Time and the Marlows

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I have now read all the modern-day Marlow books I can lay my hands on, which is all but The Marlows and the Traitor (which I remember quite well from when I was 11 or so) and The Thuggery Affair (which I gather is no great loss).

I love these books and mourn the lack of any more. In fact: sorrow! I will probably read the Player ones on the strength of them. The characters are so well drawn and well understood and not always likeable either, which makes them feel very real (except for Giles whom I dislike for being so arrogant and full of himself--and unkind in Autumn Term; I hope he never marries) and I also like how we see a part of their lives with so much more having happened and about to. We'll never know what happened between Nicola and Esther when she went back to school, or how Judith recovered from Edward running away, or how Kay coped with her family, and after all, RL is untidy like that too.

Does anyone know whether AF had any plans for future books and what would have happened in them?

The one thing I find jarring in the books is the very obvious placement of each in a different time and often decade. Why did AF feel it was necessary? The mention of the war in the earlier ones is part of them and places them, as does Ginty having to go through an operator to phone London, but apart from that a reader could, if allowed to, imagine the books to be set in their own era; country life and boarding school haven't changed much. Kingscote in the 50s wasn't much different to my school decades later. So I find gratuitous references to the Beatles, Up Pompeii, punks, Morecombe and Wise etc not just jarring but unnecessary to the story and Pastede On. If the Marlows were watching TV without the programme being mentioned, I would just keep reading, but mention a specific programme for no reason and I stop in my tracks, disconcerted.

The deliberate insertion of current slang feels odd too, or is it just because it's no longer current? Did people really call clothes 'gear' back in the 70s? OTOH I do love what I assume is specifically Marlow family slang like natch, trimmensely (both of which I used as a kid), and sorrow. Come to think of it though, 'sorrow' can't be a Marlowism because Patrick says it too.

I'm curious about Peter's dreadful nickname of Binks. How do you get that from Peter? Is it a baby name they keep on calling him? I'm totally with him on his objections to it, but the others persist in using it. Is it some sort of common baby name in England that might stick? My mother had a friend called Bunty and I could never understand how she put up with it. [shudders]

Comments

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

The slang is a great, great weakness. I was a teenager at the time and associated with Rockers though I never was one, and much of the slang used is stuff that was around at the time; but it's "painting by numbers", mixed in with slang from their parents' generation and used in situations when it never would be - it was used to confuse and shut out other people. If it was necessary to communicate, everybody used whatever was standard for their families. It was an argot, not a dialect, and they would have been perfectly capable of communicating with others in a close approximation to Standard English if they needed to.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

Yes, people did use the word 'gear' for clothes in the 1970s.

The word "Sorrow" for "Sorry" is used in a play called The Ghost Train by Arnold Ridley, so I'm guessing it was common parlance in some circles, but I've never encountered it anywhere else.

I agree about the slang and the references to pop culture. For the most part, they are unnecessary. I can see why she set the Marlow books at the time they were written though - it's a choice series writers have to make: stick with the one time or move with the times. Sara Paretsky (VI Warshawski) and Sue Grafton (Kinsey Milhone/alphabet series) both began their detective series at around the same time, and the former has moved with the times, while the latter has stayed in the 1980s - and the latter one is somehow more irritating (to me, anyway). But yes, AF could have done it without the references to pop culture, which really do date the books more than was ever necessary.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Were 'natch' and 'trimmensely' 50s slang or Marlows-only? I thought they might be the latter because they do appear in all the books.

If it was necessary to communicate, everybody used whatever was standard for their families.

That's what I'd have thought, and besides I can't imagine Patrick and the rather upper-class Marlows using it. Their own special words now, that would be different, like the odd nicknames used only at home. Gilly for Giles? Ha, he deserves that.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yes, people did use the word 'gear' for clothes in the 1970s.

Really? All the time, or just about fashionable stuff? Sometimes less is more: had for example the clothes not been described, we would be free to imagine them as something current and appropriate. Black velvet with rosebud sprigs? Just no.

There are problems with Sara Paretsky's V I Warshawski too. Although I'm delighted she now has internet access and a mobile phone, I have great difficulty with Lottie being a doctor at what must now be almost 90.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

Yes to "gear" - in a London office in 1971 men talked about bringing in gear, meaning a change of shirt/shoes/tie for the evening.
I don't think that girls did.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they meant it as 'equipment' as in being equipped for a night out? It doesn't seem right when the Marlows use it because they're (to me anyway) so very uncool and English county, much as I love them.

