Diana Wynne Jones Books – Part Two

I know, I know – you’ve waited since last week with bated breath. (Well, if you had, literally, you’d be dead – maybe half-bated breath? Occasionally bated breath?) So, without further ado…

3. Dark Lord of Derkholm and Year of the Griffin. I’m honestly not quite sure what I think of these ones. On one hand, they bring together a number of my favourite tropes, ones I’m always trying to use in my own work: an extended network of siblings, a tongue-in-cheek explanation of silly “rules” that most stories in a genre seem to follow. On the other, I’m beginning to see why those tropes don’t work particularly well: it’s hard to sympathize with a main character once there are ten of them running around, and, while the conceit of the citizens of a parallel universe running around behind the scenes organizing epic fantasy adventures (“tours”) for designated heroes from our own world is funny and clever, it gets old after a few chapters.

The plot of Dark Lord of Derkholm goes something like this: for decades, the citizens of a magical alternate universe have been forced to devote most of their energy, resources, and time catering to “tourists” from our own universe, who come to experience a cliche-laden, swords-and-sorcery epic Quest to fight the Dark Lord. Catch is, the industry depends (for reasons never quite specified) on the tourists not realizing that everything is faked. So everyone has to drop everything they’re doing to prepare an elaborate ruse that convinces the tourists they’re actually fighting evil.

This year, Wizard Derk has been chosen as the Dark Lord whom each of the hundred or so groups of tourists has to defeat at some point. Trouble is, Derk is an easygoing family man whose competency is in creating hybrid creatures (he has two human children and five griffin ones in the first book… no, I don’t want to know either, although DWJ goes to great lengths to explain it in a way that isn’t completely gross or implausible (er… implausible given the existence of magic, anyway (look, triple parentheses))). In fact, unbeknownst to him, Derk has been chosen as Dark Lord as the first step in an incredibly intricate and/or fated plan to bring down the tours system and save the world.

The minor inconveniences of the “incompetent-Dark-Lord” plot outweigh the interesting part of the “save-the-world” plot for the first two-thirds of the book; although there are hints of something epic on the horizon (who is that weird old dragon who seems to have just woken up? Why is magic disappearing from the land), it’s a bit difficult to get into Derk’s seven children running around trying to make the tours run according to plan. It’s kind of like watching a theatre show fall apart backstage but without the strong sense of what the audience expects that makes such scenes funny. Though DWJ is good enough that the reader quickly catches on to the personalities of the “main” children (Kit, Blade, and Shona) and is at least able to identify which are human and which are griffin, there is a strong temptation to purposely forget about any character who hasn’t appeared in the last couple pages.

Also, while everything about Derk seems to shout “pleasant, if slightly obsessed, British crackpot inventor/academic and dad” (think Arthur Weasley with his Muggle devices, or Caractacus Potts, or Kenneth Branaugh in that 2004 Five Children and It film with Freddie Highmore), there is the more-than-slightly creepy fact that what he enjoys most seems to be creating new animals, some of them sentient, and not considering any of the moral implications of doing so. I mean, far be it from me to take a technophobic view of experimental science, but, you know, it seems like the decent thing to do to imagine what life will be like for the flying, talking horse you intend to create and consider its potential suffering/lack of mate/treatment as pet/ etc. before you go through and actually make the thing.

Year of the Griffin is a little different – it takes place after the world has been saved at the wizarding University, where the ragtag class of incoming students has to deal with the fact that nobody, including their teachers, actually knows any wizardry beyond what the tours required. It’s a satire of academia, where no one is interested in preserving the beauty and art of his or her subject and everything is judged by its practical applications. One of the main characters is Derk’s youngest daughter, Elda, who’s starting her freshgriffin year.

I’m not particularly fond of DWJ’s portrayal of college/university students, mostly because they spend all their time clustering in coffee shops and each others’ rooms, doing all the things that I do but that I’m well aware are interesting only to the people doing them. It’s fun to participate in an intelligent conversation; it’s not so much fun to listen to one to which you can’t contribute. It’s fun to hang out with your friends but utterly boring to watch other people hang out with theirs (unless one of them is a pirate, the other is a ninja, and by “hang out”, you mean “fight crime”). Again, it’s easy in this book to get caught up in the nitty-gritty, chapter-to-chapter problems of everyday life and easy to miss or stop caring about (or not be sure what is) the overarching plot.

By the end of both books, I got attached to most of the characters, and I was glad I’d read the story, but I still felt like there was no way for me to avoid the slowness at the beginning.

4.Wilkins’ Tooth. Actually, I’d never read this one before. Why not? I haven’t a clue, because it’s great. Not War and Peace, of course, but a fun read. It’s aimed at an audience significantly younger than the previous five books I’ve mentioned. Two kids, Frank and Jess, start a revenge business. They’ve hardly been open a day before they’re in huge trouble with the local bullies, and, soon, they find themselves on the hit list of the local village witch for taking away her business.

