Readthrough: Ready Made Family: Chapters 11-13

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

The atmosphere of tension is economically evoked in the first paragraph, and of course it makes perfect sense that Chas, more irrepressible than his sisters anyway, and still presumably full to the gills with adrenalin, should trigger his father's explosion.

Goodness me, do they have Calculated Insolence lessons at whatever AU version of Dartmouth Peter attends? It strikes me that his bearing is, as Nicola observed a couple of chapters back, actually becoming quite officerly, insofar as he meets with a practised and stinging contempt Edwin's attempts to exert unearned authority over him. ' "Not remarkably. Just that they were easy things for us to give him" ' is quite a savage comment on Edwin's propensity not to allow his children to have fun in their own way, 'carefully' articulated though it is.

Rose's 'petrified' look is a red flag, of course, and indicates, I think, that it is not just grief and worry that have provoked Edwin's outburst here, though they doubtless play a part.

Mrs Marlow and Edwin have their own wrangle over the issue of sending Chas to bed without breakfast: human rights issues aside, I'm with Pam on this one—Edwin doesn't get to expect her to be in loco parentis for weeks and then defer to his child-rearing methods once a disciplinary matter arises. Edwin really is reaping the rewards of his neglect of his children, who all in their different, and very characteristic ways, side with the Marlows against him.

I simply adore Chas 'defending the train' for having failed to kill him; his emergence here as an autonomous person responsible for his own behaviour is very interesting, I think. Edwin seems slightly illogically determined to think the worst: accusing Chas both of wilful participation in the excursion and of sheltering behind an excuse he hasn't made. Interestingly, it is Karen who tries to make the excuse that 'Peter took him…', and who also points out that Chas isn't letting Peter take the blame. No-one seems quite prepared for Chas's robust acceptance of responsibility, and like the bully that he no doubt is, for all we see him in more sympathetic light later, Edwin turns to the easier target of Rose, with a notably unjust accusation. His humiliation of Karen is also fairly vile.

Edwin's violence seems to issue from guilt—he knows he has presumed upon the Marlows not just for accommodation but childcare—and embarrassment at his loss of authority. These are related; he would not have lost authority to the extent he has had he not neglected his children. Peter's riposte underlines the extent to which Edwin has failed to be a paterfamilias: in a rather officer-class way, he tells Edwin he's hen-pecked. This assault on Edwin's masculinity is presumably what finally provokes the attack with the riding-crop. The whole episode is interestingly about masculinity, I think: partially under Peter's influence, Chas leaves the ambit of the nursery and becomes distinctly a schoolboy, with the qualities of defiance, quixotic honour and honesty stereotypically associated with such characters, at least in literature; in the absence of Capt. Marlow and Giles, Peter is rather callowly assuming the mantle of male head-of-household; Edwin, by moving in with the Marlows, has relinquished his patriarchal authority, and confirms that relinquishing with violence. It works so well because of Peter's liminality: old enough to formulate an insult to masculine honour in adult terms and have the confidence to deliver it, but at the same time still a child who is smaller* and weaker than Edwin.
*one assumes Nicola exaggerates when she says he only reaches Karen's elbow, but Peter doesn't seem to have his growth spurt until Run Away Home.

Ann's fear for Fob is a really chilling moment, I think.

The sentence about the 'parallel emotions' of the families about Peter and Edwin's behaviour, is dead stylish, though one feels obliged to point out that only one of the two offered violence, and it wasn't the fifteen-year-old boy (with, it must be owned, a bit of a grime sheet in re bullying himself).

Because Miss Forest is pitiless, she doesn't really give us any time to recover before the next bombshell. Rowan's look at Karen 'almost as if she didn't know her' is marvellous—because, of course, she doesn't: Karen's ruthlessness is a genuine surprise. Karen seems also to have concealed her actions from Edwin, or represented them to him in a softer light.

The children's assumption that they will stay at Trennels is painful, I think—imagine how Edwin must feel, hearing that. But no sympathy: he's rather brought this on himself by abandoning his children. Rose's ' "But we don't know [Karen]" ' is devastating, but undeniable: Karen's mother and siblings have made much more effort with the children than she has. How do people read her apparent bafflement in the face of this? Can she be so very dense in emotional terms? Or is this, like her stone mask when Edwin rebukes her for schoolgirlishness, merely a state of shock?

Nicola and Peter's conversation about the riding crop incident is wonderful, as well: that very Marlovian reaction of embarrassment on someone else's behalf. Peter has to remain insouciant ('So tactless of him. A black eye would be much easier') or forego his status as a man able to insult on a man's terms. I sense there's class-based commentary at work here too: Edwin, a social step beneath the Marlows, has offered the sort of violence (a horsewhipping) typically associated with social superiority to one's victim, which makes him more Not Our Sort Dear than ever.

