feather_ghyll

Coots in the North and other stories: Arthur Ransome (edited by Hugh Brogan) Jonathan Cope, 1988.

This is one for Ransome completists, but it’s also frustrating. It isn’t a collection of short stories, either. The most typical ‘stories’ here of the creator of the Swallows and Amazons are chapters or fragments from uncompleted books, one being the title story, featuring already familiar characters, the other about a brand new boy with a feeling for nature. Then there are short stories, some based on folk tales, the best told in a begrudging seadog’s voice.

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I've just posted a link to a feature about the rise and rise of Novak Djokovic at tennisfans. I'm really looking forward to the French and the grass season!

In other news, BBC Films has announced that it's doing a new adaptation of Swallows and Amazons. My advice would be to play it straight and not to shoehorn a Harry Potter actor in if they're not right for the part. Actually, the possibilities of where they could position cameras in terms of POV are exciting.

I only found out about this this week thanks to Radio 2, but The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon is apparently writing a musical adaptation of Swallows and Amazons for the National Theatre. (That might actually work, mightn't it?) Having said that, there didn't seem to be much beyond the announcement, which was made in 2007, so the project may have stalled.

I have been watching (too much) of the Aussie Open, but I haven't got around to noting my thoughts, partly because life is hectic, and partly because of timing - it's as if there's always something new to comment upon. ( Read more... )

Happy New Year! I've been away reading for a fortnight, among other things, one of Jane Shaw's Susan stories; 'Red Caps at School' by Ethel Talbot, a really slight story, but not as annoying as I found some of her books over the past year; 'Sadie Comes to School' by May Wynne, a busy story with a new American girl, spies, near fatal accidents and an undercooked Christian moral; the much older 'Captain Polly' which was more of a Seven Little Australians/What Katy Did family story. I also read 'Nancy Drew and Company', a collection of academic essays about North American girls' series books, which I gleefully covered with exclamatory glosses, even though I wasn't familiar with about two thirds of the series that were discussed.

I've just finished 'Winter Holiday' by Arthur Ransome, which was a perfectly seasonal book to read at the end of the Christmas holiday, although of course, a Ransome is a good read it any time.

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After a lousy 24 hours, I finally caved and spent nearly £9 on a Swallows and Amazons mug from Borders that I've been eyeing for months. My other excuse is that there was a broken mug incident over the holidays. It features illustrations from the books on a green background and the quote about how the books almost wrote themselves. I have yet to use it.

Coming soon (maybe): a review of the TV adaptation of Ballet Shoes and Finding Minerva, which I read over the holidays.

Rereading 'Secret Water' the other week was a real treat. ( Read more... )

I must have read 'Swallows and Amazons', the first book in the series, first, but I probably read them out of order, getting them out of the library and rereading them, and I'm not sure if I ever read them all. Although there was a time when I'd have said the Anne series was my favourite series, and I've been reading new-to-me Montgomery's over the last year, I'm basking in a lot of Ransome love at the moment. Looking back, it occurs to me that I liked 'mixed' series when I was at primary school: the Famous Five, the Lone Piners and Swallows and Amazons, and more girl-centric series the older I got: the Chalet girls, the Annes and the Abbey girls. That isn't to say that it was so clear-cut, I mean, I read Mallory Towers along with the Famous Five and was into the Scarlet Pimpernel in the lower part of secondary school, and I probably started buying my own copies of the Swallows and Amazons books about that time, too, thanks to more pocket money. Due to the availability of library copies if I wanted them (and yes, they were hardbacks with the nifty dust-jackets covered in a plastic binding) and my familiarity with the stories, I didn't hunt down copies of my own. Though if they came my way cheaply, i'd buy them. As a result, I've probably read the most land-bound book, 'Pigeon Post', the most. I had half resolved that this year I'd try to complete my collection of Chalet School books (which is mainly Armada paperbacks - I try not to think about the abridging that has gone on in them too hard), but right now I'm more enthused about getting a complete set of the Swallows and Amazons series.

Reading 'Secret Water' set me off to hunt the interwebs for resources. I may have been looking in the wrong places (livejournal and Google mainly) but there doesn't seem to be much around. I wanted something on the chronology of the books, essays on the characters and their roles, with an eye to gender, and on the themes of the books. The story needs all of them, from instigator Nancy, future naval commander John, the excellent Susan (who I really appreciated in 'SW'), dreamer and mapmaker Titty, to the others. There seems to be some stuff out there about Ransome-the-author, but not as much discussion of the text, just lots of short comments that can be summarised as 'Swallows and AMazons, oh yes, I loved them. Wasn't Nancy great? They're pure escapism'. Surely there's more to say than that!

Here's what I did find:

Swallows and Bolsheviks from oursin


This knocked my socks off:
Secret waters: Reliving author Arthur Ransome's literary journey along the Essex coast by Graham Hoyland

When my father was the age of an Amazon, one of his teachers was the poet W H Auden, who later called the 1930s "a low, dishonest decade". To adults, perhaps, it was, but to Ransome's fictional children it seems an age of innocence. What parent would now leave their young children (including a six-year-old, Bridget) to camp on an island unsupervised?
[A part of me is outraged on behalf of the excellent Susan Walker.)

Resources: Arthur Ransome/S and A background books [I'd probably need to see reviews before getting them.]

Icons based on cover art by keswindhover

Any other links would be very much welcomed.