Posted by andyb on March 27, 2006 at 23:06:53 from 213.122.57.148 user beardbiter.
In Reply to: Re: Missee Lee and Peter Duck posted by Fiona on March 26, 2006 at 19:29:29:
"Peter Duck is a metafictional book in the Swallows and Amazons series" so sayeth Wikipedia in a fall and account of the novel. Anyone care to admit to writing it (the Wikipedia entry that is)?
It's hard to say whether most AR aficionados would have agreed that PD, ML and GN were 'metafictional' prior to the publication of Captain Flint’s Trunk in 1984. Back then there was no TARS and no Tarboard so few of us had the opportunity to talk about “all things Ransome” with anyone else who knew or cared about them.
I’m pretty sure, however, that I had long come to the conclusion that PD was a story within a story, as we are told as much in SD. And if PD is a story, ML, which seems a sequel to it (without PD himself) surely is to. As a child, the Lakes, Broads and East Coast books had seemed “real” to me in away which high jinks on the ocean wave never could.
Christina Hardyment reinforced the view that PD and ML were “stories” by providing the first few chapters of the story of that story telling. She also added GN to the list of fantasies.
I was attracted to her argument because GN is my least favourite of the canon and as the “metafictions” were less “real” they had long occupied a lower rank in my Ransome hierarchy. Also, there are some troublesome details in GN, (to do with school holidays and midges, rather than with guns in my view) which make it less plausible than the other books with British settings.
Now I quite agree that all the books are stories, all fictional and all to a greater or lesser degree implausible but as a child the possibility that SA, CC, SW and the rest “could be true” was very important to me. (Probably still is or I wouldn’t be bothering to write this).
There are a few scraps of internal evidence that GN belongs with PD and ML. Isn’t Dot reported as thinking about how much more experienced sailors the Ss and As are? And the action bears this out with Nancy’s expertise with the lead. Where did she learn this? Not in Amazon on the Lake. Except for in PD and ML, the only time Nancy sets sail on saltwater is in SW and then she hardly has time to learn the skills of offshore cruising in a boat a good deal bigger than Amazon.
I agree that this is evidence is at best suggestive, Nancy’s and Dot’s characters are such that Nancy would appear confident and competent at most activities and Dot would think her so even if Nancy were not.
Can anyone else think of any internal evidence from the books to suggest that some of the other stories are metafictional? There is a lot in SD but I don’t remember any direct references to PD in any of the others and none to ML or GN although this is hardly surprising given their places in the chronology.