Something Old

“PETER’S ROOM” by Antonia Forest (first published 1961)

REVIEWED BY HARRY RICKETTS

Invited to write a “Something Old” for Reid’s Reader, Professor Harry Ricketts of Victoria University of Wellington has chosen to write about the series of children’s books written between 1948 and 1982 by “Antonia Forest” (pseudonym of Patricia Rubinstein, an English author of mixed Russian-Jewish and Irish parentage). Harry Ricketts calls his article :

Antonia Forest's Peter's Room and the Pleasures and Dangers of Gondalling

            I first came across Antonia Forest towards the end of 1994.

            My wife and I were spending Christmas at her elder sister's farm near Pahiatua. My sister-in-law's house was packed tight with guests, and we slept in the children's old games-room along with the pool table, the fading photos of school teams and other childhood memorabilia. Nothing I'd brought to read seemed quite right, so I scoured the games-room bookshelves, more in hope than expectation. And there, mixed in with various children's classics, were three Puffin paperbacks, Autumn Term, End of Term and The Cricket Term, by a writer called Antonia Forest. Being a cricket addict, I picked out The Cricket Term and couldn't put it down, had instantly to read another, and, when it came time to leave, I had to borrow the third unread volume. Back in Wellington, I soon discovered that there were more Antonia Forests in the public library, so I duly devoured those and have been a serious fan ever since. If it doesn't sound too grandiose to say so, Antonia Forest now seems to me the Jane Austen of YA fiction with all the subtlety, wit, textual richness, and social and emotional complexity, that such a claim implies.

            Forest wrote 13 novels in all, 10 about a large upper-middle-class naval English family called the Marlows. These were published over a 34-year period between 1948 and 1982. The Marlow novels alternate between life at an English girls boarding school called Kingscote and home life in the holidays. In fictional time, the novels cover a two-and-a-half year period. The central character is Nicola, 12 years old when the series begins. She and her twin sister Lawrie are the youngest of eight children. Nicola is an all-rounder, a perceptive coper and doer, usually in scrapes, and the series can be seen as in effect the beginnings of a Bildungsroman about her. We see Nicola's emerging moral consciousness as she encounters and deals with a range of character-testing and character-forming situations. Without ever turning into a goody-goody or a prig, she becomes for the reader a barometer of right and wrong choices, right and wrong actions and reactions. Peter's Room (1961), the fifth novel, is characteristic in this respect though highly distinctive in others.

            The novel takes place one freezing Christmas at Trennels, the Marlows' ancestral farm. The main characters are Nicola and Lawrie (nowthirteen), one of their two brothers Peter (fourteen) and one of their sisters Ginty (fifteen) - plus their neighbour Patrick (also fifteen, and Nicola's particular friend). Ginty has been set a holiday project on the Brontes and tells the others about the Brontes' imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. Bored and forced inside by the winter weather, they decide to invent their own Gondal equivalent, assigning themselves Gondalesque names and characters in an all-male story of aristocratic skullduggery and derring-do. Their adventures (Forest provides several vivid excerpts) involve a wicked regent who sends his nephew, the boy king, and a group of followers with secret dispatches to a neighbouring kingdom. Mountain passes, snowy wastes, falconry, ambushes await.

            Lawrie, Peter, Ginty and Patrick each select a name and identity which allow them to role-play alternative versions of themselves. Lawrie - in real life, whingeing, superstitious and easily frightened but a good actor - becomes Jason Exina, the boy king: cheerful and plucky in adversity. The mercurial Peter becomes Malise Douglas (Malise being the name of an English Civil War ancestor). For Ginty and Patrick, Gondalling opens up more intriguing possibilities. Pretty but flaky Ginty becomes Crispian de Samara who fantasises about a "David and Jonathan" relationship with Patrick's character Rupert Almeda. Patrick, for his part, finds it "imperative to explore, under cover of Rupert, the twilights of cowardice and betrayal". In a separate development Patrick and Ginty initiate a private Gondal of their own, in which Rupert and a new character Rosina (Ginty) carry on a clandestine flirtation.

            Only Nicola stands somewhat apart. A reluctant Gondaller, she becomes Nicholas Brenzaida ie a male version of herself. Keen on Patrick, she soon senses that he and Ginty are conducting some sort of secret game. In various scenes, we are made glancingly but poignantly aware of her bafflement and hurt at this discovery, and are on several occasions encouraged to approve of her guts and stoicism.

