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shewhomustUnlike the people whose memories of Diana Wynne Jones I've been reading since the weekend, I have no personal connection with her. I never met her, and her books didn't change my life (by the time Wilkin's Tooth was published, I was already in my 20s). But for almost 40 years I've been following her, reading and re-reading, loving some of the books more than others and never less than enjoying them (well, I was a bit baffled by Changeover, which I found in Newcastle Library while trawling the adult shelves in the hope that A Tale of Time City might have ended up there - but I think that's fair enough). I'm going to miss her. Luckily, the books are still here, and she is immensely re-readable. And I have been promising myself a re-reading of the Dalemark Quartet for a very long time - quite possibly since I first read The Crown of Dalemark, which would make it not a re-reading but a first reading of the quartet as a whole.
It says something about Diana Wynne Jones and the games she plays with time that first I had to decide which order to read the books in. The Crown of Dalemark has to come last, of course, but The Spellcoats takes place long before the other two, and I toyed with the idea of starting there, before deciding that no, I wanted to read it as I did the first time - as it was written, I assume? - as answering questions I had already asked, identifying persons I had already met. I should, I suppose have turned to Cart and Cwidder, but my hand landed first on Drowned Ammet, and Drowned Ammet is one of my favourites, so that's what I read.
"People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end." You'd think that this act of terrorism would be the dramatic climax of the book, yet here it is, tossed down casually in the opening sentence, and then built up to not as the ending of the story but its beginning, the point at which Mitt begins to wonder what he thinks he is doing, who he is and who he wants to become. It's quite a trick, to present us in the first line with a bomb at the festival, and then to persuade us to care about the bomber. (And this isn't because the book was written in a more innocent age before 9/11 and al-Qaeda: the IRA was bombing London throughout the 1970s.)
Nonetheless, it becomes quite clear what Mitt thought he was doing. The book isn't particularly subtle about spelling out what the viewpoint characters are thinking: Mitt and Hildy, and Ynen too, are transparent, we aren't left to decipher theit emotions from their actions. I don't know if this is a flaw, but it doesn't feel crass or clumsy, it feels - well, it feels as if this is the proper concern of the story, how Mitt becomes sufficiently self aware to make the decision he is asked to make at the end of the book, and how before he can become self-aware he first has to become aware of the reality of other people.
I had not read many of the books of Diana Wynne Jones before I noticed the extraordinary absence of parents. Books for children, in which children have adventures, have to get the parents out of the way: that's a constant. But DWJ takes this to extraordinary lengths (and when I read a bit about her childhood, it began to make sense). But Mitt has, if anything, a superfluity of parents. The story begins withhis mother and father laughing, happy in their farm on the Flate. This ought to be a good sign, but it isn't. In adversity, his father withdraws, and his mother Milda shows herself incapable of managing alone. Mitt assumes a quasi-parental role towards her, yet his view of the world is formed by hers, and his mission to avenge his father's believed death grows from their folie à deux. Father figures abound: first Siriol, then his step-father Hobin take him as apprentice, and try to teach him more than their trade. Later still, Old Ammet and Libby Beer also act like surrogate parents, but that's another part of the story.
Mitt has an abundance of parents, but very little else; Hildy and Ynen live in luxury, but they are effectively parentless. Navis - an inexplicably good man in a brood of vipers - clearly loves his children. His first appearance shows him being kind and understanding towrds a lost child, seeing how Mitt's actions resemble Hildy's. Yet he has at some point withdrawn from his children. The ladies-in-waiting tell Hildy that he is "still grieving for her dead mother", but Hildy treats this romantic cliché with contempt, as well she may. Whatever the reason, he leaves her and Ynen neglected among the plenty, and although he forbids them to attend the hanging of the Notherners, this comes as an isolated diktat. Generally, he leaves their upbringing to others. (DWJ published two books in 1977. The first was Drowned Ammet, the second was Charmed Life, with the first appearance of another vague and absent father - with a taste for sumptuous dressing gowns.)
