the cut RAH scenes

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I just came across a copy of GGB's Celebrating Antonia Forest for the first time. I know other people have talked about the cut passages from Run Away Home before, but I have to say that what grabbed my attention was not so much poor Buster's demise as the little things.

I was slightly gobsmacked by Giles addressing Karen as 'silly bitch!', and saying it 'affectionately' - I suppose because it didn't fit my own sense of Giles' and Karen's relationship, or the kind of thing that Karen would be likely to accept from a brother she doesn't see often and can't know all that well...?  I wasn't sure either, given the complicated chronology of the books, how rude/informal/brotherly AF would have intended it to be.

The other thing that for some reason caught my attention - perhaps was something I didn't expect to see in AF - was the masked children of indeterminate gender at the parish hall cleanup before the play/pantomime/animal barney , to whom Nicola refers as 'the unisexers'. That struck me as a slightly false note from a teenage girl - it sounds like the kind of thing a much older person would come out with: 'Oh, you can't tell boys from girls any more, with the clothes they wear these days!'

There were things I very much liked finding out in the deleted scenes - like Karen admitting to having discounted Edwin's children at the start of their relationship, because she assumed they would always live with their mother, and that she was too deeply in love with him to back out by the time she realised she would be becoming a hands-on stepmother, after Edwin's ex-wife dies. But in general what struck me about the left-out scenes is that leaving them out was absolutely the right thing to do, because the novel works better without them. I'm hugely fond of Buster, but am also glad his death was removed because it removes attention from the Edward Oeschli plot and muddies Nick's responses to Giles' and Peter's departure. And the parish hall cleaning scenes seemed a bit pointless in the scheme of things, though I was amused that Patrick still felt strongly, years on, about the loss of his sixpence down a crack in the stage! And asking Miss Keith to lend the Kingscote thunder-and-lightning equipment seemed a bit nuts!

But the thing that struck me most about the cut scenes is that, compared to the subtlety and richness of AF's prose in the published books, the writing of those scenes is a comparatively flat. I only skimmed the introduction, so I don't know if they were removed at a very early stage in the writing process, but if you compare, say, the account of Nick finding Buster (and having to keep it together to call Patrick and get his body home so no one wonders why an elderly pony drops dead twelves miles from home) with Nick finding Sprog in Peter's Room, it seems quite weakly imagined by AF's standards. I found myself wondering if much of the richness of her writing came from endless re-drafting. Some of the cut scenes really read like sketches, as if she was getting down a basic outline to cut and revise later...

ETA: and the suggestions as to what was going to happen in the next Marlow book-that-never-happened sounded very odd and unlikely to me!