Yuletide musings

[transposable_element]

Mostly just thinking "aloud." Originally I rot-13ed the rest of this message so as not to inadvertently give anything away to any of my many fans, but then I realized it was kinder to put most of it under a cut. So only the first little spoiler is in rot-13. :-)  Decrypt at rot13.com. 

 

V tbg n erdhrfg sbe n svp nobhg V Pncgher gur Pnfgyr, fb vs lbh unira'g ernq vg (be frra gur zbivr) naq jvfu sbe ab fcbvyref, tb ab shegure!

 

The book takes place in the mid-1930s, mostly in rural Suffolk and in London. So of course I immediately began thinking about Route 66, the Dust Bowl, cattle ranching in Southern California, and Joshua Tree.

 

If you know the book you will by now have guessed that I'm planning to write about Rose and Neil (as requested). 

 

Before this I had never tried to pinpoint the year in which the book takes place. But once I started looking it wasn't hard to find a 1935 time-stamp: near the beginning Cassandra writes, "Three years ago (or is it four? I know father's one spasm of sociability was in 1931)...." In other words, 1931 was four years ago. The book begins in early March and the main events of the story are over by the end of July. The epilogue is written in October, by which time Cassandra reports that Rose and Neil "have driven across America and are now in the Californian desert." My first idea was to take them on Route 66, then to Joshua Tree and the ranch, somewhere in that general region. But then I realized that they might take the northern route in order to visit Yellowstone -- where, OMG, Rose could encounter actual bears! This idea is growing on me. 

 

The requester also said a missing scene from the book would be okay. This would be a lot easier to do, so I suppose I can fall back on that if my travelogue ideas don't pan out.

 

I had never tried to get much into either Rose's or Neil's head before. We see them through Cassandra's eyes and she is not always a reliable narrator, but Neil at least has never seemed very interesting to me (in the movie he was played by Marc Blucas, which was excellent casting, she said cattily). What we know about Neil is mostly that he's a) pleasantly ordinary-looking and b) American. Seriously, most of his other character traits (outspoken, informal, playful, somewhat anti-intellectual) follow pretty seamlessly from "American," at least from Cassandra's point of view. But at one point Neil says "I'm just all wrong over here [in England]," which gives me a little more hope for him as a character, like maybe he does have some hidden complexity. He's certainly not as straight-forward as he initially appears to Cassandra.

 

Rose is much more overtly interesting to me. That's partly because Cassandra knows her well, so we get more insight into her character. At the beginning she hates her life and feels trapped, and then in an attempt to escape that trap she rushes heedlessly into another trap. At one point her father describes her as "ruthless." She's impulsive and physically much more daring than Cassandra (I noticed on this reread that she's always climbing things). She's spirited and spunky, and in a lot of books she would be the heroine. All of this does seem to point toward the Yellowstone adventure plot.

 

Obviously I have more thinking to do.