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The deliberate insertion of current slang feels odd too, or is it just because it's no longer current?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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

The updating is slightly odd, as the Marlow's traditional values do work better before the cultural revolutions of the sixties. AF does appear to want to explore social change, though, as she first updates in The Thuggery Affair which has a contemporary setting eg mid-sixties, and I think she wrote a short preface saying how much everything has changed since the forties - men on the moon etc. Once she did it I suppose she thought she had to keep to the updated idea but some things do seem pretty strange - eg Patrick's opinions for a teenage boy in the seventies. Possibly she stopped writing after Run Away Home because she believed she was too much of a reactionary old fogey or just too old to keep up with changes in teenage culture in the 80s (she obviously tried before) - I don't know, but I always wished that there were more books.

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

However odd the updating can get, I wouldn't want the references removed, though -they are how AF wrote the books and I agree that they add to the characterization to some extent - even if Patrick does sometimes seem prematurely middle aged. Maybe this is a bit off the point but I do think that the atmosphere of Peter's Room is a little more fifties than late forties when it is supposed to be set - eg Ginty's dress, which sounds fifties, although I suppose it could be very advanced New Look from London. I'm pretty sure that The Cruel Sea was published early fifties as well. That was only a small slip up, but I wonder if someone pointed it out to AF and she decided she might as well update for the next one - she could reference books TV etc with no problem which can be one of the more enjoyable aspects of the books - they couldn't have been reading Tolkien, Mary Renault etc in the forties (although I consider that interest in social change was likely to be the main reason). The updating would make a TV series of the books difficult though - I'm not sure how it would be done (and probably won't) but I suggest early to mid-sixties, a world that was changing rapidly, but still traditional for many families.

[ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com]

Sorry - I wrote the above before reading your comment - but we seem to be thinking pretty alike about Peter's Room and AF's interest in social change. Despite it's possibly slightly ambiguous setting (before AF had officially updated) i still think it's possibly the most interesting book over all. If it was to be adapted on it's own, I'd probably set it in it's implied setting - late fifties. I couldn't remember the Mrs Bertie's TV. I do remember the Marlows and Patrick later seeming to be quite enthusiastic TV watchers - but you are probably right - as an innovation it hadn't been quite accepted yet.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I've always like the different times, and the references to TV programmes and so on. I only read three of the school setting books (Autumn Term, End of Term, and The Cricket Term) as a child as that was all my library had, so I think I just accepted it then. Reading the rest of the books of an adult, the changing settings intrigued. Mary Gentle does something similar in some of her books (Rats and Gargoyles, The Architecture of Desire, Scholars and Soldiers, Left to His Own Devices), with the same characters in different settings. The Architecture of Desire has a parallel Restoration; in Left to His Own Devices, there are computers. I think it was part of the charm of the books to see what the characters took on for each setting. The slang just struck me as a group idiolect, peculiar to this group of friends and family and their setting, adopting some from the wider world, and some, like 'trimmensely', as a blend word, like 'ginormous', that was just part of their vocabulary. Their world, boarding school, hunting, riding, estate owning, was alien to me, and the language use was part of that.

The slang in The Thuggery Affair makes it one of the hardest books to read, but I think that's because a lot of it was made up by AF for that book, rather than trying to use current slang. But there's scenes in that book that definitely make me glad I've read it. I think it's worth the slog!

I'm curious about Peter's dreadful nickname of Binks.

I wondered if it was one of those nicknames that people use to refer to a baby before the baby born, and then the name sticks. Friends of friends used to call the pregnancy bump/baby 'Binkle', and I doubt very much if they'd read AF, so I assumed it's just the kind of name that gets used in that situation. Said friends had a lot of difficulty calling the baby by his proper name when he arrived, so I wondered if it were a similar situation with Peter. I'm not sure how much that fits with the characters of Commander and Mrs Marlow though!

The Oxford Dictionary of First Names (eds Hanks and Hodges, 1990) tells me that Bunty is a nickname, occasionally a given name, popular in the early 20th century, of uncertain derivation, but most likely from a dialectal pet name for a lamb (they don't say which dialect) from the word 'bunt', meaning to butt gently. It doesn't strike me as being any worse than Buffy as a name. :-) The Guinness Book of Names (Dunkling, 1995) doesn't include Bunty in the first name statistics lists, which means it was used as given name for less than 1 in 10,000 births from 1900 to 1990.

[owl]

I was not at all surprised by 'Binks'. My sister and I are still called by our baby names into our twenties. She did make an effort to get rid of hers as a teenager, but we never quite managed it.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I read somewhere (in the introduction to one of the GGP editions?) that AF was working on a new Marlows story up to her death? Or at least that she had an outline of the next, or something? I'm sure in my own mind that she would eventually have resolved the Patrick/Nicola/Ginty situation.