Should I re-read Peter Duck, Misee Lee etc


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Posted by John Richardson on November 06, 1998 at 22:53:15:

Did anyone like the 'problem books' more on a second reading?

I've just been doing Tim John's quiz (Three Billion Cheers) and most times I couldn't get an answer I guessed 'Peter Duck' or 'Misee Lee' or, most desperately, 'Great Northern'. BTW, I'm sure PD was not over-represented but it began to feel like it!

Point is, PD, ML and GN? are my least favourite Ransomes and I know from skimming TarBoard this last year I'm not alone. I enjoyed them when I read all the books for the first time (in sequence between ages 7 and 9), but I have never re-read them: and by now (25 years old), I have re-read most of the others at least twice - plus constant dipping.

This, from the lapsed messages, is typical:
"on the subject of rereading Peter Duck, which I did not so long ago. It was certainly the Arthur Ransome book I least enjoyed when I was young ( about equal with Missee Lee, I recollect)." (Kate Crosby)

And the reasons are that they are fantasies and/or occupy an uncertain place in the chronology: PD is subtly refered to in Swallowdale as just, well, 'Peter Duck'. It is explicitly a fantasy: a Winter's Tale - in the full Shakesperean sense - told in a wherry on the Broads. This also we can infer - just - from the text of Swallowdale. (It escaped me as a child: I needed Christina Hardyment's help!). In that sense it justifies itself in the scheme of things, though the divergence between published and internal chronology (PD is set in the winter BETWEEN S&A and Swallowdale) adds (unintentionally, presumably) to the mystery.

ML seems to be completely outside time. Another story invented by the children and Capt. Flint? No, the children are older and Misee Lee seems to have no imaginative source in the mind even of Titty. No, ML is completely Ransome's own story...

And what of GN? This one, I have always felt, is unlike PD & ML in the sense that Ransome means us to take it as 'realistic' in the sense that the others are (and it is most like his best book, WDMTGTS, in the reality of the challenge). And yet AR, this once, fails to convince. I count it an artistic failure, by AR's own high standards.

So, I ask again. For those of you who - like me - liked these three least on first reading, but - unlike me - have read them again (maybe as an adult): did you subsequently reassess them?

I'm bound to read them again sometime. But it has always struck me as peverse that the books' original reviewers seemed to rate PD & ML amongst Ransome's finest.


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