News from Nowhere

I was taken by surprise, a week or so ago, by a big bright advertisement filling the whole of the back page of my newspaper. I don't usually register the kind of ad that shows a model gazing off into the middle distance, but this one had the words "Howl's Moving Castle" right across the top. "Oh, yes," said durham_rambler as if this was the most natural thing in the world, "they are all through the paper." They were, too: Loewe were spending a lot of money to promote their collaboration with Studio Ghibli on a range of Howl-themed clothing and accessories.

I find this utterly mystifying. But it did serve to jog my conscience over a long overdue post-in-progress which I have been promising (if only to myself) ever since Steepholm's talk about the film adaptation set me re-reading the three books in which the wizard appears.

This re-read set me thinking about two things, one very general and one very specific. The general one is that no-one does sequels like Diana Wynne Jones. I know there are readers who always want more about their favourite characters, and I'm not saying I don't ever want that: but if I've enjoyed a book, I'm curious to know what else the author is going to do. With DWJ, it's always the unexpected. Take the Chrestmanci series - if 'series' is the word for a collection of narratives with different characters, set in different worlds (and where the nearest thing to a conventional sequel is actually a prequel). And don't get me started on Dalemark...

( Sequels the Diana Wynne Jones way... )

Sequel or no, Castle in the Air reminded me less of Howl's Moving Castle than of two other books. One of them was no great surprise, but the other... ( And they were... )

"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."

In 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.

I started my reading for the Diana Wynne Jones conference with A Sudden Wild Magic: it had been mentioned at the earlier gathering in Newcastle as her book for adults, and I hadn't been able to place it. The subject matter - a group of women on a mission to disrupt a celibate male society - may justify that 'adult' descriptor, but there's a broadness to the humour which I initially found quite off-putting, and even when I adjusted to that, I didn't feel that I was reading something more grown-up than say, Hexwood, published the following year. Maybe that's why the two had become tangled in my mind. But when I took A Sudden Wild Magic from the shelf, I also dislodged Minor Arcana: one of the stories in this collection was described in the author's introduction as "one of the first adult stories I wrote", so I decided to take the hint and stay with that theme.

That story is The True State of Affairs, and it is quite unlike A Sudden Wild Magic. It is also quite unlike anything else in Minor Arcana. The Sage of Theare is a fun time paradox, featuring Chrestomanci, and a bunch of gods (if you wanted to consider DWJ's treatment of gods, this would be a useful data point). The pleasure of The Master is in the way the tale unfolds, which I wouldn't want to spoiler even if I had anything else to say about it. File The Girl who loved the Sun also under classicism, the Metamorphoses considered from the other side of the glass. Dragon Reserve, Home Eight is SF with dragons, and an interesting family structure - but also the standard fantasy trope of the outlawed talent. What the Cat told me is an equally familiar set-up, the wicked magician, his apprentice and the cat, but this time the cat gets to tell the story. nad and Dan adn Quaffy is widely anthologised; it always reminds me of Only You Can Save Mankind, which it pre-dates. I don't think that the short story is DWJ's medium, but none of these is less than entertaining.

And then there's The True State of Affairs, ( which is something else again. )

Picking up from where I stopped yesterday, as my homeward train bounds through the southwest of England: please be forbearing about my even worse than usual typing.

The next three papers were grouped together under the heading 'Power and the Corporations'. I set out to describe this as 'a slightly naughty piece of wordplay', but of course it's entirely in Jones' style ("Power corrupts, but we need electricity.") so fair enough: two papers on power and power structures within the books, one on the treatment of one of the books at the hands of a - or rather, the (British Broadcasting) - corporation. Akiko Yamazaki presented evidence that the reason the Goon's head is disproportionately small is simply that he is not swollen-headed. Can it possibly be that simple? Well, compare this to the massive head created by Venturus as a temple to himself, and iyou end up agreeing that yes, perhaps it can. Aneesh Barai's presentation on money and the University in The Year of the Griffin argues that, give or take a griffin or two, it is all true, and ends with the rallying cry "Do we need to follow the neoliberal system?" Some of the discussion following this panel was fascinating, but I think I'm going to omit it here and put it towards that more general something I've been scribbling in the margins.

The final paper of this session was about the BBC television adaptation of Archer's Goon, an interesting choice as the only one of the books to receive this treatment, though The Ogre Downstairs and Charmed Life were used on Jackanory. It was also a tribute to Anna Home, champion of drama for children at the BBC. And it was illustrated with screengrabs of Archer's Goon from YouTube - very fuzzy screengrabs, but worth investigation.

