Christmas in Marlow-land

[sheep-noises.livejournal.com]

This time o' year always reminds me of

1) The Christmas Play in Wade Minster, from "End of Term" (which I don't have atm as my copy gave up the ghost and fell to pieces >:( ) ;

2) The unconventional Christmas Dinner in a cave, with poor old Ann staying home in case the phone rings :( , from "Run Away Home"; but mostly

3) "Peter's Room". For me, this is the most magical of all those magical books. I must admit I've always skipped the bits in Italics, so I still don't know what fantasy it was that they acted out that Christmas, even though I've read it dozens of times. Don't care, either. The wonderful descriptions of the day-to-day Marlow (and a bit o' Merrick) winter doings are enough to keep me going :)

Comments

[smellingbottle.livejournal.com]

The fantasy segments in PR are really interesting just for the light they throw on the characters playing the characters (so to speak). You get to see Nicola wishing she wasn't involved and being as colourless as possible, Ginty making up to Patrick via this rather homoerotic friendship between their characters (pre-empting the Rosina stuff), Peter dealing with his own fears of cowardice via the torture scene etc etc. You also get to see AF writing a very different kind of fiction, too, and I think it makes the 'real life' Christmas segments of the book more compelling by contrast, if you can see why, say, Ginty is unwilling even to spare an afternoon to go shopping for a non-awful dress.