{"id":5674,"date":"2018-07-08T21:54:24","date_gmt":"2018-07-08T11:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/?p=5674"},"modified":"2018-07-08T21:54:24","modified_gmt":"2018-07-08T11:54:24","slug":"peters-room-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/peters-room-part-three\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Peter\u2019s Room\u2019, Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chapter Four: Dispatches to Angora: I<\/strong><\/p>\n

This chapter is mostly the Marlow\u2019s version of Gondal, in which the Palladian Guards are ordered by the Regent to carry dispatches to a distant allied kingdom. The plot does not make a whole lot of sense to me, but possibly that\u2019s just my impatience with High Fantasy tropes showing. The Regent forces the Guards to write letters to their families, confessing to being traitors. If they fail in their mission, the letters will be used as evidence and they\u2019ll be executed. If their families destroy the letters, the families will become traitors. If the Guards refuse to go along with the Regent\u2019s plan, they\u2019ll be imprisoned and tortured. Then the Regent turns up under a magical waterfall along the way and announces their young King will be accompanying them. The King says it\u2019s all a wicked plan by the Regent to get them all out of the way so he can seize the kingdom, but none of the Guards believe the King, even though they have plenty of evidence the Regent is evil. I mean, he\u2019s blackmailing them and threatening their families! Anyway, they set off through this frozen wasteland, where \u201cnothing moved but themselves\u201d and yet somehow their falcons find plenty of animals for them to eat. I guess their horses are eating meat, too, or maybe snow? They don\u2019t seem to be carrying much by way of provisions.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also confused about whether the children are sitting round the Hide and talking dialogue, or moving around and acting the story out, or if someone (Patrick?) is writing it down, because this part reads like a novel, not a play. But I was amused by some of the described action \u2013 for example, Malise\/Peter \u201cclimbing fearlessly down into the frozen darkness\u201d when Peter\u2019s actually terrified of heights, and Crispian\/Ginty\u2019s \u201clong swim to save\u201d Rupert\/Patrick. They are forced to take a break from Saturday afternoon till Monday due to church and Patrick\u2019s visiting relatives (\u201cmay all their rabbits die\u201d), which dismays all the children except Nicola. Discussing their next plot obstacle, Ginty suggests an ambush on the shores of a \u201cfrozen sea\u201d. The idea of a frozen sea \u201crang true\u201d to all of them. This is because the Marlows are<\/strong> a frozen sea. Well, except Lawrie, who\u2019s entirely liquid salt water.<\/p>\n

Back at Trennels, Lawrie manages to spook herself by vividly imagining a terrible scene in which the young King tries to escape the Regent, is caught and is dragged back to face his punishment:<\/p>\n

\u201cLawrie shivered, staring across the moonlit room into the room of her imagining. It really was awfully queer to be able to feel as frightened as this by a bit of Gondal of her own making \u2026 It really wouldn\u2019t have surprised her, in that panic moment of opening the door, to have found the room dark and silent and her family flown.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is totally how I would have reacted after too much story-telling-in-my-own-head at the age of 12 (or cough<\/em> 28). It really annoys me that I have so much in common with Lawrie\u2026<\/p>\n

Patrick also invites the Marlows to the annual Merrick Twelfth Night party. They will have to dress up, although Patrick concedes he does have an eccentric aunt who \u201calways wears a lace blouse and a tweed skirt\u201d instead of evening dress. It sounds very grand and possibly<\/em> a little bit romantic (if Ginty ends up the belle of the ball by turning up in some ravishing Victorian gown that they found in the Trennels attic and Patrick is smitten). <\/p>\n

Chapter Five: \u201cThe Farthest Distant Quarters\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Sunday morning, Nicola and Ginty search the Trennels library for books about explorers, to use in their story. Ginty is already amazed by a vague reference in that morning\u2019s Epistle reading that could, if you squinted, apply to Jason the boy King: <\/p>\n

\u201cGinty tried shyly to communicate her sense of the strangeness of the small coincidence as of a nudge from another dimension, \u2018like a clue to something\u2019.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And later she comes across a reference to a frozen sea, which is even more uncanny, and loses herself in a fantasy that<\/p>\n

\u201cCrispian and Rupert and the rest were true \u2013 had been true \u2013 and they themselves were only acting out something which had once been real. It could happen. It did happen.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But sensible, rational Nicola refuses to engage in such nonsense. Karen arrives and Ginty asks her what she thinks of the Bront\u00ebs and Gondal and Angria. Karen says, \u201cSo far as Emily was concerned, it was the most appalling waste of time and talent\u201d and when Ginty protests that it was noble<\/em> of Emily not to be motivated by fame and money, Karen points out the evidence, in one of Emily\u2019s poems, that Emily was devastated when her early poems were rejected and \u201cminded desperately\u201d when Wuthering Heights<\/em> got bad reviews.<\/p>\n

They discuss how the poem shows how Emily used Gondal to escape life\u2019s worries (which both Nicola and Karen think is \u201cmad\u201d and \u201cpathetic\u201d), just as Branwell used drugs and drink. Then Karen says,<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean \u2013 either life was too much for her so she retreated into Gondal, or else Gondal made<\/em> life too much for her when she couldn\u2019t avoid it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ginty thinks it\u2019s all quite understandable, given Emily was stuck in a gloomy parsonage on the moors, but Karen points out that the Bront\u00ebs had plenty of visitors and in fact, Emily travelled as far as Brussels and had lots of opportunities to escape if she\u2019d wanted. Emily chose<\/em> to limit her life to Gondal. And Branwell had his family\u2019s support and could have led a productive life, but chose to model himself on Young Soult, the dissolute poet who was his Angrian persona.<\/p>\n

