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

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

This may well be the case - but we are talking about AF

I was under the impression that you were speaking more generally, since you were talking about your own experiences, and continued to do so in this comment. However, since this community is for discussion of AF, and frankly I find her very much more interesting than tangents about puppet theatres, by all means let's return to the text.

[coughingbear]

I find Peter's Room fascinating partly because I disagree with AF about the wrongness of the Brontes' role-playing, and role-playing in general, but do love the way she uses it to explore all the children's characters, particularly Peter and Patrick. I wrote a long post about this ages ago, which I am too lazy to summarise.

I think the stuff about the Brontes is partly there so as to suggest the pitfalls AF sees in roleplaying, but it works because it is interesting anyway, and as a plausible reason for Ginty to propose the Gondal. Maybe now a group of teenagers might think of this anyway, but perhaps it was less obvious in 1961.

And I can't help believing that AF herself must have been able to be swept away by her own fantasies, to be able to write about it as she does.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Getting back to smellingbottle's original post and the point about AF's probable opinion of online RPGS (I agree that it would probably be very low), I do think it would have been fascinating to see what the Marlows and the Internet made of each other. There isn't a huge amount of difference between becoming overly identified with a character who doesn't have your problems (or, as in the case of Rupert, has problems you're a bit afraid you do have, and can explore using the character as a medium) and coming up with Walter Mitty-like fantasies on mailing lists.

I can quite see Ginty claiming to have chestnut hair and brown eyes and to be afraid of nothing to, for example, a mailing list full of fellow fans of The Constant Nymph, and then getting into a horrendous mess when she has to meet members of the list IRL...

And, of course, there are a few people out there who really shouldn't be allowed to go round pretending they are someone else because they might do themselves a mischief, just as there are paedophiles like Uncle Gerry. Fortunately, just as one can visit Oxford in the reasonable hope of not running into a fake uncle in a brown suit, one can hang about with roleplayers for years and not get shot. ;)

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I can quite see Ginty claiming to have chestnut hair and brown eyes and to be afraid of nothing

Well that would be because, in her mind, Ginty is afraid of nothing. Poor, self-deluded fool.

[coughingbear]

Though she does know she's not fearless - there's a moment when she's described as mistaking that for courage and how she thinks it's the most admirable characteristic because she doesn't have it.

[coughingbear]

Yes, Ginty would definitely be one of us! Er, not that I have ever claimed to have chestnut hair and be fearless, obviously, but she would be in fandom I am sure, and I think she might be one of the people who take a few goes to realise that it's not worth making that kind of pretence.

Patrick I do suspect may be someone who shouldn't be allowed to do much pretending he's someone else, though one has to remember he's only about 16. I wonder if his only-childness comes into it a bit (obviously I don't mean all only children are like Patrick); in a way there's an element of the online anonymity because he's getting an audience who don't know him anything like as well as they know each other, so he can develop his fantasies without much fear of anyone analysing them too personally.

Not using real guns as props would help in the not-getting-shot part, I feel! That's a case of Peter trying to be adult and competent and not in fact knowing enough to do it properly. He wants to blame it on Gondal and the devil on the roof tree, but (contrary to what I used to think), it is partly his fault in a very non-spooky way.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I've always found it incredibly funny (once I'd read TRMF and was on my way through re-reads of PR) that it's Karen (ostentatiously batting through Thucydides in the depths of the Christmas vacation of her first year) who gets to deliver the "Most incredible waste of time and talent" put-down of Gondal and Angria and, by extension, the Brontes, not just because it's so obviously a big sister who isn't as old and clever as as she thinks she is remark, and not just because it reminds me of all those people who go round whining "Why do you go round wasting your time on fanfic when you could be writing something publishable?" when they've never read any fanfic at all, let alone yours, and assume its all badly spelled pornography written by illiterate teenage virgins and featuring squid.

But after all, if any of the AF books could be treated as an Awful Warning (and I think she's far too sophisticated to be that didactic) it's TRMF:

And whatever else you do with your life, don't go and get hitched to a widower 22 years older than you, with anger management issues and three children younger than you, especially when your principle motivation appears to be Oxford not living up to your fantasy image of it, and you've got no-where to live except with a family whom you haven't consulted about the matter and who quite reasonably both disapprove of the whole situation and are concerned not merely for your well-being but for those of the three children whose awful situation your callous blind selfishness has just made immeasurably worse.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Sorry - edit the above by to spell "principal" correctly and to insert "not much" in front of "younger".

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

it reminds me of all those people who go round whining "Why do you go round wasting your time on fanfic when you could be writing something publishable?"

Oh, heavens, yes. Or the people who put down genre because it's genre, and whilst they don't actually read that, being far more interested in higher-minded things, they know by cultural osmosis that it's all square-jawed heroes who might as well be Cecil Rhodes In Space, or, alternatively, soppy-bad Jungianly dubious stuff that would be porn if it only had the courage of its convictions.

That particular pose always reminds me strongly of Charlotte Bronte and M. Heger agreeing together that Emily would only ever come into her own as an essayist. Particularly when her essays themselves are so very much like something a sixth-form Karen might have written.

[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.

[owl]

Very good point.

[ailbhe]

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

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

I agree about AF being aware of the capacity for being swept away by fantasy - I suppose any novelist would have to be, but she writes so particularly well about ambivalent kinds of attraction, like Nicola and her decision never to go to another Mass. And your other post is entirely right on the whole Marlow-Merrick Gondal interest in the playing out of betrayal on a large scale, which, on the smaller scale one finds within families and boarding schools, AF is also a specialist.

Also, a propos of something either you or one of your commenters said, I do think Patrick's attitude to fantasy torture is to do with the Elizabethan Anthony Merrick, but also with a rather gruesome Catholic interest in the sufferings of the martyrs and saints which I remember from the nuns and various forms of religious rhetoric when I was little. Presumably Patrick would have been subjected to something similar, with his recusant heritage.

[coughingbear]

Oh yes, all those martyrs. I remember being particularly gruesomely fascinated by Margaret Clitheroe.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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.

[coughingbear]

Ooops, sorry about my lack of html skills in that comment. I thought frankie_ecap had had most of the wine...