Was it any clothes, or just the really in stuff? :-)

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

I really like the movement in time! For me, it's part of what makes the books so interesting (from a literary point of view) and unusual.

I don't mind the slang, either - I simply read it as AF's idiolect. Perhaps not having been around in any of the periods she writes about makes that easier, since I'm likely to be less acutely aware of "trendy" words v. "Marlow" words.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

I suppose it was in relation to fashion, thinking about it - I remember it being used as a term in teenage girls' magazines of the time like Jackie and Pink.

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

It's the time-specific aspects of the novels I enjoy - though, in fairness, when I first read them aged nine or so, I was slightly flummoxed by the fact that books taking place over about eighteen months could include Ginty being claustrophobic from the Blitz, and swirly pea-green seventies tunics bought from pot-smoking youths. But I always found her huge frame of reference very appealing, even none of it bore any resemblance to my life in 1970s and 80s Ireland - I certainly had no idea who Morecambe and Wise were, or what Up Pompeii was (though I still find it hilarious that Patrick watches it), not more than I knew the 'Lyke-Wake Dirge' or anything about Ariel and Prospero, or what 'Mirabile dictu' meant. I think it's one of the things, as well as her gift for characterisation and dialogue, that makes her such a rich novelist, and I think the Marlow books would lose enormously if (as I gather was suggested by some editor at some point - others here would know better than I do) they were to be reissued in a version which omits the specific slang and cultural references of their various periods.

(Having said that, The Thuggery Affair is the one I never re-read.) The Elizabethan books are wonderful, though, if you haven't read them.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

books taking place over about eighteen months could include Ginty being claustrophobic from the Blitz, and swirly pea-green seventies tunics bought from pot-smoking youths.

I think of it as a kind of magic realism. Makes no sense but is rather enchanting. (Parallels with Virginia Woolf's Orlando also possible, which is the book that confused me at fourteen.)

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

It is still confusing my final-year undergraduates, judging by their exam papers, so I'd say you were doing rather well as a fourteen-year-old! (I am now somewhat confusing the issue by thinking of Ginty as Orlando, for some reason...)

[richenda.livejournal.com]

It was trendy stuff - as in "getting geared up in Carnaby Street" in around 1966. These people weren't all that trendy, but they would be taking off their office tie and shirt, and putting on another shirt with kipper or cravat or no tie at all.
All the same, I think that AF made up a lot of the slang stuff in the Thuggery, and I've always assumed that it was deliberate, to avoid specific dating.
I see what you mean about the Marlows not being "cool" at home, but aren't all young people "bilingual", depending whose company they are in?

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>>Black velvet with rosebud sprigs? Just no

I'm fairly sure that some of the Quant and Biba stuff included velvet, and a lot of the Quant and Biba stuff was black and/or floral. I remember Mary Quant Daisy boots - they were transparent, decorated with huge black daisies. I think that was in about 1966, but am not sure.

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

"Gear" was used as a noun for clothes, definitely. As an adjective (as Ginty uses it), not to my knowledge; but I don't think AF would have used it if it hadn't been used in some circles . Apart from the Thuggery with its made-up slang, I don't think anything was said or done which couldn't have been said or done in real life.

I think leaving out the "pop culture" references would definitely have detracted from the characterisations. I was thinking the other day about Nicola Marlow compared with Harry Potter - there's probably more written about HP than NM, but we know vastly more about her than him. And knowing she watches Morecambe & Wise (at least, when she's in the same universe as they are!) is part of it. I think it's because of these otherwise irrelevant details that we get to know the characters so well.

Binks? I don't think we ever get a back story on that one. Sometimes these names come from the child being unable to say its own name, or having a particular fondness for a certain sound, at age 2 or so. It's just another "irrelevant detail".

As for plans for other books, there are various threads on here with snippets, but it seems that the next book was at least half written and set partly at Trennels, partly at Kingscote, in the following term. But I've no idea of the details, especially re. the Esther/Nicola situation. I gather Buster was due to drop dead fairly soon, though.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Binky is a common name for a pet (eg Death's horse in Terry Pratchett), or for a blanket/toy that a small child carries around. So calling the new baby Binky isn't too much of a stretch - I did wonder if it was a traditional name particularly for a pet rabbit (Peter Rabbit, geddit?) but that's probably too much of a stretch.

