Readthrough: The Thuggery Affair: Chapters 12-14

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Sorry this one's rather late today.


Nicely suspenseful opening to this chapter, the think, punctuated by the Shaw-Stewart poem. Patrick's taste for antiquated gangster flicks is slightly surprising, I think, but his sang-froid here is fun.

Jukie: doesn't take drugs, doesn't go with women. Doesn't even go to the pictures. What does he do? The answer, I think, is painstaking book-keeping. It's a gangster stereotype as old as Scarface too, but one I rather like.

Patrick's attempt to get the harness and capsule from him is decidedly ill-advised, one would have thought, and it’s a miracle someone doesn't get stabbed there and then, but if we were to note every time Patrick does something ill-advised in these chapters we would be here until the New Year.

Considering the pile-on is seven against one (albeit in a fortuitously uncoordinated attack), Patrick's lack of intimidation seems a trifle implausible to me, but I like the little note of his treacherously trembling limbs. Mr Luke's propensity to kick those already down—whether calling for the others to put the boot into Patrick or taking advantage of Kinky's humiliation—is a neat portrait of a cowardly personality. 'What met your top, Jukie? It grows a melon.'—splendid Thug-speak moment.

Patrick's observation that Cousin Ambrose's knife is in its first congenial company for 200 years or so cuts interestingly across some of the class issues here, as do the ridiculous (but coded privileged) names he imagines for them.

The revelation that Patrick smokes on occasion 'depending on whom he was with' suggests a London life for the Merrick Boy perhaps a bit different in tone from his friendships with the Marlows. This has been your regularly scheduled fic prompt. (I have to say I always headcanon an older Patrick as a heavy smoker).
Jukie's comment that Rigid might give Lawrie a 'whirl' even if she isn't 'willing' casts a further chill over the earlier episode; 'the jill in the sordid mac', meanwhile, is a great phrase. Patrick's refection that even Lawrie couldn't be daft (or courageous) enough to be picked up by one of the Thuggery is fatally and ironically ignorant of the existence of Sophia.

Espresso's tears over the pigeons: aaaooo! (Espresso is my favourite Thug). The responses of the rest of the Thuggery are interestingly Marlovian: embarrassed shrugs.

Enter Rigid: the Jukie’s relative uninterest in girls adds an extra layer of exasperation to his anger with the priapic incompetent. Patrick’s ‘what a grotty bish-up’ doesn’t indicate much about his feelings on the point of he and Peter having inadvertently exposed Lawrie to potential rape: I wonder if he has any? Or perhaps it's worked in somehow with his decision to call the Thuggery's bluff on the point of how much Lawrie has told the police. Certainly the evidence of Kinky's sadism (ah, a no-visible-marks merchant: another good old gangster stereotype) seems to be a factor there.

I think the way that Kinky's attempted coup is interrupted by the honour-amongst-thieves moment of the shareout is masterly; Jukie's accountancy skills being a further neat detail. Mr Luke is actually very important to the plotting of the novel, one reflects: what with him keeping quiet about Peter, and then bursting out here. Kinky's savage revenge upon him for telling the others about the lock incident turns out to be very short-lived, and very unwise.

The confusion of Kinky's last moments is realistically conveyed, I think. Exactly how premeditated is his killing, do you think? The radio tells us that his death happens at the same time as Lawrie is eating her pork pie with the Inspector's penknife and wiping the blade on her jeans. Grim, Miss Forest, grim. I might do a chart for all the songs in Thuggery and their accompanying actions.

There's something moving about Kinky's final inability to know what's going on, and the others' inability to believe it; likewise Patrick's instinctive response of giving him the rosary; Forest seems to have used the breathtaking close of this novel to think through some ideas about the theology of repentance, which is a pretty weighty topic for the target market.

Pitilessly, Forest follows this up with the farce of the Thuggery's stampede for the exit, and indeed, the collapse of Jukie's motorbike. Jukie's reflections on Kinky's murderous ambitions and the the fragility of human life also set the scene for later discussions. His robbery of the corpse is accompanied by a bit of North Country dialect: 'I'd be a gowk...' at this point of great emotional and moral tension, Jukie returns to his roots.

Patrick's response to Jukie's tears at the loss of his motorbike is interesting too: Forest adds the apparently omniscient, authorial 'Patrick, for whom machines had no personality...'but it has always seemed to me that what Jukie is almost weeping for is the recognition that he truly has been betrayed: the dismantling and reassembly of the bike must have taken some time, after all, and suggests substantial premeditation on the part of the rest of the gang. Patrick's cruel words about real friendship are particularly lacerating in this context.