It's too early to talk here about the richness of Dalemark as a fantasy land with both geography and history. But I do love Holand, with its seaport and its flatlands and its sea festival; I love its Arcimboldoesque deities (which it has forgotten are deities); and I love the presence throughout the book of the sea, the boats and the islands.
And it's late, but if I go to bed now there might just be time for a chapter of Cart and Cwidder.
It says something about Diana Wynne Jones and the games she plays with time that first I had to decide which order to read the books in. The Crown of Dalemark has to come last, of course, but The Spellcoats takes place long before the other two, and I toyed with the idea of starting there, before deciding that no, I wanted to read it as I did the first time - as it was written, I assume? - as answering questions I had already asked, identifying persons I had already met. I should, I suppose have turned to Cart and Cwidder, but my hand landed first on Drowned Ammet, and Drowned Ammet is one of my favourites, so that's what I read.
"People may wonder how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end." You'd think that this act of terrorism would be the dramatic climax of the book, yet here it is, tossed down casually in the opening sentence, and then built up to not as the ending of the story but its beginning, the point at which Mitt begins to wonder what he thinks he is doing, who he is and who he wants to become. It's quite a trick, to present us in the first line with a bomb at the festival, and then to persuade us to care about the bomber. (And this isn't because the book was written in a more innocent age before 9/11 and al-Qaeda: the IRA was bombing London throughout the 1970s.)
Nonetheless, it becomes quite clear what Mitt thought he was doing. The book isn't particularly subtle about spelling out what the viewpoint characters are thinking: Mitt and Hildy, and Ynen too, are transparent, we aren't left to decipher theit emotions from their actions. I don't know if this is a flaw, but it doesn't feel crass or clumsy, it feels - well, it feels as if this is the proper concern of the story, how Mitt becomes sufficiently self aware to make the decision he is asked to make at the end of the book, and how before he can become self-aware he first has to become aware of the reality of other people.
I had not read many of the books of Diana Wynne Jones before I noticed the extraordinary absence of parents. Books for children, in which children have adventures, have to get the parents out of the way: that's a constant. But DWJ takes this to extraordinary lengths (and when I read a bit about her childhood, it began to make sense). But Mitt has, if anything, a superfluity of parents. The story begins withhis mother and father laughing, happy in their farm on the Flate. This ought to be a good sign, but it isn't. In adversity, his father withdraws, and his mother Milda shows herself incapable of managing alone. Mitt assumes a quasi-parental role towards her, yet his view of the world is formed by hers, and his mission to avenge his father's believed death grows from their folie à deux. Father figures abound: first Siriol, then his step-father Hobin take him as apprentice, and try to teach him more than their trade. Later still, Old Ammet and Libby Beer also act like surrogate parents, but that's another part of the story.
Mitt has an abundance of parents, but very little else; Hildy and Ynen live in luxury, but they are effectively parentless. Navis - an inexplicably good man in a brood of vipers - clearly loves his children. His first appearance shows him being kind and understanding towrds a lost child, seeing how Mitt's actions resemble Hildy's. Yet he has at some point withdrawn from his children. The ladies-in-waiting tell Hildy that he is "still grieving for her dead mother", but Hildy treats this romantic cliché with contempt, as well she may. Whatever the reason, he leaves her and Ynen neglected among the plenty, and although he forbids them to attend the hanging of the Notherners, this comes as an isolated diktat. Generally, he leaves their upbringing to others. (DWJ published two books in 1977. The first was Drowned Ammet, the second was Charmed Life, with the first appearance of another vague and absent father - with a taste for sumptuous dressing gowns.)
It's too early to talk here about the richness of Dalemark as a fantasy land with both geography and history. But I do love Holand, with its seaport and its flatlands and its sea festival; I love its Arcimboldoesque deities (which it has forgotten are deities); and I love the presence throughout the book of the sea, the boats and the islands.
And it's late, but if I go to bed now there might just be time for a chapter of Cart and Cwidder.
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Date: 2011-03-30 10:08 pm (UTC)