trennels | the Brontes and Peter's Room

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?

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I'm just rereading *The Marlows and the Traitor* which also starts with Peter's point of view, and am remembering how much I like him as well.

Your comments on what each character gets out of Gondalling ring true. I hadn't thought about it as much, this not having been one of my favorite Marlow books; but now I'm rereading the whole series beginning to end (for inspiration on writing style, character development, and how to make unlikable characters sympathetic) and I'll pay more attention when I get to PR.

Re. making unlikeable characters sympathetic (I'm assuming, possibly from something you said further up, that you're reading acquisitively for a novel of your own?), who are you looking at specifically?

I was trying to think whether I find Peter 'likeable', and realised I invariably find him discomfiting to read. He's continually nerving himself to do genuinely difficult or frightening things (whether that's the Dead Man's Drop or trying to be a success at Dartmouth after his father and the divine Giles), and quite often we see him come a cropper. He does shoot Jael and get stuck on the cliff and possibly kill a man and come off a horse hunting when he's forced himself to hunt, even though he's afraid. The worst, the thing you've feared, does happen in AF. (Not that it's unique to Peter - Nicola realising that Sprog's death, which she's rehearsed for for so long, has finally happened, is just terribly good writing.) For some reason that the most amateur of amateur psychologists could ferret out in ten seconds, I find much of that almost unbearable reading, and a lot of the parts of the novels that deal with Peter quite dark as a result. I tend to want to retreat to a Lawrie-ish world where if I bleat 'I can't light gas, it bangs at me', Nicola or Ann or Miss Redmond or someone will come and sort it out.

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.

-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.

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.

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

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.

the Brontes and Peter's Room

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