The Dig - June CC Book Club Selection

Parent Cafe
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There were some sentences in this book that I found utterly perplexing. I kept feeling that I was missing key English references. I read tons of British fiction and I normally don’t have that feeling.

Here’s an example. Mrs. Pretty is lamenting Robert’s loneliness and, after wishing there were more children on the estate or in town, she says: “My efforts to attract children from Bromeswell and Melton to come to Sutton Hoo House have not been successful. Their parents, I suspect, do not care for the idea.”

Any idea what this is hinting at? From Googling, I can see that Bromeswell and Melton are nearby towns, but I can’t figure out why the parents wouldn’t be keen on the idea of their children coming to play. Is there some sort of class issue at play? Or are we to assume that Mrs. Pretty was some sort of noted eccentric, such that parents don’t want their kids hanging around?

In any event, this was yet another little passage that nearly broke my heart for poor Robert.

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I think Mrs. Pretty’s age, eccentricity, and social standing likely set her, and therefore her son Robert, apart from other families with potential playmates. People had to know that she was ill, too. The servants would have talked. Robert certainly was an adorable young boy!

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@nottelling I’m interested in knowing what John Preston’s other books are like, can this be an example of his typical novels ?
@plantmom agree with your description of why village families may have stayed away, but someone posted a link ( maybe math mom) which said there were playmates for Robert.

Appreciate the many links to the actual sutton Hoo dig

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I agree about feeling sorry for Robert. And the options weren’t great for upper class boys of the era. British boarding schools could be pretty horrific!

Mrs. Pretty was wealthy but the money came from industry - so that may have been an issue too.

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This article has a portrait of Mrs. Pretty along with the one of her son: http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/art51873

And if you want to know how big Mr. Phillips was - he’s the guy on the left: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-404-1/dissemination/photos/galleryimg/jpg/M1excavation3_D8.jpg

It’s from a page of photos which I failed to bookmark and of course couldn’t find again, but here they are, includes a photo of the young Robert as well: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/suttonhoo_var_2004/gallery_mound1.cfm?CFID=809&CFTOKEN=337097B9-5897-4C53-B15BB39AE99F9F13

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Also appreciating the links to the dig and characters’ lives.

I did see mathmom’s link to the childhood companions of Robert Pretty, but there’s a brief reference to only one, the gardener’s son. Maybe they didn’t have much play time together? I’ve seen references to a book,Edith Pretty: From Socialite to Sutton Hoo, now out of print and very unavailable at my library :frowning: I also found this link written by one of Edith’s decendants (I don’t think it has been posted) with more photos and information about the family.

http://archmusicman.blogspot.com/2014/11/mrs-pretty-and-sutton-hoo-little-about.html

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Wow, you guys are amazing. <3 I only found a small fraction of the things in these links!

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@PlantMom what a link ! Edith was very rich, and perhaps she had more experience excavating than portrayed in book -
Was it mentioned her father had undertaken a big dig himself ?

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Edith Pretty is so animated in these extra biographical links. It really makes her seem all the more ghostly and aged, just a shadow of her former self, in The Dig. What a life!

Here’s one more link briefly describing an historical society outing in 2009 to Sutton Hoo (scroll to page 22). I am wishfully imagining that we, the cc readers, were taking a little afternoon tour of the grounds :slight_smile:

http://www.felixstowesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2010-January-NewsletterO.pdf

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Maybe what we are seeing here are the class issues mentioned in the NYT review (“the true English vice…pointless, pompous snobbery”). The neighbors aren’t keen on establishing a friendship with the Pretty household because they are of a different class; and Mrs. Pretty doesn’t feel that the servants’ children are adequate playmates for Robert because they are of a different class. (Obviously, I’m just guessing on that last point, as it’s not in Preston’s book.)

@Caraid, the only reason that I can think of for Preston to leave out the gardener’s son (Peter) is because it would have added another child to the story and detracted from the impression that Robert lived a lonely life among adults. Yet, it would have made sense for him to include it if he wanted to delve into class strata. Maybe that wasn’t a high priority for him.

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Speaking of “ghostly,” supposedly apparitions had been reported by local residents before the mounds were even excavated. If Sutton Hoo had a reputation for being an eerie place to spend the night, that might be another reason why the neighbors weren’t quick to send their kids over for visits.

I read the ghost reference in a couple of places, but here is one – it’s a 73 page thesis, see page 20: “By 1934, Edith Pretty, a widowed new mother, heard stories of a ghostly horseman and spectral figures being seen on the grounds after sunset.” http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04052006-161157/unrestricted/Ruffin_thesis.pdf
The document is quite a tome, but fun for “dipping” – has some good pictures, too.

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Thank you all for the fabulous links!

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^^^ I agree.

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@ignatius, has reading Beowulf as a companion piece affected your perspective on The Dig in any way?