At the beginning of the book, it is a little ambiguous whether or not this is going to be a story with magic or a regular E.-Nesbit-esque “Those silly kids and their money-making schemes!”, but everything becomes clear at a steady pace (no “Bam! Magic!”), and there’s plenty of what I like best about DWJ: characters we initially don’t like but come to see are actually good people. And, for what it’s worth, the story makes sense on its own terms, taking care of a lot of problems in middle-grade fantasy (eg. how do you get the parents out of the way so it’s the kids’ story?) neatly and plausibly.

Also, revenge is bad. But don’t worry, it won’t cause you to accidentally murder everyone you ever cared about (SWING YOUR RAZOR HIGH, SWEENEY!!!!), it will just be the jumping-off point for tense but safe adventures and hilarious hijinks.

5. Last but not least, Fire and Hemlock. It’s funny that I can like most of DWJ’s “incidental” couples (Howl and Sophie; Rupert and Maree) so much and not particularly care for the two characters whose romance forms the body of this book, Polly and Tom. The structure of the story is fascinating: it starts with Polly sitting in her room after coming home from college, realizing she’s lost a whole bunch of her memories, all relating to a man named Tom whom she first met when she was a little girl. So the whole novel is basically flashbacks of Polly going through her and Tom’s friendship and trying to figure out why she lost those memories and what, if anything, his ex-wife Laurel and her sinister family has to do with it.

If the legend of Tam Lin means anything to you, you will probably have figured out exactly what the problem is a little before Polly, but that’s cool. What I don’t like about Polly and Tom is that a large part of their relationship is about a secret fantasy world they make up together (which seems to come true on numerous occasions). Now, I understand that this can be a fun social activity for friends to share with each other, and I know from my childhood how much fun shared imaginary worlds can be. However, I also know from my childhood how utterly obnoxious other people’s shared imaginary worlds are, and I can’t help but be completely fed up with Polly and Tom every time they bring it up. (Perhaps it’s because I find their fantasies somewhat pedestrian and boring? Like, you had a whole imagination, and that’s the best you could come up with?)

Surprisingly, this is my biggest annoyance with them, despite the fact that he’s old enough to be her father and has known her since she was a kid, which ordinarily would set off my “creep!” alarm faster than a childless fifty-year-old man in a crop top at a Hannah Montana concert. They discuss their age difference in the text, agree that it might be a problem, and decide to work around it. There’s also a lot of discussion about how, given the plot of the story, Tom winds up to have been manipulating Polly just as much as the wicked Laurel clan. To Polly’s credit, she doesn’t smooth over this bump in the pavement with the giant Steamroller of True Love. She acknowledges that the way he’s treated her was wrong, and she’s still hurt, but she thinks they can still go back to their former friendship-and-maybe-more if they’re both willing to work hard at it.

The first time I read this book, I found it terrifically confusing, and the ending still leaves me wondering precisely what happened. But knowing the Tam Lin story helps, as does having the perspective to see how the bits of Polly’s real life fit in with the bits of her fantasy one. And, as a DWJ fan, I find one of the most interesting things is noting her variations on a character. That’s not to say her characters are all alike, because they’re not. They’re not even like the Agatha Christie stock figures who reappeared from book to book (sinister young man, bluff professional fellow, vulnerable young woman in love… etc.). But it’s easy to see how Polly’s deadbeat, spineless father is just a variation away from Wizard Howl, and how they’re both a twist or two away from Nick Mallory, who’s another face of Christopher Chant, Chrestomanci… I find it most fascinating when, like the first two I mentioned, the characters serve completely different story purposes and the traits which make one endearing (Howl’s slithering-out habit) make the other a nasty piece of work.

Anyhow, I don’t particularly enjoy Fire and Hemlock because Polly and Tom’s imaginary world annoys me, and because there’s just one drop too much of “mystic” and “profound” concepts that don’t get explained. But the plot is quite sharp – most of the time, you don’t even notice that everything we’re talking about has already happened and the action is someone remembering the whole thing, which is difficult to pull off. And I admire DWJ for sticking with a very flawed Tom and a very young Polly and making that story work instead of glossing over all the sticky parts. (Which is clearly a deliberate choice and not a blind following of the seed myth – in Tam Lin, Janet winds up pregnant, which does NOT happen in this book…)

Anyway, just in case you didn’t have enough Diana Wynne Jones reviews in your life, there you are. Um… That idea of my being outright appalled about some themes in Harry Potter but apt to overlook some more insidious ones in the work of writers like DWJ who rarely make sweeping statements about good and evil is something I’d like to get back to on this blog.

But don’t worry, not very soon.