Diana Wynne Jones Books – Part One

I can tell you’re shivering with anticipation.

Well, you already know I love most things by Diana Wynne Jones, so it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed these. After enjoying House of Many Ways so much, I thought I’d reread all of DWJ’s work, especially the ones that left me “enh” or “wtf?” on the first read. I didn’t remember them very well (read: at all), so it was almost like reading a whole new book:

1. Deep Secret and The Merlin Conspiracy. They both involve her “Magids” universe: basically, there exist many related worlds, each getting by to varying degrees with science or magic or both. Magids are a network of agents placed throughout the worlds who manipulate and steer those worlds and basically make sure everything stays OK with the multiverse, guided by the decrees of the diety-like Upper Room. In the first, Rupert Venables is a Magid searching for a new recruit who somehow ends up involved in the search for an heir to the nasty Empire on a nearby world. In the second, Nick Mallory, a boy from Earth whom we first meet in Deep Secret, and Roddy, a girl from an Earth-like world where the king of the pseudo!UK has to travel around the land to keep the magic in balance, are unwittingly drawn into a nasty plot that might destroy the balance of magic in the multiverse.

Deep Secret was marketed as an adult novel, while The Merlin Conspiracy was marketed as a YA, but the second is clearly a sequel to the first. The difference has more to do with the POV characters. Rupert Venables and Maree Mallory both have a slightly more finished edge to them than do Nick and Roddy; the things they think are clearly based on more experience, and both Rupert and Maree are more clearly entrenched in their ways and their worldviews than the other two. (Also, much of The Merlin Conspiracy revolves around Nick and Roddy’s efforts to get someone in power to believe them, which isn’t so much of a problem for Rupert or Maree because, well, they’re adults and/or they’re the ones in power.)

I remember reading these books a while ago, when The Merlin Conspiracy first came out, and I just didn’t get them. There are a few complicated concepts to grasp, some necessary political ideas to understand, and a lot of secondary characters to keep track of. But, reading them again, I fell in love with the main characters, and that helped a lot. Rupert is adorably straight-laced, a stiff-upper-lip and by-the-book type. Maree – well, of all the characters, I like Maree least, because impulsiveness just isn’t something with which I usually sympathize, but she’s still a harried and insecure intelligent young woman just trying to make her way in a world that seems against her. Nick is a hilariously self-centred teenage boy whose cleverness and aptitude for manipulating people with his charm get him out of messes. And Roddy… I love Roddy best for blankly refusing to fall for any of Nick’s aforementioned charms, despite the fact that he plies her with them as hard as he can.

Now, the concept of Magids is a little troublesome to me – I don’t much like the idea of what amounts to divinely designated people with power who shape the events of the universe according to a bunch of people who “know best”, who lack accountability to the point that the people whose lives they govern don’t even know they exist. (If this were The X Files, the Magids would be the ones invading in 2012.) It’s easier to overlook stuff like that in these stories than it is to, say, overlook all the weird Muggle-secrecy stuff in Harry Potter or Narnia’s muscular-Christian monarchy in part because, while the latter two works are all about how the main characters fight for that system of government because it’s right and everyone else is wrong, Deep Secret and The Merlin Conspiracy are more like: OK, here’s some characters who live in a world governed in a particular way, and the plot requires that sort of government to make it work. We’ll talk briefly about how the government isn’t so bad, because, otherwise, you might hate Rupert and Maree and all the rest of the characters you’re supposed to like. But the important part of the plot is going to be about saving the space-time fabric of the universe from destruction or preventing civil war in the Koryfonic Empire, which are things we can all agree are good.

(Also, there’s something about books like the Chronicles of Narnia or the Harry Potter series or The Dark is Rising sequence that seems to say, I AM WRITING ABOUT THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF GOOD AND EVIL ON AN EPIC, POLITICAL SCALE, while authors like Diana Wynne Jones, Astrid Lindgren, and Patricia C. Wrede seem to say things more like, GOOD AND EVIL ARE IMPORTANT, BUT THIS STORY WILL DEAL WITH THEM ONLY ON A PERSONAL LEVEL AS “MEAN” AND “NICE”. Or is the latter a more insidious and therefore more dangerous way of making moral statements? I dunno, what do you think?)

