Diana Wynne Jones FTW!
I finally decided to give the Toronto Public Library another shot after previously experiencing its excruciatingly long wait times. Lo and behold, books I put on hold are coming trickling, nay, flooding in at a heretofore unprecedented rate. So, of course, I decided to read them and then write pithy little paragraphs to put on my blog. Unfortunately, before I could actually do so, I found myself writing an essay on why Diana Wynne Jones is awesome. Because the very first book I started to type up was…
House of Many Ways, by Diana Wynne Jones. OK, I lied, this book didn’t come in from the library. I pre-ordered it way back in the fall. That, by the way, says something. There are only two* authors whose books I ever buy on matter of principle, let alone pre-order. One is, surprisingly (or maybe not), J. K. Rowling, and that’s because I know it will take forever to get her books through the library, and, in the meantime, if I want to avoid spoilers, I will have to stay off the Internet. The Internet is more precious to me than shelling out $25 for the latest HP extravaganza. Whatever. The second author, however, is Diana Wynne Jones, and the reason I automatically pre-order her books is because, dude, she’s THAT GOOD.
First of all, all her people are people. Her villains are people. Her heroes are people. Her walk-on-once-and-never-say-another-word bystanders are people. They all have virtues and flaws and selfish little tics, and, no matter how badly they’re behaving, you can always understand why they think what they’re doing is a good idea. She doesn’t bash you over the head with their backgrounds, but you can always see it in the way they perceive things – Sophie Hatter’s sensible, we’ll-just-see-what-has-to-be-done attitude comes from being the eldest of three sisters and working at a hat shop all her life. Howard Sykes’s dreamy obsession with rockets and experience taking care of his little sister Awful gives him the particular understanding he has of the seven wizard siblings who run his town. Gair’s life as the unremarkable middle brother in a family of Gifted royalty gives him the thoughtfulness and humility that gets him through life’s troubles.
(In this respect, DWJ reminds me strongly of George Bernard Shaw: neither (usually) writes villains as innately evil, and both have a sensible, grounded feel to their work. More interestingly, they both allow their characters, both major and minor, to step up to the plate once in a while in ways the reader didn’t expect: Freddy Eynsford-Hill is a giant fop, but he’s there for Eliza when she needs him. Cart, Fenella, Imogen, and Sally’s emotionally distant mother is morally weak, but she nevertheless rallies when one of her daughters is in the hospital.)
Second, all her Chekov’s guns fire. If there is a little detail in the first ten pages, you can bet she won’t have forgotten it’s there in the next ten, and, by the end of the book, it might just be important enough to influence the main plot. Also, her plots work: like the very best Agatha Christie mysteries, the events as they first seem are confounding, but, once the main character has struggled through the plot, everything slowly begins to piece together until, aha! It does make sense that Howl would keep visiting Sophie’s sister or that nobody knows where Quentin’s words go or that things are going wrong for everyone on the Moor at once. That’s not to say ALL her endings work for me – those of A Tale of Time City and Fire and Hemlock never really wowed me – but, when they don’t, it’s more a matter of personal preference rather than because they don’t logically follow from the stuff going on in the book. Even better, I can reread her books again and again and always pick out new meanings in familiar events and telling details I didn’t notice before: what the Witch of the Waste means when she tells Sophie she doesn’t need the competition at the very beginning of the book, or why the schoolchildren collect blood for the nameless ghost to drink.
(One reviewer of Howl’s Moving Castle on Amazon.com complains that DWJ assumes the reader is following along with her when really it’s difficult to pick up all the plot on the first read. Er… but that’s why I especially like her books. The main plot points are generally clear on a first read in the same way those of a less complicated plot would be, but, when you go back and start again, instead of that same old plot you just finished reading, there’s a treasure-trail of goodies and nuances to pick up.)
Another thing about DWJ that ties into this is she knows the way to tell an exciting, suspenseful story: start with a really long sequence of events, and begin your actual story with an appealing character who knows nothing of any of this somewhere close to the end. Time of the Ghost begins way, way after most of the interesting stuff has happened, and the reader and the narrator have to figure out together what happened to her and why. Actually, I can’t think of even one DWJ novel where the salient events did not start happening at least five or ten years before the novel itself begins. (If you consider her novels based on various mythologies (although to tell you which they are would spoil them), then I guess you could argue some start thousands of years before.) And the way she works it, you can tell she’s carefully extrapolated in the “Hmmm, this happened in the past – what does that mean for the present?” way rather than (or as well as) in the “Okay, I need this to happen in the story now – what could have happened to cause it?” one.
She’s also got a way of hiding things the characters are looking for right under the noses of both searchers and readers, in the way that doesn’t feel like cheating (there’s clearly something about the brass bedpost or strange leather book that isn’t quite normal), but is nevertheless unexpected. (“Oh, so the legendary ‘gold of the ancient kings’ is actually the sunlight that pours into the throne room and shows the way to the hidden treasure.” Maybe that wasn’t a good example, because I had to make it up in order not to spoil any books.)
To top it off, DWJ is terrifically funny. If you know the Lord of the Rings trilogy back-to-front and read lots of Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan, see her Tough Guide to Fantasyland for an example. But even in her fiction, there are plenty of howlingly funny moments – Sophie trying to use seven-league boots and not being able to stop, the children of Larwood House flying random cleaning implements to safety because there aren’t enough brooms, Sam always greedily making himself sick on butter pies. The humanity of all her characters makes each one ripe for humour – Chrestomanci and Howl’s vanity, Howard’s tendency to daydream, and Joris’s unstemmed adoration for his boss Konstam. In a DWJ book, you can be fairly certain that, much like real-life technology, no artifact or spell will ever work the way its users hoped it would; computer-like magic will only do exactly what it’s been told and no more, and the fountain the characters enchanted to chase away the water-fearing demons will wind up flooding the basement.