            As soon as the children start to Gondal in earnest, Forest's prose crackles with scepticism:

            "We simply must stop there," said Nicola firmly as the stable clock struck half past six on Saturday evening. "Supper's at a quarter to seven tonight ...."        The others came to themselves, blinking a little as if a light had suddenly been switched on. They always felt oddly fagged when it was time to stop and resume the everyday flatness of their ordinary selves.

            The warning note struck here is soon reinforced and developed. The following day there is a carefully loaded discussion between Ginty, Nicola and their eldest sister Karen, "down from her first term at Oxford". In the course of the discussion, Karen (entirely unaware of what the others are up to) delivers an impromptu potted lecture on how for the Brontes Gondalling became both dangerous and addictive. To Ginty's consternation, Karen even suggests that, for Emily, Gondalling became a kind of imaginative equivalent to Branwell's drunkenness and drug-taking, a compensation for life or substitute for it or both. Ginty, aghast, refuses to accept this toughly anti-romantic view. The novel, however, increasingly seems to endorse Karen's verdict that

" 'most people Gondal after a fashion when they're young - Cowboys and Injins and such. It was just that the Brontes went on for longer than was reasonable.' "

            The denouement comes when, in the teenagers' made-up Gondal, the traitor Rupert Almeda is captured just as he is about to assassinate the boy king Jason. Rupert now faces the prospect of being burnt alive. To the dismay of the others, Patrick announces that his character Rupert is going to shoot himself and puts the muzzle of a (supposedly unloaded) antique pistol to his head. He is about to pull the trigger when Nicola, "suddenly panic-stricken", knocks the pistol out of his hand "with the hilt of the heavy sword she had been holding as Nicholas":

  Whereupon a number of things happened all together.

            Patrick exclaimed and doubled over, clutching his wrist: the pistol struck the edge of the table: there was a flash: the window-pane behind Lawrie's head starred and splintered: the explosion roared: the dogs woke and burst into hysterical barking: the cold bright air rushed through the broken pane: and from the spinney a furious voice shouted, "Hey! Stop that! What on earth d'you think you're playing at?"

Gondalling has got almost fatally out of hand, and only Nicola's quick action saves Patrick's life. Her immediate reaction echoes that of Karen earlier: "'I think those Brontes of Gin's must have been absolutely mental, still doing it when they were thirty, nearly!'" And with that, Nicola literally walks out on the fantasy.

This is not, however, quite where the novel ends. It concludes with Patrick and Ginty disconsolately mourning the loss of Gondal and their alter egos, and brought to the reluctant realisation that "from now on ordinary, everyday life would have to serve". This downbeat ending seems doubly appropriate. It allows the two characters a moment of Romantic tristesse but also suggests Forest's awareness that her own Marlowing is a form of Gondalling. Quite literally so. Forest was born Patricia Guilia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein, of Irish and Russian Jewish extraction, and her London upbringing had about as much in common with that of the upper-middle-class Marlows as the Brontes' had with their Angrians and Gondals.

            The point also holds true on a more subliminal level: writing and reading fiction can themselves be seen acts of Gondalling from which author and reader must (however reluctantly) eventually withdraw. When Forest's characters lament to themselves after a stint of Gondalling, " 'It's queer how real our people got' ", their response can be thought to reflect the feelings of both author and reader: Forest's sense of loss on emerging from the spell of composition and the reader's on emerging from the spell of reading. While Nicola embodies Forest's sense of the dangers of fantasy taken too far, the shiftier Patrick and Ginty more closely mirror what author and reader feel on closing this terrific novel.

                        - Harry Ricketts

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature,

history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

THE BOOK, NOT THE BANNING

            I went on far too long this week in considering Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, so my homily for the week will be very short.

            My reflection is simply this – that an author or thinker is persecuted or harassed does not automatically put that author or thinker above criticism.