Ann comes in at this stage and says her favourite Bront\u00eb was Charlotte and how when Ann was nine, she thought that if Karen and Rowan died at school like the eldest Bront\u00ebs, then she, Ann, would be like poor Charlotte. And they talk about what a miserable time Charlotte must have had with Branwell, Emily and Anne dying in the same year, and then only having nine months of married bliss before she died.<\/p>\n

(Meanwhile, I\u2019m just sitting here imagining what modern-day Australian publishers would say if I presented them with a children\u2019s book manuscript that included a twenty-page analysis of the troubled adult lives of the Bront\u00ebs and whether juvenile role-playing games hindered their integration into society. Probably the same thing those publishers said when I sent them a children\u2019s history of medicine, analysing the role of superstition, science and pseudoscience, ie “Ha ha ha … oh, you’re serious. NO.”)<\/p>\n

Karen also talks about Emily killing off her puppy characters, which so horrifies Nicola that \u201cWuthering Heights<\/em> promptly took its place with books like The Lamplighter<\/em> and Black Beauty<\/em> which Nicola was never<\/em> going to read, ever<\/em>.\u201d There was also a good bit in an earlier chapter where Nicola, hearing of the Bront\u00eb name\u2019s link to Nelson, thought, \u201cSuddenly the name on the covers of two of the many books she ought to read \u2013 this year, next year, sometime, more likely never \u2013 took on a romantic glow: perhaps she really would read them.\u201d That\u2019s exactly<\/em> how I feel about Shirley<\/em> and Villette<\/em> and whatever novels Anne wrote.<\/p>\n

The next part of this very, very long chapter involves the Marlow sisters handing down dresses to one another in preparation for the Twelfth Night party. Poor Nicola ends up with unflattering white frilly net (although I don\u2019t see why Lawrie can\u2019t have that, if they\u2019re identical). Ginty tries on a ghastly pre-war peacock chiffon that belonged to their mother and just as they\u2019re discussing how to alter it, Doris the maid announces she\u2019ll<\/em> do it and carries it off. This is bound to be a disaster because Doris wears \u201csad, drab\u201d clothes, even to church. Mrs Marlow can\u2019t alter another dress for Ginty because it will hurt Doris\u2019s feelings if she sees, so Rowan comes up with a plan to buy a new dress on Monday and \u201caccidentally\u201d drop Doris\u2019s terrible dress in the bath on the night of the party, and then \u201cdiscover\u201d the new dress in Ann\u2019s wardrobe. <\/p>\n

Mollified, Ginty is back in her room, happily fantasising about how much she\/Crispian loves Rupert\/Patrick, \u201clike David and Jonathan\u201d, and picturing Rupert dying tragically in Crispian\u2019s arms when she suddenly realises that the shopping trip will mean cancelling their Gondalling on Monday! This is such a terrible thought that she decides she\u2019d rather wear the Bridesmaid\u2019s Horror, an ancient net dress that doesn\u2019t even fit properly. There, see what Gondalling is doing to Ginty already, passing up the rare chance of a nice new frock.<\/p>\n

Mrs Marlow now decides Peter has to accompany Nicola on her nightly trips to the hawkhouse, even though he rightly points out he\u2019ll be useless if the village drunk does attack them. Peter then insists he needs to take one of the old pistols with him and Nicola recalls when he shot the Nazi at the lighthouse. But Peter claims to have forgotten all about it and when Nicola muses that Foley was half like Giles, maybe even \u201ckinder than him\u201d, Peter loses his temper and says, \u201cIf you\u2019re a traitor it doesn\u2019t matter what the other half of you\u2019s like.\u201d It\u2019s clear he\u2019s repressed the incident \u201cfathoms deep\u201d. This is understandable given his upbringing (and also being threatened with the Official Secrets Act if he talks about it), but it does seem bound to cause future problems for him.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bit more Gondalling in the hawkhouse with Patrick, as they figure out what happened to the old King. The evil Regent pretended the old King had robbed the Treasury, the King abdicated to avoid civil war, then the Regent got his only friend and ally to kill the King, then executed the friend. Nicola is a bit uneasy that Patrick keeps coming up with these evil plots so readily. Also, apparently the Queen died in childbirth. I notice that all the characters are male \u2013 apparently girls and women can\u2019t have adventures, if you\u2019re a Marlow.<\/p>\n

Then Patrick rejoins his relatives. Forced to be sociable when he just wants to sit quietly and contemplate Rupert being a traitor, he snaps at his Aunt Florence and is made to apologise. (Slightly off topic, is it weird that he calls Aunt Florence “an interfering old faggot<\/em>\u201d? The American use of the word as a pejorative wouldn’t have been common in 1960s England, surely, and it’s usually used about men, not women, so is he referring to fagging<\/em>, as in public school boys? I don’t understand what he means here.) We also learn his Uncle Alex is in the Foreign Office and often talks Top Secret Stuff with Mr Merrick. I wonder if that comes up in subsequent Marlow books? (I was also imagining Uncle Alex would know Colonel Stanley-Ross, but they wouldn\u2019t get along because Alex is a ferocious Tory and the Colonel isn\u2019t.)<\/p>\n

Next, Chapter Six: \u201cAll the Birds of the Air\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter Four: Dispatches to Angora: I This chapter is mostly the Marlow\u2019s version of Gondal, in which the Palladian Guards are ordered by the Regent to carry dispatches to a distant allied kingdom. The plot does not make a whole lot of sense to me, but possibly that\u2019s just my impatience with High Fantasy tropes … Continue reading \u2018Peter\u2019s Room\u2019, Part Three<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,6,11],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-5674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1950s-and-1960s","category-books","category-young-adult","tag-antonia-forest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5674"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5684,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5674\/revisions\/5684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}