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shewhomustAnd 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...)
Reading the Quartet in a single sequence, some of those doubts are removed, but I remain ambivalent about The Crown of Dalemark. There were things about it I liked better than I had remembered, and others I liked less. Let's start with the nature of the Quartet. What I wrote all those years ago was that you could make all the traditional jokes about "the fourth book of her much acclaimed trilogy" but that wasn't quite what The Crown of Dalemark was: it's the missing piece which makes a diptych and a one-off into a tetralogy. At the time I seemed to feel this was a compliment, but now I wonder.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance said, in conversation, that he had felt he was waiting impatiently for this final volume to tell him 'and then what happened?', but I never felt that. Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet both end with the central character poised to achieve a goal which isn't an ending but the start of something else: I liked the sense that they had the whole world before them, I didn't feel the need to confine them within the limits of a sequal. The Spellcoats only appears to end with the great deed not yet accomplished, on the verge; the conclusion is there, it's just told in an admirably indirect narrative. I am, at best, suspicious of sequels, and a sequel to these books seemed to be saying that endings I admired were not, in fact, good enough. If The Spellcoats is Dalemark's The Magician's Nephew, The Crown of Dalemark is its The Last Battle, at least in the sense of finality, of drawing a line under Dalemark.
Yet in its way this is one of the strengths of Dalemark, the entirely believable creation of a world with its own history, from its earlist past when the very landscape was different, through the late medieval / early industrial era where the earls are beginning to give way to men like Hobin and Alk (Mitt having found himself yet another father figure), right up to the modern day - or at least to Maewen's time. This doesn't feel entirely contemporary, not just in the ways that a book written in 1993 isn't contemporary (no mobile phones, no internet) but in ways that felt old-fashioned even in 1993 (the aunt who entrusts Maewen to the care of the guard, the absence of television and radio, though Wend has a radio handset in the museum). The effect is to add a layer of strangeness to a familiar fantasy structure: the child from our time / our world is able to cross into the past / the realm of magic. But the real strangeness is that Maewen isn't from our world: she is a time-traveler within the magical world of Dalemark. Why does this simple twist feel so enormously innovative?
Her travels take her into another familiar fantasy structure, the Quest: a band of heroes travel across the standard issue map (only there is no map; once again, I would have liked a map) collecting plot tokens; when they have gathered all the magical items, they will have earned a dénouement. The magic ring, cup and sword will announce the return of the king, Dalemark will be reunited and the repressive rule of the earls will be over. This being Diana Wynne Jones, the apparent meaning of these talismans is constantly subverted: Noreth does not have some special claim to the crown, the magical items do not point to her in the way they appear to - yet at the same time, they do designate a king, and that king will bring about a golden age. There's an inevitability with which the Cinderella figure, the person who takes it for granted that he is excluded by his low status, does in fact become king, and more, the greatest king of his country's history and one of the Undying.
Is this the ending to which the earlier books were tending, or is it something that Diana Wynne Jones constructed late in the day when she returned once more, after a long break, to the Matter of Dalemark?
There's a whole essay to be written, too, about the gods and the Undying, but that might require another re-read, so it will have to wait. But it's the same question: did DWJ know from the start where she was going with her depiction of the Undying, or did her ideas develop as she wrote? Are the gods even present in Cart and Cwidder? It's a book whose mythology seems dominated by heroes rather than gods. Then comes Drowned Ammet, with its half-forgotten gods, its Old Ammet and Libby Beer who appear when needed like powerful magicians. Not until The Spellcoats is this formulated in terms of religion: Tanaqui and her family are set apart from their neighbours who worship the river as a god, because they 'know' that the only gods are the Undying. For much of the book, while the Undying are bound, imprisoned in the forms of the family's various idols, they seem quite different in kind to the gods of Drowned Ammet, one a larger and more impersonal scale. But the clues to the family's Undying heritage, the identification of Tanaqui with the Young One of the household gods, suggest that the Undying are not more remote but more human than Old Ammet and Libby Beer. Only the One remains aloof, not to be looked on, the spirit of the river and of the land itself. He is a Monotheistic God in a pantheon of gods. This divergence continues in The Crown of Dalemark: Noreth's claim to be the daughter of the One is regarded as extraordinary, but the revelation that she is Wend's daughteris not; the blood of the Undying runs in the veins of most of the central characters. The binding of the Undying is no longer related to their worship; the crucial thing is not that they are depicted in idols, but that they are depicted at all. The simple act of portraiture is a trap. An interesting idea was diluted down to a plot device.
Much the same is true of the characters. No wonder I was confused on my first reading of The Crown of Dalemark, not because I didn't remember the characters from the earlier books, but because I did. When did Hildy become such a shallow little snob (oh, her upbringing might well incline her to snobbery, but she is someone whose emotions and frustrations I had shared from her point of view, and I hated seeing her being so cold and so silly)? Could anything really have been bad enough to drive Wend / Duck / Mallard into alliance with Kankredin? The political machinations of the Northerners, who are not, after all, the paragons of freedom and egalitarianism we may have hoped, may be no more than a dose of political realism which is overdue in heroic fantasy, but they have the effect of unpicking some of the growth that Mitt has achieved in Drowned Ammet, forcing him back down a path he had already travelled (some of this, it turns out in in the end, comes not from cynicism and ruthlessness but from a suspicion of who Mitt may become, and a sense that what is being asked of him is no more than a test. This "it doesn't count because I had my fingers crossed" defence does not appease me).
