Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on February 14, 2012 at 04:11:48 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Lesson learned or not? posted by Roger Wardale on February 11, 2012 at 06:39:28:
I beg to differ.
The internal evidence of all twelve novels is that Ransome did not go in for "fantasy stories", like "The Borrowers" or "The Hobbit", that required suspension of disbelief on a different plane because they were completely improbable by the lights of the 1930s.
Every story is grounded in things that were actually happening when they were written.
ML turns on the very real issue of China Coast piracy (see, eg, Aleko Lilius).
PD turns on the real possibility of sailing off to a tropical island to look for buried treasure just like EF Knight did long before (see, eg, Bob Roberts)
If some people like to see GN as a metafictional tale then Great Northern Divers could indeed nest in Scotland, as indeed they have done, since.
If people spent a little less time on the minutiae of Ransome's "life" and a little more on his "times" they would perhaps see this.