Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones

[lightreads]

Archer's Goon

3/5. The one about Howard, whose father is supposed to produce 2,000 words every quarter for a mysterious personage, or else, and the or else gets his family entangled in a set of seven mysterious alien siblings controlling the town.

This is a weird one. It's making a subtle but strange point about the difference between unpleasant people who are sympathetic and interesting, and unpleasant people who are not. The difference being self-awareness. Howard knows he has the potential to be a twit, and he definitely sees the dark road his sister* (named Awful, just in case you missed it) could go down. But his father is a raging twit and has no idea, and is rendered insufferable thereby. That's some complex stuff for a kid's book, which is typical DWJ. But it's not all that much fun to read about.

*I gloss her as genderqueer, btw. You can make a pretty good case for it in the text, though it's clearly not what DWJ actually intended.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

Quentin and Catriona are, I think, the most nuanced parents in all of DWJ, because they genuinely love their children, are doing the very best they can, adopt Howard more than once without being asked or rewarded till Howard gets around to the reward eventually (without telling them), are making a teetery but still functional living doing what they love... And they still fuck up a lot and are completely out of their depths, sometimes in ways anyone would be in the circumstances and sometimes because of who they are as people. They feel three-dimensional to me, not just the sort of parents one gets in rollicking adventure/mistaken-identity/kind-of-heist-flavored middle-grade books.

[lightreads]

This is true. There's a lot going on under the surface of their marriage, too -- she makes more money than he does even though he has two jobs, to name just one thing, which gets brought up at a key moment of tension between them. I enjoyed Catriona in her way, even when she was occasionally a really bad parent (telling Awful she wished she'd never had her, yikes). But Quentin, boy I don't know. I started out indifferent and by 3/4 of the way through, had nothing but disdain for him. I can't even put my finger exactly on why. Though tbf his story of finding baby Howard in the snow was one of his best moments.

It's a funny little book, with these two family groupings running side-by-side, both plagued by selfishness and infighting and general antisocialness in their own ways. Though I suppose it says something that the parents were not included in the send-all-the-most-unpleasant-relatives-off-on-a-spaceship solution, lol.

[jadelennox]

I have always liked it so much for the way that some of the most selfish people are some of the best without necessarily becoming less selfish: Torquil, Awful, Hathaway. They're not selfish-horrid like Venturus or Shine, but they don't have reformation arcs. They're selfish people who can feel love and make sacrifices for others, as opposed to nothing but self-glorification.

[lightreads]

Yes, I think that thinking only of the self is the great unforgivable in this book. See Quentin, who is notably oblivious of the abortive love triangle that is screamingly obvious to absolutely everyone else.