I understand the value of Pat Green as a dramatic device: another outsider who's a critical resource in times of national crisis and then dismissed with the return to "normal," her post-war compliance a cautionary tale against which the hero's nonconformity stands out all the more. I just find Clarke so much more interesting
From what you've told me, she definitely sounds far more compelling. Speaking of dramatic devices and reality being more complex and interesting, your example also reminds me of how, having learned through thuis article about E.M. Forster living in a menage a trois with a policeman and his wife for decades, where Forster and the wife, May, despite initial difficulties not only learned to share the man they both loved but formed their own bond, I later read the novel the author of the article wrote, My Policeman, and being extremely puzzled that the novel chose to go another way entirely, as in the novel, the wife reports the writer once she figures out he's in love with her husband to the police (in a way that doesn't incriminate her husband), and is punished with decades of a loveless marriage in name only. Why, thought I, if the real life precedent that attracted the novelist's attention was both more interesting and happier (despite difficulties) for all parties concerned?
There's just enough of her reality left in the fiction of Pat Green for the character to feel like a disservice not just to Clarke personally, but to the complexities of history.
This, as the kids say these days. Like you, I can see the dramatic device points of Me and Orson Welles putting a fictional character in place of a real one: evidently the author wanted to tell a coming-of-age-story including sex, love, rivalry and heartbreak, and that wasn't doable with 14 years old Arthur Anderson (who got along fine with Welles), and presto, fictional 17 years old Richard Samuel happens. But recognizing the why doesn't sell me on the result. (With the caveat that maybe if I hadn't known anything about the rl circumstances, it might have worked? I can't be sure.)
no subject
From what you've told me, she definitely sounds far more compelling. Speaking of dramatic devices and reality being more complex and interesting, your example also reminds me of how, having learned through thuis article about E.M. Forster living in a menage a trois with a policeman and his wife for decades, where Forster and the wife, May, despite initial difficulties not only learned to share the man they both loved but formed their own bond, I later read the novel the author of the article wrote, My Policeman, and being extremely puzzled that the novel chose to go another way entirely, as in the novel, the wife reports the writer once she figures out he's in love with her husband to the police (in a way that doesn't incriminate her husband), and is punished with decades of a loveless marriage in name only. Why, thought I, if the real life precedent that attracted the novelist's attention was both more interesting and happier (despite difficulties) for all parties concerned?
There's just enough of her reality left in the fiction of Pat Green for the character to feel like a disservice not just to Clarke personally, but to the complexities of history.
This, as the kids say these days. Like you, I can see the dramatic device points of Me and Orson Welles putting a fictional character in place of a real one: evidently the author wanted to tell a coming-of-age-story including sex, love, rivalry and heartbreak, and that wasn't doable with 14 years old Arthur Anderson (who got along fine with Welles), and presto, fictional 17 years old Richard Samuel happens. But recognizing the why doesn't sell me on the result. (With the caveat that maybe if I hadn't known anything about the rl circumstances, it might have worked? I can't be sure.)