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]

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.