Gaudy Night - chapters 1-2

[shinyopals]

Chapters 1-2: in which we meet a whole host of complicated characters talking about complicated things.

Brief synopsis:
Our story begins with our intrepid heroine, who clearly feels she hasn’t had enough to angst about the last few years so has decided to attend her High School reunion college’s Gaudy. It turns out she was BFFs with one of the

Comments

[read2day]

Oxford and Cambridge acceptances are by the college, not the University. The colleges are very much more independent than at Durham and it is entirely up to the college who they offer places to. The university has some say in how many per subject - because the teaching load is generally organised at the university level - but not who.

A Gaudy is a reunion of old students but the detail varies from college to college - and not all of the colleges call them Gaudys. My old college does, for which I'm rather absurdly grateful because I like the Sayers tie-in . We have Gaudys every five years after graduation, and nowadays covers about five matriculating years at once

[nineveh_uk]

I got absolutely hooked on GN from the very first page. So I love the first chapters, even if though it was my first Sayers I was a bit confused about Harriet's backstory. I love all the bitchiness about the students, because it is so real. Disadvantages of not knowing quite what was going on and why this book was about Harriet Vane when I thought it was supposed to be about Peter Wimsey, it plunged me straight in wonderfully, to the extent I actually remember a 60 minute wait at Peterborough station with pleasure

[read2day]

It does look rather like Ceiling Cat is about to appear ... but I'll forgive them because it's Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, who have the distinction of being the only actors who actually fitted my mental image of the characters perfectly.

The 1987 BBC dramatisation of Gaudy Night was *awful*, particularly because Strong Poison and Have His Carcase were reasonably good within the confines of television, but the script for GN was written by an idiot who apparently hated Sayers (or so it feels). Petherbridge is particularly scathing on the topic (I heard him at the National Film Theatre when they screened the television series there a few years ago) and it appears he and Harriet Walter did what they could to salvage it, including flatly refusing to do the end scene as he'd originally written it - they wrote what was filmed in a hurry when the director got fed up and told them to rewrite it if they hated it so much.

I still watch it once a year or so, nevertheless.

[colonial_abroad]

I was so disappointed in the film adaptation that I've never been able to rewatch it... despite loving both Strong Poison and Have His Carcase. So it's interesting to hear the backstory!

[kalichan]

Here's a link to Petheridge's comments on the matter which you may find gratifying!

[brandy_painter]

I'm delurking to say that your summary made me spit Pepsi all over my computer screen. And I actually needed that today so thanks. :)

I have always found the eugenics discussions in this novel interesting because we see it from the perspective of the time. This was actually written when eugenics was a trendy thing and was brought up at dinner parties as a topic for discussion (kind of like we might discuss health care policy or environmental policies; I'm not equating those with eugenics just pointing out that it was that run of the mill). I think Sayers implies through her portrayal of S-S and the reactions of both Harriet and Peter that she is not a fan. The response to the discussion isn't as negative as ours because we know what it led to, while to Sayers and her 30's audience it was just an idea to debate about.

[ibmiller]

I actually think the issue is a bit more complicated than that. Miss Schuster-Slatt and Padgett's admiration for Hitler's policies are satirized, I would agree, but in the heart of the discussions about scholarly integrity, some of the dons come out quite strongly in favor of the kind of medical experimentation that was being planned in Nazi Germany, with no real dissent on Peter's part.

That's not to say that Sayers or her characters wouldn't be horrified at the realities of their philosophies, but I think the novel is an artifact of the values which were floating around at the time, some of which were quite in tune with the Nazi program - as you state quite nicely.

[elirrina]

:D I read this book this summer and need to go get it again, I think. This summer, of course, I was reading it as a break from school, because I'm doing my PhD and it didn't work exactly, because then I ended up thinking about school after all. But I pretty much love the dons, and Harriet, and Peter, so whatever.

LOL no, blurb people. Try harder next time, please!

I feel like I had something more important/applicable to say, but apparently I'm up past my bedtime so my mind has checked out. Maybe next time.

[littlered2]

The fact that Harriet drinks half a bottle of wine before driving on to Oxford always impresses me (in a slightly disturbed way). Clearly the Bohemian lifestyle gives one a good head for alcohol.

Oxford colleges! As a current student at one, I can answer this. All of the colleges are part of the University of Oxford and thus linked, but separate (less so than they have been throughout the university's history, though). You apply to an individual college, but if you're a good candidate and they don't have room for you, you may end up getting accepted at another one; there's a system in place so that everyone has an equal chance of getting in, no matter which college they apply to (because they are of such wildly varying sizes that otherwise getting into the smaller ones would be much harder than getting int the larger ones). Or you can do what I did and do an open application, which means you end up at a college that has room for you, basically; again, they have systems in place to ensure this is just as likely to get you a place as

[crimedoc1]

That's about how it works at Cambridge also, although it would have been a bit different for Harriet because of course she could only apply to a woman's college such as Shrewsbury