And oh my goodness the resonances… I think Voigt must have had all these characters fully realized in her head from the very beginning.
Omg, yes, this! I've been thinking this since we started having our Tillerman discussions. The only way I can achieve anything like any kind of interweaving is to go back and forth through the different parts and insert and delete references and smooth them out. I can't just start at part one and work my through a series and have echoes and foreshadowing and different perspectives.
She must have had a *lot* of this worked out, in her head if not on paper, before publication.
This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat (…Bullet's old boat, right? So it's its own character too?)...Bullet finished his boat. He was letting go, and not holding on to anything.
Johnny's boat, actually. So there are two boats (it took me rereading Runner to get this straight:
A sailboat that Johnny built, that Gram uses to sail into town, and it's slow, and not going to hold out much longer. Huh, I think it may be a counterpart of the farm.
And a motor boat, which Patrice is salvaging throughout the course of Runner, and which he paints red because he knows Bullet is going to want it, and Bullet likes fire engine red (see also: his sweater, which Dicey inherits). Bullet uses the money he's been earning to buy the motor boat for his mother, so she can be more independent and not have to rely on a slow sailboat that won't last forever.
Bullet's motor boat is the one we see getting active use when the grandkids show up; Johnny's sailboat is the one Dicey and Sammy rebuild.
Johnny's the one Bullet remembers as always working off his anger in wood. He's also the one who built the tree house for Liza, as Bullet remembers after Johnny leaves, and Gram remembers at Liza's death bed.
Runner has a theme of builders and breakers, and Johnny is a builder in this classification scheme. Bullet and his mother are breakers. (Sammy the younger as builder, hmm.)
I totally agree about Bullet letting go. I feel like Runner is a story of him learning to reach out, and it's Patrice who leads him to the epiphany.
There's some ring composition around Bullet letting go of the farm:
From a few pages in:
He knew he could allow no weakness in himself if he was going to win free. He could feel the danger of his father’s will closing in around him, and he could feel his own strength too. It would cost him, but what didn’t cost something? Nothing, that was what. It would cost him this farm that ran acres wide under his feet, that ran acres deep and fertile underneath him.
And then the last paragraph where he's still alive, which I've quoted to you before:
The fields stretched away on either side of him, and he stopped at the end of the driveway to look back at them. He’d new-harrowed the fields, and they were ready now to take the crops he wouldn’t harvest from them. Tough luck, and he had known what it would cost. But he let his eyes run over them, over the lumpy surface of them. He wanted to keep connected to himself as much as he could; he wanted to be sure he could take with him whatever memory could carry.
Oh, that's interesting. Because the lines immediately preceding the first quote are:
Bullet shook his head to clear the image out of it. He’d learned not to make dreams up for himself, that was part of growing up. Growing up meant you knew what you wanted and you worked for it, and you didn’t let yourself get in your own way. Not dreams, not memories—he knew he could allow no weakness in himself if he was going to win free.
So now he's learned to value memory, to hold on. Just like he reached out by ploughing before he left, preparing for a harvest he knew he'd never get to see.
OH. Wow, and *that* reminds me of near the end of Homecoming, when the kids are giving Gram one suggestion after another for making the farm financially solvent:
James said, “With inflation, and if you’re on fixed income— you could lose the farm if you can’t pay taxes.”
“Could you?” Dicey asked. “Could that happen?”
“What’s that to you?” her grandmother demanded.
“I guess nothing. But if we can’t be there I want you to be. So it matters something. And you can’t change that.”
Wow, I don't think anyone had to teach Dicey to reach out.
This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat
Oh, right, and Jeff of course has his iconic moment of sinking the boat. Dicey is sinking to rebuild, though. And now I remember Gram at the beginning of Dicey's Song:
“Let the wood soak up water, to swell up again. I knew that once, but I forgot."
She did know that, because it's in Runner!
Johnny’s boat was still there, still afloat. He wondered how many years it would be before the wood gave out to the weather and the thing just sank. His mother was the only one who ever took it out, and she bailed it too and scraped as much of the bottom as she could get to standing beside it in the shallow water. But she couldn’t get it out of the water for the winter, didn’t have time to caulk and paint the hull, never had any money, so she couldn’t have it hauled at one of the boatyards. Too bad. Too bad the old man wouldn’t let her get a driver’s license either, because that meant the only way she could get around on her own was this sailboat. Which would, someday, sooner or later, just rot away.
