Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on May 11, 2001 at 18:00:25 from 152.163.207.67:
In Reply to: FOR EVER posted by Ed Kiser on March 24, 2001 at 03:18:10:
A very good bit of criticism indeed. I think you have put your finger very accurately on what is almost the very soul of these books - AR's nostalgia for the happy childhood that he might have had. There is, espescially in SA, where you have found FOR EVER to occur most often, an almost over-intense yearning for it, and that book has a poetic quality about it that the others lack. As a child, I could not bear to re-read SA, although I read the others almost constantly, because SA, with its intense nostalgia, made me feel desperately sad. The later lake books, in which the Wild Cat Island paradise is not recaptured, somehow "frame" the experience of SA, and this is a part of their appeal.
AR wanted, subsonsciously I am sure, the experience to be "real" and "for ever".