the Brontes and Peter's Room

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I cast an eye over Peter's Room (which I don't own, and know far less well than other AFs) lately, and found myself wondering about the sections that deal with the Brontes, before the Marlow/Merrick Gondal kicks off - the conversation in the Shippen where Ginty tells the others about the Brontes, and Gondal and Angria, and the slightly later one where Karen (all hot water bottle and Thucydides) nudges Nick and Ginty through a sort of Socratic dialogue about art vs life and the general wrongheadedness of adult addiction to fantasy games. (I suppose there weren't role-playing societies at Oxford in her day, and one can imagine her opinion of on-line RPGs...)

It's completely fascinating and the usual intellectually-sophisticated AF stuff, but I found myself wondering whether the novel actually required so much Bronte material? It's probably my own favourite part of the novel, but, after all, all the characters in PR have independent capacities for starring in their own fantasies, as shown in the novels as a whole, and the collective fantasy isn't so much of a stretch from Nick's Scott or Lawrie being a resistance fighter when her conduct mark is read out etc etc. So - in some ways the Bronte stuff reads like a compulsively readable red herring. I'd forgotten simply how much of the early part of the novel those two conversations actually take up, effectively postponing the start of the 'action'. Also, I have no memory of when I first read the novel, but I read the Brontes young, and so probably knew what AF was talking about from other sources, but there may well have been readers completely befogged by the very elliptical way in which the Brontes' story is told by various AF characters. I was talking about it to a children's book agent friend the other night and she didn't think that kind of digression would get past an editor these days.

So - how effective/necessary is the Bronte stuff to Peter's Room? If you read PR young and without any knowledge of the Brontes, were you at sea or not? Did anyone read the Brontes because of PR? And, because this occurred to me as I was reading, how does anyone imagine the Marlow/Merrick Gondal to have been carried out, exactly? We know they don't act it out by actually moving around and doing the actions, apart from the very end, because Patrick says so, but are we to imagine them taking it in turns to narrate a kind of recitative, something like the italicised narrative the reader gets? Or just speaking their own parts?

Comments

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Pressed to death, wasn't she? Honestly, I do laugh at myself. I am a veritable encyclopedia of Unpleasant Ways in which People Were Martyred. I get called upon in art museums to identify various saints by their accompanying paraphernalia. I was going in to far too much detail on Saint Laurence and his gridiron or Saint Catherine and her wheel once in the Uffizi, and turned round to discover I had a small audience of rather disgusted-looking American tourists...

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think Peter's a likeable character--not flawless, nobody in AF is flawless, but likeable. In The Marlows and the Traitor, Foley is the obvious unlikeable but sympathetic character. Or perhaps better put, the character whose flaws outweigh his good qualities, but whose good qualities are nevertheless vivid.

In the series as a whole, Lois is my favorite example of such a character and I really miss her when she leaves the school! Marie is an interesting one as well: so wet and drippy seen through Nicola's eyes and yet, as you think about her, you realize that somewhere along the line she was OK (she was form prefect before *Autumn Term*, right?) but she's weak and people start to realize it, and she becomes the form outcast in the Third as a result, and never recovers.

Marie's death and the others' reactions to it inspired one of my own plotlines as well.

Edwin Dodd is another, interesting case because like Foley he's an adult seen through children's eyes yet is allowed to be a pretty subtle and complex character. Most children's authors don't do that--it's kind of against the "rules" in children's writing. I want some of my adult characters to be complex in comparable ways, so it interests me how AF carries this off.

Ann and Ginty are, depending on your viewpoint, each rather delicately balanced between being sympathetic and unsympathetic. Most of the characters, indeed, have moments of not being entirely likeable, and ones of being sympathetic.

[forester48.livejournal.com]

Peter's unique in children's literature - or perhaps not unique, perhaps I can't think of anyone else - in that he has acute self knowledge and many fears and shows, if not exactly courage, then a resigned acceptance that whatever he's got to do he'll do with no great expectations that he will do it particularly well. He's the second son, with the ghastly Giles, to say nothing of his father, to live up to and is aware of his second rate-ness. His contrast with the competent Nicola and Rowan, neither of whom seem to have so much to wrestle with, I find poignant.

