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The deliberate insertion of current slang feels odd too, or is it just because it's no longer current?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

[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.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

Agreed - especially re. Patrick's extreme form of young fogeyism (which is basically a mouthpiece for AF's own views - a 60-year-old woman's voice coming out of a teenage boy will always seem strange). I've said several times that AF felt trapped by the changes in the 1980s (which were really far more profound than anything before - radical Conservatism, which supplanted and marginalised the many real MPs of the ilk Patrick's father came from, changed more things in the end than any form of social democracy had) and that this was the main reason why there were no successors to RAH. Had the books stayed in the post-war era, I remain strongly convinced that there would have been more.

It's only a superficial reference, but she first mentions television in Peter's Room, I think - but she has a representative of the servant classes having a TV and the Marlows not. This is quite accurate for the UK in 1961, when there was a vast wariness of technological innovation among the landed elite (which Thatcherites believed was every bit as responsible for Britain's industrial decline as militant trade unionists had been) and much less of a correlation between who had the most money and who were the earliest adopters of new technology than is the case now. Sydney Newman, the Canadian expat who exposed many of Britain's internal contradictions at this point as producer of the TV strand 'Armchair Theatre' (and was later, among much else, the man behind the beginning of Doctor Who), commented that when he saw the dominance of plays about the upper class on early British TV, he thought "damn the upper classes - they don't even own televisions!" And that was quite an accurate comment at the time - TV was embraced by the supposed "lower orders" but seen as vulgar and "American" (in those circles, still ringing with the humiliation of Suez, the worst possible insult back then) by the old landed elite, so the situation in Peter's Room is quite realistic for its post-Suez, pre-Beatles times.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Oh, so do I. I'm sad that I've only got the Players books to read now (if the library has them).

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

Agreed, although I found Patrick's young fogeyism a lot less peculiar (or liable to look as though he were just AF's mouthpiece) after I met Young Tory undergraduates at Oxford in the 90s. Their short-back-and-sides haircuts, dateless clothes, conservatism, and passion for the Latin mass were pure Patrick, without the golden eyes and the charm (that appeals to Nicola and Ginty, anyway - I remain uncharmed by Patrick).