lightreads

Fire and Hemlock

3/5. Polly discovers, at age 19 on her way back to college, that she has two sets of memories. In one of them she is ordinary. In the other, starting at age 10 when she befriends a man at a funeral, she lives a life that is strange and frightening and mysterious.

Hoo boy. No one tell the antis about this book, they will cancel DWJ wholesale.

I read DWJ writing about this book long before I read the book and had the strong impression from her essay that very few people understood or appreciated this one the way she wanted. I can see that – it’s dense and allusive. A Tam Lin story, obviously, and Thomas the Rhymer too, but that’s just the surface layer. The many layers beneath are Eliot and obscure art pieces and, I strongly believe, pieces of DWJ’s own subconscious that she poured onto the page and never bothered to explicate, so of course they make no damn sense to anyone but her.

And through all of that runs a strand of sexuality in this book that is deeply . . . predatory. I can come up with no better word for it. And I’m not just talking about Polly, teenager, and Tom, grown ass adult man. There’s Polly’s mother and her parade of boyfriends that she sucks dry for happiness like a vampire, and the boyfriend she (correctly) suspects of having the hots for Polly, and there’s the faerie queen, of course, latching on to young man after young man, and Polly’s friend Fiona who flees the country at 15 in pursuit of a man. Everyone is grasping, grasping, consuming, usually across an age gap.

It’s all very . . . you know, she didn’t mean this at all, but the looming sense of threat I got from all the implied sexuality in this book crosses uncomfortably with Polly’s journey of overturning false memories and rediscovering what really happened to her as a child. Put it this way, this could have either been a faerie book or a sexual abuse memoir. It stays on the faerie side of the line, to be clear. But surely I’m not the first to think this?

Enchanted Glass

4/5. Thoroughly charming standalone about a kid who flees to the country home of what his grandmother said would be a great wizard, only to find the great wizard's grandson, a somewhat magical professor instead. Lots of dog and country fair hijinx and the fae and suchlike. Charming, that is, if you ignore the thing where the book tells you something cheerfully and you're like whoa wait what the fuck. You're talking about sexual exploitation of a young and vulnerable woman by an older powerful man, right? and the book is like la dah dah. So there's that.

The Lives of Christopher Chant

3/5. Chrestomanci. Christopher Chant has nine lives, and carries on wasting them doing stupid things with his rare power to travel between worlds. This was okay, but Christopher's privilege is so overwhelming from start to finish that his conflicts over whether he is going to bother to be a decent person or not didn't land for me. I mean, for real, he spends half the book sulking about how he is being trained to be the most powerful enchanter in the world when he'd rather be back at his posh boarding school playing cricket with all his rich friends. Okay dude, whatever, tiny violin.

Conrad's Fate

3/5. Better. Young man becomes a servant in a wealthy household to uncover who is making reality skip and reset itself. It turns out a running theme in these books is the terribleness of being a child in the power of manipulative adults. The ultimate resolution here has had all the sense surgically removed from it, but the journey is enjoyable, as Conrad learns to define himself instead of letting adults do it for their own ends. Also, Christopher appears, and the book is quite aware of how he is like 20% charming and 80% terrible from an outsider's perspective.

The Magicians of Caprona

2/5. Meh. Not in the mood for a book about rival magical Italian city-state magician families. I.e. a book about people being irrationally prejudiced against each other (they literally both think the other family smells bad), sprinkled with DWJ's cultural stereotypes about Italy. Good cats though.

Mixed Magics

3/5. Four Chrestomanci shorts, ranging from the cute (criminal leaps dimensions, ends up being bullied by a dog and a small child), to the . . . weird? (boy brings down a world of rules by asking questions of gods). But by this point I was starting to ask some uncomfortable questions about the Chrestomanci series in general, like so basically the rule here is that the most powerful man becomes the multiverse head cop and judge and jury? That's sure a system you've got going.

Dark Lord of Derkholm

3/5. A fantasy kingdom collectively decides it has had enough of the tours groups that come through from our world seeking adventure.

I mistakenly thought this would be zany, as it had all the hallmarks – jokes about geese! Animals of all sorts that can talk! Nonsensical prophecies! But actually it's a rather grim tale of exploitation and the costs of it. This fantasy land is forced to conform itself to tourist ideas, and in so doing it teaches many of its people, including those who hate the tours, to think of life and other people as their playthings. It's a hard lesson for a lot of them, including the putative good guys.

And I'm not sure this stuck the landing? It stuck a landing, I'll give it that. But I have a sinking suspicion that DWJ was not actually entirely aware of all the kind of exploitation she put in here. Like, the main guy has two human kids and five talking griffin kids, and it's all charming blended family, right? Except he's also bread a talking winged horse that, for absolutely no reason, is chattel and not a child even though I'm damned if I can see the difference.