Which is why he gives her the motor boat (instead of buying himself a gun like he originally planned).
I don't know what music means exactly in these books, except that it's a way throughout the cycle that people are drawn together, that people in these books strengthen families and create found families.
Yes! The passages that come to mind are:
“So bravery is one of the things you choose by?” Mina asked.
“Sure,” Dicey said.
“And music.”
“Music’s not a quality,” Mina protested.
Dicey noticed that Mina had them talking about Dicey again. She made a mental note to ask Mina what she chose by, but was too interested in her own ideas to do that right then. “It is too,” Dicey insisted.
“You can’t be music,” Mina argued.
“But you have it, don’t you?” Dicey asked. “Don’t you?”
And Jeff with Dicey:
He had seen the way the music coiled around her and drew her to him, in her eyes, seen something helpless in her against music and melody...He played a couple of chords so the thread of music wouldn’t be broken between them.
And with Maybeth:
At first she was shy and silent but, like Dicey, she could be looped in with music. He watched the way the songs and the singing won her over slowly.
Interestingly… I think (?) the only book devoid of music entirely is The Runner, and even that one has poetry as a way to (sort of) connect.
Even that has Bullet remembering Liza singing, constantly. Neither he nor his mother can produce music, but they both seem emotionally connected to it. And there is the scene where Bullet enjoys square dancing. So it's there a little bit.
I do think you're right about there not being a boat in Come a Stranger. I'll have to think about that.
She gets it explicitly because she has children in the house. So the phone, itself a means of communication, becomes representative of Gram's willingness to communicate, her connection, her reaching out.
YES. This.
Incidentally, I notice that her husband can hold on, but nothing else:
His old man was a nothing, nothing but right answers and holding on to his precious farm.
You can see Gram's lesson on how all three are important--holding on, letting go, and reaching out--are important.
(Geez, I want more fic about Gram. She learned all these lessons, slowly and painfully, that she's telling to Dicey in this book. What was it like for her?)
I know, I was thinking of that when reading Runner--you get a glimpse of what she was going through (and that's abuse), but we rarely get her POV.
no subject
And oh my goodness the resonances… I think Voigt must have had all these characters fully realized in her head from the very beginning.
Omg, yes, this! I've been thinking this since we started having our Tillerman discussions. The only way I can achieve anything like any kind of interweaving is to go back and forth through the different parts and insert and delete references and smooth them out. I can't just start at part one and work my through a series and have echoes and foreshadowing and different perspectives.
She must have had a *lot* of this worked out, in her head if not on paper, before publication.
This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat (…Bullet's old boat, right? So it's its own character too?)...Bullet finished his boat. He was letting go, and not holding on to anything.
Johnny's boat, actually. So there are two boats (it took me rereading Runner to get this straight:
A sailboat that Johnny built, that Gram uses to sail into town, and it's slow, and not going to hold out much longer. Huh, I think it may be a counterpart of the farm.
And a motor boat, which Patrice is salvaging throughout the course of Runner, and which he paints red because he knows Bullet is going to want it, and Bullet likes fire engine red (see also: his sweater, which Dicey inherits). Bullet uses the money he's been earning to buy the motor boat for his mother, so she can be more independent and not have to rely on a slow sailboat that won't last forever.
Bullet's motor boat is the one we see getting active use when the grandkids show up; Johnny's sailboat is the one Dicey and Sammy rebuild.
Johnny's the one Bullet remembers as always working off his anger in wood. He's also the one who built the tree house for Liza, as Bullet remembers after Johnny leaves, and Gram remembers at Liza's death bed.
Runner has a theme of builders and breakers, and Johnny is a builder in this classification scheme. Bullet and his mother are breakers. (Sammy the younger as builder, hmm.)
I totally agree about Bullet letting go. I feel like Runner is a story of him learning to reach out, and it's Patrice who leads him to the epiphany.
There's some ring composition around Bullet letting go of the farm:
From a few pages in:
He knew he could allow no weakness in himself if he was going to win free. He could feel the danger of his father’s will closing in around him, and he could feel his own strength too. It would cost him, but what didn’t cost something? Nothing, that was what. It would cost him this farm that ran acres wide under his feet, that ran acres deep and fertile underneath him.
