I was intrigued by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay's post about this detective story, even before I registered what an apt coda it made to our recent adventures in Shropshire, Peters being, of course, a deeply Shropshire author. I had liked her Cadfael books well enough when I read them to have worked my way through most, if not all, of the series, but had never ventured into her other novels, and had no idea that she had set a murder mystery at a residential music college which is a hosting a week-end course on folk music.
"[A] residential music college" does not begin to describe Follymead. The opening of the novel is contrived to show it to the reader through the eyes of the astonished Liri. Two major aspects of the book each reveal the other, the singer and her reaction to the extraordinary location: the disproportionate grandeur of the gates, the full set of eighteenth century follies, the Grecian temple, the hermitage, the ruined tower ("No pagoda?" complains Liri, as the car rounds a corner and yes, there is the pagoda), the decoratively arched bridge over a river gleaming innocently like Chekhov's gun, the one element of genuine wildness in this artificial landscape... And then the house itself, a riot of towers and turrets and steeples and vanes - I enjoyed all of this enormously, and half-expected Michael Innes's Appleby to turn up. I cannot quite believe in it as a music college, especially a college in the ownership of the County Council. Peters offers some justification for this - the last of the family, for want of an heir, left it to the county with a handsome endowment fund, it operates under the aegis of a university - and plays up, too, quite how precarious it all is (the threat to Follymead is as urgent a concern of the narrative as any other) but even so... Ellis Peters was, says Carol Westron in an illuminating essay, passionate about education, "very active in the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) and helped to establish the Shropshire Adult Education College at Attringham Park. She also played a great part in setting up an Adult Education music college." In Follymead she gives free rein to a fantasy of a music college valued locally (Detective George Felse and his wife consider attending a forthcoming course on Mozart) and nationally.
If the book alloed the author to indulge in creating a fantasy music college, is the depiction of a folk music weekend similarly self-indulgent? She knows her ballads, and uses one of them for the scaffolding of her plot. (sovay recognised it ewven before the bog reveal, and identifies it as the version sung by Ewan MacColl: I defer to her expertise, and had to refer to the estimable Mainly Norfolk which offers achoice of variants.) But a passion for music and an eye for the potential of a balled do not add up to a love of folk music: maybe Liri is speaking for her author when she refuses the description "folk singer" as being ill-defined. "I'm not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is... About a ballad singer you can't be in much doubt, it's somebody who sings ballads. That's what I do ..."
How fortunate, then, that the story is set at a week-end course at which Professor Penrose will help us to examine the nature of folk music, with the promise of much debate, his record collection and some star live performances. I don't suppose Ellis Peters expected her background colour to be appealing enough that I am (at least) halfway to regretting that pesky murder investigation for getting in the way of some interesting music and talk, but there you go, that's what happened. ( The best I can do is to put it under a cut. At inordinate length, then: who's who, and who sings what? )
[Emerges, blinking, from the rabbit hole.]
sovay characterises as misdirection the use of a song - does it qualify as a balled? - to provide the nove's title. Indeed, and not just because Liri's vengeful rewrite invites the reader to anticpate an entirely different narrative to the one which eventually unfolds. It directs the reader's attention to the most obviously romantic pairing in the book, Liri and Lucien, the musical power couple between whom something has gone badly awry: contrast them with the rational observers, Tossa (short for Theodosia) and Dominic (Felse, son of the series detective, which is convenient), treading carefully through their a newly established relationship, and reflect that young couples tend to emerge well from the Cadfael books (this is from memory, but I'm pretty certain of it). Perhaps, then, the black-hearted true love is to be found in the third couple, the one introduced before the others, on the very first page ("only ine woman really existed in his life, and that was his wife.") There's a whole other post which grows from that reading, and considers the novel as it was surely intended to be considered, as a detective story. There's the character of the detrective to be considered, and whether he is a plausible policeman (to be set alongside the question of whether Cadfael is a plausible monk).
