"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)

I started reading AF at about 9 or 10 and was completely overwhelmed by the fact that some characters were ambivalent - until then, my childhood reading had been very (Blyton) Goodie and Baddies based.

I am reading King of Shadows to my Year 6 class at the moment and had a massive Deja vu to the Shakespearean details in The Player Boy.

As an adult who was previously married to a Jewish man, and knowing that AF was a convert, I am now struck tbh by the total absence of Judaism in the stories. I really don’t think Miranda goes anywhere near converting in End of Term - she gives a perspective of an intelligent listener to an alien story being celebrated, and trying to make sense of it. I see why AF does it that way. My mother’s reaction to the vogue for prophet names among the babies of my ds’s generation, including my own ds who had a Jewish father, shocked me - she was really, really taken aback and mildly disapproving at the number of Isaacs for example. Just having a character who is known to be Jewish and some basic references to prejudice plus Miranda’s mother’s ’work with refugees’ is all AF does that I can remember. Very subtle. I wish I knew whether AF was afraid to do more than that or just not interested. I haven’t read the non Marlow historical books though.

That's really interesting @PermanentTemporary. I wasn't sure how to phrase it and didn't want to offend.

The kids have a discussion of the Balfour Declaration in one of the books I think?

Oh yes the discussion of the Yom Kippur war as mentioned earlier in the thread. And I suppose the whole Jesus was Jewish plotline. Probably quite a lot for a book of its time.

If anyone’s interested in reading the cut scenes from Run Away Home, they’re available in a book called Celebrating Antonia Forest, the papers of an AF conference held in Bournemouth in 2006, which is on Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/celebratinganton0000anto/page/158/mode/2up

As well as some bleak musings from Karen to Giles on Edwin beating the children after they’re discovered to have gone to Yetland Cove by themselves and lied about it (to help ‘Daniel’, which is what Edward Oeschli is called in this version, but they never admit it), and how she’d imagined the children would continue to live with their maternal grandparents, and that she mightn’t have married Edwin had she realised they’d be living with her, the cut scenes are chiefly notorious for containing the death of Buster and Patrick and Nicola kissing under the stage during the prep for the Noah’s Ark performance Rose, Chas and Fob are in.

Gosh yes, especially if you compare the casual antisemitism of e.g. Dorothy Sayers' books, not that long before.

There's also some antisemitism directed at Miranda by a 'common girl with a perm' (Joan Baker perhaps 😁) and Miranda talks about how she would invite friends to tea and they'd agree, only to tell her the following day in an embarrassed way that they couldn't come. She talks briefly about Zionism in Attic Term.

Thank you for the link. When I saw @LookingThroughGlass mention it I went to see whether the book was available for purchase and recoiled from the (imaginary, no copies available) price.

But then, after reading your post, something stirred in my back brain, and I went to the distant bedroom containing the AFs and there it was. I must have bought it in my early looking-after-elderly-invalids days because it shows no signs of having been read.

Gosh, just seen the imaginary price myself 😮

I must give DH one of my periodic reminders of which few books out of my hundreds are worth something, should I drop dead.

Agree that Miranda isn’t that interested in Christianity and is certainly nowhere near converting over the Christmas play. I just think AF wasn’t that interested in portraying Judaism in much detail.

She’d converted by then, and was clearly hugely invested in being an anti-Vatican II trad Catholic, and in exploring Patrick’s faith, his (rather tiresome) pride in his recusant family heritage and his clashes with his progressive school etc.

And in Nicola’s confused attraction to Mass in the Merricks’ chapel, and in the various Marlows’ different attitudes to their own Anglicanism, from Ann’s devoutness, Pam skipping ASB services, Lawrie thinking everyone thinks Jesus and co are imaginary, Rowan saying to Patrick that she sometimes believes and sometimes doesn’t ‘for quite long stretches’ etc etc. Plus the opportunities for religious theatre given by the Play and the carol service.

Though I am always interested in the fact that AF sketches in more than one reference to anti-semitism (Miranda talking about inviting people home in the holidays and them suddenly finding they can’t come because their mother’s going out, and the ‘common little soul with the perm and the Jaguar’ who never stops saying ‘Whose father’s a rich Jew, then?’), but we never get to see that in action. That ‘common’ girl (whose name escapes me? Yvonne?) never makes an explicit anti-Semitic remark in front of the reader, though we see her being explicitly unpleasant, on the first day of term, about Miranda’s wealth, by remarks about the ‘exclusive model’ (the green and black dress Miranda travelled to school in because the au pair packed her uniform in her trunk), and the obvious cost of the Disaster she later gives to Nicola.

