Early Flowering in Cornwall: Amazon Review of Scholarship by Edmund Marlowe

I hope Edmund Marlowe will not mind, but I have taken the liberty of posting his review at Amazon here for others to see.

"This moving story of sensitive Pip Cox's years as a boarder at The Rocks, a fictional prep school in Cornwall, is apparently otherwise only loosely fictionalised autobiography. Though it covers the full span of Pip's time there in the 1960s, most of the story concerns his last year, when he was twelve, and his deeply affecting friendship with slightly younger Sacha in the year below. The author has a remarkable memory of the atmosphere of prep schools and the emotions of young boys which he makes excellent use of, so that by the time we reach the love story at the heart of the novel we are well immersed in the details of life at The Rocks, whether special or mundane. 

On one significant point, I am puzzled. The average age at which boys reach the critical stage of puberty where reproduction is possible has dropped steadily from sixteen in the 19th century, when prep schools were invented, to below thirteen today. The invention is indeed sometimes said to have been occasioned by the need to segregate sexually-innocent pre-pubescents from their lustful elders. As late as 1986, the average age was 13.4. The 12-year-olds of The Rocks, however, were in 1968 at least as developed as boys today (they had to wash away the evidence of masturbation). Their headmaster even tells them a Victorian stable boy their age was "more than capable" of making a woman pregnant, which I suspect was actually impossible.

Why does this matter? The story hinges entirely on the deep suspicion of apparently everyone at the school that Pip's friendship with Sacha was sexual and so immoral on little more grounds than that Sacha was in the year below. The principal characters all conclude (rightly as it turns out) that Pip is queer and it is this perception he was nastily different that poisons the end of his time there.

This image of prep school as so sexually charged is so alien to my own as to demand explanation. Yes, pubescence at mine lent the emotions and friendships of many 12-year-old boys a new intensity, and a few engaged in fondling, but that is all. Boys at my prep school and those of my friends who had reached spermarche were either non-existent or unique. We never heard a suspicion of any boy being queer. The authorities never gave the slightest discouragement to age-discrepant friendships. It is in fact hard to see the rationale for such a taboo at prep school. It sometimes existed at public school because the still androgynous beauty of 13-14 year-olds could bring them to the erotic attention of female-starved older boys to a degree that adolescents with more developed manliness could not.

All these things depicted at The Rocks were by contrast so familiar to us at public school that a friend is convinced Pip's story has been transposed from one, which I doubt because the depiction of prep school otherwise rings so true. Is it possible that the author, having soon later established his sexual orientation and tormented by the sadness unjustly inflicted on him, has read too much into the earlier sexual consciousness of his peers and even himself, easy enough to do? Or is it possible that the headmaster who so brutally attacked Pip and his friendship was by his misplaced and exaggerated suspicion himself guilty of importing into the school an untypical hysteria about sex? Or was extra maturity another bonus of the location, which gave Pip "the typical Rocks look, long-legged and suntanned by years of days in the Cornish sun"? I wish I knew.

None of this in the least detracts, however, from the heart-wrenchingly poignant depiction of loss, which is the author's crowning achievement.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander's Choice, another pubescent boy's love story."

As I have stressed many times, Scholarship is a work of fiction but it is heavily influenced by my own memories of my time at prep school down to the incidents and dialogue that I can recall.

Were age-discrepant friendships discouraged? This is perhaps where I have taken a liberty with facts, I do not recall a deliberate separation of boys because there was a large difference in age, but I do recall that generally it was the boys who policed this aspect. As I was the youngest boy in my year, I drifted between being at the top of the year 'below' or being at the bottom of my real year so I had friends in both years, I recall being an exception, by and large friendships were contained within one's year.

It was very generous of Edmund Marlowe to write a review, I was particularly pleased to see the review from an author whose work I admire.