The Merlin Conspiracy (Magids)

2/5. Standalone sequel to her Deep Secret, which I loved. More alternate universe-hopping magical shenanigans.

I am at a loss here. Deep Secret is charming and sweet and complicatedly kind. This book is – I don't even know what this book is, aside from a mess. It's a splattery mash of magic and personalities; it is perhaps appropriate that a literal elephant walks through this book, randomly trompling things. The plot is, eh, whatever, things happen, it more or less hangs together. But the few parts of this book I can comprehend on a meta level strike me as confused at best, wrongheaded at worst. This book is sort of about influence – magical, familial, political – in relationships, which is a way tidier explanation than anything in the actual pages, and to the extent it is a thinking creature at all, this book has no comprehension of consent or why it's important.

What the hell, DWJ?

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3/5. Cheerful little boarding school story set in a world where witches are still burned alive as a matter of national security. One class receives a note saying that one among them is a witch: shenanigans ensue.

I entertained myself greatly playing the [insert queerness here] game with this book. You know, where you take the shameful, dangerous secret everyone suspects of each other and replace every use of the word "magic" with the word "queer." It generally works eerily well, as it does here. It's fun in this iteration, where the author was not deliberately coding the text this way. It's way, way less fun in the case of, say, X-Men, where certain authors are deliberately attempting to use mutation as a metaphor for queerness, which is all well and good until you start wondering . . . um . . . if they're so interested in talking about queerness . . . why don't they put in any queer characters or, gosh I don't know, actually talk about queerness without the metaphor.

But DWJ wasn't playing that metaphor game. Other metaphor games, yeah, but not that one. So it's fun to read 'secret frightening exhilarating power' as queerness because, well, it's actually a bit more interesting than what DWJ was doing with this book: things out of balance, trying to do it right and getting it wrong every time anyway, kids being kids. Nothing wrong with it, I mean, just not as interesting as the story of secretly queer kids and their teachers.

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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Drowned Ammet by Diana Wynne Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another fantasy, this one about a boy raised to be a terrorist bomber who fails in his attempt to assassinate the tyrannical earl and ends up on the run with the earl's grandchildren.

The first 80% of this was really good for me. It was playing with the role of children in political drama. Our protagonists are all tools of adult agendas, either as a murder weapon or a bargaining chip in an arranged marriage. This is the second book in this series in which a protagonist's parents turn out to be separately awful in unique and chilly ways. Except this book was facing up to that more directly and chewing at it. The book treads some predictable but nicely done ground regarding the formation of an independent self. And I'm always a sucker for these 'people become prickly friends across a painful class divide' stories.

Then the last fifth turned into a lot of deus ex machina with actual gods, and the whole structure came tumbling down, with all that careful work she'd built going nowhere. Disappointing.




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Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Early 90's DWJ about an earth child seeing some odd happenings in the wood near her house, which are somehow connected to a machine belonging to our unknown galactic overlords.

I was expecting something silly and probably too young for me. I got a startlingly ambitious tale of nonlinear time, fluid identities, and the overthrow of feudal power. Over-ambitious, maybe – this got a little muddled and crowded here and there.

But mostly I think this book was hobbled by being too precisely a transformative work. By which I mean I was like, "oh, we're mucking about with a bit of Arthuriana here and there, yes I see, that plays well as a lens for this reimagining of – oh. Hmm. I think that might actually be Arthur. You know, that's less interesting, it turns out." The notion of Arthur et al giving one a great deal more story room in their penumbras, as it were, whereas the actuality of Arthur locked things down and made me start thinking about how this whole feudalism metaphor collapses in on itself, and you know, DWJ you're making some very questionable choices in re the ladies, etc. etc.




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Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Adorable. It’s a DWJ book, so it’s all multi-universe wizards who end up solving their problems while attending a scifi convention, also baby animals. It is sweet and silly and one of those stories where every plot thread converges in a charmingly improbable bow with built in deus ex machina. But it’s DWJ, so it is also wryly observed, a little dry, a little piercing. But still kind. I mean, it’s set at a scifi convention in all the embarrassing/awesome/exhausting spectacle you’d expect, and she is so droll about it – like when you facepalm but you’re grinning behind it.

I love her like this, writing about grownups but for young people. (Rather than a lot of her books about children for children, which often bore me.) She had this way of writing about adults for children that keeps them from being aliens. Hell, it’s DWJ – the aliens aren’t alien. Just a keen eye and a steady hand, that was her.




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