it's a wonderfully well-constructed one, with motifs and resonances at every turn. The finding of the capsule underlines the futility of each of the missions--already indicated by the adults' exasperation: the trope of the child detective-hero nicely demolished, I think.
We turn to Patrick's narrative, on a first reading, at least, with the possibility that it may end in his death. Given the Inspector's commentary on the illegality of his actions, his self-justification of them as assisting the police is a nice bit of irony.
What do people make of his earworming by 'I saw a man this morning'? Here's the whole poem. The ambiguous ontological identity of the speaker of that poem (is he dead already or isn't he?) is certainly ominous for the first-time reader of the novel, who doesn't know whether Patrick gets out of this one alive. He shares his given name with its author, who didn't get out of his trench alive. Any ideas on how the evocation of Achilles' furious and violent grief for Patroclus might resonate here?
Only Patrick Merrick would bring his eighteenth-century roué ancestor's knife to a pigeon heist. I'm always a little endeared, though the endearingness wears off pretty fast in the next chapter.
I enjoy the account of Patrick's climb of the Dovecote, it seems believably tricky. And the 'feathered stirring and soft disturbed throaty noises' are rather marvellous, or incredibly creepy, depending on how you feel about pigeons. The vulnerability revealed by Patrick's little snooze is exasperating, or adorable, depending on how you feel about Patrick. (I always picture him as one of those skinny, lanky boys who is perpetually 'outgrowing his strength' as my granny would have put it). He has been up since four and he's had rather a trying day, but even Lawrie managed to stay awake for all of it, for chrissakes. The description of the disturbed pigeons' heads emerging from the walls as Patrick investigates is gorgeously uncanny.
Espresso/Mike is another well-drawn character, I think: his tender, intimate care for the pigeons, his 'hungry upbringing', his 'blank, beautiful' face, his propensity to give things away: I confess, I'm rather gone on Espresso. This has been your regular scheduled fic prompt.
'Why so much try to decorpse this one flutterlet?': immortal. Skidskid's 'Trees is weirdies'. 'Onstercreep'. I've been enjoying the argot more than ever during this readthrough.
The chilling backstory of Dipso and Napoli (was Dipso, who wired the signalling system, around when Jon and Patrick visited?) also seems ripe for fic.
Leaving you on a cliffhanger this time: quite enough from me. Looking forward to your commentary!
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