News from Nowhere

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)

Reading Cart and Cwidder purely at the level of the story, I was glad that I had started my Dalemark reread with Drowned Ammet: I had witnessed the unlucky landfall of the Northerners in Holand, and watched what happened to them, before hearing about it at second hand; and I knew something of life in the South, so I knew that Moril's dreams of freedom in the North did have some contact with reality. This is perverse, because while the two books weren't necessarily written to be read the other way round, that's the way their first readers must have read them, as they were published. I can only conclude that despite the two year (and two book) gap between them, the two books must have developed together in the author's mind, and I wonder how far that is true of the Quartet as a whole: The Spellcoats follows after the same interval, but there is then a long gap before The Crown of Dalemark. Well, time for that sort of question when I've read those books.

Turning to Cart and Cwidder, I certainly felt that I was reading a much earlier book, one that lacks the dash and inventiveness of Drowned Ammet. I don't want to describe it as 'pedestrian', given the believability and liveliness of the characters, individually and in their interactions with each other, and how much fun it is; but that's the word that lurks at the tip of my tongue. The narrative thread of the journey homeward from enemy territory, the mysterious passenger (and initially disliked), the object of power whose use the hero must master in order to save the day - the use Diana Wynne Jones makes of these is all her own, but the structure itself holds few surprises. Necessarily so, because Moril's yearning to live the life of the heroes of legend is counterpointed with the reader's awareness that his life is the stuff our our fictions, even before ( it's never too late for a spoiler cut )