One might have thought that Chas's revelation that Rose had a plan in place for running away, and Fob's that she had some sort of means to finance it might be the cue to call the cops, even if they know she hasn't made her escape by train or bus. But apparently not. Edwin it seems, has so comprehensively ignored his children that the possibility of Oxford as her destination hasn't occurred to him.

The sketch of Mrs Barnes and Sammy as the socially-sanctioned targets of Westbridge's disapproval is nicely-observed, I think, as well as chiming with the book's theme of neglect and carelessness.

I'm not sure that Nicola is at her most logical in deciding to go to Oxford alone, but Forest I think creates the conditions for character-based suspension of disbelief if not entire plausibility. It's a nice touch that the walk along the embankment and the 'saving' of the train, which starts the row that leads to the revelation that scares Rose away, also creates the conditions for Nicola's trip to Oxford, in that the stationmaster feels sufficiently warm towards her to lend her fifteen shillings.




I am from the environs of (and indeed a graduate of) The Other Place, so I'm quite immune to the romance of Oxford. But feel free to wax pornographic lyrical below over Ridley and Latimer and melting down plate for the King (and other Wrong but Wromantic actions) and May morning and the Radcliffe Camera and Wimsey of Balliol and street not being a said word and the home of lost causes and St Mary the Virgin and the leopards of Oriel and all the rest of it. It's also recognisably the Oxford of the 1960s, though, green-lipsticked and bescarfed undergraduates and all.

However I am charmed despite myself by Nicola being so fascinated by Oxford that she has periodically to recall herself to her mission, and her reluctance to ring home. I'm touched by her wanting to have someone to share her discoveries with: rejecting Lawrie and Ginty, and realising painfully that Patrick isn't available to her any more. Her solution of a telegram is wonderfully illustrative of her qualms about whether she's done the right thing, and at the same time sets the mood of a dangerous lull before peril.

Does anyone recognise 'Little Nan is lost and I have gone to find her?'
It's nice that we venture out of 'Oxford proper' a bit onto the Cowley Road, I think: one of the things I like about the wretched place is that it is a real city, not just a village with a stonking great medieval university plonked in the middle of it, controlling everything, like some Other Places I could mention. And Nicola's visit to the Wrong Dodds nicely illustrates her combination of resourcefulness and naïveté. Her conversation with the undergraduate on the bridge is replete with dramatic irony.

(Lawrie and Nicola going to see Lawrence Olivier as Othello: this has been your regularly scheduled fic prompt…might be just me, that one… Mrs Marlow's comment is interesting.)

I enjoy Nicola's frantic re-ordering of her thoughts on the very fortuitous coincidence (disbelief-suspension mechanism duly reinforced) of running across Sammy and his taxi, and the little reference back to Thuggery with her reluctance to go to the police because of Lawrie's treatment by them.

Nicola gets quite an education in Research Methods during the course of this afternoon, doesn't she?

A little further ballast to the suspension of disbelief mechanism is necessary for the next coincidence: but, belief duly suspended.

On a careful re-read, I find Uncle Gerry a rather subtler portrait than I had previously imagined him. I'm interested in his implied social class: a pork-pie hat, highly polished shoes and a camel coat indicate to me the borders between the working and lower-middle-class, and not the sort of person Nicola would consider an 'obvious uncle' at all. (Not that Nicola has extensive experience of uncles, one reflects: though the winsome cousin of Autumn Term suggests that there is at least one on Geoff's side of the family.) I wonder if Forest is playing with the word 'avuncular' here, for that--for a sinister value of the word--Uncle Gerry is, with his 'soppy, blurry' face and plausible manner. Nicola's suspicions, alternating with her firm suppression of them as too lurid, are particularly neatly pulled off, I think; the moment at which she suspects Edwin, only pulled back by the memory of Mrs Clavering's mourning clothes, suggests how convincing Uncle Gerry can be. The exchange about the tattoo is a vivid reminder of how mores surrounding tattooing have changed, if nothing else...

Her reflection that she can't appeal for help to the other café patrons Rose and Uncle Gerry look 'from the point of view of clothes, [...] as if they belonged together' takes us back to Lawrie in Thuggery, and the importance of appearance: but now Nicola's trust in the police seems to be restored.

