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I just read that Diana Wynne Jones has died. She had been very ill with cancer for at least the last year.
I can't remember if my first Diana Wynne Jones book was Charmed Life or Fire and Hemlock; they're both still among my very favorites of hers. Or it might have been the odd, spooky Power of Three, which could be classified as a "psychic kids" book, but was not exactly a typical example of the genre.
After I read whichever one that was, I began to haunt used bookshops, libraries, thrift shops in search of her novels, until I slowly, slowly managed to obtain everything she'd ever written, even her very slight and hard-to-find first novel Wilkin's Tooth. I was thrilled when her books finally came back into print in the USA, but I got enough enjoyment from the search, not to mention the finds, that I don't regret the probable hundreds of hours I spent prowling dusty stacks.
She wrote at least five of my very favorite novels of all time: Witch Week, Fire and Hemlock, Charmed Life, The Homeward Bounders... The fifth is always difficult: Do I select Archer's Goon or Howl's Moving Castle for their perfect puzzle-box structures, with every element clicking into logical place at the end? The Ogre Downstairs for the living toffee bars undulating down the stairs? The Year of the Griffin for its all-too-recognizable portrait of college life, complete with curses and ninjas? The heartbreaking Dogsbody?
Everybody who likes Jones' work at all seems to have a completely different list of favorite Jones novels, which speaks to her versatility and quirkiness. I love Fire and Hemlock because it's so funny and numinous - a very unusual combination - but others find it unreadable or flat. I didn't think Dark Lord of Derkholm was funny at all, but it's on plenty of people's top three lists.
I read an essay of hers in which she discussed being neglected as a child, and noted that Time of the Ghost was directly autobiographical, except for the ghosts and curses and witches and split personalities and time travel. Her adults are often villainous, but nearly always have understandable motives, and just as often are complicated and sympathetic; her children are surprisingly unsentimentalized.
I can't read Fire and Hemlock without breaking my heart, but in the good kind of way (if you like that kind of thing); I can't read the "worms in custard" or "Simon Says" or "MY SPIRIT IS BEING DRAGGED TO UTTAR PRADESH TO UTTER DESTRUCTION I MEAN" scenes in Witch Week without weeping with laughter.
It seems like a good time to re-read and review her novels. Look for them here.
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 2: The Magicians of Caprona / Witch Week
Howl's Moving Castle
Year of the Griffin
Dogsbody
Fire and Hemlock
The Homeward Bounders
I can't remember if my first Diana Wynne Jones book was Charmed Life or Fire and Hemlock; they're both still among my very favorites of hers. Or it might have been the odd, spooky Power of Three, which could be classified as a "psychic kids" book, but was not exactly a typical example of the genre.
After I read whichever one that was, I began to haunt used bookshops, libraries, thrift shops in search of her novels, until I slowly, slowly managed to obtain everything she'd ever written, even her very slight and hard-to-find first novel Wilkin's Tooth. I was thrilled when her books finally came back into print in the USA, but I got enough enjoyment from the search, not to mention the finds, that I don't regret the probable hundreds of hours I spent prowling dusty stacks.
She wrote at least five of my very favorite novels of all time: Witch Week, Fire and Hemlock, Charmed Life, The Homeward Bounders... The fifth is always difficult: Do I select Archer's Goon or Howl's Moving Castle for their perfect puzzle-box structures, with every element clicking into logical place at the end? The Ogre Downstairs for the living toffee bars undulating down the stairs? The Year of the Griffin for its all-too-recognizable portrait of college life, complete with curses and ninjas? The heartbreaking Dogsbody?
Everybody who likes Jones' work at all seems to have a completely different list of favorite Jones novels, which speaks to her versatility and quirkiness. I love Fire and Hemlock because it's so funny and numinous - a very unusual combination - but others find it unreadable or flat. I didn't think Dark Lord of Derkholm was funny at all, but it's on plenty of people's top three lists.
I read an essay of hers in which she discussed being neglected as a child, and noted that Time of the Ghost was directly autobiographical, except for the ghosts and curses and witches and split personalities and time travel. Her adults are often villainous, but nearly always have understandable motives, and just as often are complicated and sympathetic; her children are surprisingly unsentimentalized.
I can't read Fire and Hemlock without breaking my heart, but in the good kind of way (if you like that kind of thing); I can't read the "worms in custard" or "Simon Says" or "MY SPIRIT IS BEING DRAGGED TO UTTAR PRADESH TO UTTER DESTRUCTION I MEAN" scenes in Witch Week without weeping with laughter.