And then the last paragraph where he's still alive, which I've quoted to you before:
The fields stretched away on either side of him, and he stopped at the end of the driveway to look back at them. He’d new-harrowed the fields, and they were ready now to take the crops he wouldn’t harvest from them. Tough luck, and he had known what it would cost. But he let his eyes run over them, over the lumpy surface of them. He wanted to keep connected to himself as much as he could; he wanted to be sure he could take with him whatever memory could carry.
Oh, that's interesting. Because the lines immediately preceding the first quote are:
Bullet shook his head to clear the image out of it. He’d learned not to make dreams up for himself, that was part of growing up. Growing up meant you knew what you wanted and you worked for it, and you didn’t let yourself get in your own way. Not dreams, not memories—he knew he could allow no weakness in himself if he was going to win free.
So now he's learned to value memory, to hold on. Just like he reached out by ploughing before he left, preparing for a harvest he knew he'd never get to see.
OH. Wow, and *that* reminds me of near the end of Homecoming, when the kids are giving Gram one suggestion after another for making the farm financially solvent:
James said, “With inflation, and if you’re on fixed income— you could lose the farm if you can’t pay taxes.”
“Could you?” Dicey asked. “Could that happen?”
“What’s that to you?” her grandmother demanded.
“I guess nothing. But if we can’t be there I want you to be. So it matters something. And you can’t change that.”
Wow, I don't think anyone had to teach Dicey to reach out.
This book begins with Dicey sinking a boat
Oh, right, and Jeff of course has his iconic moment of sinking the boat. Dicey is sinking to rebuild, though. And now I remember Gram at the beginning of Dicey's Song:
“Let the wood soak up water, to swell up again. I knew that once, but I forgot."
She did know that, because it's in Runner!
Johnny’s boat was still there, still afloat. He wondered how many years it would be before the wood gave out to the weather and the thing just sank. His mother was the only one who ever took it out, and she bailed it too and scraped as much of the bottom as she could get to standing beside it in the shallow water. But she couldn’t get it out of the water for the winter, didn’t have time to caulk and paint the hull, never had any money, so she couldn’t have it hauled at one of the boatyards. Too bad. Too bad the old man wouldn’t let her get a driver’s license either, because that meant the only way she could get around on her own was this sailboat. Which would, someday, sooner or later, just rot away.
Which is why he gives her the motor boat (instead of buying himself a gun like he originally planned).
I don't know what music means exactly in these books, except that it's a way throughout the cycle that people are drawn together, that people in these books strengthen families and create found families.
Yes! The passages that come to mind are:
“So bravery is one of the things you choose by?” Mina asked.
“Sure,” Dicey said.
“And music.”
“Music’s not a quality,” Mina protested.
Dicey noticed that Mina had them talking about Dicey again. She made a mental note to ask Mina what she chose by, but was too interested in her own ideas to do that right then. “It is too,” Dicey insisted.
“You can’t be music,” Mina argued.
“But you have it, don’t you?” Dicey asked. “Don’t you?”
And Jeff with Dicey:
He had seen the way the music coiled around her and drew her to him, in her eyes, seen something helpless in her against music and melody...He played a couple of chords so the thread of music wouldn’t be broken between them.
And with Maybeth:
At first she was shy and silent but, like Dicey, she could be looped in with music. He watched the way the songs and the singing won her over slowly.
Interestingly… I think (?) the only book devoid of music entirely is The Runner, and even that one has poetry as a way to (sort of) connect.
Even that has Bullet remembering Liza singing, constantly. Neither he nor his mother can produce music, but they both seem emotionally connected to it. And there is the scene where Bullet enjoys square dancing. So it's there a little bit.
I do think you're right about there not being a boat in Come a Stranger. I'll have to think about that.
She gets it explicitly because she has children in the house. So the phone, itself a means of communication, becomes representative of Gram's willingness to communicate, her connection, her reaching out.
YES. This.
Incidentally, I notice that her husband can hold on, but nothing else:
His old man was a nothing, nothing but right answers and holding on to his precious farm.
You can see Gram's lesson on how all three are important--holding on, letting go, and reaching out--are important.
(Geez, I want more fic about Gram. She learned all these lessons, slowly and painfully, that she's telling to Dicey in this book. What was it like for her?)
I know, I was thinking of that when reading Runner--you get a glimpse of what she was going through (and that's abuse), but we rarely get her POV.