So yes, it's like Bunty - a not-unheard-of old-fashioned kids' nickname. Although some girls seem to have actually been named Bunty, like the classic girls' comic, or Bunty Penfold [?] in the Second at Kingscote. I wonder if it's a shortening of Elizabeth?

With all the repeats on telly and parents/family yakking on about Blitz spirit and rationing, I never noticed the odd timeline when I read the school stories in the late 80s - except for the currency, they could easily have been contemporary with my going to boarding school. The phone operator confused me, but I thought it was like the school switchboard. And the descriptions of some of the outfits sounded odd, but that was it.

I rather like the Thuggery Affair, but if you find the slang and pop culture in the others jarring, you're more likely to hate it!

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

I think it's true that pop culture among the young transcended social class less at the time than now, if only because it was (obviously) a much newer thing. But if you read contemporary literature and newspapers/magazines that were likely to get paranoid over such changes and cater for people who were even more so (e.g. the Telegraph or Spectator) it's obvious than in the mid-late 60s / early 70s large numbers of young people from traditionally upper-class backgrounds were already using slang terms, adopting modes of dress etc. that may be more instantly associated with the lower classes. They were quite widespread, even then.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

Indeed so. And young people from the Marlows' background at this point were even more so than other young people at other times, because the values they were absorbing from the mass culture around them (this was the time when the mass were beginning to assert themselves as a model from the elite, whereas only a few years earlier it had been overwhelmingly the other way round) were *utterly* alien to the values imparted by their parents: there was absolutely no connection.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

I agree that it makes them interesting - I'm a sucker for timeslips, people placed in a world they cannot understand (which is the element I would advance if I ever wrote Marlows fanfic - though I don't think that is the right word for what I would come up with). But I also think it did for them in the end. Someone else suggested on here a couple of years ago that AF probably realised that Britain had changed too radically - ironically, partially because of a government hailed by its original supporters as a force to restore the old order - for the Marlows to be tenable anymore (mass culture having asserted itself over elite culture even among the elite, thus making young people such as the Marlows more or less a thing of the past even in *really* posh circles) and I think that's true. She trapped herself, in a way, not realising just what was going to happen - when she wrote 'Run Away Home' she probably thought, in common with most people who shared her worldview, that the new government was going to Make Everything Normal Again, rather than finally break whatever ties remained.

Had she continued to set the books in the immediate post-war years, I suspect that quite a few more would have been written.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

"it's obvious than" = "it's obvious *that*"

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Look at how thrilled Lawrie in particular is at the idea of dressing up as a punk and going slumming. And the whole Changear thing is to some extent about a bunch of (largely) well-bred boarding-school girls absconding from the 'Mummy's friends to tea dismals' and dressing in a way that's less specific to their own class.

And is the first time we hear Nicola (or is it Miranda?) using the word 'gear' when she's speaking to the pothead 'townie' in Changear - making an effort to use a different kind of idiolect?

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

I can't remember, but that's probably correct. Of course, by the time 'The Attic Term' was written that whole pop-cultural era had largely played itself out, and was set to face the mortification of punk the following year - but children's and young adult literature even today tends to be a couple of years behind in its description of youth cultures, and was so considerably more at that time when much more of it was written by people who only heard of such things not so much second hand but tenth hand.

I genuinely think that a comparison of some of the later Marlow books with the early ones could be useful for people with no interest in the books *on their own terms*, purely as a documentary guide (written by someone, lest we forget, who strongly disapproved of such changes) of a phenomenon we're all now familiar with - "slumming" and "Mockney" have entered the language - but whose specific origins are rarely explored.

I meant to say above "the mass were beginning to assert themselves as a model *over* the elite" rather than the more ambiguous "from the elite".

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

And Mary Quant stuff was definitely gear! And "gear" was also used as a term of approval, so it was gear in both senses of the word....

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That's interesting, It jars with me, I suppose, because it doesn't seem to go with their otherwise very correct English and therefore feels tacked on. But as I'm not English... :-)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That does indeed sound cool, and I know about the big stylised daisies. I get the impression that the rosebud sprigs on Lawrie's dress were 3D and sewn on. Eep.

I met someone called Biba and she was named after that shop. :-)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

"slumming" and "Mockney" have entered the language

Did AF coin them then? That's impressive. I know about "Mockney", but not "slumming" unless it means going to a poorer part of town--am I slumming when I go to the closest library? I don't remember seeing either though; were they in The Thuggery Affair? That's one of the two the library system doesn't have.