I enjoy the description of Nicola's knife as a kind of mascot, and then as Boudicca's chariot-wheel: it really has a featured cameo role here, doesn't it? Nicola's suspicions continue to alternate with her dismissal of them: her reflection 'sudden and hurtful as a bee-sting' of the cruelty of pretending to Rose that her mother was still alive, is particularly acute. It occurs to me as it doesn't seem to to Nicola that the husband of Edwin's sister (of whom we're told nothing more, I think than that 'he doesn't get on') or of another unmentioned Clavering sister would not be named Dodd or Clavering and might still be a genuine uncle, but the point, I suppose, is to get to his suspicious refusal to offer Nicola a surname.

The next little episode is a masterly mixture of distinct physical threat--Uncle Gerry picking up Rose, Nicola somewhat fortuituously injuring him with the knife, him kicking her--and the phantasmagorical: Walter de la Mare's 'The Traveller', Priestley and (fascinatingly) An Adventure. Nicola's reference to the latter is in flash-forward (though whether she knew the text at the time is not made entirely clear). The exact relevance of the Moberly-Jourdain incident to all of this I will leave to the comments, but wow. Just wow.

The scene with the estate agent and the prospective buyers (surely a bisexual menage à quatre? This has been, &c.) is deliciously balanced between comedy and the uncanny: I'm particularly fond of the 'bearded peasant' and his stodgy camp. Here, though, Nicola's confused (and perfectly accurate) sentence has the power genuinely to terrify.

In true thriller style, Uncle Gerry hasn't quite disappeared. Nicola's reflection that she hadn't felt truly petrified before strikes me as faintly unlikely, especially if we imagine her to be continuous with the Nicola of Traitor, but perhaps it is a different kind of fear, as Foley was different kind of plausible to Uncle gerry?

A final coincidence, as the taxi that Nicola intercepts turns out to contain...but a nice link back to the events of the morning...

Nicola's pas devant les enfants is a sharply observed moment of dark social comedy, but I do hope that this incident doesn't become utterly unmentionable, for the sake of Rose's future safety... Edwin's mention of the police officer saying that Uncle Gerry was wanted for 'something which happened up north last month' suggests an allusion to the Moors Murders.

Edwin and Nicola's unlikely detente over various cultural matters is charming, though I'm not sure why Edwin being 'no churchgoer' should preclude him having an interest in Edmund Campion, who is fascinating on his own account. He should surely be able to explain to Nicola that in the 16th century religious affiliations were often unstable.

Edwin's moment of vulnerability, when he admits his grief to Rose, does something to rehabilitate him, and the relative happiness of the Dodd household in subsequent books perhaps suggests that he follows through on this by being a bit more open and less authoritarian: this being Forest, though, it's not a Damascene conversion.

The many flash-forwards to Nicola's future life suggest the extent to which this book is concerned with maturation. I am very touched by the tactful elegance of the sunt lacrimae rerum (poor Miranda, asked by Cartwright to explicate the untranslatable!) paragraph: Forest catches very well that Virgilian mood of piercing sentiment and muted hope.

It's a neat touch that Nicola uses one of Mr Tranter's phrases to dismiss Sammy Barnes. What do we make of Karen here?--'rock-bottomish'--as Nicola puts it--at the child she had not really bothered to make the acquaintance of having such a close shave.

I always enjoy scenes of people finding common interest over cultural artefacts, and the Walter Mitty and Peter Wimsey references here are just the thing to lighten the mood. (I'm told Karen's preference for Gervase Fen reflects poorly on her: do you think Forest meant it to?) And Nicola's telling Edwin about the log opens a cautious avenue for a friendship.





There's lots of matter in this two-page chapter: explaining to Fob about school terms; Edwin's friendliness over Peter's Mummerzet and Peter's inner recoil from it; Rose's continued misery (oh, poor Rose!); Karen being 'prefectish' with the infant Dodds, but at least starting to get to know them; the Marlows meaning 'good luck' when they said 'so long'; the relief of not having to consider 'Edwin-their-guest'; and Nicola and Ginty's minute but perfectly pointed exchange over Persuasion.



I'm sorry that I've posted so late this week (unexpected domestic happening). It strikes me that this is a good place to take a break, resuming with The Cricket Term in the New Year. (I notice that there are four Forest-related fics in the Yuletide collection, but there might still be some writers pursued by Yuletide bears, so it seems only fair to let them exit. Are the bears coughing, one wonders?)

