"Delicately balanced on a razor edge of mutual toleration": Rowan Marlow, Saint or ?

[CreativeGreen]

Apologies if the quotation isn't quite right there: no Forests to hand.

Inspired by a post on another thread, I need to talk about the Marlows. Is Rowan spectacularly awful, and Lois an Unsangered heroine? Is Giles ghastly? (I think yes). What's your Marlow Family Liking List?

(I will be posting and running for now but I have many thoughts and wanted to start the thread while I remembered to)

Always happy to come across more Forest fans. They are genuinely some of the most psychologically astute books ever written and criminally underrated. My favourites are End of Term and Cricket Term - I reread EoT just before Christmas, which is when it should be read. Both the Christmas play scene and the scene where Nicola and Patrick ride home from Wade Abbas in the dark are extraordinarily evocative. Cricket Term is brilliant for the very realistic reactions to Mari’s death and for Lois finally getting her comeuppance at the cricket final! I could honestly talk about the books for days.

Oh, and Patrick absolutely grows up to be a horrible tradcath Rees-Mogg type. I mean what normal teenage boy is that obsessed with Vatican II?

Phrases from Marlow books that I regularly think of/adapt:

'she had hoped she looked rather particularly charming, but apparently not'
'in a few short years you will find yourself out in the world where people will not have the time or inclination to treat you with the [tolerance? indulgence?] you seem to think you deserve'
'don't you like the look of the little gate any more?'
'I'd rather be properly sorry if I've got to'
'it's quite a liking sort of name'
'those Brontes must have been absolutely MENTAL'

there are more....

I must say I’d forgotten hints of Patrick going into the army. I saw him more as a publishing type. The au pair snogging was horrific but perhaps shoehorned in to suggest he isn’t going to be a priest or a monk.

The casual cruelty of their treatment of Marie is so physiologically accurate. They basically don’t even intend to be cruel - they just don’t really see her as a person with feelings, because she’s irritating and not very bright.

Yes, admittedly the main point in Edwin's favour for me is that he whacks Peter with a handy riding crop. Mind you, I think I'd have forgiven him for strangling him, too, as long as it stopped P doing his 'Mummerset' voice.

Yes, Peter (and to an extent Patrick) are at their most interesting because vulnerable in Peter's Room. Which I think is partly a brilliant novel, partly semi-skippable italicised chunks of what their Bronte-influenced 'Gondal' fantasy game was. I've always enjoyed the conversation that Ginty has with Karen in the Trennels library about the Brontes, though it always makes me want to shout 'STAY AT OXFORD, KAREN! DON'T BECOME A DOWNTRODDEN HOUSEWIFE! EDWIN'S NOT ALL THAT!'

Yes. Marie’s story is so clearly and devastatingly written. Am I wrong, did she end up leaving? My deteriorating memory is letting me down here - clearly time for a full reread.

She dies in Cricket Term, and basically none of them care. 😢

Yes , Lawrie really shows her immaturity when Marie dies. She doesn’t even pretend to care.

I agree that ride home in the dark is brilliant.

Though I think I only realised years later (like most people, I imagine, having read the books piecemeal via the library and secondhand shops) just how dangerous and careless Patrick's behaviour is when he starts galloping and jumping bushes when reciting 'How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix', and Mr Buster follows him, because it's only from reading the earlier books that you realise how inexperienced a rider Nicola is. She's only just got used, the previous summer, to sitting on Buster and walking, and has probably never gone above a trot, or a a brief, gentle canter. She has no idea what she's doing, has never jumped or galloped, is lucky not to have fallen off rather nastily, and Patrick isn't remotely apologetic.

Was anyone else, as a child reader, completely bamboozled by the timeline, not being aware that AF set each book when it was published, despite the internal logic of 'Marlow time' only advancing eighteen months between Autumn Term and Run Away Home?

I was about ten, and puzzled as to how Lawrie is dressing up as a punk while her sister is claustrophobic because she was trapped in a cellar in the Blitz.

And is given the most appallingly tragicomic death -- her heart stops when she gets up to turn on Top of the Pops. Poor Marie!

