Peter

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

This was mentioned in the last thread but two,but I thought I'd start a new one rather than add on an old. Is Peter a "poor copy" of Giles? We see him so much more from the inside whereas apart from a few lines at the end of RAH we never see Giles except from the outside. Peter has fears obviously but makes a point of making himself do the things he fears.And he is of course at the age of teenage insecurities etc.
I sometimes feel Peter's 'tragedy' is that he seems to have the potential to be a good teacher or farmer,(just to give two examples) but will end up in the Navy because it's the family tradition, and therefore is almost as limited in his life choices as the girls.Not that he won't do well in the Navy, I'm sure.

Comments

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

Might have this completely wrong, but isn't that why people no longer join at such a young age?
Fourteen - or whatever it was - being perhaps too early to judge officer material?
Then there's the later question of how suitable Giles was - risking an international incident as well as life and limb.
Hilary Clare once said that AF "wasn't hands -on - she got it all out of books" Perhaps she read the wrong books about the Navy?

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Given a large number of British military cock-ups over the years, perhaps she read exactly the right books about the Navy?

Anyway, not having a friend who isn't psychotic by the age of about 12 or so doesn't strike me as the sort of character flaw age will remedy.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Who does he bear a grudge against?
And he copes in a real crisis - Marlows and the Traitor, Thuggery Affair, Runaway Home although he makes a few mistakes at the end which can be blamed on exhaustion.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Patrick for one, for the 'lily-livered loon' remark in Falconer's Lure.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Runaway Home although he makes a few mistakes at the end which can be blamed on exhaustion.

The reason he is exhausted is that he has chosen to take a wholly inadequately provisioned open day boat on an eighty-mile cross-Channel voyage in January without charts, lights, adequate weather information and with only one other competent sailor on board. The fact that Giles becomes concussed in mid-Channel making this effectively a single-handed voyage is an unfortunate additional complication, but the exhaustion in general was entirely foreseeable.

[charverz.livejournal.com]

Yes, very early on in AF's writing Dartmouth stopped taking young teenagers. She mentions this in the foreword to one of the books.

The teenaged midshipmen of Hornblower and Forester (and into the First World War) became a thing of the past.