Raoul and Lancard

[igenlode]

I had a lot of fun writing my Raoul/Lancard/boatbuilding scene yesterday (it's so much easier writing character interactions and dialogue than it is writing action actually happening in the plot...) I'm getting very fond of sardonic, meticulous Lancard, and it's odd to think that he was only introduced as a throwaway character to make Raoul's life even more annoying, and that we are rapidly approaching the sole scene for which I decided to allow him to stay alive... the one in which he falls into the water and has to be rescued, thus allowing Raoul to get injured and invalided home ;-p

Ironically, however, I'm starting to wonder how I'm going to get *rid* of him; he has no part in the end of the story and in fact more or less vanishes from the plot from the moment that Christine re-enters it (since he didn't originally exist at all at that point!) But if he and Raoul have spent this much time together in their love/hate relationship and have tentatively acknowledged that they have become friends, it's going to be a bit weird for him to just drop out of Raoul's life the moment this girl comes into it (especially as they are perforce going to be travelling together on the way back to France).

Of course, he has a family of his own whom he will be eager to reassure as to his continuing existence, just as Raoul needs to convince Philippe that he is really alive... and there is the convenient crutch of duty on which to lean; he is an officer on active service, and may well be posted off to another ship. Although Raoul apparently isn't, if he goes on this Erik-hunting expedition! I suppose Raoul's injury is more recent...

---

Unfortunately, when I typed up the material with which I was so pleased in order to show it off, I discovered that my attempts at subtlety had become so obscure that I'd actually failed to make the central point of the scene; the fact that they realise that they are friends :-(

It's not that I hadn't written it; it's just that it wasn't at all clear that that's what it was meant to imply. My description of the cobbled-together craft in which they plan to make their escape wasn't nearly as good as I'd hoped, either; I was worried about its not being clear to people who didn't know nautical jargon, but in fact by the time I'd inserted all sort of extra bits it was pretty confusing even to my own eyes.

The 'oops, we're friends' moment has been fixed, I hope, although I had to resort to 'crossing my lines' in red biro in order to fit the insertion into a crowded page. I suspect the summary of the Résurgence will have to be redone again when I come to that part in the typing-up, but I've fiddled with it some more.

I'm still not decided about whether the Résurgence ought to have her e-aigu accent or not; I deliberately picked the name because it's more or less the same in French and English, but decided that logically it ought to be given in French since we're referring throughout to the Requin and not the Shark (for fairly obvious reasons of dignity, plus continuity with Leroux...) On the other hand it looks a little odd and fussy to me when I write it :-(