Posted by Jock on August 25, 2008 at 10:56:52 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: Great Northern? Real! posted by Elizabeth on August 25, 2008 at 03:13:05:
I thought so too!
As they say in school essay tasks it's interesting to contrast and
compare PD, ML and GN.
In PD AR plays a little game with us as, at first glance, there is
nothing in the book to suggest that the story is metafictional.
For example, the fact that CF just happens to have provisioned
the Wild Cat for a transatlantic voyage is artfully explained.
In fact, the realism of the Lowestoft scenes, including the
recruitment of an experienced hand in the person of PD himself,
makes me think that originally the PD story was supposed
to be at the same level of reality as the other stories. This theory
is given some credence by the 'missing year'. SA takes place in
the summer of 1929, SD in the summer of 1931 so presumably
1930 was originally intended to be the date of the PD adventure.
AR liked to make his stories more real than reality and it would
have been a stretch too far, to have us believe that the parents of
the S's, and the A's mother, would have had no objection to CF
taking their offspring a third of the way round the world in a small
schooner. So, at some stage in its writing, AR decides to recast PD as
metafictional and adds an explanation. He abandons PD for a time
and gets on with the writing of SD where the text flows more freely
from his typewriter. He removes the labelling of PD as metafictional
from PD (his discarded text is rather heavy handed). He adds the
explanation as a signpost in SD where it is very skilfully and lightly
interwoven into the story. He then completes and publishes SD
before PD. He recasts his chronology. In SD he tells us that PD was
'made up' in the winter immediately after SA and that SD is
taking place a year after SA, but he forgets that he has already
made a reference to SD's action taking place in 1931 in accordance
with his earlier timeline.
PD establishes a convention or code which is repeated in ML.
The stories take place on the Wildcat. The Ss and As have their
dinghies Swallow and Amazon. While the action is realistic up to
a point, the stories incorporate some pretty dramatic 'special effects',
the waterspout and whirlpool. The length of the adventures takes no
account of the need of our heroes to attend school.
GN is not tagged with this code. There is no Wildcat or CF-owned
successor. Swallow and Amazon are missing. The action could have
occurred within the timespan of the Easter or Whitsun school holidays.
'Special effects' are conspicuous by their absence. It seems to me
that AR himself is telling us that GN is not to be regarded as in the
same class as PD and ML!