            Salman Rushdie spent a decade dodging the fatwa that was meant to kill him. For that he has (I hope) our profoundest sympathy. But this does not mean that we switch off our critical faculties when we sit down to read a Salman Rushdie novel. I think of my own mixed reactions to the man’s work. Midnight’s Children? Pure delight. The Moor’s Last Sigh? I didn’t engage with it. Fury? Yawn. Joseph Anton? Needed a damned good edit. If I wished to, I could defend each of these reactions at length. They are not born of hostility to Rushdie personally or a lack of feeling for his difficulties. They are reactions to his books. The life is not the same as the work and feeling about the one has to be separated from reaction to the other.

            The critic Walter Benjamin was Jewish and was driven to suicide as the Nazis closed in on him. Sympathy for his tragedy and personal circumstances? Of course. Agreement with his critical theories? Not always. He could be pompous and could obfuscate and he never really did work out a proper response to the delight factor in great literature. Sorry to say this, but even being persecuted by the Nazis does not automatically transform one into a saint or infallible sage. Refer last sentence previous paragraph.

            So I could fill up pages with further examples.

            Of course this is just a variation on my earlier posting “The Song Not the Singer” [see index at right]. How nice or nasty the author of a book is should have nothing to do with our critical response to the book itself.

            But there is a particular inflection here. We all feel morally inferior to those who have suffered. We know we should defer to them and treat them with respect. Therefore, we might be inclined to listen to dodgy ideas they express, because their suffering was undeserved.

            In his recanting book Radical [see index at right] the former Islamicist extremist Maajid Nawaz praises Amnesty International, which supported him when he was imprisoned. But he notes that – along with many genuinely admirable people, of course -  AI’s “prisoners of conscience” also include a number of fanatics who preach destructive creeds. The criterion for being a “prisoner of conscience” is simply that one has not committed violence in furthering a cause. The quality of the cause itself is not questioned.

            Result? After release, former AI “prisoners of conscience” are accorded great respect for their sufferings, and this is falsely taken as an endorsement of whatever they are selling. The fanatical ones therefore face less forthright criticism as they go about preaching hatred and so forth.

            Their ideologies should no more be judged on the basis of our feelings about their lives than the work of novelists should be.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“TICKET TO PARADISE” by Ben Stubbs (ABC Books – Harper/Collins, $NZ34:99)

            As any modern writer of travel books knows, you cannot now serve up books that simply describe foreign sights and sounds, or ask readers to gasp at what is exotic. Too many travelogues and TV documentaries have been made for such an approach to justify a book. Leave the bland descriptions and listings to tourist guides, Lonely Planet handbooks and private travel blogs. A full-length travel book, intended to be read from cover to cover, has to have a gimmick, or at least a hook of some sort, to justify the book-length narrative.

            In his first book, the young Australian travel writer Ben Stubbs has a very good hook indeed. He wasn’t just travelling to Paraguay to take in the scenery. He was travelling there to find out what became of the descendants of a bunch of idealistic Aussie socialists, who went to Paraguay over a century ago to set up a perfect community.

            Ticket to Paradise cuts back and forth between slices of Paraguayan history, and the author’s experience of modern Paraguay, or “el culo del mundo” (“the arsehole of the world”) as other Hispanics sometimes rudely call it.

            In 1891, after the cockies, squatters and army had broken the big shearers’ strike in Australia, the radical socialist journalist William Lane persuaded over 200 Australians that they could build a socialist paradise in some isolated corner of the world, far from capitalist bosses. After some scouting, they found a place in deepest Paraguay. The Paraguayan government was ready to unload it for free. (Shattered by a genocidal war a few years before, the Paraguayan government was anxious to assist anyone who would help them repopulate.)

            In 1893, the Australians arrived and began to set up “New Australia”.

            William Lane had that odd mixture of  genuine communitarianism and white-supremacist racism which was common to many working-class movements in the late nineteenth century. His original rules told the settlers “It is right living to share equally because selfishness is wrong; to teetotal because liquor drinking is wrong; to uphold marriage and keep white because looseness of living is wrong.” [quoted Page 19]. So he expected all the males of the community to drink no alcohol and to shun native Paraguayan women – especially the Guarani Indians, whose land they were really taking over. As Stubbs puts it: “Despite the Guarani’s claim to the area, Lane and his Utopians simply couldn’t cohabit, as these dark-skinned natives would cloud their precious colour line and break rule three of their racist creed”. [Page 72]

            Inevitable tensions arose, and in a very few years the mass of Aussie settlers had rebelled against Lane’s autocratic rule and reverted to capitalist ways of private ownership – as well as drinking whisky and taking Paraguayan wives and mistresses. The minority who remained loyal to Lane’s vision hived off to form their own true socialist community which they called New London. But this too fell apart after Lane himself gave up and left. By 1908 all lands of the two Aussie settlements were divvied up for private ownership and only a third little settlement called Cosme was trying to wave the red flag.