I'm touched by Espresso's fidelity to the flutters, and fascinated by Patrick's apparent independent decision to go with Jukie: he's perhaps only anticipating what he believes Jukie will force him to do anyway, but the point is he does anticipate it, to the point that even Jukie is surprised.

'This maverick sense of sympathy': I ship it. Sorry, did I, erm, say something there?





Miss Forest is doing absolutely nothing, with this opening dialogue, to stop me shipping it, Patrick's 'sudden secret smile' and all. This has been your &c.

Little hoarse shout of self-reflexive appreciation moment for 'if it wasn't terribly wearing, to have to talk in that madly special way.'

No-one ever took the knife out of Kinky, did they? No, they did not. It surprises me that the Merrick Boy is not, as Jukie intimates here, asked a few more questions about that in the endup of all. Privilege again, I suppose.

And, on the point of privilege, Anthony Merrick's lack of ambition and honesty is a pure product of same, as Jukie perspicaciously points out: 'he's got it all already.'

Patrick coining a Thug-speak phrase ('so square he's a cube') continues the thread of suggestion that he's quite familiar with yoof dialect, from some source or another; there's another nice touch in him telling Jukie that he and the Marlows have nicknamed the gang the Thuggery: as readers, we think of them automatically as such, but this is the first time Jukie's heard the word.

Jukie's backstory is neatly balanced, I think: not wholly a sob story, but he clearly has a background both troubled and stigmatised; the detail about him feeling his grandfather wanting to beat his errant father out of him is particularly pitilessly observed, I think. Patrick, with his instinctive sympathy for the 'grands', is at pains to deny the hostility: but I suspect Forest means us to understand that Jukie's instincts were sound.

The conversation about teenage spending power shows the Merrick Boy at his most clueless and his author at her most incisive. The difference between a working-class teenager who desires the freedom of a pay-packet but is being urged to delay gratification for the greater eventual rewards of qualifications and upper-middle-class 'pocket money' supported by the trappings of privilege couldn't really be greater, and Forest, I think much to her credit, leaves Jukie scornfully, but irrefutably to point this out. Patrick's comparison of his father's 'sober rooted income' with 'the spoils of millionaires' is similarly inadequate to the situation that Jukie is describing: the detail of the 'middle-aged Rolls' is choice irony, especially given the vehicle in which they are travelling.

What do people make of the story of Jukie's theft from his grandparents' rent and bills money? Jukie's grandfather seems to combine an authoritarian temperament with a positive anti-talent for telling acts of discipline: a mixture all too often found.

'No was a lie; Yes pharaisical' is a lovely antithesis, and I do warm to the Merrick Boy for it.

'Well, just remember you ain't the jill'n I ain't Rigid.' Aren't you now? Glory, glory, Miss Forest, you're not doing anything at all to make me stop shipping this. And Patrick being 'a trifle surprised' that Jukie doesn't come with him to the lavs is just *blink blink* Miss Forest did you say what I think you just said? Any thoughts on exactly why he doesn't risk waiting for the operator that don't involve shipping it like mighty?

In a lovely echo of 'Belshazzar it, herbert', Patrick does write on the wall, or on the glass at least. Jukie's convincing pastiche of U-speech is rather delightful, as is the nod to Chesterton.

Jukie's grandfather's authoritarianism strikes again... The Approved School headmaster is a nice, subtle character sketch, I think--I'd love to read fic about him peeling Jukie's rind off.

The account of how Jukie came to Monks' Culvery, by contrast, strikes me as a weak point in the narrative: too many coincidences--what do other people make of it? Forest is generally quite hostile to social workers, and here the 'Youth Grouper' and their organisation appears as a corrupt facilitator of forced and indentured labour, manipulated by mobsters. At this point, 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone' on the radio, with its sentimentalisation of wasted life, strikes a powerful, complex note of irony: echoed in Jukie's later lability at it.

'Moonlight and tree shadows alternated along the road; moonlight reflected into the car from the bonnet, showing Jukie's face as ivory, his eyes, mouth and nostrils pebble black.' Haunting.