There's also a footnote about Ellis Peters' relationship with Czechoslovakia. But somebody stop me, before I launch into either of those...
sovay's post about this detective story, even before I registered what an apt coda it made to our recent adventures in Shropshire, Peters being, of course, a deeply Shropshire author. I had liked her Cadfael books well enough when I read them to have worked my way through most, if not all, of the series, but had never ventured into her other novels, and had no idea that she had set a murder mystery at a residential music college which is a hosting a week-end course on folk music."[A] residential music college" does not begin to describe Follymead. The opening of the novel is contrived to show it to the reader through the eyes of the astonished Liri. Two major aspects of the book each reveal the other, the singer and her reaction to the extraordinary location: the disproportionate grandeur of the gates, the full set of eighteenth century follies, the Grecian temple, the hermitage, the ruined tower ("No pagoda?" complains Liri, as the car rounds a corner and yes, there is the pagoda), the decoratively arched bridge over a river gleaming innocently like Chekhov's gun, the one element of genuine wildness in this artificial landscape... And then the house itself, a riot of towers and turrets and steeples and vanes - I enjoyed all of this enormously, and half-expected Michael Innes's Appleby to turn up. I cannot quite believe in it as a music college, especially a college in the ownership of the County Council. Peters offers some justification for this - the last of the family, for want of an heir, left it to the county with a handsome endowment fund, it operates under the aegis of a university - and plays up, too, quite how precarious it all is (the threat to Follymead is as urgent a concern of the narrative as any other) but even so... Ellis Peters was, says Carol Westron in an illuminating essay, passionate about education, "very active in the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) and helped to establish the Shropshire Adult Education College at Attringham Park. She also played a great part in setting up an Adult Education music college." In Follymead she gives free rein to a fantasy of a music college valued locally (Detective George Felse and his wife consider attending a forthcoming course on Mozart) and nationally.
If the book alloed the author to indulge in creating a fantasy music college, is the depiction of a folk music weekend similarly self-indulgent? She knows her ballads, and uses one of them for the scaffolding of her plot. (
sovay recognised it ewven before the bog reveal, and identifies it as the version sung by Ewan MacColl: I defer to her expertise, and had to refer to the estimable Mainly Norfolk which offers achoice of variants.) But a passion for music and an eye for the potential of a balled do not add up to a love of folk music: maybe Liri is speaking for her author when she refuses the description "folk singer" as being ill-defined. "I'm not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is... About a ballad singer you can't be in much doubt, it's somebody who sings ballads. That's what I do ..."How fortunate, then, that the story is set at a week-end course at which Professor Penrose will help us to examine the nature of folk music, with the promise of much debate, his record collection and some star live performances. I don't suppose Ellis Peters expected her background colour to be appealing enough that I am (at least) halfway to regretting that pesky murder investigation for getting in the way of some interesting music and talk, but there you go, that's what happened. ( The best I can do is to put it under a cut. At inordinate length, then: who's who, and who sings what? )
[Emerges, blinking, from the rabbit hole.]
sovay characterises as misdirection the use of a song - does it qualify as a balled? - to provide the nove's title. Indeed, and not just because Liri's vengeful rewrite invites the reader to anticpate an entirely different narrative to the one which eventually unfolds. It directs the reader's attention to the most obviously romantic pairing in the book, Liri and Lucien, the musical power couple between whom something has gone badly awry: contrast them with the rational observers, Tossa (short for Theodosia) and Dominic (Felse, son of the series detective, which is convenient), treading carefully through their a newly established relationship, and reflect that young couples tend to emerge well from the Cadfael books (this is from memory, but I'm pretty certain of it). Perhaps, then, the black-hearted true love is to be found in the third couple, the one introduced before the others, on the very first page ("only ine woman really existed in his life, and that was his wife.") There's a whole other post which grows from that reading, and considers the novel as it was surely intended to be considered, as a detective story. There's the character of the detrective to be considered, and whether he is a plausible policeman (to be set alongside the question of whether Cadfael is a plausible monk).There's also a footnote about Ellis Peters' relationship with Czechoslovakia. But somebody stop me, before I launch into either of those...