It seems like a good time to re-read and review her novels. Look for them here.
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 2: The Magicians of Caprona / Witch Week
Howl's Moving Castle
Year of the Griffin
Dogsbody
Fire and Hemlock
The Homeward Bounders
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I don't know why I always go back to this since it's not the primary thing that made her brilliant and wonderful, but there isn't anybody else in the world, not in horror novels, not in anywhere -- except Joan Aiken a few times -- who could do that creeping yet matter-of-fact depiction of having bad parents, who are also bad people. Most writers I think have only the stomach to show one or the other at a time. There's not even usually blatant abuse or unambiguously criminal neglect -- just, the children realize, or we do, that not only are their parents not good to them, they aren't very good at all. I never know how to describe it right to convey how stunning it is.
also, Gwendolyn Chant: the best.
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I think it goes back to the same thing, though - she never allows the adults to be defined entirely by their relationship to their children, which is what you tend to get in a lot of YA novels. The parents in DWJ books always exist as people independent of their children, whether good or bad or (like most people) somewhere in between, and the children have to come to terms with that.
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The fact that the really bad parents aren't condemned as bad people, I agree -- depending on what you mean by that -- but that's exactly what makes it so amazing for me, and bleak. It's so matter-of-fact, presented as one of the many awful things that often happen to children. The effect of Polly's fucked-up parents in Fire and Hemlock is somewhat cushioned by the existence of her grandmother, just the fact that there's an external authority around to validate her and to say that this treatment is not standard or okay (and Polly's parents are pretty harmful, but they're treated much more generously and understandingly than most Wynne-Jones parents. Even so, the various scenes where Polly realizes that they are not ever going to be able to put aside their self-protection or self-involvement and consider things from her point of view or put her first, ever, are really powerful.) Condemnation, either from another character or, in some ill-defined way, from the text itself, makes it easier to tolerate, makes it seem more like a problem that could conceivably be corrected or a situation that could be improved. Leaving it out is even more, if you will, badass.
This isn't a parental relationship, but it's a similar dynamic: that cold feeling Cat gets when he realizes that his sister is actually totally willing to kill him, not because she dislikes him but because there are a lot of things more important to her than him. Speaking as a sister of a brother, I basically adore Gwendolen, but I think she's both presented as a pretty unfixably wrong and bad person, but also not condemned as such, in the way a vastly inferior book might have no choice but to do.
Oh my god this is a long comment! But lots and lots of books, not just children's books, take it as an article of faith that members of a nuclear family love each other, and that it is literally impossible to stop, let alone never to have started, even if they are abusive or estranged or act unlovingly in various ways. I always loved that DWJ felt free to show that sometimes this is not the case.
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But yes, I very much agree with the fact that the matter-of-factness with which her parents are written is one of the things that makes her books so exceptional. I think what stands out about her really horrible parents is that, as you say, there's no great hue-and-cry made about it within or without the world of the story. And while you can see that it's screwing the kids up in all kinds of ways, it's all sort of just under the surface - you never get the bright flashing lights pointing to "TERRIBLE UNNATURAL PARENT," because for DWJ it's not automatically exceptional, it's just the way things sometimes are and you learn to grow up and into yourself in spite of it. (People don't tend to grandstand about their baggage in DWJ either, they just kind of quietly stow it behind them. But if you look at them in profile of course it's there.)
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Well said, and so true.
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This. I couldn't make words happen m'self but kept thinking YES as I read what you said.
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I don't know which of hers are my favorites... I could better say which ones I don't like. I tend to share your opinion of Derkholm, although I don't think I dislike it quite as much. And I didn't care for A Sudden Wild Magic, though I'm not sure I could have articulated why at the time and certainly can't now.
I am one of the people who doesn't quite understand the ending of Fire and Hemlock. But I like the book anyway.
I haven't re-read too many of her books yet: if you post a schedule of the ones you will review here I and others might want to re-read with you.
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DWJ tribute
Charlie Butler (a close friend of Diana Wynne Jones) and I, are collecting together all the web tributes. We intend to format them, print them on good quality paper and bind them into seven copies for Diana's immediate family.
Would you be willing to allow your piece to be included?
No publication or sale is involved.
[Given that you don't know either of us: both of us can be checked out by googling our names + Diana Wynne Jones].
All the best
Farah Mendlesohn
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Re: DWJ tribute