"Fire and Hemlock"

[fiefoe]

Supplementary reading:

• Polly hovered a moment between Five Children and It and one most enticingly called The Treasure Seekers, and then picked up at random The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill from Hereford, from T. O. Massling. The Thirty-nine Steps from Oxford, from Mr. Tomlin, Tom’s Midnight Garden from Birmingham, from A. Namesake
• Mr. Lynn’s first parcel of books: through “Artemis and Hippolytus,” “Sympathetic Magic,” “The Magical Control of the Sun,” “Magicians as Kings,” “Incarnate Human Gods,” “The Sacred Marriage,”
• A hero, first, is the one you identify with in the story.
• when I later heard the saying, “Those whom the gods love die young,” I thought that, though thoroughly unfair, it was probably a profound truth.
• children do, by nature, status, and instinct, live more in the heroic mode than the rest of humanity. They naturally have the right naïve, straightforward approach.
• The Odyssey accounts for the shape of the story, and the way it had largely to be told in flashback.
• She has to perform a strenuous and truthful act of memory to break that thralldom. This is in itself intended to be an act of heroism akin to Odysseus confronting the Sirens.
• All the female characters are arranged in threes, with Polly always at the centre.
• this had to be in my conscious control. The organizing overlay I chose was T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. This, on a purely technical level, gave me a story divided into four parts and featuring a string quartet. It also gave me the setting and atmosphere for the funeral Polly gatecrashes in Hunsdon House:
• to become a quest of the mind away from the Nothing of spiritual death (Hemlock in my book), towards the Fire which is imagination and redemption—the Nowhere of my book. A heroic journey from Nothing to Nowhere is what Polly takes.
• Tom in fact has Cupid’s attributes, although few people seem to notice. When my British publisher was unable to see this, I simply asked her, “Who is mostly blind and goes to work with a bow?”

http://www.suberic.net/cgi-bin/dwj/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=Fire_And_Hemlock_(Spoilers)&revision=24
http://rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com/254549.html
http://rushthatspeaks.dreamwidth.org/401546.html
__ Now, remember that Polly held onto Tom, when she did, by using the Queen's gift against her, by living with Tom in between the two worlds. In HERE--NOW, Polly is a little girl and Tom an adult with romantic problems; in NOWHERE Polly is nothing at all and Tom is a human sacrifice. But in WHERE--NOW Polly is a hero and is Tom's loving, ever-faithful sidekick, and he is a hero and is free. Because of the Queen's gift, while Polly kept making that story WHERE--NOW was the reality that mattered.