Re: AR reading years (The Cook abd the Captain)


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on March 29, 2008 at 07:42:06 from 80.176.146.133 user PeterC.

In Reply to: Re: AR reading years (was Dick's camera) posted by Jock on March 28, 2008 at 22:00:16:

I enjoyed it, but I was too young to realise that the Captain and the Cook were having an affair.

Exactly the same was true for me. I suspect that most children wouldn't have been able to make head or tail of it. What specially puzzled me was that somehow the cook was there, but not there. Had no other role or relationship. Was in none of the photos, while the Ancient featured largely... That seemed very odd to me, and meant that pretty well for ever, there was a curious unresolved element to 'Racundra' that affected the way I felt about the book. For me it was a 'sleeper'; I loved the stories within it but it never really came to life until, decades later, I visited Helsinki.

Of course you could argue (I would) that 'Racundra' wasn't written for children. It seems to me to be quite representative of travel books of the time- including that reticence in describing relationships between men and women- especially, of course, given AR's strained and complicated personal life at the time before his divorce. For another example of this kind of reticence there's Peter Fleming's book 'News from Tartary' when he walked across Tibet with Ella Maillart. I remember reading it as a teenager and being surprised that he never mentioned her real name. There was never any hint of impropriety, but he gave her a made-up name. I only found out who it was years later, when I was reading a biography about her as an adventurer and photographer (she did quite a bit of sailing too).


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