This is spot on, tootooticky (can I take it you are a Tove Jansson fan? I'm only just getting over the Finns in Eurovision!). I have long felt that had AF decided to keep the books as 1940s / 50s period pieces, there might have been many more. Updating the setting made the books more intriguing in many ways - the ever-increasing desperation and incongruity (c.f. tonight's Radio 4 documentary on Down Your Way) to make them fit in to a changing world - but it made them much more vulnerable. As Thatcherism put the final nail in the coffin of the world that her original supporters honestly believe she would restore, so it made a follow-up to Run Away Home impossible. The late 70s / early 80s, on the cusp of all things, were the last moment ever that such things were possible in the present tense (c.f. the surprisingly convincing update of the Famous Five for the 1978 Southern TV series - needless to say they never tried that in the 90s).
Follyfoot is one of my favourite TV series, but like the books (and indeed like the same author's World's End books), it's fundamentally opposed to the social order and values expressed in the works of AF (and, on a lower literary level, the Pullein-Thompsons and their ilk). The character of Dora, like Monica Dickens herself (the writer went from being a debutante to going into domestic service), was in fact born into the Marlows' world but felt that she didn't belong there, and reinvented herself as a kind of egalitarian social democrat (remember her expressing her disgust at the foxhunting set?). And that sort of reinvention only really took hold in the middle classes during the mid-late 1960s - Antonia Forest would have loathed the character and her real-life equivalents, would have regarded such people as "class traitors" on a Peel / Westwood scale.
No, by the late 60s / early 70s the setting of the Marlow books in the present day was already looking more and more incongruous. If they have to be in one era, the 1940s / 50s is the one. Removing the pop-cultural references from the later books would hardly interfere with their essence, because you would merely be removing superficialities; trying to make the early books make sense even in a 1970s setting would involve changing far more fundamental elements of the text.
Oh, and welcome by the way (although I've been lurking for some time).
no subject
Follyfoot is one of my favourite TV series, but like the books (and indeed like the same author's World's End books), it's fundamentally opposed to the social order and values expressed in the works of AF (and, on a lower literary level, the Pullein-Thompsons and their ilk). The character of Dora, like Monica Dickens herself (the writer went from being a debutante to going into domestic service), was in fact born into the Marlows' world but felt that she didn't belong there, and reinvented herself as a kind of egalitarian social democrat (remember her expressing her disgust at the foxhunting set?). And that sort of reinvention only really took hold in the middle classes during the mid-late 1960s - Antonia Forest would have loathed the character and her real-life equivalents, would have regarded such people as "class traitors" on a Peel / Westwood scale.
No, by the late 60s / early 70s the setting of the Marlow books in the present day was already looking more and more incongruous. If they have to be in one era, the 1940s / 50s is the one. Removing the pop-cultural references from the later books would hardly interfere with their essence, because you would merely be removing superficialities; trying to make the early books make sense even in a 1970s setting would involve changing far more fundamental elements of the text.
Oh, and welcome by the way (although I've been lurking for some time).