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From the introduction of Beowulf:

It helped me picture the treasure trove and added missing romanticism to a somewhat dry The Dig. I can see the revered king set afloat in the funereal boat. I particularly like the last two lines as I can now envision the salvaging of “that load.” Overall, though, I just loved Beowulf: I hadn’t read it (listened to it) before. I highly recommend listening to Seamus Heaney (great voice) reading his abridged version - a tad over two hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaB0trCztM0
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaB0trCztM0

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^ Wonderful!

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I’d forgotten how lovely Beowulf was. I read it for “Epic Poetry” which I signed up for in high school, not because I had any desire to read epic poetry, but because I wanted to have the teacher who taught it. She was wonderful, but couldn’t save Milton!

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Thank you, Mary, for posting the BBC link. I meant to try to find that, or last least to hear the nightingale’s song while I was reading, but became distracted by the artifacts! The bird’s song when accompanying the cello is so interactive and hopeful. Poor little guy–he’s courting a woman wed to wooden instrument :slight_smile: I reread the scenes with Peggy, Rory, and the nightingale–both Peggy’s relay to Rory of the BBC incident, and then the night scene where they actually heard the bird sing. Rory, the naturalist, is shocked to hear that Peggy has only heard the nightingale sing through a radio transmission. I imagine Rory sitting outside on spring evenings alone, in the relative quiet of late evening or even as he’s trying to sleep out in the open, hearing the clear and wistful courtship song of the male nightingale, taking pleasure in the song knowing what it represents, listening to the specifics of the call with its chirps and warbles, and living in the moment of the experience. She, on the other hand, has heard a recording on the radio, a performance staged by a musician in a garden for microphones and mechanical documentation. The bird’s song is beautiful; however, the miracle is not the song itself, but its uniqueness because this wild creature has chosen or been fooled into thinking he’ll find a mate in the cello/cellist pairing. A naturalist vs. a humanist point of view? Nature vs. recorded art? Or a living person’s first hand experience vs. an event recorded or interpreted through a mediator?

But why introduce the nightingale at all? Unless there’s some record of nephew Rory’s conversation with Peggy about the nightingale, I’d hypothesize that Preston has paid hommage to Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. The BBC story was a timely way to plot Peggy-the-anthropologist’s awakening to the deadness of her marriage, the seeming smallness of her life, self-doubt over having a life focus on artifacts of a people long gone, and her own mortality. She says to Rory while waiting to hear the nightingale,

This section of the book is one of the most beautiful, and one of the saddest in the book, imo. She wants the magic of the moment with the gold flecks falling, beside a companion who’s alive and aware of her and the present moment, surrounded by the "bubbles of sound " streaming something “sadder…full of yearning and desperation and the proximity of regret” to last forever. She says

She’s awakening and clearly struck by her passion and joy of this moment. Meanwhile, the policeman comes and she knowingly, with “relief at not letting myself down” resumes her life as the archaeologist. Sigh, I thought it was a very powerful piece of Preston’s writing.

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Very beautifully explained, Plantmom. Thank you for that analysis. That was by far my favorite passage in the book and the one part of the book that made me interested in sampling Preston’s other works.

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There’s something that is nagging at me about this book – does the fact that we are getting so much enrichment from outside sources speak to a failing in the book itself?

I think novels based on real-life characters and events present difficulties no matter how good they are.

In some ways, a book that is the polar opposite of this one is The Master, by Colm Toibin. It was a fictionalized account of Henry James’s life, with a rich fully realized cast of characters. In that book, you really did not need to go beyond the text to have an intensely satisying experience because the characters on the page had so much depth and nuance.

And yet … There was something very frustrating about the book because the reader craved the footnotes … With almost every scene I wanted to know if the material was real or invented, and even if invented, what the source was that sparked the inspiration.

I decidedly did NOT have that feeling here – the characters and events were sketched loosely enough that the excellent research skills of our members added to the pleasure and filled in the gaps quite nicely. There were very fews scenes where I really cared how closely the source material matched. The scenes that seemed to be fanciful – the wonderful nightingale scene, for example – seemed fanciful in a way I could accept. And the fact that the nightingale incident was based on a true event – though not specifically tied to these characters – added to my pleasure.

And yet – as a literary achievement, I admire the Toibin so much more, even though I found the book much more frustrating in many ways. I’m not sure why; maybe it is because I came to the Toibin as a full-fledged Henry James devotee and I’d never heard of the Sutton Hoo find before (hangs head in shame).

Not sure I have a real point here; just noodling around with ideas.

Does anyone else wish that all novels based on true events came in a heavily footnoted and annotated form? I’d pay extra for it!

(PS – If this thread were a novel, we’d all meet at the Sutton Hoo exhibit at the British Museum to discuss it in person! I can’t wait for my next trip to London to see it!)