House of Many Ways is set in the same universe as Howl’s Moving Castle, my favourite of DWJ’s books (well… maybe. Closely followed by Archer’s Goon, Power of Three, and the Dalemark Quartet, to say the least). Her most recent couple of series books (Conrad’s Fate, The Pinhoe Egg) have both been in the Chrestomanci universe, which is fun but can’t top Howl, Sophie, and Calcifer. Anyway, if you intend to read it, I highly recommend reading the first two (Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air) first, so you can better appreciate the cameos and reappearances.
In House of Many Ways, sheltered bookworm Charmain gets sent to take care of the strange house of her Great-Uncle William, the Royal Wizard of Norland. “Strange” because, depending on how you open it, the same door can lead to many different places, including the underground village of small, blue creatures called “kobolds” and the Royal Palace. Coincidentally, an Ingarian sorceress named Sophie is paying a visit to the Princess to help her with something. Charmain finds herself taking care of an unusual stray dog and the unexpectedly-just-arrived new apprentice, along with dealing with the evil “lubbockin”, negotiating with the angry kobolds, and helping save her kingdom from an awful fate.
Charmain is, quite frankly, an awesome character. DWJ is very good at capturing the essence of ordinary people: it’s not that they don’t think of the greater good or overarching benefit of humankind, it’s just that they don’t necessarily see how their own selfish wants conflict with it. Charmain is very self-absorbed and incompetent – she doesn’t know how to cook, do laundry, or clean up after herself. What she does know is how to find out the information she wants, and that proves to be a valuable skill. Similarly, it’s not that she intends to be mean or cold to the people around her, it’s just that they don’t capture much of her attention. But, when it occurs to her, she does her best to be pleasant and nice. That’s a character I can love right there.
Charmain’s interaction with Peter, the new apprentice, is funny and rings true. Their swathes of incompetence intersect just enough that each knows most of the things the other doesn’t: he can’t tell right from left; she’s surprised to learn that you have to heat up water to brew a cup of tea. She doesn’t know not to put a red shirt in with the whites; he doesn’t realize it’s a bad idea to try a spell that’s never worked for him on the newly pink clothing. He gets on her nerves for making bigger messes than than the ones he’s trying to clean up; she gets on his for doing nothing about them in the first place.
And it’s terrible fun to watch Sophie and her family through an outsider’s eyes, especially as they’re all up to their usual antics. Again, if you’re familiar with Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air, you’ll unravel the plot a bit further than Charmain has near the middle of the book, but it all comes together for a satisfactorily surprising ending. Also, DWJ writes Morgan, the Pendragons’ now-two-year-old son very evocatively – I can imagine a toddler running shrieking around the room.
I will interject here to point out that Howl and Sophie are one of my favourite fictional couples. (Note for the benefit of friend!Diana: when they first meet, she is eighteen and he is twenty-seven. However, when he falls in love with her, she is in her seventies or eighties. See, I looked it up just for you.) I tend to gravitate toward selfish, obnoxious anti-hero characters (you may have noticed), but their relationships, romantic and platonic, are often a little one-sided – Sherlock Holmes is the hero and Dr. Watson is the sidekick. Mulder and Dr. Who lead, Scully and the Companions follow. But Howl and Sophie have one of those rare balanced relationships where each party has glaring faults that the other both compliments and antagonizes, and neither is the more dominant of the pair. Like Benedick and Beatrice or Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, both can make the reader laugh at them, laugh with them, or even fall a little in love with them. Howl is vain, fickle, and cowardly; Sophie is blunt, impulsive, and possessive.
(Actually, Peter and Charmain have a somewhat similar dynamic, minus the romantic stuff (so far). That’s not to say they have the same personalities as Howl and Sophie, because they don’t, but they do have those oh-so-amusing-to-watch giant flawed streaks that clash with each other tempered with attempts to have affection for one another, and constant rows where neither really has the upper hand. Actually, the more I think of it, DWJ is really, really good at setting up actually-fun-bickering dynamics like this: Jonathan and Vivian; Christopher, Conrad, and Millie…)
The only complaint I had about this book (other than the fact that it ended) was the same as the review to which I linked last week. I’m not sure why the lubbock and lubbockin had to be “innately evil” – a concept, as anyone who wearily puts up with my more long-winded blog entries already knows, that I don’t like very much. It seemed like there didn’t need to be any based-in-the-genes explanation of why they were against the protagonists: if you feel the kingdom actually belongs to you and your people, then it makes sense for you to try to put one of you on the throne.
Other than that, I heartily recommend this book. And in an awkward segue, I will leave you with this thought: my watch is getting abducted by aliens. No, seriously, it’s missing time. It will have been giving me the correct time all day, then, all of a sudden, I’ll look at it only to find it’s fifteen or twenty minutes behind my clock. But still ticking. And then, when I correct it, it’ll run fine for another week or month or so… and then suddenly lose fifteen minutes again**! Paging Agents Mulder and Scully…
* OK, maybe Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, too. Sometimes.
**Actually, on the day of writing this, it somehow gained an hour. W… T… F???