I think RMF is a remarkable book, not least for offering no simple solutions or happy endings, but exploring an immensely complex emotional and family situation with such subtlety. And doing all of that, quite consistently, through the perspective of an (admittedly unusually intelligent and perceptive) young teenager.
You're right of course that this structure means that we're left to fill in an awful lot of the gaps, but I think this works particularly well in this book because if the book has a theme then it is one of absence and how you deal with it: the dead mother, the empty houses, the absent father, the moribund farm manager, Karen's lost student life, the book even begins in a odd 'space' between term and holidays (I think there's been illness at school?) and the tone is set by Nicola's opening struggle with 'Persuasion', that saddest of the JA novels.
It is very daring I think to have written a character as unlikeable as Edwin and to allow us - via Nicola - to understand as the book goes on that he is caught up in grief and guilt - for his failed marriage, for his dead wife, for his children. And that Karen is inescapably the casualty of that. You're right that we see glimpses of a likable, focused Edwin when he talks to Nicola about history and I think this is also such a sophisticated point - when you realise that people have different angles and personae to them, that they are different people in different contexts, and here is a man - in his forties presumably - removed entirely from his professional sphere and forced to be grateful to a new (and disapproving) family at a time of great personal pain and confusion. I assume there is a class point here too: the Marlow property and background make Edwin insecure and defensive and make his professional standing that he has worked for seem insignificant and irrelevant.
As you say, we simply see nothing of the 'student Katie', of the dynamic of attraction, hero-worship, intellectual excitement and vulnerability that must have created the relationship.
And then to allow Edwin's character to show us unlikeable things about almost *all* of the rest of the family: Peter, Rowan, Ginty and Karen all come off badly at various points, but in ways that ring true to their characters in the strain of that situation, and we see Nicola understanding more about the strengths and weaknesses of *all* her family, even those she had most admired (like Rowan). And of course they all learn more too about their own parents' marriage - just at this moment when all of them (even Ginty perhaps) are realising that even the very beginnings of a relationship can be fraught with compromise and earlier sadnesses. When Nicola's mother talks about running off with their father, and her parents' horror, I always think of that moment in 'Autumn Term' when she reveals quite casually that all four of her brothers died in the first world war.
I know lots of people do prefer to school stories, but I find it a very moving book.
no subject
You're right of course that this structure means that we're left to fill in an awful lot of the gaps, but I think this works particularly well in this book because if the book has a theme then it is one of absence and how you deal with it: the dead mother, the empty houses, the absent father, the moribund farm manager, Karen's lost student life, the book even begins in a odd 'space' between term and holidays (I think there's been illness at school?) and the tone is set by Nicola's opening struggle with 'Persuasion', that saddest of the JA novels.
It is very daring I think to have written a character as unlikeable as Edwin and to allow us - via Nicola - to understand as the book goes on that he is caught up in grief and guilt - for his failed marriage, for his dead wife, for his children. And that Karen is inescapably the casualty of that. You're right that we see glimpses of a likable, focused Edwin when he talks to Nicola about history and I think this is also such a sophisticated point - when you realise that people have different angles and personae to them, that they are different people in different contexts, and here is a man - in his forties presumably - removed entirely from his professional sphere and forced to be grateful to a new (and disapproving) family at a time of great personal pain and confusion. I assume there is a class point here too: the Marlow property and background make Edwin insecure and defensive and make his professional standing that he has worked for seem insignificant and irrelevant.
As you say, we simply see nothing of the 'student Katie', of the dynamic of attraction, hero-worship, intellectual excitement and vulnerability that must have created the relationship.
And then to allow Edwin's character to show us unlikeable things about almost *all* of the rest of the family: Peter, Rowan, Ginty and Karen all come off badly at various points, but in ways that ring true to their characters in the strain of that situation, and we see Nicola understanding more about the strengths and weaknesses of *all* her family, even those she had most admired (like Rowan). And of course they all learn more too about their own parents' marriage - just at this moment when all of them (even Ginty perhaps) are realising that even the very beginnings of a relationship can be fraught with compromise and earlier sadnesses. When Nicola's mother talks about running off with their father, and her parents' horror, I always think of that moment in 'Autumn Term' when she reveals quite casually that all four of her brothers died in the first world war.
I know lots of people do prefer to school stories, but I find it a very moving book.