About a couple weeks ago, the subject of Qwilleran's age popped up on the Cat Who... mailing list - what it was, if he aged at all, and if Braun's long break from the series affected his age - whether or not Qwilleran aged those eighteen years between the written-in-the-'60's The Cat Who Turned On and Off and the published-in-the-'80's The Cat Who Saw Red. To tell the truth, the subject doesn't much interest me personally, largely because I don't see much to dispute about the matter (for reasons discussed below), but enough people were interested in the subject to keep the thread thriving for several days, so it must be a topic that's controversial to some degree in the Cat Who... community, so I'll stick my oar in.
The most popular theory seemed to be that, since the eighteen-year supposed chronological break threw such a monkey wrench into the age issue, it would be best to just declare Qwilleran to be an "ageless" character, like Nero Wolfe - which, according to the books' events, can't be true. Qwill celebrates his fiftieth birthday in The Cat Who Sniffed Glue; his "obituary" in The Cat Who Lived High states his age as 52; if you follow the clues and chronology of book-to-book events, he'd be 57 at the end of Saw Stars. The world around him plainly isn't stuck in any sort of temporal stasis, either - Qwill in Played Brahms, which takes place in June/July, talks of having met Rosemary three months ago - an event that took place in Saw Red, which is set in March of the same year; Clayton Robinson (Celia's nephew) is thirteen in Went into the Closet and fourteen in Tailed a Thief, which takes place twelve-fifteen months after Closet; the young offspring of folks like Junior & Jody and the Bambas whose maturing, as kids, would be the most noticeable of the cast, grow up at a steady rate; the progression of Qwilleran's five-year wait for his formal inheritance of the Klingenschoen fortune begins, is chronicled, and concludes appropriately within the books' span; characters refer to events taking place x months ago that were detailed in books that were actually set x months ago; and so on and so forth. It's not like the temporal loop of, say, a comic strip, where months go by and the townsfolk behave, dress, prepare, and celebrate appropriate to the season or holiday, but the characters never age and are always back where they started when the beginning of the "next" year rolls around - still in the same grade or celebrating the same wedding anniversary that they were in or did a "year" ago - so that no actual time really passes at all; time is a constant in this world, and one can piece together a book-by-book timeline - and it therefore wouldn't make sense to assert that, while the rest of the books' world grows older, have Qwilleran and the cats alone remain invulnerable to aging - especially when the books explicitly state that he doesn't by giving him progressively older ages throughout the series. (Unless, of course, Qwilleran is...the Highlander. Hey, the man has Scottish roots, right? "Born fifty-seven years ago in the highlands of Connecticut..." But anyhow.)
The only sticking point I can see in the age issue are Qwill's war-correspondant crededentials, which, when they were heavily mentioned - during the city arc, written in the '60's - were intended to be pointing to something else - namely and obviously, World War II - but, as expressed earlier by other mailing-list subscribers, can be explained away by other, "currently chronologically compliant" conflicts - the possibility of Qwill covering Vietnam, the Seven Days' War, etc. And our perspective is colored by our knowledge of the fact that the books were _written_ in the '60's; though some of the slang is out of the date and there's an absence of talk about certain technological advances in recording, etc. that would've been at a newswriter's disposal in the late 80's-early 90's, there's no iron-clad evidence - historical allusions, say - that definitively sets the action Down Below in the '60's themselves in retrospect from the Moose County books. (The lack of historical references that place the events of the books in a solid current-events context is characteristic of all the Cat Who... books, in fact - a by-product, unintended or no, of Braun's strategy of only giving only sparse (potent, but sparse) physical detail to her main characters and locales so as to engage the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks she intentionally leaves empty, thus making the world seem all the more real in the reader's mind. (The sole exception to this rule is Saw Stars, which breaks so many other rules of both the series and good writing than it errs itself into irrelevance.))
The basic problem here is that we're trying to fashion an in-book-event-based excuse for an anomaly whose explanation we all know rests in real life - namely, Braun's eighteen-year hiatus. It's like when a television show makes a continuity error - says that a certain character received a critical present on Christmas one episode and on her birthday on another. Or, say, switching leading actors in mid-series and trying to reconcile the fact that Darrin on Bewitched looks completely different than he did an episode ago. Or...having Qwilleran assert in Sang for the Birds that he never discussed Koko's sleuthing talent and supernatural abilities with Arch Riker before, despite the numerous instances where he has in previous books, like telling him about how Koko twisted his tail into the shape of a corkscrew to cast suspicion on a culpable bartender in Lived High, recounting Koko's exploits to large audiences in the Press Club in the city episodes, etc. The Cat Who... series, like all of the examples above, is a work of fiction, created by vulnerable and fallible humans, and the integrity of its world is subject to the attentiveness, safety, career plans, real lives, and God knows what else of those who create it. When such a blip on the continuity radar occurs and the work contradicts itself, viewers and readers should be expected to understand the context in "reality" of the mistake to forgive the gaps and reconcile the facts that authors are human and errors can happen. Braun means for the reader to understand that Qwill started out in his mid-forties and aged to his late fifties over the course of the series as it currently stands, and that the books took place in more or less close succession over that period of time. Let's accept that and move on.
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