Themes
Unlike Marianne Dreams with its magical plot, the sequel focuses on character and emotion. There are however, a number of occasions which could be interpreted as supernatural, especially the fortune teller's knowledge of Marianne and her dream. It is left ambiguous as to whether Mark experienced the events of Marianne Dreams or if they were all only a dream of Marianne's. There are hints that it was more than just a dream as the fortune teller notes that Marianne's previous actions helped Mark, and later Mark takes Marianne to a lighthouse which looks exactly the same as the one from the dream, and he asks her if she remembers it. This could mean that the dream did happen to both of them or he could be simply commenting on the fact that both of them have in fact visited the spot before, in real life.
At a conference on children's literature, one respondent suggested that the novel was realistic rather than fantasy because of the needs of the novel form for older children, and that this is less successful than the earlier book. Storr's response was:
Perhaps this didn't come off as well. … I wrote that because I'd always wanted to write on the Macbeth theme – if you are told that something is going to happen to you, you make it happen. That was what the book was supposed to be about and there is a very good example of using fantasy.
Read more about this topic: Marianne And Mark
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
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