Re: The End or the Beginning?


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Posted by Duncan on March 07, 2003 at 12:59:05 from 205.188.209.46 user Duncan.

In Reply to: Re: The End or the Beginning? posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on March 07, 2003 at 10:01:56:

It's funny isn't it? Picts and the Martyrs has always been one of my favourites and yet I know some people really never took to it.
For me, the ones I've only developed a passion for as a grown-up (and, I occasionally fear it to be a slightly detached academic passion, which is a shame)are the romances, Peter Duck and Missee Lee. I didn't really re-read them as a kid, or not very often. I suppose I would have to say Secret Water and the Picts and the Martyrs are my favourites, with Coot Club, Pigeon Post, Swallowdale and WDMTGTS running up close behind... But then, my love of birds and particularly divers helps Great Northern? along to place of prominance in any list. And then, when I'm reading Swallows and Amazons it's the best book ever written...

I think if you were giving the books to adults to enjoy as literature WDM and P&M would be those most likey to excite a grown-up interest, if that interest is not harnessed to childhood memories of the books, in whcih case S&A, etc. might come first. WDM is just such a neat piece of story-telling (that chapter when you're suddenly taken back to night at Pin Mill is one of the cleverest pieces of writing and pacing I've ever come across) and P&M works BECAUSE of all the grown-up concerns that Genia criticised it for, and because of little conflicts and resolutions of a psychological and social kind all around. The Great Aunt is the resident of an older society, long gone, who is rather adrift in a modern reality from which she tends to cocoon herself, and the Nancy of SA is fighting with a grown-up Nancy and arriving at a fascinating compromise of piratical solutions to grown-up crises. Wonderful stuff.


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