Posted by Andy on April 21, 2009 at 08:38:35 user AndyG.
In Reply to: Peter Duck - an alternative. posted by Owen Roberts on April 20, 2009 at 00:53:09:
Peter Duck would have worked so much better had it followed the original idea of "made-up story on a (non-summer) break aboard a wherry". Neatly squeezed in between Swallows and Amazons and Swallowdale.
In Ransome's short story, Two Shorts and a Long, there's a similar structure to this - the yachtsman/author and hired hand are stuck in a fog. The scene, minimalist as it is, is set. Hired hand then goes on to tell the tale of his last employer standing into danger...
As published, after Peter Duck's rewrite to fit a stand-alone format, my recent re-reading (for the first time in perhaps twenty years) made me realise that its first couple of chapters just don't mesh well with what follows. The shove into some alternative "reality" - albeit one explained by Titty in Swallowdale - and host of unlikely events easily place this book in my bottom three.
I'd much sooner have had "scene setting" on the Broads, meeting Peter Duck (for it is his wherry), his tales of ocean sailing, and Captain Flint spinning the yarn - no doubt with input from the children and PD - on the back of this. Then I would have enjoyed the waterspouts, earthquakes and pirates...and would forgive the "why not cut the Viper's hawser?" that (surely?) we would all have done.