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the guest posters: legionseagle, for leading the discussion on Peter's Room, highfantastical and sprog_63 for contributing posts on Falconer's Lure, and jackmerlin, for a post on Ready Made Family. Also to the mods coughingbear, ankaret and thewhiteowl, for model modliness, and to all the contributors to discussion. And to those who have been moved to fic! I've had a lot of fun so far, made some new acquaintances and learnt an enormous amount: I'm overwhelmed by the sustainedly enthusiastic and informed response. I'm looking forward to more in the new year. For now, though, sincere thanks again to you all, and wæs þu hæl.

Comments

Re: Family territory.

[antfan.livejournal.com]

To be Doylian about it – one thing that has come out strongly for me reading the books one after another so close together, are some of Forest’s strategies as a writer that I just hadn’t noticed before. One of these is that I think she makes a fairly arbitrary decision at the start of each book as to which characters she wants to focus on. Then she excludes many of the rest in more – or less – plausible ways. Nicola and Ginty heading off to London and Paris seemed completely in character in Thuggery, and I never thought of it as a device. But Lawrie spending the whole of RMF studying Ariel – when a few weeks before she had been unable to contemplate spending a mere weekend without companions – seems unlikely, even for such a fanatical actor. (And when she did consider mooching in Thuggery, Mrs Marlow wouldn’t have it, even for one day.)

So with Ann – Forest obviously isn’t that interested in her, so she gets rid of her with housework and Guide stuff. (And no mention of her ever having any friends, either, which also seems implausible.) Admittedly, it does seem very plausible that the younger Dodds would prefer to spend time with Nicola and Peter, who are much more fun, and who are enjoying entertaining the young Dodds more than they ever expected.

And Ginty too - I can’t think it’s very likely that Patrick and Ginty would have been allowed to spend every single moment together, unsupervised. I’d have thought that would ring alarm bells with both sets of parents, and that the Dodd children would have been a good excuse for Mrs M weaning her away. But AF has obviously decided that she only wants Patrick and Ginty as a minor thread, so it suits her for them to constantly hawking. (Or whatever it is they are doing.)

It’s only reading the books so close together that makes it seem incongruous I think – that Patrick and Peter, great pals in Thuggery, as someone pointed out never even meet in RMF…And if she did provide lots of elaborate explanation for what each character was up to, it would get a bit tedious for the reader.

Re: Family territory.

[occasionalhope.livejournal.com]

Though Lawrie only says she's spending the time learning Ariel to get out of helping.

I do wonder what she did during Falconers' Lure when Nicola was occupied with hawks so much of the time...

What did Lawrie do in Falconer's Lure ?

[sprog-63.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the advantage of a big family is the possibility of linking up with different sibs at different times? Lawrie went swimming with Peter at least once - perhaps she annexed him, and there were other swimming trips? They were both abandoned by Patrick and Nicola - and in TTA (only a few months later) seem to get on quite well together. Also there is indicated a good relationship between her and Karen and so she may have spent some time with her? She and Ginty have just spent half a term together at home and might (if not fed up to back teeth with each other) do things together? Can't ever see Rowan having a lot of time for her, but equally she wouldn't refuse to let her tag along if going to explore the outposts of the farm .... Of course, perhaps she spent some time wingeing/whining around her mother and that is why Mrs M nips any such behaviour so firmly in the bud in TTA as she's not having that again!

Plus of course, she was privately (and disastrously) rehearsing her recitation!

[Edited to correct italics!]

Re: What did Lawrie do in Falconer's Lure ?

[scarletlobster.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do sometimes reflect on the relationships we don't see. We learn once that Lawrie has often in the past gone to Karen for comfort, so I like to think that they have been close up until Karen's marriage. (Though any sense of loss to Lawrie is not touched on at all.) Nicola is close to Rowan and quite close to Peter, but who has Ginty been close to? You would think Anne - she is gentle and uncritical, which Ginty would find soothing; but do we ever actually see them doing anything together?

There are times when Anne seems there to make up the numbers, and occasionally say something that the others dislike; as with Margaret Dashwood in Senses and Sensibility, you can imagine dramatizing most of the books with her entire part cut.

Re: What did Lawrie do in Falconer's Lure ?

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

In End Of Term Ginty and Ann have gone to the cinema together. I also like the fleeting reference in Thuggery that Karen and Rowan go to horror films together and find them funny.

Re: Family territory.

[(Anonymous)]

I've always thought that with AF - the ones she doesn't want to focus on are just shoved off until needed - Rowan off somewhere on the form, Karen working in the library (working on what? between school and university?) Ann wherever good works are needed. People always criticise Mrs Marlow for not doing anything, but after being a stay at home mother with a smallish house and only two children and seemingly always busy I have a lot of sympathy for her. Just because what she is up to isn't specified it don't mean she hasn't got a lot to do!
Pip