(Incidentally, does this mean Miranda returned to school in a couture outfit?)

I am unreasonably desperate to read that link, but it keeps saying another user has it .... looking forward to it though, thank you!

Oh, you will enjoy it! As well as the cut parts from RAH, the conference papers are really interesting. AF lends herself really well to analysis! There's one by a senior naval type speculating on what sort of naval career Nicola could have in the modern Navy as it was at the time of publication, and another all about the various crushes that went on at Kingscote and how they compare to lesbian undertones in other girls' school fiction - I particularly liked those two, but they're all good.

I must read mine again. It was a birthday present from my mum who also likes AF, or at least she did before she lost her mind to dementia - I hadn't even known it was out - I remember my complete joy when I opened it and sat down to devour it.

Oh that's lovely @LookingThroughGlass - AF has always been a point of connection for me and my mum too. So funny really, because neither of us were (or indeed could have possibly been) reading them as contemporary children's fiction when they came out, but both got heavily into them when we were perhaps 14 and early 40s respectively.

My mum was born in the early 1940s, she introduced me to a lot of girls' fiction from the 1940s/50s and earlier. She was a great fan of Elinor Brent-Dyer, not just the Chalet books but her other girls' fiction, also Noel Streatfeild and Angela Brazil. 'A point of connection' is a great way to put it, it's exactly that. My mum and I always had similar tastes in books and music, whereas my sister has very few overlaps with us for some reason - she mainly seems to read non-fiction and American fiction.

(Edited to remove the inevitable auto-correct of 'Streatfeild')

Thank CHRIST she didn't end up calling it "The Snatch" 😂

Well that was fascinating, thank you. My god Rose and Chas in that timeline would have some justifiable beef with both their father and stepmother in adulthood wouldn't they?

Poor Nick - never a Christmas goes by but she loses an animal and has to repress all emotional response.

Mine has an almost complete collection of Brazil, Brent-Dyer etc - I never cared for those ones so much, but adored the Marlows and did read things like Trebizon and Malory Towers that were kind of tangential to the collection. Likewise with Streatfeild and the like. I realise now how relatively unusual it is for someone my age to have grown up with, as well as Judy Blume and so on, Streatfeild - and Anne and Pollyanna and Sara Crewe and so on.

Miranda's parents not at all like that! Mummy is madly much a zionist and always busy with committees. Daddy is the only one who comes to concerts etc.

Ohh yes. There's a great fanfic of this with them buying antiques together at the Trennels closedown sale.

Can't help feeling the rest of the Marlows didn't do much for Peter's sense of healthy masculinity by calling him Binks until he was 15. Although in RAH Giles gets called 'Gilly' doesn't he...
Meanwhile: Kay, Ro, Ann (no shortening, obvs, but never Annie either), Ginty/Gin, Nick/Nicky, Lawrie/Lal. No other cutesy nicknames except for poor old Binks.

Internet Archive works like an actual library, in that you ‘borrow’ a book and have exclusive access to that copy while you’re actively reading it (as shown by you tapping to turn over pages). However, if the current reader gets distracted or goes off to make dinner or answer the phone, their loan times out and you’ll be able to borrow.

As a writer I’m unreasonably pleased to see that earlier drafts (the cut scenes of RAH) are far less psychologically acute and beautifully written than the published text, so AF clearly worked hard and improved things draft by draft, rather than being one of those frightening writers whose first draft is acutely good and barely changes! I mean, I can see why she cut them.

Also, the lost MS of the Marlow novel after RAH plays on my imagination nearly as much as the (possible) lost MS of Emily Bronte’s second novel…

Also, the lost MS of the Marlow novel after RAH plays on my imagination nearly as much as the (possible) lost MS of Emily Bronte’s second novel…

Oh I know which I'd rather read! And it's not more shite about people going off and hanging the puppies when the author really wants you to hate them

Ha I'd much rather read another Marlow novel than another Wuthering Heights!

Yes, Mummy is a hard-ass and continually elsewhere, hard at work, never sounds all that keen on Miranda, liking her to be distracted with a million hobbies and commitments during school holidays, and apparently never comes to Kingscote while she and Nick are friends. Then again, AF does a bit of a line in self-involved/distracted, not obviously sympathetic mothers — Mrs Frewen, Mrs West, Mrs Merrick, Madame Orly, Pam Marlow, Karen as stepmother.

Monica's mother is the only nice one isn't she! And doesn't Tim only ever mention her father, not her mother? I think AF, like Nick (and indeed Nico in well-but-it's-limited Mask of the Apollo, though not with the same resonance), preferred boys.