Jukie's belated recognition of the truth of Kinky's death, after his faux-philosophical musings in the previous chapter, strike very hard indeed. The Merrick Boy does another touch of breaking and entering: the use he considers making of poor Mrs Denny's cottage later does suggest a 'maverick sympathy' gone out of control. Not that I ship it or anything.

The difference between corpsed and dead plays wonderfully into the novel's play of different idiolects.

The discussion of repentance in extremis is rather extraordinary, I think, considering the novel's target market, but its culmination in:

'Like, man, you were there, you can fable.'

'What on earth good would that be?'

is beautifully observed as a comment on Jukie's essentially secular understanding of repentance, moulded by his experience of authoritarian discipline, in which the outward show is everything, and Patrick's more high-minded take, which in turn is only made possible by a sort of privileged self-confidence.

Patrick and Jukie's shared looks as they eat (aaaaaooooo).

The sudden presence of atomic warfare and Bertrand Russell (I assume this is who's meant and indicted in Patrick's wonderfully callow and precocious apothegm, but welcome correction) is a bit of a startlement, but it's a wonderfully bizarre moment.

Patrick's recognition of his own guilt in bringing the knife is welcome--Jukie anticipates the (to my mind, but my experience of criminal justice is mercifully scant) attitude of the police in saying 'The Gestapo'll never swoop you for that.' I would have thought that your highly identifiable antique weapon being found buried up to the hilt in someone's back was exactly the sort of thing the Gestapo usually swoop for, but never mind.





Jukie and Patrick's mutual horror at being 28 after release from a 12-year sentence amuses me, though I suspect not the target market for the novel.

I'm really interested in hearing your thoughts on why Patrick so steadily follows the promptings of the right romantic thing to do' in helping Jukie. And in AU fic in which Patrick takes a blindfolded Jukie to the priest's hole.

' "One day I'm going to take you home with me and introduce you to me grands. They'll take to you, Herbert." ' Not that I ship it or anything.

Thoughts on Jukie's do-it-yourself morality and do-it-yourself theology? Insofar as the alternative to DIY is acceptance of authority, I don't know that Patrick's giggles and bafflement are not rather unmeritedly lofty, but that depends which side of the Reformation you shake down on, I suppose.

'Me dial a pope-shouter?'--delightful. In not taking the chance to ring the police, Patrick shows himself again almost more invested in Jukie's interests than Jukie is. Jukie's sense of the precariousness of this compact 'once start talking to the zombies 'n you'd be with them again...' is a touching and subtle analysis of esprit de corps.

Forest does a great job, through Jukie, of caricaturing an outsider's understanding of Catholic theology on points such as masses for the dead; she seems to take rather a mischievous delight in it. 'Spill the pensive' is a fantastic phrase.

Jukie's 'flashes' sound like migraine symptoms, except the 'agony' never hits: anyone recognise what he's suffering from?

Patrick's identification with Jukie's interests seems to have gone rather beyond thinking him a likeable character whom one mustn't mistake for a friend: it occurs to me that the last half of the novel delineates increasingly susceptible characters being drawn into ever more compromising situations with regard to the Thuggery and their activities, and it is fascinating that Patrick, in some ways the most inflexible moralist of them all, is also the one most subject to incriminating involvement.

Patrick's propensity to doze at inopportune moments strikes once more! And the applicability of the Shaw-Stewart lines to the dawn is very effective. How do people read the poem in the light of the Patrick/Jukie situation? From being the 'man who did not wish to die' (or even serve 12 at the pleasure of the Top Chick) Jukie becomes despairing, murderous and suicidal in response, I think, to what he sees as Patrick's betrayal of him. Patrick, whom I tend to identify with the ambivalent speaker of the lyric who says: 'If otherwise wish I', by contrast, at the crucial moment shows a powerful survival instinct.

Patrick's coming round after the crash is beautifully, understatedly handled, I think, particularly his stricken face at realising that Jukie has been killed, and the anger leaving Mr Merrick's voice at the same.

I think Patrick gets a very easy time from the police, given well, everything. The first of his two pieces of fiction seems to have a touch of self-interest in it as well as concern for Jukie's grands--admitting that he was Jukie's accomplice and planning to help him hide might have strained even the licence clearly extended to MP's sons--but never mind. The Inspector seems to have his suspicions that Patrick is not telling the absolute unvarnished, but leaves things be as well.

Patrick's interruption of Peter's story with the news about Regina is pricelessly, perfectly Patrick. Peter's sneer at Jukie's given name, and being checked by a nihil nisi bonum impulse, is a great bit of bye-writing.

