Unexpected Diana Wynne Jones
Nov. 11th, 2020 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIn the course of my consideration of The True State of Affairs, I commented that Everard's Ride, which I had not read, "seem[ed] to be set in Dalemark." Since, as far as I knew at the time, the only edition of Everard's Ride was the rare and collectable NESFA Press edition (published to celebrate DWJ being Guest of Honour at Boskone in 1995), I didn't see any propect of reading it any time soon. So I was delighted when marineko pointed out that it is included in a collection called Unexpected Magic, which is easily obtainable.
And I rapidly obtained it. It's just as curious a mixture as Minor Arcana. It begins with an autobiographical fragment called The Girl Jones, which I suspect is substantially true (that is, I have a feeling I have heard the story from one of her sisters): as true, anyway, as a novelist's account of something that happened when she was nine is ever going to be. There follow 15 short stories - there's a substantial overlap with Minor Arcana, but there are also several stories that I hadn't read before: I can't call them unfamiliar, because I've seen collections in bookshops, stories aimed at younger children, deploying - at a cursory glance - quite a broad humour, and I've passed them by thinking they weren't for me. Reading the stories here didn't change my mind about that, but it doesn't matter, because the last two fifths of the book are Everard's Ride, and that's what I came for.
I don't know what I was expecting, but this isn't it. Knowing that it was an early work, unpublished until it appeared in that semi-private edition, produced for the benefit of enthusiasts and collectors, I'd expected something odder, rougher, more eccentric. Everard's Ride is a very smooth read, a charming fantasy, well executed but not all that different from any number of other fantasies. Children from our world find a way to somwhere else and play a part in the affairs of that place ...
I have heard Everard's Ride described as a Dalemaek narrative, but the somewhere else is not Dalemark. It is known to the people of the mundane world as "the dangerous kingdom of Falleyfell", and they believe it to be the land of the dead - but when the children ride there, they discover a land of living people, whose ways are very different to their own: time moves differently there. In our world Queen Victoria is on the throne, and people make fortunes buying shares in the railway, but across the bay the middle ages are barely over. It's tempting to think of the period as Shakespearian, because there's more than a touch of Hamlet about the situation at court. It isn't a magical kingdom: I thought, inevitably, of Narnia, but there are no talking beasts, no naiads or dryads, just a picure-book imagining of our own past - until very late in the story, Aaron appears. He is "a wandering magician, a seer and a teller of tales," and if he offers advice unasled, then what he says is true. He is little more than a mechanism to direct characters where they need to go and to tell them what they need to know. He does not alter the essentially non-magical nature of the territory.
What makes it tempting to identify Falleyfell with Dalemark is The True State of Affairs, which is explicitly Dalemark, even if it isn't exactly recognisable as such. Think of it as a stepping stone between the slightly generic Elsewhere of Falleyfell and the richness of the Dalemark of the Quartet. This may not actually be the order in which those early texts were written, of course; and the Dalemark of the Quartet undergoes some dramatic transformations. So that's a logical rather than a chronological progression, but that's how it feels to me. I note also that one aspect of Fantasyland is viewed a little quizzically in Everard's Ride: the children from our world find themselves among nobles and courtiers, treated as equals, deferred to by villagers and addressed as 'my lord' and 'my lady'. They are not comfortable with the assumption that they belong among the nobility (and some use is made of this). This chimes with the puzzle, in The True State of Affairs, of whether Emily is a lady or not: but that story is as concerned with the people who are emphatically not nobles. It's as if the author is irked by the assumptions of the genre.
There's more to say about this aspect of Everard's Ride and the wool industry of Gairne: but this is long enough. And I've barely mentioned the thing that I really enjoyed, which is not the adventure but the very natural relations between the characters, more specifically the children. Alex and Cecilia, the brother and sister at the center of the story; the affluent family with whom they are encouraged to be friends in the name of social advancement (with predictable results) even Everard, the fatherless prince, all are believable, all constantly misread each other. This was what kept me reading, and reading for the story, not for the historic interest.
marineko pointed out that it is included in a collection called Unexpected Magic, which is easily obtainable.And I rapidly obtained it. It's just as curious a mixture as Minor Arcana. It begins with an autobiographical fragment called The Girl Jones, which I suspect is substantially true (that is, I have a feeling I have heard the story from one of her sisters): as true, anyway, as a novelist's account of something that happened when she was nine is ever going to be. There follow 15 short stories - there's a substantial overlap with Minor Arcana, but there are also several stories that I hadn't read before: I can't call them unfamiliar, because I've seen collections in bookshops, stories aimed at younger children, deploying - at a cursory glance - quite a broad humour, and I've passed them by thinking they weren't for me. Reading the stories here didn't change my mind about that, but it doesn't matter, because the last two fifths of the book are Everard's Ride, and that's what I came for.
I don't know what I was expecting, but this isn't it. Knowing that it was an early work, unpublished until it appeared in that semi-private edition, produced for the benefit of enthusiasts and collectors, I'd expected something odder, rougher, more eccentric. Everard's Ride is a very smooth read, a charming fantasy, well executed but not all that different from any number of other fantasies. Children from our world find a way to somwhere else and play a part in the affairs of that place ...
I have heard Everard's Ride described as a Dalemaek narrative, but the somewhere else is not Dalemark. It is known to the people of the mundane world as "the dangerous kingdom of Falleyfell", and they believe it to be the land of the dead - but when the children ride there, they discover a land of living people, whose ways are very different to their own: time moves differently there. In our world Queen Victoria is on the throne, and people make fortunes buying shares in the railway, but across the bay the middle ages are barely over. It's tempting to think of the period as Shakespearian, because there's more than a touch of Hamlet about the situation at court. It isn't a magical kingdom: I thought, inevitably, of Narnia, but there are no talking beasts, no naiads or dryads, just a picure-book imagining of our own past - until very late in the story, Aaron appears. He is "a wandering magician, a seer and a teller of tales," and if he offers advice unasled, then what he says is true. He is little more than a mechanism to direct characters where they need to go and to tell them what they need to know. He does not alter the essentially non-magical nature of the territory.
What makes it tempting to identify Falleyfell with Dalemark is The True State of Affairs, which is explicitly Dalemark, even if it isn't exactly recognisable as such. Think of it as a stepping stone between the slightly generic Elsewhere of Falleyfell and the richness of the Dalemark of the Quartet. This may not actually be the order in which those early texts were written, of course; and the Dalemark of the Quartet undergoes some dramatic transformations. So that's a logical rather than a chronological progression, but that's how it feels to me. I note also that one aspect of Fantasyland is viewed a little quizzically in Everard's Ride: the children from our world find themselves among nobles and courtiers, treated as equals, deferred to by villagers and addressed as 'my lord' and 'my lady'. They are not comfortable with the assumption that they belong among the nobility (and some use is made of this). This chimes with the puzzle, in The True State of Affairs, of whether Emily is a lady or not: but that story is as concerned with the people who are emphatically not nobles. It's as if the author is irked by the assumptions of the genre.
There's more to say about this aspect of Everard's Ride and the wool industry of Gairne: but this is long enough. And I've barely mentioned the thing that I really enjoyed, which is not the adventure but the very natural relations between the characters, more specifically the children. Alex and Cecilia, the brother and sister at the center of the story; the affluent family with whom they are encouraged to be friends in the name of social advancement (with predictable results) even Everard, the fatherless prince, all are believable, all constantly misread each other. This was what kept me reading, and reading for the story, not for the historic interest.
