Tuesday, April 8, 2008
the high school analogy expanded
I think it's Courtney who compares the book as a whole to high school. I kinda understand what she's saying. Now that I look at it that way, every single detail in the book made a difference later on, even though we didn't think so. I know we kept complaining that the whole book could have been written in like half the volume, and probably have been better. But, at the end of the book, you feel like you know each character so well, and like you actually understand their feelings in response to the events going on around them. The book doesn't tell you... you just know because you have seen these characters grow up and change, like your classmates in high school. Leaving those people at the end is so much painful when you have done just that. This is probably what the author intended. She wanted us to get attached to the characters and to mourn the end of the book.
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2 comments:
Wow this is a very accurate portrayal! Even though they're using magic to fight a battle, the world of these people is very much a bubble with few people entering and exiting. It's actually surprising at how isolated these characters are in the grand scheme of the novel. Considering they consist of the first two magicians to return to England and so on.
Keep in mind that during this period in our own timeline, the population of England, Scotland and Wales together was only a bit more than the population of Georgia today, while the population of London was about the same as today's population of the Birmingham-Hoover area. Do all the wealthiest, most powerful, most influential residents of Birmingham and Hoover know each other? Probably so, at least by reputation and mutual acquaintance. Ditto London in the time Clarke's writing about -- it was, for the upper classes at least, a small town.
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