Re: motivation for


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on February 19, 2007 at 10:51:27 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Re: motivation for posted by PeterH on February 18, 2007 at 21:54:44:

I am not sure that there was any 'plot purpose', Ed - I reckon AR was just inking in a bit more of Dorothea for us.

He's filling in the picture of Dot, and maybe Captain Flint- or more realistically James Turner and a layer further down, AR himself.

'Riddle of the Sands' was a complicated book in that although it was an adventure romp with a great deal of detail and a lot of sailing in it, it was also a deeply political book which was warning of the threat from the emerging Germany. The traditional enemy was France, but after the German victory in the war of 1870, Childers was one of those warning about the new major power in Europe. There was a movement calling for reinforced defenses against invasion; that was the idea behind 'Riddle of the Sands'. There was a parallel movement which advocated that Britain should have an army capable of intervening on the Continent, which at that time, fresh from the revelations of military weakness and incompetence in the Boer War, it certainly did not. Childers' own position as an Irishman led to even greater complications in his case.

The arguments raged around the beginning of the 20th century and were deadly serious, involving questions of millions of pounds in spending on the Fleet and the Army. These are all things of which AR, along with any politically and militarily aware person at the time, would have been acutely conscious. Placing RoS on the houseboat shelves was a nice piece of background colour for CF, placing him in AR's world of awareness in his youth.

And it really isn't surprising that Dot wouldn't have found it to her taste; it's very much an adult book, rather technical and full of hard, unpleasant people. AR is defining her in the same passage; for the children reading WH, to whom this would have meant little, he provides a short explanation (maps, sailing, not her kind of book). For the grownups, a rounding out of the characters and their history. Skilfully and economically done- but then of course this is AR we're talking about...



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