catholic question?

[antfan.livejournal.com]

So good to find this site, full of other people who share a passions for the Marlows    Fascinating that people have such very different responses. Never occurred to me that you could love the books but not Nicola, or that anyone actually liked Patrick Merrick….   So I’d like to ask opinions about something I find puzzling. All the obits/biogs say Antonia Forest was such a strong catholic, and yet why (to my mind) are her noncatholic/nonreligious characters so much more appealing? And her catholic characters so strongly unappealing. Mme Orly is a nightmare –fun to read about, but a nightmare – and then there’s Patrick… I suppose he is the major example. To me he always seems both arrogant and a prig, and his religious certainties always seemed a big part of this. He is just way too certain of himself and his beliefs.   Some examples: In conversation with Rowan, he states that of course he never has any difficulties at all in believing in God (End of Term). Nicola, following a conversation with him, reflects that she hopes her ancestors were genuine believers in Protestantism, as anything else would seem so inferior to the Merricks, with their acceptance of possible martyrdom. (interesting: she seems to detect in his religion a kind of dynastic superiority rather than a personal spirituality!) In the same conversation Patrick makes clear that he sees the whole of English history through a Catholic prism – completely writing off the Tudors and the Restoration, and stating that of course his family supported Charles not ‘Orrible Oliver during the Civil War. (And more fool them, as Oliver Cromwell’s regime was notable for its toleration towards Catholics – far more so than after the Restoration.) Patrick’s certainties (religious, social, intellectual) are not even much shaken up by his long talk with Jukie (Thuggery Affair) although he does at least find Jukie’s DIY theology baffling, rather than amusing (as we are told would usually be the case). Is such cast-iron certainty/superiority really an attractive feature in someone who is only fifteen/sixteen? Wouldn’t you want to shoot him for such smugness!   Most tellingly, I can’t think of any notable example of kindness or generosity by Patrick, religiously inspired or not. Quite the opposite, in the whole betrayal of Nicola for Ginty -which makes it all the more annoying she is just delighted to get him back!)   (Oops – I suppose Patrick’s willingness to help Jukie – at some personal risk – is an example here. However, Jukie dies and the incident seems to have no lasting effect upon Patrick at all.)   ALSO I can’t help noticing that AF herself chooses for her main characters people who are both open-minded and reflective and generally of no strong religious conviction at all. (Does this mean she likes them best?  Or she thinks they are more appealing to readers?  )In End of Term, Nicola is both thoughtful and intrigued by the different religious beliefs she encounters, almost sociologically observant, but very far from expressing any particular belief herself. This makes Nicola a lot more appealing in my eyes…she is also generally a kinder person than Patrick, and far more reflective about herself and her own behaviour. For that matter, Lawrie (who states that she thought Christianity was some sort of mythology, like the Olympians, and even tries to make bargains with God) is a lot more appealing than Ann (full of conventional religious piety).     Then there’s Nicholas and Will (Player’s Boy/Rebels). AF’s Will is surely one of her most appealing characters: wise, ironic, shrewd, detached…and he has no interest in supporting the Old Religion. Furthermore, he believes Nicholas is right to betray the Essex plotters regardless of the fact that some of them are hoping to restore the Catholic faith. (He and Nicholas’s scruples and regrets about this are to do with personal loyalties/friendships, not religion.)   So what’s going on here? Am I misreading the books totally? So many things I like about AF’s writing – her subversiveness (especially in the school setting), her openness to paradox and alternative points of view, and her choice of open-minded, searching, pragmatic characters for her main narrative viewpoints – seem at odds with what I read on the AF web-sites – that AF was a strong catholic herself.   (And monarchist for that matter.) Of course, I have to say it is decades since I read Attic Term – would that make things clearer? Do I simply not understand what AF was trying to do? Comments please! Tags: nicola, patrick, religion

Comments

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Patrick is sixteen, just the age where if he's going to be smugly superior, he will be. I bet that if we were to meet him at 18, and certainly at 21, he would be completely different! Madame Orly would probably be dreadful whatever her denomination - she just isn't comfortable around young people, and it shows!

I find Nicola's and Lawrie's total ignorance of the basics of Christianity really rather surprising, considering that they go to boarding-school, where church attendance and daily prayers are undoubtedly compulsory! But there again, Nicola's surprise at discovering that there are real believers today, people for whom God is as real as bread and butter, and for whom worship is a normal part of daily life, may be due to her age.

As for Ann, she wouldn't be nearly so irritating if she wasn't quite so in-your-face about things. She may or may not be a believer, but she gets things just wrong - she has to do everything for everybody, can't ever let anybody else be helpful. Patrick's faith, I suspect, is a lot more real and grounded than Ann's is! He talks about it when asked, but basically gets on with the job of living - Ann has to try to prove she's "holy" in every interaction with her sisters.

It's interesting that the glimpses we get of her in Attic Term show that she's actually a successful prefect, managing to work very well with the juniors who are put in her charge. Yet in Run Away Home she is as irritating as ever - and devastated when left out of the family plans to rescue Edward, since she can't be trusted not to hand him over to the authorities.

