Can anyone provide a summary for this weird chapter? I'm really enjoying V. so far and I like the writing style, but this third Chapter (in which Stencil does eight impersonations) went all over the place and it was kind of hard to pick up how the story was continuing.
Sorry for being a bit stupid
its been a while but
pre ww1 tensions
two agents porpentine and bongo-shaftsbury (forget who is who) from enemy sides meet at a ball event or something and meet up with victoria wren
they spend the rest of the night with victoria and some other folks despite being enemies
on the train one of the agents tells a little girl he is a mechanical man. i never undersdtood if he was meant to be some degree of a cyborg or if he was just joking, i think the latter, but symbolically he does represent the mechanizing effects of modernization (as another key figure comes to later on)
then the one guy kills the other guy at a play(?)
its told from multiple perspectives, from what i recall, a cafe server, a ball waiter and wannabe anarchist, a farmer,(?) a train conductor, some con man and ex child predator, someone hiding in a bush (a burglar?) and then like an objective pov with no character attarched
>>7711640
All those POVs are stencil
Also OP is a re-written version of a previous story of pinecones, it may help to read the older one. I think its called Under the Rose.
>>7711640
thank you
>>7711640
Porpentine is with goodfellow. Bongo-shaftesbury and the blue eyeglass guy are the other team
The start is an introduction about stencil and it lets you know also that shaftesbury will kill porpentine later on
Part I is a coffee stand guy who sees porpentine meet goodfellow, they are going to monitor some anarchists who plot to murder alastair wren (father of victoria wren). Goodfellow wants to seduce her.
Part 2 is an anarchist at the ball who is sees victoria and also sees porpentine fall down the stairs and the blue eyeglass guy as well. He thinks alot about what comes to be known as the fashoda incident (an event that people thought might cause a great war in the years before ww1. Stencils V often has some kind of harbinger / agent of destruction motif).
Next is a pedo at a coffee shop who sits with them and tries to pretend to be a tourist when hes a homeless cripple. Shaftesbury and lepsius (blue eyeglass) come over and talk to them.
Part 4 is a train conductor who thinks about his family, passes lepsius and sees victorias sister mildred being taunted by bongo shaftesbury who claims to be part doll (important theme of inanimate vs animate). Porpentine tells him to fuck off. An arab man tries to kill goodfellow but is stopped by porpentine.