I was about ten, and puzzled as to how Lawrie is dressing up as a punk while her sister is claustrophobic because she was trapped in a cellar in the Blitz.

Yes - it’s even more jarring if you only read the school-set books as the jumps are bigger. In End of Term Mrs Marlow talks about her brothers being killed in the First World War, and in the next school book (Cricket Term), Marie dies when getting up to watch Top of the Pops! You just have to go along with it really.

Absolutely! Falconer's Lure does locate things a bit more in relation to WWII in terms of the Marlowverse.

Though I think I was almost more amazed, aged ten, that Nicola, an intelligent, enquiring type who is interested in family history, was entirely unaware that her mother had lost four brothers in WWI -- that it had simply never come up in conversation. I know they were Maunsells, rather than Marlows, but still... I mean, I wasn't born till the 70s, but I still knew we'd lost several great-uncles in WWI, and that one had survived but had shrapnel in his thigh till his death.

(Were the brothers Piers, Something, Giles and Rollo?)

(Were the brothers Piers, Something, Giles and Rollo?)

I just checked my (ancient, falling apart) copy. Piers, Rollo, Giles and Terence! Presumably the younger Giles is named for his late uncle, which makes it even odder that Nicola wasn’t aware of them.

Peter’s Room is such a clever and interesting book because it shows so clearly the attractions and danger of getting immersed in a fantasy world. I don’t mind the Gondal narrative bits because they demonstrate the kind of overwrought fantasy that teenagers enjoyed then and now. Look at the current popularity of the Romantasy genre. More sex in those obviously though there is clearly a sexual undercurrent in the Rupert/Crispian fantasy which then carries over into the real life Patrick/Ginty relationship.

I like Rowan and I have a soft spot for Anne. Can’t stand Giles-and I knew a lot of Gileses in my youth! I swither over Nick and Peter. I think Peter is a victim of his family’s expectation- he has absolutely no choice about his navy career.

i can’t believe I’ve found, if not my people, people who know astoundingly more than me!

I have all the school books I think but not the others - coukd someone suggest a reading list?

I read Autumn Term then Attic Term, and for years I had none of the ones in the middle! Suddenly - no Karen or Rowan, Patrick Merrick, who he? Buying fab gear in town from possible potheads for 20 p. .... after I'd left them in a world of shillings and ice-cream sundaes and the school cert. Most baffling to a 12 year old.

The non-school books in order are (I think):

The Marlows and the Traitor
Falconer’s Lure
Peter’s Room
The Thuggery Affair
The Ready Made Family
Run Away Home

Of those I think Peter’s Room and The Ready Made Family are the strongest, but they are all worth reading.

I love Rowan and Peter.

Rowan for her brisk practicality that occasionally fails her and Peter for the complexity of his thought process. Peter and Esther would have been an interesting couple.

Patrick infuriates me but intrigues me. He’s so privileged and in many ways naive - I’d love to see him and Miranda meeting.

Giles is just a pompous arse. The way he treats his sisters is horribly avuncular and patronising on so many occasions.

Does noone else think that Peter and Patrick are headed to end up together? Foreshadowed when Patrick rescues Peter from the cliff? And that is why Peter struggles so much with all the "man" stuff, and Patrick is so stupid with the women?!

The Thursday Kidnapping (non Marlow book) is interesting.
Kathy is a Marie Dobson character. That grubby, unlikeable individual. But you can understand why she is like that when you look at her circumstances.

Me too!

Years ago for Christmas DH tracked down a full set of the books for me.
They are referred to as “The Precious Books” and have pride of place in my bookcase.

GGBP have a reprint of The Player’s Boy in stock at the moment.

I like this theory and would happily read fan fiction on the subject! 😄

I think one gets a better understanding of Peter, and can be more sympathetic, having read Marlows and the Traitor and Falconer's Lure. He did have some fairly traumatic experiences, and only Nicola seems to realise and remember.

That said, he is very annoying at times, but then he's a teenage boy.

I think the argument over buying horses when the family fortunes were in a dicey state is a bit pointless, arising from the long gaps between the books. When AF wrote about the horses, she didn't know that she was going to want to use the family fortunes as a plot device in Cricket Term.

(I used to look in on Trennels, but don't think I ever posted.)