Peter's Room, by Antonia Forest

When rachelmanija wrote about The Twelve and the Genii I went to look for it in a local second hand shop, and there it was, the only thing by its author (who is Penelope Farmer, by the by; if it's much like A Castle of Bone I'll be surprised*). And there Peter's Room was too, the only thing by its author -- which seems providential, since they're both books centred on the Brontës, specifically the countries the Brontës' invented together, Angria and Gondal.

It also seemed providential because one scarcely ever runs into the Marlows in second hand shops, although I'm always looking.** They're one of my favourite fictional families, and come down to me from both sides of my family -- I think between the Larsen and the Kingsbury collections I have access to a full set, but they're precious books that cannot be borrowed without great care, so I'm accumulating. Some of the Marlow books are set at at an all-girls English boarding school, and some of them, like this one, are set in the holidays at home. The characters are so very themselves all the time -- not that I've ever known a family with as many siblings as the Marlows have (eight? Am I missing one?) but they feel very real as they joke and bicker and grumble and love/like/admire/tolerate/confuse each other. I tried to write descriptions of them, but it doesn't seem close to enough to say that Ann is mild and good and generally out of the main line of plot and confusing to central fallibly-sensible Nicola, who doesn't know why you'd make someone's bed for them unprovoked, and who admires Nelson tremendously and her Naval elder brother Giles only a little less, and is the twin of Lawrie, talented actress who dithers and complains and uses her emotions for effect, but sometimes stops if she notices she's in the wrong (or else it isn't working). Perfectly serviceable descriptions; the problem with them is that these are the sorts of characters who come through in everything they do, and I can't really write out an explanation of how Peter climbs stairs in a way that is Peterish, it would take far too many words and be beside the point anyway.

This is the book where, given a holiday, and the odd little disused room they've discovered, and terrible weather, the younger Marlow children, Peter and Ginty and Lawrie and Nicola, start talking about the Brontës, and decide to start up a Gondal of their own. They each bring a different kind of enthusiasm to it: Lawrie who has a very strong idea of how excellent a person her boy king is and resists all suggestions that making him a bit feckless would be narratively convenient, Peter who really wants to be a particular ancestor of his from the Civil War but is putting the character in the Gondal as best he can, Nicola who actually has no enthusiasm at all but joins in because otherwise she'll have nothing to do and no one to do it with... The process of their coming up with the plot together, where shall we set it, how about this, no, how about this, is exactly right, the way the story ends up tracing a line of greatest intensity through the possibilities of landscape and villains and heroism and treachery, so that the rest of life comes to seem like the filler between important bits of Gondaling.

Which may not, in the end, be a good thing. The back cover of this 2000s edition preserves the wonderfully moralising original text: "As usual, there is more in Miss Forest's story than appears on the surface, and this time ... she gives a clear warning of the dangers inherent in make-believe prolonged beyond the proper age." The book probably does come down closer to that than to any other one-sided position -- first in a long conversation about whether Angria and Gondal were good or bad for the Brontës, and then, more powerfully, in the playing out of the Marlows' own Gondal -- but unlike her cover-copy writers, Forest almost always does well by both sides of an argument, and lets characters stand on each side. Which means the events of the book don't feel like a boot kicking a moral into your face, they feel like one specific set of bittersweet events. More bittersweet than I remembered -- I found it quite hard to read the end, which I hadn't expected.

(I was thinking 'Fantasy novels don't tend to have this slant on the fantasy of imagination', but actually it's treated in quite a similar way in A Castle of Bone, though the tone is wildly different).

Alongside and woven through the imaginary game -- and taking up as much or more of the book -- there is also the kind of English childhood where everyone automatically has penknives, and there's hunting, and falconry, and a countryside where the farm logs go back to the sixteen hundreds (not because that's when the farm began but because that's when literacy arrived on it), and family members who aren't in the Gondal are doing a lot of helping with the sheep, and people talk about the books which were children's classics in the fifties, and the traumatic events of the previous school book have become something for Nicola to laugh about and explain to her mother as lightly as possible.