The image of Espresso howling on a maternal Mrs Marlow's bosom is rather affecting; more farce, albeit of a rather dark kind, ensues in Peter's account of the rest of the Thuggery's adventure. Note again that it's Mr Luke who provokes a reversal.

The wrap-up of the story is really quite complex, revealing (I think believably, perhaps), that everyone involved in the drugs-trafficking was misled and/or misleading others in some way. But I do think that the orchestral conductor detail is unnecessary and rather bizarre (anti-Semitic despite the meta-commentary of Peter's 'the thing you mustn't be anti?')--what's going on there? It's a nice touch that the thread concerning Catholic penance and redemption is resolved from Peter's embarrassed, half-comprehending perspective. Mrs Marlow being moved by Father Hunt's administration of the last rites is surely worth a fic?

And finally, OH MY GOD: Patrick and Peter keep the drugs. Bearing in mind that it has been suggested that a pigeon might be carrying somewhere between 15g-50g of uncut cocaine. That's some weekend right there, lads. This has been your regularly scheduled &c. Is this actually the most subversive ending to a YA novel ever conceived?


So that's it: The Thuggery Affair. A novel about drug-running pigeons, don't forget, and at the end the teenage protagonists hang onto enough coke to fuel a City banker through a minor stock-market bubble. In all seriousness, I started this stage of the readthrough thinking I was dealing with a novel with a very daft plot and implausible setting but some brilliant characterisation, set-pieces and writing. I'm now not so very convinced that the plot is so daft after all. Frankly, I reckon it's a miniature ruddy masterpiece: especially these last three chapters. But YMMV: over to you!

Comments

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

The bit of the book that has stuck with me over the years is "The telepathy of friendship came to Patrick's aid".... I don't know why, but it seems one of the best-written sentences I've ever read anywhere, and one knows so exactly what she means....

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

I've always thought Patrick 'was' -- in some sense -- functioning as the ambivalent speaker of the Shaw-Stewart poem; in part because it chimes so well with Peter's Room and the character development there.

Now, what I would really like to know is this, although it does necessitate, ahem, imagining that we can revive Miss Forest momentarily. Do you think (does anyone think) she could have been aware of, and/or very deliberately playing upon, the Patrick/Jukie dynamic? It feels in some senses ridiculous to suggest it, but ... it is AF, who for all her personal conservatism has given all sorts of subjects not normally taken in by juvenile fiction a whirl. There are indisputable queer themes in the historicals. Could she be...? This is by no means a wishful-thinking 'pairing' based on a couple of suggestive interactions, but a striking bond (in some ways reminiscent of the bonds in adolescent folie à deux situations?) which animates the whole last section of the book and gives rise to many of its best passages.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I think the series provides pretty ample evidence (Miranda, Nick's conversation with Miss Cromwell about The Mask of Apollo) that whatever else, homophobia wasn't any part of AF's conservatism, so I absolutely don't see why not.

Patrick/Jukie

[antfan.livejournal.com]

I think one of the funniest lines is Patrick on Jukie: "he was a rather likeable character"

It's such an utterly inadequate description of Jukie and of their relationship, whichever way you look at it, {an inadequacy acknowledged but never explored in Patricks' continuing unfinished thought "or not likeable exactly but -") that it does rather suggest that Patrick is doing some pretty heavy suppressing of his sub conscious at this point.

[cleodoxa.livejournal.com]

The last few chapters really are very intense and haunting, one of the bits of Forest's writing that really make me think she'd be known as a truly good writer if she hadn't written children's books, and awkward ones at that -- though of course that awkwardness is part of her quality.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I don't quite get the part about the bike being taken to bits and the nuts hidden. When would they have done that?

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

That's my problem. They can't possibly do it after the decision to split is taken; there isn't time & they're in too much of a visible state for precision anti-engineering. Possibly at the point when they're actually believed to be beating up Mr Luke? Premeditation for the attempted coup on Kinky's part, and Mr Luke's in a state partly because of some beating up, and partly because of what he's been told will happen if he lets on to Jukie what they've done to the bike?

Jukie's passions

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

A passion a la Plato for a Norton or a Triumph?

I hate to mention this but are you seeing echoes of another thin-lipped, narrow-faced, abnormally self-disciplined young man, driven and self-loathing, driven to the very end by the collapse of his hopes?