            New Zealanders will have a horse laugh when they discover that William Lane gave up his original socialism. He became a staunch conservative and upholder of the British Empire and white overlordship. In his later years he settled in Auckland and during the First World War became editor of a rag that then supported his new creed – the New Zealand Herald.

            So where does this leave the young travel writer in 2010, as he visits the descendants of the Aussie settlers? He finds some people who speak only Guarani or Spanish, but have names like Smith, Kennedy and Casey. He finds very ambiguous attitudes towards Australia. Many descendants profess to be not in the least interested in their Australian ancestry. Others are angry that Australia still has no official representation or consulate in Paraguay, so it is impossible for them to establish Australian links. Most think of themselves as Paraguayans. Some have enough ancestral knowledge to make wry comments. One descendant says of the Utopian enterprise: “They were looking for an impossible dream. Single men used to shearing sheep and drinking beer all of a sudden expected to act like squires.” [Pg.212]

            Stubbs is rather alarmed to discover that a number of these Aussie-Paraguayans, living in an isolated area far from the city, tell him that things were a lot better for them under the long and brutal dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1953-89). Then, they say, they knew where they stood and they were left in peace. Now, with Paraguay’s very shaky democracy, there is corruption everywhere, public officials are slacker and more palms have to be greased to get things done.

            Stubbs is an amiable guide and a fluent speaker of Spanish who obviously has an emotional connection to South America. A couple of times he tells us that his wife is Argentinian. Before the book gets to Paraguay, it lingers first in Buenos Aires and then in Montevideo. There are times when Stubbs’ writing can go slack and dip into purple clichés, as in the first part of the following:

            “Buenos Aires is one of the world’s most intoxicating cities, known for its football, curvaceous women, tango, passion, carnivorous delights and the arrogance of the beautiful people. Portenos (the people of the port, as they call it in Buenos Aires) call it the Paris of South America; most Argentinians have never been to France and they don’t feel the need to confirm the description. My wife often delights in telling me that ‘God is everywhere, Ben, but of course he has his office in Buenos Aires’ ” [Page 35]

            As he reaches the end of his journey, there are also signs of a little exasperation with Paraguayan ways, and a growing homesickness for Oz, as when he tells us:

            “In Australia the road rules are easy. You drive in your lane, you use your blinkers to indicate, and you use the horn to get attention. In Paraguay, things are much more fluid. Traffic lights are suggestions rather than impediments, people drive two to a lane or wherever they are comfortable, and seatbelts are only used in the front seats – and  fitted more for police to make pocket money than as a safety device.” [Pg.236]

            The toxic-smelling grot of the huge slums; the sense of menace in the cities; the sweaty “green hell” of the Chaco; the crudity of a local bullfight – this is all conveyed vividly enough.

            I would have to add, however, that the last sixty pages of this 300-page book seem a bit of an afterthought.

            Having dealt with Paraguay’s general history, and the general history of the Australian Utopias there, Stubbs devotes five swift, magazine-article-like chapters to other groups who have attempted to set up ideal communities in Paraguay. First the Jesuit “reductions” three hundred years ago, which attempted to protect the native tribes from the worst predations of European slave-traders, until the King of Spain put the boot in and expelled the Jesuits from Spanish territories. Then a moderately successful settlement of Japanese after the First World War. Then the terrifying “New Germany” colony that was planted by Friedrich Nietszche’s sister among others (anti-Semitic and pure Aryan, it lasted long enough to be a haven for at least some fleeing Nazis after the Second World War). Then a chapter on a formerly-cannibal tribe, the Ache. And finally the terribly efficient (and Indian-exploiting) Mennonite community, derived from a German Anabaptist sect.

            I think the author dashes through these things a little impatiently, and without making the same connections he makes in the “Australian” bits.

            Ticket to Paradise still justifies itself as the new style travel book which expresses an attitude and has more to offer than a naïve gasp at exotic peculiarities.