The afternoon ended with a keynote speech from Gilli Bar-Hillel, whom I remembered vividly from Newcastle. She speaks well, vividly, and I enjoyed her memories of a peripatetic childhood, identifying each of DWJ's books with the American college town in which she first read it. But she has also translated DWJ into Hebrew (and published her, but that's another story): which you would surely assume was an impossible task. Hard enough to translate the huge vocabulary of English into the restricted vocabulary of Hebrew, whoever the author. But an author as playful with words, as profligate with allusions as Diana Wynne Jones? So The Homeward Bounders becomes in Hebrew 'Those Who Walk the Edge', abandoning the pun between bound as boundary/ leap/ tied, but playing up the edge / margin/ marginalised and throwing in for good measure that a walker is the name for a pawn in chess. Sometimes, she said, you pick up a reference, and all you can do is pat yourself on the back and move on, as she did when Howl calls Sophie a "Busy old fool" - but there was no way to escape the more prolonged reference in the same book to Donne's Song. So she translated it into Hebrew, and is justifiably proud of herself for it!

Am I, incidentally, the only person who first met that poem not through Howl's Moving Castle but on John Renbourn's first album? If I weren't restricted to CrossCountry wifi, I'd close this post with it, but things being as they are, it's on YouTube, if you don't know it go listen.

Where did the DWJ Conference experience begin? With a plunge into re-reading the books? Or, as I suggested in my previous post, with getting lost first on the way to the hotel, then within the hotel? At breakfast, when I spotted a fellow guest carrying a copy of Charmed Life, and she joined me and explained that she had won it in a raffle at a convention (possibly London WorldCon), and showed me the tiny slip of paper inscribed: "I belong to Chrestomanci Castle"?

Technically, it didn't start until yesterday afternoon. I spent the morning ambling around a very small part of the city, but I'll save that for a picture-heavy post. Just one tourist view of the waterfront to be going on with:



( And now, the real point of my visit: )

I could, at this point, have found myself a group of dinner companions, but I was suffering from overload. I came back to the hotel, checked e-mail, fell asleep for a bit, went out in search of a quiet dinner, didn't actually get lost but did discover that the road I thought I was taking didn't go where I expected it to, ended up in the Shore Café Bar which may or may not be part of this hotel - it seems to have been disowned, and was very quiet, which is what I was looking for. So that was fine.

durham_rambler sent me a link to this gallery in the Guardian. The Folio Society, in a clever piece of self-promotion, is holding a competition to choose who will illustrate its forthcoming edition of Howl's Moving Castle, and these are the finalists. I'm not at all sure that I approve of this entire enterprise, but there are some very pleasing pictures here. And how often do you get a gallery of DWJ fan-art in the Guardian?

ETA: fjm e-mails to point out a fuller selection, and how to vote.

Had we but world enough and time, I would have prepared for the Diana Wynne Jones conference by re-reading everything she ever wrote in order of publication. In this imperfect world, my re-reading was much more random: a couple of particular favourites (Fire and Hemlock and The Homeward Bounders), a couple of books which featured prominently among the titles to be discussed, but of which I had only a hazy recollection (The Lives of Christopher Chant and Hexwood) and Power of Three, taken from the shelf, as I said, in a spirit of 'Oh, might as well re-read one of the early ones...' Power of Three was the only one of these which gave me any surprises: I continued to love the books I knew I loved, and to enjoy but not find exceptionally memorable the books I - well, you get the drift. And then there was Power of Three, so clever, so inventive, so - powerful. Where did that come from?

( Cut for length and potential spoilers )

The holiday catch-up posts begin just before we went away, with the Diana Wynne Jones conference I had attended immediately before leaving England (and when I say 'immediately', I mean that we had deliberately scheduled our departure for the day after the conference). Two days, two locations, and enough interesting material that I could happily have spent the entire afternoon in Cambridge - no, another two whole days - talking through it all with nineweaving and rushthatspeaks. But we have LJ, we can open the conversation wider than that.

( Day One: Friday at Seven Stories )

---

*After two days listening to - and talking to - people who had known Diana Wynne Jones personally, some of them very well, we were all falling into the habit of talking about 'Diana'. Outwith that context, I feel impertinent continuing that usage (however well I may have felt I knew her as a reader). Hence this compromise.

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 )