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The deliberate insertion of current slang feels odd too, or is it just because it's no longer current?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

[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.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

The boarding school part was familiar to me, and I sometimes used to spend holidays on different friends' farms, but the hunting and the society the Marlows move in is alien to me too. I like what I assume to be Marlowisms, the ones that are constant throughout the books, especially trimmensely and natch (which I tried to adopt as a kid). It's just that the Beatles and Top of the Pops etc seem to be tacked on. I did sympathise with Nicola and Lawrie wanting modern clothes instead of hand-me-downs though, even if they sounded ghastly. :-)

Binks does seem to be a baby name, but it seems awfully late for Peter to reject it. My sister was Jimpy because I couldn't say Jennifer, but that was gone well before we went to school.

My mother's friend had a real name but chose to be called Bunty which I could never understand. Eh, to each their own!

[(Anonymous)]

I think AF said once that she hadn't seen any need to "explain" Binks - she assumed her readers would just understand that it was a family nickname. It does seem to be a sibling nickname rather than parents - can't think of an instance where Mrs M calls him Binks. Perhaps it was what Karen or Rowan called the baby and it stuck.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Ah. Well, if she said so, then that's it! Maybe it's from Peter Rabbit as someone suggested.