Writings, scribblings etc

I have also had some more feedback on Scholarship, which is always gratifying.  One thing I have noticed is that if one is minded to buy the paperback version, it is worth checking the prices at Amazon as well as at Lulu as they do seem to fluctuate with Amazon often cheaper.  Quite how, given Amazon takes a third of the published price, I do not know.  But take advantage of it, sales are always very gratifying even if I do not actually receive any money myself.

'Sales' of Scholarship be it downloads or actual books continue steadily, somewhat to my surprise, I was expecting some sort of decaying trend but no things continue at the same pace.  On blogspot I can see where the sources of traffic are, it is predictably UK biased but with a reach into places like the USA, Canada, Australia and Germany.

Ian

Alexander's Choice by Edmund Marlowe

Finally managed to finish reading the above book over the festive season.

The ending hits like a rather unpleasant tackle whilst playing a dominant team, an expected result.

Anyway, I enjoyed some fine writing from Edmund Marlowe. Alexander indeed makes his choice and the plot heads in a familiar direction.  There is no getting away from it, 'school boy' romance tends to be something read through the cracks in one hands as one flinches at the on page action.

Of course when I finished reading, I can understand why our hero was called Alexander, it is all in the Greek references.  My hero nearly had the same name but in the end I went for the slightly more obscure Russian variant Alexei in honour of his slightly fiery nature and because I wanted to use the familiar version of Sacha.

I too nearly came out with the same ending but veered away at the last moment when I realised there was an alternate ending, which most people can relate to.

Anyway I recommend reading Alexander's Choice.

In the mean time, happy new year!

Ian

A Follow On?

The most requested item is a follow on to Scholarship.

Indeed this remains a possibility. A couple of ideas have come to me in recent weeks, aided by some down time from the real world of working. The ideas that have arisen follow Sacha on the next stage of his life at his new mixed boarding school where of course girls start to play a big part of his life.  Again some of the inspiration will come from my own life as a teenager, the urge to confirm, sexual experimentation and the risk of your whole life falling apart. In other words, a typical teenage experience of life.

Indeed I did start to write a short section of prose based around Sacha's existence at a new school, how a girl comes into it. Whether that was a false start or not I do not know at this stage

A Milestone Passed - 1,000 downloads

Well I checked just now and it looks like 1,000 people have taken the plunge and downloaded Scholarship and some have even brought the paperbook version.  Thanks!  I hope it was worth the read!

Publishing Update

I have climbed the various hurdles placed in one's way at Smashwords and Lulu so now both have accepted the revised version mentioned below.

The published book will appear on Amazon in due course, it takes about six to eight weeks.

With this version, short of a 'real' publisher coming along (I am open to offers...) this is intended to be the final version.

Thanks to all those of you who have downloaded or purchased Scholarship to date, there are nearly 1,000 of you!

New Version of Scholarship

With the kind help of N Fourbois acting as editor, there is now a revised version of Scholarship.  It has been uploaded to lulu.com and will appear at Amazon.com in due course.

Editing is more than just correcting a few typos and (my weakness) overly complex sentence structures (sorted by exchanging some commas for full stops), it is also about being asked occasionally why you wrote what you did.

The best example of the latter is my comment about Michaelmas being an odd name for the autumn term.  This is a classic error rooted in my childhood (I have a habit of mistaking one word for another), I always mistook Michealmas for Christmas.  I have now been educated as to the difference (Michaelmas is actually totally separate for Christmas and occurs around the 29th of September).

Some interesting discussions also ensued on the names of positions in a rugby team (my editor is fortunately someone who knows the game well) and the change from holding around the waist to Sacha's hold on me which was up between the legs holding on to my waist.

A couple of sentences have changed as a result, I hope for the better!

New Year News and Sh*t

And suddenly we are in the teens with 2013.  Most of us can remember reaching the teenage years if only because generally by this age sex is rearing its sometimes ugly (and sometimes pretty) head.

The other part of the new year was far less welcome, an old friend of 35 years standing passed away after a short illness, he was two weeks younger than me.  In an era when one can hope to live to 80+ so long as you do not over abuse your body or get hit by one of life's still fatal illnesses to die as my friend did in his early 50s seems somehow unfair, it is always the good guys who go first.  I now know four people who have died, all roughly my age.  A depressing thought.

