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

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh, I had those elaborate boarding-schools as well, with class lists and floor plans and everything. Mine were all based on a dream I had that involved a murder, a swimming pool, and a headmistress who was close kin to (perhaps identical with) Glinda the Witch of the North. Never, ever would I have told anybody about these pretends, shared them with anybody, or acted them out with anybody. I so, so sympathized with Nicola on this one, too.

In the late 1970s at college I fell in with a group of older students who did their own elaborate role-playing game, all Renaissance and ballads and Dorothy Dunnett, and I greatly admired their imagination (several are now fairly well-known fantasy writers). I was not a very enthusiastic player; I just watched them do it and somehow knew that I couldn't, not really, not right. Their whole fantasy thing ended rather badly, however--I was involved in the denoument. Afterwards I considered basing a book on the whole episode, a plot where role-playing becomes too intense for a few participants while the others don't realize this is happening, and therefore gets mixed into life with unfortunate consequencees. I even outlined the book one summer.

It was only a year or two later that I found PW and discovered that AF had done this already. I don't think you need to be ahead/behind your time or to generalize about role-playing to see that, when the participants in a fantasy world have different levels of commitment, when some are more vulnerable and some more manipulative, the boundaries between fantasy and reality can easily become blurred, the human dynamics can be distorted, and the consequences can be disasterous.

I admit that I've never been able to stomach those bits of PW, the Gondalling bits. The first time I read it I just skimmed by them, eager to get to the "real" parts of the "real" characters. I only vaguely knew about the Brontes and just wasn't very interested. Each time I reread the book I try to force myself to read the Gondal stuff more carefully, and I think I've probably covered it all by now and understand how it fits with the overall plot and the individual characters. I think of the book as another Forest experiment--you know, a horse/hawk book, a spy story, a 'problem teenager' story, a role-playing-meets-reality story... I like the book for that experimental quality (and for some of the non-Gondal scenes, like the hunt) but it doesn't work for me.

[res23.livejournal.com]

Oh me too, with the boarding school, class lists, timetables, floor plans, grounds plans, elaborate uniform designs for every cirumstance, etc etc.

I also skimmed the Gondal bits for the first several times I read PR. It took me ages to accept that they revealed something more about the characters - and this was as an adult that I was reading it. I still find it hard even now to really enjoy those sections, although I can see how they do reveal interesting things. But I still prefer the non-Gondal sections. I'd never heard of Gondal/Angrie, and I didn't know much about the Brontes, either, so I was quite glad for that bit of introduction to it, or I'd have wondered what it was all about, and why it seemed to be someting so controversial for Nicola. I don't think it would have occurred to me that role-playing could be negative, nor really that people could get so seriously into it as it sounds like the Brontes (and perhaps some of the Marlows) did. I probably tended to assume that everyone's imaginary worlds were like mine, soemthing that was entirely deliberately created, and which I always knew was very separate from the 'real world'.