Re: Jukie's passions

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

The bike reminds me of a short story I once read, in which a gang take apart someone's house very carefully then put it back together. The unfortunate owner comes open and as soon as he touches the door the whole thing collapses. For some reason I'm thinking it was a Graham Greene story but it was many years ago I read it, so could be totally wrong. But as with that story, the bike just makes me think - how could they possibly do that without it taking hours? And having put that much effort into doing that, they all supposedly change their minds and come back for Jukie an hour or so later, when they must have assumed Jukie would have escaped some other way?

Re: Jukie's passions

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Neatly and soberly dressed, fair hair, searching blue eyes? Charismatic, rather sentimental? Can't think what you mean.

Re: Jukie's passions

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

A passion a la Plato for a Norton or a Triumph?

Passions for machinery take me to the mental territory of A Rebours--the bit with the fetishization of the railway engines (and to Flann O'Brien's superb parody of it in The Third Policeman.) Bit of a sublimation case at the very least, our Jukie.

Re: Jukie's passions

[antfan.livejournal.com]

WHO? I am totally in the dark!

They keep the drugs

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Phew! In my comments on the last session about the relative idiocy of Peter, Patrick and Lawrie, I was dying to mention this as the crowning moment of stupid, but here it is. (And, technically, in passing the capsule to Peter, Patrick "supplies" - talk about the snake eating its own tail.)

Re: They keep the drugs

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

"Even the police weren't likely to want it now." Really, Patrick?

Re: They keep the drugs

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I think Peter might stow the capsule away somewhere safe, probably in the same place that he keeps the knife Foley gave him at the end of MATT. There it will lie forgotten until a few years later when Fob is having a jealous rummage around the Shippen and comes across it......

Book-keeping

[sprog-63.livejournal.com]

The answer, I think, is painstaking book-keeping. It's a gangster stereotype as old as Scarface too, but one I rather like.

Oh yes! I had never thought of that: I've always read it simply as a recognition that Jukie has imbibed something from his grandparents' upbringing. Would his grandad have recognised it, I wonder? Could his grandad see anything good in Jukie? (And was Jukie named after his grandad in order to soften him towards the baby by his teenage Mum?)

Jukie is thoughtful, analytic, empathic, intelligent if uneducated ... it is heartbreaking to think that with only a scintilla more warmth and rather less blame for his parentage from his grandparents (and doubtless also blamed at some level for being the death of his mother: their daughter) he could have developed into a lad the "grands" could have been so proud of.

We've noted the Peyton-Forest link before: but he makes me think of Pennington - or rather where Pennington could have ended up without Crocker & Bates' mum giving him some positive input.

Why doesn't Patrick escape?

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

So why does Patrick go with Jukie? Jukie had already got into the car. Patrick could leg it at that point, as easily as Espresso does in the next few minutes. So ruling out the obvious reasons - because it is supposed to be a childrens' book - why does he?

Re: Why doesn't Patrick escape?

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Because he's also a teenage boy looking for teenage kicks?

It's the best I can come up with, honestly.

[fengirl88.livejournal.com]

I've enjoyed the book so much more in this read-through than when I read it before - thank you for the commentary and guidance! I still find aspects of the plot implausible, but I agree that the last chapters are haunting, and the Patrick/Jukie relationship has been a revelation this time around.

[antfan.livejournal.com]

Agree with all that, and I find myself concluding that all the complicated pigeon smug druggling stuff is basically all to bring Patrick and Jukie together in these final chapters. And such amazing chapters.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

'Well, just remember you ain't the jill'n I ain't Rigid.'

I'm more inclined to see Patrick as Rigid and Jukie as the jill in this scene. (Yes, I ship it, too, and it doesn't help that I also see Cassandra and Simon's drive through the night from I Capture the Castle (also doomed, if not in precisely the same way) when I read this chapter.)

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

I'm more inclined to see Patrick as Rigid and Jukie as the jill in this scene.

O RLY? Care to elaborate? :-D

Methuselah/Bertrand Russell/Cuban Missile Crisis

[antfan.livejournal.com]

It only came to me on this read through that Methuselah was surely Bertrand Russell (put out Lilliburlero was there before me!) I read the book originally in the 80s and never thought much about the original setting – but Russell, a very old man in the 60s, and a famous pacifist and atheist, surely fits the bill.