And I don't

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

When Nicola gets round to showing Patrick the details from the farm log about the martyred Merrick ancestor, he says something along the lines of how odd it is, that every time he's decided the whole thing (ie his faith) is nonsense, something like this always comes along to make him reconsider. So I think it's clear that in those later books - when he is, presumably, around 17 - he is, as one would expect, experiencing a very normal stage of doubt and questioning, whereas in the earlier books (also, in a pscyhologically rather convincing manner) he is as deadly certain and priggish as early adolescents generally are about their beliefs (whether religious or otherwise). As for Nicola, it is made quite clear I think when she goes to Mass that she finds it a deeply religious experience, one which she would rather not repeat precisely because she found it overwhelming. So I think the religious/non religious lines are a bit more blurred than you suggest here as the children grow up.

Patrick is often sensitive and resourceful in his dealings with others. It is true that he is not often kind in a particularly creative or thoughtful way but in my experience that is very typical indeed of intelligent only children, and perhaps especially of boys. There is a kind of everyday thoughtfulness (about bathwater, television sharing and so on) which is an essential part of being one of a large family, and is quite alien to a well-off only child.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

I think that the reason that I like Patrick is that I don't take him very seriously all the time.
I liked the discussion about which cathedrals "you can keep" or "we'll have back". That struck me as sardonic humour rather than priggishness.
As for Jukie's death, I need to look this up, but doesn't he consult a priest for advice about Jukie's state - or at least plan to do so? I need to look that up, but it didn't strike me that the death left him untouched - rather the reverse.
As for Ann, I like the description of her as "gay and recollected" and "swinginf her hat" after going to Early Communion.
And I think that plot line was sound about her view of the escapade to France. Giles is risking his youmger brother's career as well as his own - and we got a very sympathetic picture of the mother and her predicament after the play.

[nzraya.livejournal.com]

I think AF's characters represent a wide spectrum of relationships to religion, as someone said above, and that that's partly because she is such a *realistic* writer -- if not in all things, certainly in her portrayal of peopleand relationships -- and partly because she was probably actively interested in exploring/modelling/representing different ways of relating to the questions that preoccupied her, and the characters may indeed reflect not only what she encountered in others but also the different stages of thinking about religion that she herself sent through, at different times, or even just as the mood took her.

I also have to say that I LOVE Patrick -- for all his flaws, he's near the top of the list of fictional boys I'd totally say yes to if they asked me -- so, you know ;). What I mean is -- I think that because AF's characters are so fully drawn, different readers actually have different favorites, much as they would gravitate to different people if they met everyone from the Marlowverse in real life. I'm a fairly biddable/obedient reader on the whole, so I tend to identify my own point of view pretty closely with Nicola's (even though if I were to be honest, I'm probably more like one of her less admirable, more self-centred sisters, Ginty or Lawrie....), and I tend to like whom she likes: Patrick, Giles, Rowan, Miranda. I think it's totally plausible, though, to dislike that set of characters (as I know many AF readers do) and prefer the more "difficult" ones: Lawrie, Tim, Ginty, Esther. Or to have a sneaking regard for Ann, or (at the other end of the spectrum) Lois -- especially if rebelling actively against the Nicola-centric/Marlow-centric perspective in which both Ann's conscientiousness and Lois's anti-Marlow sentiments are suspect.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Just to add that I don't think it's that unreasonable for Nicola, and especially Lawrie, to be so ignorant of the basics of Christianity. It's perfectly possible to go through seven years of C of E boarding school without listening to a single word spoken in an assembly or church service and not understanding the words you do hear and not caring enough to ask anyone to explain it to you.

I remember once, about 10 years ago, meeting a very confused girl who was indeed at an English boarding school who thought Jesus died twice and rose twice, because people kept talking about him 'rising again.' So Lawrie "obviously they were all Christians" doesn't seem so unlikely to me.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Patrick and Nicola's discussions about religion read wonderfully and hilariously to me: they're almost never entirely serious, I think, or seriousness gets deflected at crucial points, and yet they are about things that both hold deeply and dear. I grew up in a not very religious, but "mixed" household; my mother is a Catholic (not anciently, like the Merricks, but working-class late-nineteenth-century converts who were Very Impresseed by Cardinal Manning. How I envied him his "yes, penal times and all" throwaway lines!) and my father CofE. Which cathedrals "we'll let you keep" were the sort of jokey discussions I grew up with. I was so delighted to find them, at the age of 9 or 10, in fiction, and I still adore them. Patrick is a prig, of course, but I think his priggishness is ably characterised as temporary and adolescent: it results from deep conviction, not superfical piety. As for his dealings with Ginty and Nicola, why on earth should a character who is meant to be likeable not do unlikeable things? Moreover, I think Patrick provides an extremely useful character for AF to think through her own religious conviction and its possible conflicts with her equally strong attraction to subversives and madcaps. The way in which monarchism tangles up with Catholicism in England is odder than you suggest - it usually means Jacobite sympathies, which are subversive in the most basic sense (though not progressive...)