Posted by Peter Ceresole on February 28, 2010 at 11:40:11 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: PM review on Amazon - what a splendid review! posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on February 28, 2010 at 09:00:29:
The GA is indeed an invader. Nancy chooses to collaborate with the invader whilst organising a secret resistance. As a study of a population under occupation, this book is not bad at all!
I simply can't agree- I think this is an over-projection with hindsight. Which is what I meant when I said that I thought the review was in part a joke, a satire on excessive critical analysis. Of course it's a perfectly tenable view. I just disagree with it.
For me the main characteristic that Nancy displays in PM is a more developed form of her behaviour in previous books, not necessarily more mature; focused on operational questions, goal oriented, and unconventional. Her role as a hostess is an example of that. She enjoys being the hostess, but her decorations are skull and crossbones and Scarab flags, and her hostess skills are profoundly conventional, themselves a parody- and she and her guests are perfectly aware of that. And then she climbs down the rose trellis...
As for a description of a country under occupation, I really think that's dragged in by the short and curlies. I don't see AR thinking in those terms at all. His wellsprings were personal; the lakes, his imaginary ideal childhood, children in a state of innocence; he famously never managed to relate to his absent daughter except as a small child, even when she had grown up, and he fell out with the Altounians when they grew out of his control. I don't think he cared much about the occupation of countries, beyond the equivalent he'd seen when the Bolsheviks changed Russian society- or tried to, as it seems to have reverted fairly rapidly to a robber baron authoritarian state. To an extent that was an occupation, but I don't think he was writing about that at all in PM.