It also struck me that Jukie, when he talks about Methuselah/Russell “telling how it was a strictly dicey time n ‘most likely it’d drop next week…it didn’t” sounds as if he is referring to a specific event, and I wondered if that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sure enough – the Cuban Missile Crisis is 1962 and Thuggery is published 1965 so I’d submit the dates work very well. Furthermore, Russell was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis (wrote public letters to Kruschev and Kennedy) so would have been quite likely to be opining on the “talk box”.

If this is correct, then Patrick’s remark about Russell “one more old man who has abolished God and is now afraid to die” strikes me as totally contemptible (as well as callow and precocious as Lilliburlero says). Even without the fact that we now know the Cuban Missile Crisis was an even closer thing than was thought at the time, in what world, regardless of your religious or political perspective, is it either selfish or cowardly to be concerned about the prospect of Nuclear Armageddon?

(By the way, I wonder if it is Russell, if it was Forest’s choice or her editor’s not to refer to him by name?)

More than that, Russell seems to be carrying the can for the whole tragic tale of Jukie Clarke. Without typing out all the dialogue (all those apostrophes!) Jukie says he realized that if Methuselah/Russell was right then “you grabbed the loot the fastest, never mind how. Cause there’s no more time…”. So, err, Russell’s atheism and pacificism (nihilism or catastrophism maybe in Forest’s view?) to blame for Jukie taking up drug-dealing?

I’m glad it’s all so oblique, because I don’t like what the novel/Forest seems to be putting forward here. But to my mind, this is all quite revealing as to why Forest might have chosen to write the novel in the first place (and even why she might so suddenly have chosen to update – and in a very ostentatious way - the Marlow time line, if she was preoccupied with some of these very current issues of the time).

Would be interested to know if others think this is the case or a case of barking up the wrong tree altogether?

Re: Methuselah/Bertrand Russell/Cuban Missile Crisis

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Pretty certain it was Russell and I wouldn't have been surprised if it hadn't been the Cuban Missile Crisis.

With respect to Patrick, that remark is the sort of thing I hope he remembers when he's twenty years older and kicks the sheets about.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Jukie's flashes sound absolutely like ocular symptoms of migraine. Mine are variable, milder than most migraineurs seem to get, and sometimes go away without progressing to headache, but sometimes I have a definite feeling that if I can lie down and preferably sleep for a short period that it will go away, and often even when I have the headache if I lie down perfectly still in the right position the pain goes away and I can go to sleep and get over it. But if I move it's horrid.

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

Almost every member of my family gets regular painless, or nearly painless, migraines with the most baroque visual disturbances. Sometimes all I can see is a giant shimmering star across my entire visual field.

What does the target market think?

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

I didn't read Thuggery until I was an adult, and it was the last of AF's books I came across. I can read Patrick's 15 year old pronouncements with the indulgent air of an adult whose own 15 year old sayings were never written down, thank goodness. But I don't know what I'd have thought as a child reader. I don't know what I'd have thought about the plot or language either. I suspect I would have tried to 'get into' the language, and I might have gone along with the plot, but I know I'd have been horrified that there was no Nicola. (Like the Ransome books without Nancy in, which I didn't properly appreciate for years!) However I certainly wouldn't have picked up on the sexual tension between Patrick and Jukie.
Dianne Wynne-Jones said it's much easier writing magic books for children because they don't question how the magic works, they just buy into the story and accept that it does work. I wonder if spy/adventure/crime stories for children work the same way.

Re: What does the target market think?

[(Anonymous)]

I read Diana Wynne Jones said children were smarter so you didn't have to explain so much ...not sure that means that they don;'t notice the plot holes. Though I certainly never did!

I did read Thuggery first at the right age, and it's hard to remember exactly, but I think I enjoyed it a lot. I didn't reread it as much as some, but I think that's because of the one day/one basic plot premise, which makes it quite an intense read - not so many plots and changes of mood. Also - no Nicola. On the other hand what I do remember finding hardest when young was the way Nicola is snubbed and humiliated in parts of Autumn Term and End of Term - those were the bits/books I avoided rereading.

I think Lawrie's Colebridge adventure is actually very interesting to a teenage girl, and I think the meaning of life/existence of God/what is the point of it all Jukie/Patrick conversations actually do tap into themes interesting to teenagers. And the relationship between Jukie and Patrick - whatever you do or don't pick up about it (or read into it) the emotionally charged nature of it is very appealing to a teenage reader (this teenage reader).

