"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)

Oh yes and Lawrie thinks it’s a bond between them because ‘Failure’ must mean her parents were also disappointed she wasn’t a boy. Lawrie being Lawrence because they had it all saved up and couldn’t bear to waste it. What a message to give a child. Couldn’t they have turned it into Florence, or Laura, or Laurel? Useless pair.

@Benvenuto ( obviously also a great feline) I agree that we are much more sensitive to age -gap relationships now, but the Tom/Polly friendship just never struck me as inappropriate. There’s a podcast on DWJ called Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones . Their discussion of FAH is interesting though I don’t agree with all their views. The Backlisted podcast also has a discussion of it. There’s just so much in that book.

Sprog's death is heartbreaking - there's a line that says '..putting out a finger for a last tickle of Sprog's breast feathers...' during the last time she takes him back to The Mews which is foreboding his death during the night but you don't realise it at the time.

The geese should have been Nicolas! In my mind they are on a par with the wild gallop back home from their day out and the night they sleep in the haystack

There's another great line that sums this up in Attic Term. It's the morning when Ginty has to go home because she hasn't packed so Nicola ends up spending a companionable morning with Patrick - when she goes home (after having to be phoned for and run home in the landcover) Ginty is furious and asks what they'd been doing - just talking, she says and thinks like when we were properly friends

Found it

“Then what were you doing?”
“Nothing special. Just talking.” Talking like when we were properly friends, she thought: and a bubble of happiness seemed to break at the back of her throat.

I think Nicola feels Patrick's deflection to Ginty as a huge and hurtful betrayal.

Is anyone a KM Peyton fan?

I love her books - again, beautifully portrayed characters. Not quite AF standard but superior to so many other children's authors

@TarquinGyrfalcon me! Started with Pennington and went back into her other books including Flambards.

It was a close race between Peter’s Room and The Ready Made Family for me. There are so many different strands to consider. My favourite DWJ is Fire and Hemlock for the same reasons others have mentioned. Witch Week is underrated - tinned tomatoes - but every Chrestomanci book is superb. I love that there are so many of us who enjoy these books. I haven’t ever been able to discuss them in real life!

The description of when Cousin Jon died in Falconer’s Lure is also very good. It shows the suddenness of death very well.

There’s a very good bit in Peter’s Room where Patrick nearly jumps on Nicola during the hunt and Nicola realises that he has his ‘Rupert face’ on. This really scares her , as it should, because it shows how, particularly for Patrick, the fantasy has become more important than reality.

Changeover is on Internet Archive, by the way!

I have an eternal question about K M Peyton. Perhaps there are people here who can answer it.

Peyton was a friend of Antonia Forest's, and she admired Forest's work. I read, on Trennels I think, that she had said that her Peter (in the Ruth / Jonathan Meredith strand of her books) was in fact Peter Marlow, copied in a different setting.

I absolutely cannot see any resemblance beyond the name. Has anyone heard this? Can anyone tell me what I am missing?

Yes, why does Tim prefer Lawrie? There’s certainly a comment fairly early on from her POV that you couldn’t have one twin without the other, but of course that changes quite sharply, and she definitely chooses one and not the other. Does she prefer Lawrie before The Prince and the Pauper, or is whoever says she does ‘My Friend the Actress’ (Miranda?) right, and she only becomes Laurie’s friend after she’s established as an unusually good actress?

I mean, I enjoy Laurie’s babyish dithers and weird patches of ignorance as a change from the masterful Nick/Rowan/Giles end of the Marlows (and even, to an extent, Peter, Karen and Ann), but Tim is a spiky, combative character, popular, influential, managerial, rather cruel, intolerant of ‘rabbits’ wibbling — so why doesn’t she think Lawrie is just another slightly babyish dumbo, bar her membership of the Kingscote Royal Family, and her acting talent?

Possibly it’s because Lawrie needs Tim ( ‘the only person in this beastly place who ever knows what I’m talking about’ or words to that effect) and it’s always nice for a certain type of personality to be needed. Tim doesn’t seem to have many other friends- she’s too spiky.

is whoever says she does ‘My Friend the Actress’ (Miranda?) right, and she only becomes Laurie’s friend after she’s established as an unusually good actress?

I think there's an element of that.

I think Tim views herself as a creative, artistic type and sees Lawrie as the same. Nicola is a bit too jolly-hockey-sticks and Navy for her.

I started with Flambards moving onto the Ruth Hollis/Peter Mcnair/Jonathan Meredith books and then Pennington

I love the Pennington/Ruth crossover.

Ruth is so well written, all the angst and pain of being a teenager beautifully portrayed

Interesting question!

I don't think they are the same character - although I do like and sympathise with both.

Peter McNair is far less of a dreamer than Peter Marlow and has had a much harder life. Dead mum, difficult and harsh dad - mellows after he marries the fat Italian singer, but is still strict with him.

I don't think it's being artistic, exactly that makes Tim prefer Lawrie (Autumn Term: "Father's not at all artistic. Father paints"). But I think she sees in Lawrie something of the snarky outsider personality that Tim likes. Lawrie doesn't "do [the] Marlow thing" of being "terribly terrible keen and terribly terribly competent" which I think Tim recognizes, sometime resents, sometimes envies, and only really finds tolerable in Nicola by the time we get to Cricket Term.

Lawrie is amusing - she does impressions and 'bits' - and she doesn't try to be good at things she doesn't care about - like Tim. I suspect Tim knows if she was up against Nicola in almost anything that mattered, she would lose, and she isn't up for that. But she and Lawrie can snark and be a bit irreverent and insincere together, and Lawrie is also a genius and exceptional in ways Tim finds acceptable and interesting: better to be a once-in-a-lifetime Shepherd Boy than a highly competent netball player, in Tim's worldview.

Tim very strongly rejects the code of the schoolgirl, per school books. They all do to an extent, but Tim most overtly. See: when Lois asks her if she's happened upon an epidemic of cribbing in the Thirds and should she Go and Sneak - and Tim uncomfortably recognizes something of herself in that ironic satirical detachment. Nicola is more likely actually to be troubled by such an epidemic - Lawrie wouldn't care at all.

Basically Tim and Lawrie are Chaotic Neutral and Nicola is Lawful Good (95% of the time) and Chaotic Good the other 5%

I love this and now want to know all the Forest characters’ D&D alignments! What on earth would Lois Sanger be?

Lois - neutral evil I think?

Yes, or lawful evil. She does enjoy sucking up to authority.

Ann - Lawful Good, obvs. Probably Esther, too
Everyone involved in the Edward Oeschli drama in RAH - neutral good at best
Rowan - Neutral Good (lippy to fool the coppers but disapproves of Lois ever-so-carefully breaking her ankle before every match, takes Nicola for a sundae and a milkshake to make the most of only being allowed to be taken out by a senior twice in a term)
Tim - True Neutral
Giles - neutral good? mutton and mint sauce...
Ginty - True Neutral (it's literally 'evens whether she goes to the good or bad'. When she's playing Mary Nick doesn't dare tell her about the netball swap because she's gone all lawful, but by Attic Term she's bending and breaking the rules all over the place)

Yes true - and she's aware of the 'law' that means by being narrator she'll be accused of doing a popularity hunt among the Thirds, but decides she doesn't care....

Lawful neutral, maybe