Re: Can't Go Home Again


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on January 02, 2005 at 20:31:11 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Can't Go Home Again posted by Ed Kiser on January 02, 2005 at 23:08:30:

We knew they made it back to The Island, but we, the readers,
never did.

As so often, it's all down to the mucky business of writing. AR had his annual task- to produce 300 or so pages that would keep Cape off his back and him and Evgenya in comfort. I dare say that he also wanted the stories to please himself, to avoid boring himself. He'd 'been to' the island, done that, needed something new to keep the readers faithful.

But as a light in the distance, the ideal of Island life was a powerful device. He knew all about it, having felt the lure of the idealised Lakes in his Russian exile; in fact the whole beginning of PM with the renewing of contact by the Ds, Dorothea at Beckfoot relaxing into a sensual daze of pleasure as she slips into sleep with the call of the owl and the smell of new-mown hay (PM JC 1948 p.26), strikes me as one of the most powerful personal moments that Ransome wrote in any of the books.

But he had a readership to satisfy, and as the skilled craftsman he was, he got on with the knitting.


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