[coughingbear]

I once explained to some people why St Agatha is the patron saint of breast cancer. They didn't seem that pleased to know, for some reason. Everyone likes Uncumber, though.

[owl]

I imagine them sitting sitting around doing dialogue with more (Lawrie) or less (Nicola) gusto, along with stage directions, eg "So Rupert's going over to Crispin to say". Interspersed with arguments about what's about to happen.

[antfan.livejournal.com]

-Edwin Dodd is another, interesting case because like Foley he's an adult seen through children's eyes yet is allowed to be a pretty subtle and complex character. Most children's authors don't do that--it's kind of against the "rules" in children's writing. I want some of my adult characters to be complex in comparable ways, so it interests me how AF carries this off. -

I think part of it is that you always know there is an awful lot about these adult characters that we never find out - yet you know it is there. With Edwin, you wonder what happened with wife 1, how he met Karen and how that developed, and none of it is ever explained, and yet it doesn't seem random (well, actually, I know from earlier threads it does to some people but not to me). Mrs Marlow and Mrs Merrick are also intriguingly enigmatic in many ways - you only get little bits and pieces of how Mrs M fell out with her mother, ran off with Captain Marlow etc. By contrast, I think in many children's novels you may see the adult characters through the children's eyes BUT that is all there is, you don't get the feeling there is more to them.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

My family/neighbours had grit on rhododendron leaves as our soup equivalent cure for the Black Death. Fortunately as the game required it not to work, no-one had to eat it.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

If there were a novel actually about the adventures of Cecil Rhodes in space, I should be on my way to Waterstones right now.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Taking on a farm at sixteen isn't much to wrestle with? Fair enough.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I got an answer - a starter for ten, I believe - right in University Challenge bny knowing about peine fort et dur from Margaret Clitheroe.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I've always thought that the crying shame about Foley's traitorhood - apart from the obvious - is that his no doubt thoroughgoing and accurate officer's assessment of Peter qua Dartmouth cadet presumably got discounted.

Peter should not be in the Navy. He is a shocking judge of people (look at the fact that the family look in awed respect at Selby because he's not psychopathic even while being a Friend of Peter); he panics in a crisis; he's something of a bully (Nicola in the kitchen); he lies to people in charge of a mission about whether he's up to what's required (Falconer's Lure) he makes daring plans with no contingency even considered for failure (Run Away Home) and he lacks essential skills for the job (I've got no head for heights which is why I'm not a high-level window-cleaner. Savvy?).

None of this has anything to do with whether he's a reasonable human being; but he's undoubtedly being trained for the wrong role in life, which wouldn't be so bad if it was only himself that was going to be screwed up by that, but if he ever graduates from Dartmouth he's going to get a lot of people killed.

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

I think perhaps the book could have been written with much less Bronte, but it would have been a very different book. The Ginty-Patrick-Nicola relationship, for example, would have had to be resolved entirely differently.

I think "Peter's Room" contains two chapters which, for various reason, should be among any anthology of great children's writing - "All the Birds of the Air", and "Hounds are Running". If Peter's Room had been different, we'd probably have lost those two chapters, too.

[coughingbear]

I think in fact I knew about her from Blue Peter as much as anything I encountered at church - I remember them visiting the convent in York that's got her hand. This would have been the mid-70s, so I suppose in fact she hadn't been canonised that long and was quite a current story. And that has just explained something to me - Patrick in one book refers to the fact that 'Blessed Edmund Campion said Mass at our place once', and that used to puzzle me because I knew him as St Edmund Campion, but of course he was only canonised in 1970.

[ailbhe]

I still think the cover illustration is her, not Nick, too.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the book you are thinking of is "The Return of the Twelves" (also titled, "The Return of the Genii") by Pauline Clarke.

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder if AF used the Brontes as a shield and a justification for writing on this topic. I can't help thinking that she must have had her own private experience of intense imaginings/roleplay and this was why she wanted to write about it (she just GETS it, doesn't she?) but perhaps didn't realise just how common it is - maybe had only the Brontes as an example of others 'indulging'?