Cliffs of Fall (Charioteer story)
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Cliffs of Fall |
| Author(s): | Greer Watson |
| Date(s): | 30 April 2012 |
| Length: | 1646 words |
| Genre: | backstory |
| Fandom: | Mary Renault |
| External Links: | "Cliffs of Fall" |
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"Cliffs of Fall" is a short story by Greer Watson based on Mary Renault's 1953 novel The Charioteer. It takes place a couple of weeks after the end of the book, shortly before Christmas 1940. The story is set at the E.M.S. hospital outside Bridstow, and seen from the perspective of Nurse Adrian.
Synopsis
Completely unaware of the complications of Laurie's romantic life, Nurse Adrian misses him badly. She had expected him to write, as he had promised; but no letter has arrived.
Background
"Cliffs of Fall" was written for fawatson in the 2012 Rarewomen challenge on LiveJournal. It was posted to Archive of Our Own on 30 April 2012. The reveal was on 7 May 2012, and the story was immediately placed on the author's website. It was also posted on 9 May 2012 to the maryrenaultfics LiveJournal community in a members-locked post.
The title, "Cliffs of Fall", comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "No worst, there is none".
Comments
Comments on the story include the following:
- "I love this - all the detail from the original, from the red hot pokers to the brother, carefully and skilfully threaded in, together with all your own detail which has given this such a reality, down to the Camp Coffee and the weak, inferior tea. Thank you so much :)"—comment by trueriver
- "Oh my, greer...this is lovely. We have always liked Nurse Adrian in the cbcs - you have really brought her into her own. Like chatting with a boy from home, like one of her brother’s friends... Yes - they would have made the perfect pair, had Laurie been capable of that choice."—comment by my_cnnr
- "Yes, Nurse Adrian is a nice girl. I think, once we think of her at all, we all recognize her essential merits as a human being. Yet...you realize we never even learn her first name? I'm sure Laurie must have come quite soon to call her by it, at least in private. Yet Renault never tells us what it is."—response by greerwatson
- "This is so... I don't know the right way to put this, but melancholy somewhere, very like Hopkins' poetry.
Makes me feel terrible for Nurse Adrian, less because of the unexplained lack of love than for the exclusion from the circles of secret(ive) knowledge.."—comment by toujours_nigel- "Of course, the two things are not unrelated. It's her exclusion from the circles of knowledge that makes Laurie's behaviour so hard for her to understand, particularly his failure to write her. Remember, it was a time when people still wrote letters—and often quite long letters, too—even to people they knew from years back.
So it is really not unreasonable for Nurse Adrian to write Laurie. Nor is it unreasonable for her to expect a letter back: the two were friends, after all. No doubt, she's been expecting to read all about his mother's marriage, and later about his return to Oxford."—response by greerwatson
- "Of course, the two things are not unrelated. It's her exclusion from the circles of knowledge that makes Laurie's behaviour so hard for her to understand, particularly his failure to write her. Remember, it was a time when people still wrote letters—and often quite long letters, too—even to people they knew from years back.