Marianne Dreams

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Ali: One of the things I liked in the book was how it talks about Marianne’s feelings about being ill. Ali: I think in the book, you never really know for sure, but the dream world is definitely treated as being real in terms of the narrative. Whereas in the film, it seemed to make more sense, at least, if you read it as being fever dreams. And the illness is much more linked to the dreams.

Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr - Google Books Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr - Google Books

Adam: Which is what I think makes the film a very odd adaptation of the book because it’s coming from a very different perspective.Marianne is a twelve year old girl confined to bed for months with a debilitating illness. Tired but restless she plunders a keepsake box handed down from her great grandmother to her mother and finds amongst the shiny trinkets a nice pencil, 'It was one of those pencils that are simply asking to be written or drawn with.' Adam: Or the white king possibly. Anyway, the sleeping monarch’s dreams. And Alice is very upset by this, and protests that that’s not true. So Mark seems equally upset by the idea that he might just be a character in Marianne’s dreams. I must say, the TV show makes this distinctly less “weird” by confirming that Marianne fell off a horse and broke her leg; if she’s hallucinating, it’s because of the boredom of bed (like in the classic Victorian metaphor-for-the-lives-of-women short story the Yellow Wallpaper). If the book features a mystery malady instead, that’s a lot more interesting; and there’s also a political dimension to that, especially in the way that women with mystery maladies like MS/chronic fatigue/fibro are undermined as “hysterics with a mental health problem” rather than people experiencing a genuine health crisis; it spirals out into all sorts of ideas culture has about both good health and also women. Very much like Yellow Wallpaper, actually. a b c Marianne dreams (1964 record of "[Rev. ed."). Library of Congress Online Catalog (lccn.loc.gov). Retrieved 2018-06-28.

MARIANNE DREAMS by Catherine Storr. Review by Penny Dolan. MARIANNE DREAMS by Catherine Storr. Review by Penny Dolan.

See Faber authors in conversation and hear readings from their work at Faber Members events, literary festivals and at book shops across the UK. So, in Paperhouse, it’s a similar setup, Anna draws her father and then decides she’s drawn him wrong and scribbles his face out. While suffering from glandular fever, 11-year-old Anna Madden draws a house. When she falls asleep, she has disturbing dreams in which she finds herself inside the house she has drawn. After she draws a face at the window, in her next dream she finds Marc, a boy who suffers with muscular dystrophy, living in the house. She learns from her doctor that Marc is a real person. Ali: Yeah, I like standing stones in general. But as villains I think they’re pretty good in this. Standing stones with a single cyclopian eye is particularly good for me.

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Adam: Sure. So in the book it’s much more based around problem solving. Creating objects that Mark might like, or might help Mark in the house. Whereas in the film, she draws the house and next time we see her draw a whole plethora of objects, and there’s not much rhyme or reason. Over the course of the series, she finds that everything she draws appears in the dream - unfortunately, as she isn't very good at drawing, the images in the by now recurring dream look odd - the scribbles on the window appear as curly prison bars. Another one of her pupils, a boy named Mark, who we never see outside of Marianne's dreams, is also ill.