trennels | Would there be as much discussion / fanfic if AF had stopped at Cricket Term?

Since the readthrough I have been thinking about the series as a whole, because it's the first time I have read all the books in order from beginning to end. It seems to me that the series could have stopped at Cricket Term and existed as a perfectly complete, 'finished' series. It comes to a natural close at that point:-
The older characters - Lois, Jan, even Val, have all left the school. Marie has died. Lawrie is acknowledged as a special actress and her future is secure with the Prosser. Nicola is accepted as a good sportswoman, player and coach, and will no doubt soon join the Prospects and one day end up Games Captain. Rowan is running the farm, Karen is married with children (after a fashion!), Ginty and Patrick are established as a couple - in actuality if not spelt out in words. So, no loose ends, no dangling threads, no unanswered questions.
But then Attic Term and RAH stir everything up. A crack appears between Ginty and Patrick, allowing Nicola to become the third point in the love-triangle. Esther runs off leaving everything up in the air between her and Nicola. A gulf seems to be developing between firstly Ginty and the family, and Ann and the family. Catholicism moves centre-stage and Nicola is interested in it. Now there seems to be all sorts of potential stories developing, and lots of unanswered questions.
So, I wonder: how many people first tried reading or writing fanfic, because after AF's death they were never going to know what happened between Nicola and Esther when they met again? Or wanted to know if anything would develop romantically between Patrick and Nicola? Have the loose ends left us all desperate for more in a way that perhaps we wouldn't have felt if the series had closed off neatly after Cricket Term?

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Hmm. I'm not a big reader or writer of fanfic (I keep my distance partly because I'm afraid I'll be Sucked In and never break free) so maybe I'm not the right person to answer this. But I do think CT is a very satisfactory conclusion to most of the strands of the series, and don't read AT or RAH much, so maybe you're right and that's why I'm not actually "desperate for more"?

Patrick/Nicola/Ginty is the one strand that is somewhat unresolved by CT I think, but then I prefer the way that it is left at the end of that book to the way it develops later, in RAH in particular.

An interesting point of view on the series, but AF herself appears to have not believed that Cricket Term was where it should end, as she did go on for two more books, and by most accounts, at least started another. I think in some ways it is true it is not resolved though, and maybe that is partly why some of the fan fic is written. But sadly with AF no longer with us, there will never be a definite ending. But it does leave people free to imagine Patrick with Ginty, Patrick with Nicola, possibly Patrick deciding more than friendship with Marlow girls is not a good idea, or whatever they want. Lizzzar

I think if it had stopped at Cricket Term, Forest would be remembered for a minor school trilogy and otherwise forgotten.
It was Attic Term that reeled me in to the wider issues and probably introduced me to the concept of subtext (who's Rosina? Oh, there's more books? [reads] WTF???). It's still my favourite and I have a soft spot for Patrick.

I do need to re-read RAH and Traitor, not least because the recent AO3 offering inspired me and I realized 8000 words later that it's not Foley who's killed by Peter, which means a significant rewrite...

Just to be clear - I wasn't suggesting that AF should have stopped at CT. I was simply thinking that it's the last two books that leave all the unresolved themes and dangling threads. Perhaps it's the very unfinished nature of the series that keeps the characters so alive for us?

Yes, I agree with a lot of this - I wish she had finished, as I like the resolutions you get in most books/series. But I suppose you could argue that resolutions in books are an artificial way of getting some kind of made up closure, although they are also something most readers like, and not knowing for sure what will happen to AF's characters makes them seem a little more like real people.
Lizzzar

Have you read Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle? Its narrator Cassandra talks about her dislike for what she calls "brick-wall happy endings--I mean, endings where you never think about the characters after the book is finished" (quoting from memory so probably inaccurate, sorry), very much what you're saying. I think she agrees with you and Jackmerlin that closure can end up making a book less interesting for the reader, depending.
For the record, I like happy endings myself, and tend to reassure myself in non-closed situations by thinking "Well, I'm sure Nicola and Esther made it up the next term, or Esther found someone else to be friends with," "Well, I'm sure Cassandra eventually ended up happily married to [redacted]" (in the book above) and so on. But having it not clearly stated by the author does strengthen the sensation of "these things happen because they would happen," not "because the author forced them to do so".
Not very coherent today, sorry...

I agree with not wanting brick wall happy endings. I now prefer endings where the future is hinted at rather than spelt out, although perhaps as a child I preferred endings a bit tidier. It certainly niggled at me not knowing what would happen to Esther; on the one hand, Nicola is sensible and would probably have casually resumed friendship without a fuss, but on the other hand, suppose Esther carried on avoiding her out of an assumption that Nicola wouldn't want to be friends and ended up miserably distant from her.
I really don't like the way things are going with Nicola and Patrick at the end of RAH either!
I wasn't saying that I would prefer not to have Attic Term, although I could probably do without RAH. But I was more curious about the published continuation novel than I would have been if it wasn't for the loose ends. And it fascinates me just how many different takes on the characters' futures can be found in fanfic. The characters have gone on living for me in a way that other characters from favourite books haven't quite.
Perhaps the amount we 'need to know what happens next' depends on how much we identify with the characters ourselves, so what we really want to know is whether things will turn out alright in our own lives. The teenage me really strongly identified with Esther.
I don't know if anyone has read 'The Fault In Our Stars'? The heroine in that is obsessed with a book about a girl suffering (like her) from terminal cancer which suddenly stops without a proper ending, as if the character had died. But it turns out that she is obsessed with what happens next, not so much about the girl because she accepts that she would have died, but with the girl's parents. She is worried that her own parents might break up after she dies. After a conversation with them in which she finds out that her mother is training to be a counsellor and they reassure her that they are not going to break up, she is much happier about the unfinished book.

Edited 2015-09-22 19:53 (UTC)

I've read TFioS! I make it a point to read any new major illness-related YA books for personal reasons (off-topic, but have you read Jacqueline Wilson's recent updating of What Katy Did, by any chance?). TFioS is a really fascinating text to bring into this discussion on endings/resolutions.

I was curious about Jacqueline Wilson's Katy, but haven't read it yet. My reading of current childrens/YA fiction tends to follow what my daughter is reading and she has moved on from JW to the likes of John Green. (I slightly felt JW was losing her touch the last couple of books I read, just to go even more off-topic!)
I thought TFIOS shared something with AF's books actually, although being a very different genre and style. It wasn't afraid of being 'too clever' for it's audience. Like AF, John Green seems to assume that teenagers like to engage with unfamiliar ideas and don't mind going to look up a reference that they don't immediately 'get'.

I don't really know about other people, but I find that the loose ends aren't really why I want to discuss the books. It's more like I want to discuss who the characters are and why they acted the way they did, and why certain parts of the books have this overwhelming emotional power, and so forth. To me, the last books actually leave less room for discussion, because I find that things are more black and white in them than in the earlier books. RAH especially - the nuances of character just aren't there. And even Attic Term seems much more certain of who is good and who is bad than the earlier books do. I'd rather discuss Ginty's character in MaTT through Peter's Room -- in Attic Term, Forest almost seems to be giving up on her. --Katy

I like your point about AF giving up on Ginty. The fact that she entirely disappears in RAH suggests that she had indeed given up on her! Although the next book was supposed to be about Ginty running away, she never wrote it.
I also wonder if she could be said to be 'giving up' on Esther in a sense; Esther's lack of ability to overcome her fear has damned her to be cast out of Nicola's friendship group. Would Esther have featured much in a future story or might she just have drifted off to be one of the 'rabbits'?

Would there be as much discussion / fanfic if AF had stopped at Cricket Term?

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