Posted by Peter Ceresole on August 04, 2013 at 02:26:46 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Thoughts After Another Re-Reading posted by Peter Hyland on August 03, 2013 at 09:41:51:
I see that the Bawdsey radio mast problem has been mentioned again!
I plead guilty (again). What I like about it especially is that it has to do with the reality of AR writing the stories (he calls them 'romances' doesn't he- I'm reading Hugh Brogan's splendid editing job in 'Signalling from Mars' where AR is longingly writing from Petersburg about how he's like to be shot of political journalism and get back to writing romances). There's always a danger in equating an author with their work, equating their reality with the world they describe, but when the stories are so good it's impossible to resist. I mean, I've cruised round Shotley with Google Street View, looking for the hospital Jim Brading might have been in during WD 'Lost! Two days and a boat'. There are a few that look as though they would have been there in the '30s. This is of course totally pointless, but I feel a warm involvement with one of my favourite AR chapters... The same goes for Bawdsey, after all one of the very few references that can be tied down in place and time. The fact that it doesn't fit with the internal timing of the books doesn't matter a bit. After all it's the books that are 'right'. As the writer X Trapnel says, in Anthony Powell's 'Dance to the music of Time'; "People think that because a novel's invented it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it's true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that ..."
Needless to say, I have to confess that Powell is really my favourite author- even ahead of AR- WHAM! Magic lightning from the sky! I am reduced to a pile of ashes...
And anyway, this is FUN.