Posted by Peter Ceresole on February 22, 2010 at 17:32:14 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Here we go again; Best books and why? posted by Adam Quinan on February 22, 2010 at 15:52:32:
I also like Peter Duck, the first I ever read, mostly for the sailing down Channel scenes at the start and back again at the finish.
Oh yes, the night sail down channel is a wonderful sequence, one of his very best, but the 'fantasy' stories, which I quite enjoyed as a child, now seem to me to be too... Fantastic.
I love the grounding in real life that articulates the other books to reality- that feeling that real feet are really jumping on and off real dinghies, the real sound of real children running along wooden piers in Bowness, with the smell of the water, and the tar from the boat sheds.
I never really took to the Norfolk pair in the same way.
I can understand why you feel that way. The Norfolk books need reading with more care; they are more story led, less loving recreations of AR's own childhood feelings. There's a passage in PM before things have gone wrong, where Dorothea is settling down to sleep for the first night in Beckfoot, which lyrically evokes what I am sure were AR's own thoughts and feelings when as a child he used to arrive by the lake. My favourite passage in any of the books...
That sheer love of place is inevitably missing in the 'non-Lake' books, and I think it shows. Mind you, one of the finest sequences in any book is when, in the epilogue to BS, the owner of the Cachalot takes the D&Gs to the Roaring Donkey to witness the installation of the World's Whopper- and they are totally bemused by the whole thing. The old fisherman learns that they caught the pike and says 'Poor lads, so young and nothing left to live for'. As a child I simply didn't understand that remark; it was years before I got the point. But I still enjoyed the book.
I do like Great Northern? and prefer it to the Norfolk books and Missee Lee.
I never really enjoyed GN, and ML is the only book I have lost; not on purpose, but I suspect it's significant. Tales of foreign parts aren't what I feel makes AR great- although PD is substantially not foreign but based on the Wild Cat, which is a mobile bit of Lakeland, and I think PD is the best of the 'invented' books. Of course in PP for example, a bit of romantic byplay in which CF recalls discussing copper with Timothy in the hills above Pernambuco helps wonderfully to establish atmosphere, but real life is on the fells above Windermere.