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)
Reading the Quartet in a single sequence, some of those doubts are removed, but I remain ambivalent about The Crown of Dalemark. There were things about it I liked better than I had remembered, and others I liked less. Let's start with the nature of the Quartet. What I wrote all those years ago was that you could make all the traditional jokes about "the fourth book of her much acclaimed trilogy" but that wasn't quite what The Crown of Dalemark was: it's the missing piece which makes a diptych and a one-off into a tetralogy. At the time I seemed to feel this was a compliment, but now I wonder.
desperance said, in conversation, that he had felt he was waiting impatiently for this final volume to tell him 'and then what happened?', but I never felt that. Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet both end with the central character poised to achieve a goal which isn't an ending but the start of something else: I liked the sense that they had the whole world before them, I didn't feel the need to confine them within the limits of a sequal. The Spellcoats only appears to end with the great deed not yet accomplished, on the verge; the conclusion is there, it's just told in an admirably indirect narrative. I am, at best, suspicious of sequels, and a sequel to these books seemed to be saying that endings I admired were not, in fact, good enough. If The Spellcoats is Dalemark's The Magician's Nephew, The Crown of Dalemark is its The Last Battle, at least in the sense of finality, of drawing a line under Dalemark.Yet in its way this is one of the strengths of Dalemark, the entirely believable creation of a world with its own history, from its earlist past when the very landscape was different, through the late medieval / early industrial era where the earls are beginning to give way to men like Hobin and Alk (Mitt having found himself yet another father figure), right up to the modern day - or at least to Maewen's time. This doesn't feel entirely contemporary, not just in the ways that a book written in 1993 isn't contemporary (no mobile phones, no internet) but in ways that felt old-fashioned even in 1993 (the aunt who entrusts Maewen to the care of the guard, the absence of television and radio, though Wend has a radio handset in the museum). The effect is to add a layer of strangeness to a familiar fantasy structure: the child from our time / our world is able to cross into the past / the realm of magic. But the real strangeness is that Maewen isn't from our world: she is a time-traveler within the magical world of Dalemark. Why does this simple twist feel so enormously innovative?
Her travels take her into another familiar fantasy structure, the Quest: a band of heroes travel across the standard issue map (only there is no map; once again, I would have liked a map) collecting plot tokens; when they have gathered all the magical items, they will have earned a dénouement. The magic ring, cup and sword will announce the return of the king, Dalemark will be reunited and the repressive rule of the earls will be over. This being Diana Wynne Jones, the apparent meaning of these talismans is constantly subverted: Noreth does not have some special claim to the crown, the magical items do not point to her in the way they appear to - yet at the same time, they do designate a king, and that king will bring about a golden age. There's an inevitability with which the Cinderella figure, the person who takes it for granted that he is excluded by his low status, does in fact become king, and more, the greatest king of his country's history and one of the Undying.
Is this the ending to which the earlier books were tending, or is it something that Diana Wynne Jones constructed late in the day when she returned once more, after a long break, to the Matter of Dalemark?
There's a whole essay to be written, too, about the gods and the Undying, but that might require another re-read, so it will have to wait. But it's the same question: did DWJ know from the start where she was going with her depiction of the Undying, or did her ideas develop as she wrote? Are the gods even present in Cart and Cwidder? It's a book whose mythology seems dominated by heroes rather than gods. Then comes Drowned Ammet, with its half-forgotten gods, its Old Ammet and Libby Beer who appear when needed like powerful magicians. Not until The Spellcoats is this formulated in terms of religion: Tanaqui and her family are set apart from their neighbours who worship the river as a god, because they 'know' that the only gods are the Undying. For much of the book, while the Undying are bound, imprisoned in the forms of the family's various idols, they seem quite different in kind to the gods of Drowned Ammet, one a larger and more impersonal scale. But the clues to the family's Undying heritage, the identification of Tanaqui with the Young One of the household gods, suggest that the Undying are not more remote but more human than Old Ammet and Libby Beer. Only the One remains aloof, not to be looked on, the spirit of the river and of the land itself. He is a Monotheistic God in a pantheon of gods. This divergence continues in The Crown of Dalemark: Noreth's claim to be the daughter of the One is regarded as extraordinary, but the revelation that she is Wend's daughteris not; the blood of the Undying runs in the veins of most of the central characters. The binding of the Undying is no longer related to their worship; the crucial thing is not that they are depicted in idols, but that they are depicted at all. The simple act of portraiture is a trap. An interesting idea was diluted down to a plot device.
Much the same is true of the characters. No wonder I was confused on my first reading of The Crown of Dalemark, not because I didn't remember the characters from the earlier books, but because I did. When did Hildy become such a shallow little snob (oh, her upbringing might well incline her to snobbery, but she is someone whose emotions and frustrations I had shared from her point of view, and I hated seeing her being so cold and so silly)? Could anything really have been bad enough to drive Wend / Duck / Mallard into alliance with Kankredin? The political machinations of the Northerners, who are not, after all, the paragons of freedom and egalitarianism we may have hoped, may be no more than a dose of political realism which is overdue in heroic fantasy, but they have the effect of unpicking some of the growth that Mitt has achieved in Drowned Ammet, forcing him back down a path he had already travelled (some of this, it turns out in in the end, comes not from cynicism and ruthlessness but from a suspicion of who Mitt may become, and a sense that what is being asked of him is no more than a test. This "it doesn't count because I had my fingers crossed" defence does not appease me).
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)
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Date: 2011-05-24 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-25 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-25 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-25 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-25 08:41 am (UTC)But it's sad to think we'll never know. I thought as I was writing this, at least I won't be proved wrong about the finality of 'Crown of Dalemark' by the appearance of another Dalemark book...
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Date: 2011-05-25 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-25 08:49 am (UTC)On the other hand, while I love the Tough Guide, I'm lukewarm about the related novels.
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Date: 2011-05-25 09:06 am (UTC)