The Ogre Downstairs, by Diana Wynne Jones

[rachelmanija]

One of Jones’s earliest novels, it has a far simpler plot than most of hers: an unhappily blended family has hijinks with a magic chemistry set. I wouldn’t put it in her top ten or even top fifteen (maybe top twenty) novels, but I have re-read it several times and it reliably cracks me up. Rather unusually for Jones, it contains sympathetic parents, including, eventually, the eponymous ogre.

They came home from school to the not quite unexpected sight of six enormous toffee-bars undulating down the stairs toward them.

This sentence both sums up the novel and demonstrates Jones’s particular sense of humor and genius for creating inherently funny situations and then combining the perfect wording with the perfect image to put me, at least, on the floor. What makes this sentence so brilliant is the combination of the image, the resignation to the oncoming catastrophe implied in “not quite unexpected,” and the word “undulating.”

The Ogre Downstairs

Comments

Re: My top ten Jones novels, complete with handy Amazon links! (Part I)

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

This has some of the best plotting of anything I've ever read

Looking at this again, I find I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. I'd be interesting in seeing a post about plotting if you should ever care to write one.

Re: My top ten Jones novels, complete with handy Amazon links! (Part I)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I haven't read this in a while, but my recollection is that there are a lot of events which seem random at the time but which all turn out to be meaningful by the end - it's a puzzle-box novel, like several others of Jones', Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, and Louis Sachar's Holes. It's a form of plotting which I particularly like.

Re: My top ten Jones novels, complete with handy Amazon links! (Part I)

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

That makes perfect sense. I too like this style, when it is done well. Like anything else, there are lots of ways to do it badly.

Have just done a quick re-read of Howl, I like it better and agree it is a fine example of this form. Castle in the Air is actually another example - I am curious to see if the third book is too.

I guess I should read the Stead and Sachar books.