Posted by Joe Windsor on August 28, 2006 at 12:47:46 from 84.12.25.230 user Joe.
Getting back to AR and away from things that hurt, something has troubled me for ages. On p.299 of Hugh Brogan's Life of AR, Malcolm Muggerdge is quoted as saying:
Ransome never seemed to care much for children, which may well be a necessary qualification for writing successfully about and for them. Most adults like children because they are different from them; a child-like adult like Ransome dislikes them and is bored by them, precisely because he is like them. For that very reason, he can understand their games and attitudes as an adult cannot, and so his writings interest them'.
AR in-synch but out of sympathy?
AR within but apart?
AR uncaring but caring enough about his tales?
And is THIS the KEY REASON why the Ultimates keep refusing even the merest idea of a sequel - because they cannot imagine someone else with this discomfort about children who could create stories for children as gloriously as AR? If that's where they are coming from - I can fully understand that. It would make sense.
Is this the bar we must cross somehow to enable AR's young people (I can't call them children) to live again and flourish? Ideas, anyone? Joe