Posted by Peter Ceresole on August 03, 2003 at 13:04:32 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: 'Marxist nonsense' posted by andy bolger on August 03, 2003 at 10:07:38:
do you think it is possible to be an honourable Catholic?
Hang on a bit.
I was posting because it seems to me that AR couldn't possibly have been apolitical, but that's because of his personal history and the circumstances of the time. In his books, which is what interests me when I'm here, there's no overt trace of politics. There's not even a sense that his characters are living in the course, and the aftermath, of one of the great economic crises of the 20th century- and that's quite reasonable. His books describe a bourgeois world, and for a considerable proportion of the middle classes in Britain, the '30s were a time of prosperity, not of misery. And it's clear too that the Lakeland books started out from a personal sense of delight, possibly of relief at creating a world that was free of the crises that he had observed for years at first hand. He set his stories in Coniston, not in Wigan; he left that to Orwell...
It also seems likely that he had quite a good instinct for what his readership might want.
Maybe I shouldn't have responded to the Marxism point, especially as it's a discussion that crops up again and again on Usenet. There are plenty of places to discuss the rights and wrongs of the world; I too was a journo for several decades (in television) and frankly I agree with AR; not here please.