Of Monasteries and Mountains

[selenak]

Having successfully mastered the art of the Peugeot driving - honestly, it wasn't the various gears per se, I did learn to drive that way, not on automatic, I am that old; it was the secret of the reverse! - I was set to chauffeur my mother around the island. Well, we planned various tours, and on Tuesday, we did the first. Which led us to

Comments

[wee_warrior]

Just lovely. I'll never understand why so many people go to Mallorca only for partying, when it is so amazingly beautiful.

Oh, Chopin and Sand! Yay for early gender-bending couples!

Well, quoth I, while the novel is indeed a great one, it IS a novel and the Graves parts (he's only a minor character in it anyway) struck me as very much what happens if a fanfic author has an OTP (in Barker's case Sassoon/Owen) and doesn't want anyone to be as important or shock, even more important and connected to one of her guys, so she bashes that annoying person TPTB Real Life provided.

Hee. I'm reading it just now and it is a really good book, although I must admit that the real life circumstances of Sassoon and Owen's insta-friendship/mutual crush/epic romance/presumably all of the above really look like a romantic screenplay gone wild, so I can see why Barker would be tempted to concentrate on that. (As for Graves, he mostly strikes me as incredibly pragmatic to Sassoon's idealistic frustration so far. Does he get more dickish later on?)

I hope you and your mother continue to have fun and be able to relax somewhat. Don't let the Peugeot overwhelm you!

[selenak]

Re: early gender-bending: have you ever read the Gustave "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" Flaubert/ George Sand correspondance? He addresses her as "chère Maitre" - which the German version makes into "liebe Meisterin", not being able to use the female adjective and the male noun, and the whole thing is just fun to read on every level - popular novelist versus ultra-artistic super critical novelist, vivacious old lady versus gloomy man who feels aged somewhere in his 30s, busy family woman (with her sons and grandchildren, and still writing novels, of course) versus hermit, and G.S. as something like the last surviving Romantic versus Flaubert the realist/naturalist.

"Pragmatic" is not a word I'd use for WWI era Robert Graves, is all. (Nor the later one, actually, though he was trying then - but any man who has the kind of crazy personal life he had during the 20s is seriously lacking in pragmatism.) For starters, he was as shell-shocked as Sassoon and Owen, though managed to keep himself out of a hospital. (In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.) Also, leave it to R.G. to think saying "I have hallucinations, too" makes him a credible witness when testifying for Sassoon. But Barker needed someone to play the "now do be sensible, Siegfried, we're not going to change anything anyway" role, and she didn't need another soldier-poet in an intense relationship with Sasson, hence the basically two Graves scenes we get and their content.

[wee_warrior]

Re: early gender-bending: have you ever read the Gustave "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" Flaubert/ George Sand correspondance?

Nope. *puts on list* I believe to remember reading that she used to call Chopin her wife, more or less jokingly, but I may have made that up. They must have been quite an interesting pair, though.

ut Barker needed someone to play the "now do be sensible, Siegfried, we're not going to change anything anyway" role, and she didn't need another soldier-poet in an intense relationship with Sasson, hence the basically two Graves scenes we get and their content.

I confess that I interpreted these entirely different, namely as Graves being concerned about his friend and thus doing everything to get him into a hospital instead of prison...now, I'm also someone who doesn't think pragmatism is bad, so it could just be my interpretation merrily overriding authorial intend to my heart's delight. So far I also have the feeling that Prior is more of a main character than either Sassoon or Owen, but that might of course change.

[selenak]

Prior is; he's also the central character of the entire trilogy, and entirely fictional, which is why his characterisation is completely up to the author. *g*