Handling Sex

Yes it is a tricky subject, the most rewritten parts of Scholarship were the parts where 'things happen'.

The question is what to include and what to omit?  Am I trying for the bad sex award or something more subtle?  There was also another overriding motive that led me to spend so much time on these parts was the desire not to produce an erotic novel but one that went deeper into what was going on in a relationship between two boys, part of which concerned their physical relationship.

It took numerous drafts before I felt I had the balance right between what was happening and what I wanted to say.  That meant editing out a lot of other encounters as I felt things were getting repetitive.  Whilst the other encounters were based on real life events, they did not take the story forward, in fact they waylaid the story and I felt gave the wrong impression about what the book was about.

I was reminded of this when re-watching one of my favourite films, Thomas Paul Anderson's 'Boogie Nights', which presumably had the same problem, how to make a mainstream film about the adult porn scene in California.  Director Anderson used dialogue taken from real porn movies to make it real and on screen it sounds so stilted it is very funny as Amber says to our hero Dirk:

"Let me check on something"

She pulls down Dirk's pants,

"This is a giant cock."

That dialogue took some writing, totally banal yet it tells you what is happening so for most of the film, you know you are in the world of the adult entertainment industry without having to digest endless sex scenes.

Location, Location, Location

When writing Scholarship, I knew I had to relocate the school, nowhere near where I went to school but instead somewhere I knew.

In the end, that became an easy choice.  I have connections with Cornwall, and used to holiday there each summer as a kid.  In later life I would often drive along the north coast between Sennen and St Ives.  En route, between Zennor and St Ives is a spectacularly lonely stretch of road where there is a very small hamlet with a house on a high promontory over looking the sea.  It is here that I imagined the school to be. In fact all there is, is a farm and some farm buildings.  The design of the school is based on my old school which indeed was a converted farm and a large house built around a quadrangle.  Our gym and dining hall were both in converted barns and the changing room was a dark labyrinth underneath another barn.

Anyway, late last year I braved the six mile Zennor to St Ives walk twice, once along the coast and once along "The Coffin Path" (it does exist).  Six miles and four hours of solid slog.

This stream probably originates on Trendrine hill which lies the other side of the road.

If anywhere is chapel cove, this is it!  In reality, Chapel Cove was based on a cove near Swanage in Dorset.

Wicca does exist as a place, that is closest to the location I chose.  

Wicca on Google Maps

The Coffin Path

If you have not already worked out, lots of weirdness takes place in Cornwall.  I was there during the eclipse in 1999, we saw nothing, it was thick black cloud and raining, when the sky darkened, it was the proverbial end of the world to look at.  Didn't stop the local farmer from ploughing though!

About "Scholarship"

Okay, "Scholarship" is that precious thing, the first novel.   Apparently, so one of my friends tell me, I have been talking and writing this for "quite some time".  Deep breath....

Scholarship is fiction, the school called "The Rocks", does not exist.  Let's get this out of the way first.

However, Scholarship is very much drawn from a series of events that happened in my life when I was at Prep School in England in the 1960s.  This is the British sort of prep school, educating boys aged 8-13.  In the novel, it is an all boarders single sex establishment.  That environment alone is enough to generate lots of material as it is an artificial environment, women and girls are virtually absent, emotions repressed and no escape.

I actually rather enjoyed my prep school, we had a great time, the food was good and I liked most of my teachers.  But in this environment, I found out I was gay.  My body found out sooner than my brain.  I was a bit confused, especially when I fell for a boy (called Sacha in the book) when I was 12.  Sacha was six months younger than me but as soon as I saw him, I realised there was something special there.

That is the basis of Scholarship.  If you read the end notes, you will see that I tell you that many of the incidents that make up the story are true (even the dialogue is based on my memory of things said almost 40 years ago).  Also based on reality are most of the characters, teachers and boys. Names have been changed.  The dates I give are also slightly out.

More to follow.