I wonder what reviewers thought of it? I think both PEter's Room and FAlconer's Lure were nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and I'd have thought Thuggery would be an ideal candidate: ambitious, tackling big social contrasts and themes, inventive language, boy leads (not that that should matter but I think it's harder for girl-led books) plus all the other stuff Forest is always good at. But - amazingly - 1966 (which I guess would be the relevant year) no prize was awarded at all because no book considered suitable!

[lizzzar.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of an erotic link between Patrick and Jukie, but I guess it could make a bizarre sort of sense. I will have to read the book again. Introducing drugs and at least implied sexual threat in the Marlow books must have been quite a jump for AF, but something that she obviously wanted to do, and may have been the ultimate reason for the updating. I think the final scenes are also meant quite seriously in their discussion of theology.

'if it wasn't terribly wearing, to have to talk in that madly special way.'

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

The other thing I love about this quote from Patrick's interior monologue is that it's couched in language that is every bit as "madly special" as that of the Thuggery -- or at least very nearly so. AF has been sustaining(/inventing?) a special "Young Persons of a Certain Class" dialect all along; the Thuggery just happens to speak a different one. If one adds in Mummerzet, she is positively Tolkienesque in the "proliferation of made-up languages" department.

Re: 'if it wasn't terribly wearing, to have to talk in that madly special way.'

[sprog-63.livejournal.com]

And there's the Kinsgcote vocabulary with words and phrases taking hold "utter scrudge" (which IIRC covered leaky biros to expulsion) or Miss Cromwell's "I am not my colleague's keeper" which we are told becomes a catchphrase (though I don't think we hear a girl using it); dialect perhaps, rather than a whole language, but perhaps it's another one to add to the list?

TTA - A cinematic book?

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

Very late last thoughts!

The radio tells us that his death happens at the same time as Lawrie is eating her pork pie with the Inspector's penknife and wiping the blade on her jeans. Grim, Miss Forest, grim. I might do a chart for all the songs in Thuggery and their accompanying actions.

I'd never noticed how the songs work to connect the scenes until it'd been pointed out in this read-through. The chart would be very interesting.

It's also prompted me to think that this is a very cinematic book. (Caveat: I am not any kind of film-maker, nor have I studied film in anyway.) I could see the songs being used in wide, opening shots, seemingly background music until you zoom in on the characters and realise that the music is what the characters are experiencing themselves. And the way that Lawrie eating the pork pie and Kinky being killed could be shown in some kind of cinematic overlay (?) with the music linking them both could enhance the grimness of these scenes.

There's also the opening bits with Lawrie's imagining the headlines/articles if they drowned, which I can see as the film trope of the newspaper whirling into focus (there's probably a proper technical term for this). The slow descent encased by the lock and the gloom of the lock walls, for Peter, Patrick and Lawrie in the canoe, and the Thuggery chasing Peter, with their dank, slimy and prison-like quality enhancing the themes of the book. The water in the canoe that Lawrie fails to bail soon enough could reflect Lawrie's changing images of herself, always distorted and unreal, the stand-off with the guns, both serious and ridiculous and Jukie's bike, looking immaculate but suddenly and shockingly falling apart (no matter how unlikely as discussed above) could be equally a tragi-comic moment, much like Peter being rescued by the steam-powered road-mender, which reminds of the end scene of the The Ice Princess, which I suspect might be the only film in existence where the cavalry ride to rescue on a Zamboni machine. And there's the nightmare and dream qualities of Lawrie's encounter and escape from Rigid, and Patrick and Lawrie's drive into the night. I wonder if the latter would work with some of the dream-like and sinister qualities of the way Picnic at Hanging Rock was filmed. And maybe even the slang that the Thuggery uses would be more understandable in film when you'd have tone of voice and body language to convey its meaning, and the even sharper contrast with Marlow and Merrick voices and body language.

The film of Brighton Rock was released in 1947 and I don't know whether Forest would have seen it or similar films, or even have had it in mind when writing this book, but one can be affected by cultural osmosis even things one hasn't seen or read.

It's not that the other books don't have stunnning visual moments (Jon's last flight while Patrick and Nicola hawk) but there do seem to be a lot of them in this book that belong to the zeitgeist of the film world.

Re: TTA - A cinematic book?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I think I assumed it was a Top 40 sort of station and the same songs came on quite frequently.