Gemini at 70

Today is Bob Dylan's 70th birthday; Saturday was Martin Carthy's. For the best part of 50 years they have been the fixed stars in my musical firmament. They are the two faces of folk music as I know it, the singer-songwriter and the reviver of traditional material, yet they are not opposites. The first Bob Dylan album I bought* credited Martin Carthy as the source of the tune for Bob Dylan's Dream. I wish I had been there when they were playing the Troubadour together.

I wish them both many happy days, and I thank them for all the music.

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*My cousin Michael recommended two new folk singers, Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan. He told me that Dylan had made an album called Bob Dylan, but when I went to buy it I found there was a new one, Freewheelin', so I bought that instead.

We'll always have Dalemark IV: The Crown of Dalemark

And so, at last, to the point of this re-reading - to the reason, that is, why I chose to re-read these particular books by Diana Wynne Jones, rather than one of my favourites. I had been thinking of The Crown of Dalemark as enjoyable enough, but unnecessary, closing off the land of Dalemark, tidying up its loose ends - only they weren't loose ends, they were open ends, which is different. I'd found it confusing, too, leaving me with a sense that things didn't quite match my recollections - but that my memories of the earlier books weren't clear enough to be sure why, or even whether I was just misremembering. (Looking now at my book diary for 1993, this discomfort was balanced by several things I had liked, including that very neatness, that sense of completion which in retrospect grated on me. Do I contradict myself? Very well...)

( Cut for long and rambling )

I remain, then, as ambivalent about The Crown of Dalemark as I was the first time round, though not necessarily for the same reasons. And yet, if it isn't Diana Wynne Jones at her very best, it is still a big absorbing book full of magical pleasures. All of this thinking is retrospective; while I was reading it I was just enjoying the ride, the journey through a landscape, the green uplands haunted by the traces of its own past, but also by Maewen's knowledge of its future. This was wonderful - and with the curious extra twist that I had only recently read Jo Walton's wonderful Among Others, and the fairy-haunted industrial ruins of her Welsh landscape overlay Dalemark in my mind's eye (there was a plot echo, too, which I won't spoiler by discussing here)