Anyway, Deep Secret takes a while to start, and Rupert and Maree aren’t exactly the easiest characters to like right off the bat. But once I got a few chapters in, I was completely hooked, and, despite not particularly caring for Rupert and Maree to begin with, they and their argumentative/spiteful/growing relationship also had me hooked by the end. I couldn’t wait to get The Merlin Conspiracy from the library (I’d forgotten that Rupert and Maree play absolutely no part in it, which is a habit of DWJ’s. I’m not sure whether I find it disappointing or wise; after all, while we all love Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy or Romeo and Juliet, when we have to stick with them through picking out curtains and mid-life crises, it rather takes away the magic. See: Mulder and Scully). A reading (or re-reading) of Deep Secret is definitely recommended before embarking on The Merlin Conspiracy, but the second book is a lot faster-paced and easier to get into.

Both books make interesting use of alternating points of view between the male and female protagonists. It’s especially funny to watch each one make outrageous assumptions about the other’s character and motivations that the reader knows are completely false, and, of course, with regards to Maree and Rupert, it’s a pleasure to watch them slowly move from despising each other to tolerating each other to respecting each other. (With Nick and Roddy, the pleasure comes more from contrasting Nick’s confidence in his charm with Roddy’s complete “That don’t impress me much” and Roddy’s sense of the gravity of the situation with Nick’s characterization of her as a worrywart.) In short, fun.

2. Hexwood. This is a standalone that I remember not getting AT ALL the first time I read it. Which makes sense: it’s purposely disorienting. The characters are going through a number of changes in time, space, and even identity, and, as we readers see the whole plot from their points of view, we get all the confusion that comes with it. So, again, if you like your stories to have no thinking required and/or you are the sort of person who gets confused during murder mysteries, this isn’t the book for you. (Right now, at least. It wasn’t the book for me seven or eight years ago, but, presently, I adore it.)

The plot concerns a number of characters who all have something to do with strange events occurring in the land around Hexwood Farm. A powerful computer/machine that can change the nature of matter, thought, time, and space has been activated there, and it’s sucking everyone into its new reality. Everything is, of course, hella more complicated than that: the machine was constructed by the original, honest founders of what has become a corrupt oligarchy of power-hungry individuals (not unlike Magids Gone Bad). Hexwood also houses the cryogenically frozen bodies of powerful/dangerous/heroic rebels who opposed the corruption of the oligarchy, and everyone’s afraid the machine may have revived them.

However, the trouble in opposing Hexwood is twofold: a) it can manipulate time, so if you’re looking for someone or something, it’ll just take you to a time where that person doesn’t exist in the form you want; b) it can manipulate your mind so that you forget what you want/who you are/what just happened, etc.

This concept turns out to be pretty neat, as, in theory, such a machine is undefeatable. (A handful of powerful characters stride into its domain determined to find it and shut it down, only to believe they’re medieval knights attending a king at court.) The characters still seem to retain their “true” identities somewhere – each will sometimes think to him- or herself that something is vaguely familiar or that they had a very different life somewhere, which, I suppose, is necessary to make things interesting: it would be a pretty horrible story if characters you’d grown to know just became different people every time the machine said so.

I did get a slight sense of being cheated when it turned out that one of the main characters was someone completely different than I’d been expecting, and also when it turned out that other characters had underestimated by far the range of the machine’s power (ie so that a number of things we thought were real were actually constructions of the machine). But I think that “wuh?” when the carpet’s pulled out from under your feet is worth it when it puts you in the (suddenly head-over-heels) shoes of the protagonists. It’s when things start making sense to the characters but not to you that you want to throw the book across the room.

Anyhow: I really liked Hexwood (although perhaps it tells you something about the nature of the story that I don’t remember any of the characters’ names, nor do I even know how to describe them in an accurate but spoiler-free way), but I can see that it’s definitely an acquired taste. Sort of for the I, Robot crowd or fans of other “hard” science fiction – people who don’t mind it when a story makes their brain hurt once in a while.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO NEXT WEEK….