Marianne Dreams

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Ren: I think they wanted to rehabilitate the image of him after the horrifying dream father sequence. Because he seems pretty decent.

Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr - LoveReading4Kids

Ali: So after that the house is very crumpled and grimy and smeared with dirt. It really does have the texture of something that has been in the bottom of a bin bag. Ren: So a lot more is made in the book of Mark recovering, or becoming stronger and becoming able to walk and ride a bike. And this is a process that takes a long time, faster than it would in the real world, but still quite a long while of dreams, and Marianne providing more equipment and items that Mark can use to become stronger.Ren: Anna draws this for herself and then this bizarre sludge of ice-cream comes out, just splurges out —

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Adam: NHS green ice-cream. And she kind of says to herself, ‘Oh, I forgot to draw some cones’. As though a cone would make it all better. Ali: Well, in the book. Marianne draws a radio in another room to where Mark is, because she thinks it will keep him entertained. But then when they turn it on — well, we haven’t talked about THEM yet, but anyway, it’s a sinister radio. Ali: I think actually that some of the strongest elements of the film are the parts that are about the fantasy, the visual elements of these dream-like things that have been shoved together and are the wrong shapes. Adam: It reminded me of rewatching Big with my sister, the Tom Hanks film in which he’s young and in the body of a boy, and there’s a whole relationship scene where me and my sister were going ‘Oh ho ho, wouldn’t it be awful if something actually romantic happened’, and it does, and we were both quite horrified. Adam: Well, one thing Ali, you pointed out watching the film was that the laws of cause and effect don’t really apply in the way that the book has it. The book’s very much a sequential narrative.

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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. Adam: Well, in the film he has muscular dystrophy. So we kind of know as adult viewers from the start that he’s probably going to die. Muscular dystrophy’s degenerative and pretty devastating. Magical Land: Marianne is able to live in the fantasy world she created for herself by drawing it in a notebook. Adam: Well, that was my main one, but I was also going to say the general texture of the walls of the house. Ali: — she does draw, and she does use the same pencil, as far as you can tell, but it’s not really emphasised as being an important object.

Catherine Storr - Wikipedia

I like how genuinely conflicted she is. Like, ‘I guess I can’t kill him. But God, I really don’t like him!’. In this episode we talked about the film Paperhouse, and the book it's based on, Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr.Ren: It says when Marianne and Mark are escaping, they hear ‘the sound of steps behind, plodding, slow, like the pounding of a giant pestle in a huge mortar’. Such is the quandary at the heart of Marianne Dreams. When the lively, imaginative Marianne falls suddenly ill on her tenth birthday with a curiously unspecified malady, she is confined to bed: potentially for several months. And her freewheeling lifestyle of riding lessons and slap-up feasts is transformed instantly into a claustrophobic existence of inactive misery; her world reduced to the toys and books that surround her, and the visits of three central adults: her mother, her doctor, and hired-in private tutor Miss Chesterfield. Ren: And then right at the end of that, the dream and the real world are completely blurred in the film, because she ends up finding a note from Mark, at the real lighthouse, that he’s gone off to write in the dream. So it’s definitely a lot less demarcated between the real world and the dream world and how they relate. Adam: But then, I’m fond of the film but I can’t imagine many groups of adults going to the cinema and enjoying it. Townsend (1987), 246, " Marianne Dreams is strong stuff for children of the fairly low age-group (about nine to twelve) for which I have seen it suggested. But I would not say it is unsuitable. The realization that we all have power for evil must come some time, and could take far more disturbing forms than this."