The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones

[lightreads]

The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Huh. I said of a previous book in this series that I didn't really understand what DWJ was doing; having finished it, I'm not sure DWJ understood what DWJ was doing.

This was supposed to pull everything together. And it tried to, I think – structurally this series is supposed to be woven (like a story coat) with characters moving through time, taking each other's places, etc. etc. And it just . . . didn't. The threads swapped out too many times and I was never sure who I was supposed to be caring about at any moment.

And, well, file this under 'thinking about it too much,' but this is epic fantasy of the sort where "revolution" is actually an incredibly conservative act that shores up the system of power rather than reordering it. You know, the evil king is bad, so we fix it by replacing him with the good king. All the problems of hierarchical hereditary political dictatorships being contained in the caliber of the dictator, you know. Here its evil barons replaced with the good king, but same damn thing. I'm not asking for the great democratization of fantasy land – that has its own perils, and they are many – it's just that let's not pretend here. Books like this play with the emotional rush of political uprising while never, for a second, meaningfully threatening the social order they spend so long calling corrupt. It's not like people aren't still writing this sort of political fantasy that parades around in the trappings of radicalism while actually being intensely conservative. I just happen not to read it that much anymore.




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Comments

[azara]

I actually liked this the most of the series, which I did find problematic in a lot of ways. I always assumed from the framing story that modern Dalemark was supposed to be a European-style constitutional monarchy, with a figurehead king and a palace which was more important as a site of historical tours that as a centre of power. So the good king's rule was not a steady state happy-ever-after as it is in so many fantasies, it was just a necessary stage on the way to a parliamentary democracy. In the two hundred years or so between the back-in-time main section and the framing story, Dalemark seems to have made roughly the equivalent industrial modernization as Britain from 1800 to the present day, but it has made a proportionately much greater political modernization, since it ends up the political equivalent but is starting from a much more autocratic set-up than 1800s Britain.

After all, Mitt doesn't see being the king as a job for life - he sorts out the worst problems around him, then trains up other people and bows out.

[lightreads]

Yeah, I wondered about that, because what we see of modern Dalemark was a little unclear to me. The trappings of monarchy were the tourist attractions, yeah, but I can't remember now what we actually learned about current politics (I read this a few months ago, so it may well have been there). The future/modern portions felt . . . hm. I won't say irrelevant, but something like it. It was like the past and the future converged all their energies on Mitt's time; it did not seem like it was all for the purpose of creating the future we get glimpses of, it was just . . . the point at which things converged, because that's how magic works in this series, in going forward and coming back. And for that matter, I'm not convinced that either the future or the past were fixed around the moving middle point -- I think they all moved, and not in the usual linear way. Which makes the idea of progress a little more complicated, I think.

Which, if nothing else, convinces me there's more to this series than I first thought, so hey.

[azara]

Now that I think about it, there probably wasn't actually any specific description of modern-day politics. The feel of present-day Dalemark was so much that of a modern European country that I think I just saw the references to the almost irrelevant monarch and assumed a parliamentary democracy.

I thought the law school and its endless jargon and its scary sport was very funny, but the ruthlessness and expediency of the politics was generally pretty grim.