*[Edit: as rachelmanija points out, this is untrue. The Twelve and the Genii is by Pauline Clarke. I must have jumped to the other conclusion... because both their names start with P? I don't know.]

**Although I saw another Peter's Room in Pegasus Books today, beside an Autumn Term, if anybody's looking. Those two seem to be floating around the city at the moment -- in the case of this one, at least, because Harry Ricketts is teaching it at Victoria. The edition has a foreword from him.

Vase / Conrad's Fate

Pegasus, drat you, you managed to sell me a vase! I go into second hand bookshops expecting to be seduced into buying books, and I have been successfully resisting random ornamental objects for ages, but now the first time I see you stocking anything other than books you manage to stock too lovely a vase to resist. I just filled my room with boxes again, and cycling gear I'm not using, and roller skates I have never used, and an empty spice-rack. I did not need a vase!

--thank you Pegasus Books you are excellent.

Also, while I'm writing up books, I just reread Conrad's Fate by Diana Wynne Jones for the first time in years. There are plenty of her books I'm middling to neutral keen on -- I definitely think of her in tiers: favourites, non-favourite really good ones, lukewarm ones -- but up until now I thought Conrad's Fate was the only one I actively disliked and wished she hadn't written. Now it isn't. I don't know what happened. I don't think it's one of my favourites, but it almost feels like one just now because of the unexpected jump. It's definitely a book full of patterns she uses elsewhere, and it has a mild main character (he isn't even as passive as some of her passive characters get, he's just a good soul, rather quashed, who unquashes), and the main characters end up having surprisingly little to do, because the deus ex machina comes on with an even heavier whump than usual... But I really like it. It is highly congenial in its mildness, and funny as Jones ever is, and it also (I had completely forgotten this) has one of her best houses in it. The story starts when circumstances and an officious uncle send titular Conrad chasing after his titular fate to investigate the misuse of magic at Stallery, the great mansion on the hill, in the role of a servant; and Stallery is such a bustling great mansion, maintained gilt and glorious in its ludicrously labour-intensive state of perfection by a platoon of skilled, busy people. During Conrad's first tour of it he's passed from hand to hand between people who have allocated six minutes to showing the newbie around, but keep being interrupted by something very urgent at minute two. I love the moment when Conrad and his fellow ulterior motived servant Christopher look at each other and go, "...we were both intending to have plots, in this book, but we are going to have to do do all the plot in a two-hour slots on Thursday and Saturday afternoons, because all our other minutes have been allocated." Of course the book ends up having a lot of plot in it, but it remains centered on how much house the characters are in, and how much individual work goes into it.

The one thing I remember specifically disliking last time I read the book was Christopher. Since the first Jones novel I remember reading (being read) was The Lives of Christopher Chant, where the character turns up younger, and then for a long time the series jumped straight to the adult Christopher as Chrestomanci in his authority, I think I'd got attached to the idea that Christopher's life was very smooth between those points and also that he was not obnoxious in the least. In this book Christopher is a teenager, viewed from outside, and he is rather obnoxious, but in a plausible and essentially benign sort of way that now seems completely in keeping with the rest of him to me. And it makes me happy that he's been put in a book about doing domestic work. His having his nose pointed at the kind of work which, as an enchanter, he can do most of by thinking, is probably important for his long-term development into a person one would want to see managing the magic of a number of worlds.

Oh, speaking of which, I also remember thinking the probability-magic was out of keeping with what we otherwise knew about the Related Worlds, but now I don't. Again, it feels of a piece.

Saint Jerome is looking at me from where he leans against the bookshelf. He's disappointed I haven't hung him up yet. Jerome, thematic as it would be, I shall neither hang you up nor find a place to put the cycling gear nor clean the bathroom. I shall go to bed.