November's recommendation: Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones.
I've decided to limit myself to one Diana Wynne Jones recommendation per year; last year's was Howl's Moving Castle. I've got a couple more years to go before I've even covered the novels which compete for the title of My Favorite DWJ Book. As I said last time, she's the sort of children's/YA author you can still enjoy when you're well past your child/YA years.
I picked Fire and Hemlock this time around because it's the book which got me started writing. I'm serious: I know I had written at least one thing before I read this novel, but I distinctly recall putting this down and thinking, very clearly and for the first time, "I want to tell a story." It's because the two main characters, Polly and Thomas Lynn, spend much of the novel making up a story together, and I wanted to do the same.
Much as The Princess Bride was a formative influence on my life (I studied Spanish and fencing because of Inigo Montoya), so was this novel. My fascination with the Scottish ballad "Tam Lin" may be traced directly back to it. Oh yes -- this is a Tam Lin retelling. But not a very straightforward one. Funerals come down from Hunsdon House every nine years, not every seven, and every eighty-one years it's a woman. Thomas Lynn bears some resemblances to Tam Lin, and some to Thomas the Rhymer; he is neither of those men. He is merely (hah!) caught up in the same strange events they were.
Quotes from those two ballads are interspersed throughout the novel, but you don't need to be familiar with them to enjoy the tale (I wasn't). The flip side is, being familiar with them doesn't mean you'll understand everything (I don't). As embarrassing as it is to admit, I've read this novel multiple times and I still don't quite get the ending. How, you may ask, can I go around recommending a book I don't understand? Well, somehow the ending works, even if I don't get it. And I love stories where a later reading unveils things I never saw before. It wasn't that long ago I figured out what was up with the pictures Tom took from Hunsdon House -- not the "Fire and Hemlock" picture, the other ones -- a blindness on my part, I'm sure, but oh, the glee when the light bulb went on.
Right. Back to something that might actually sound like a recommendation. The main character is Polly, who's ten years old when the novel begins. She and her friend Nina gate-crash a funeral at Hunsdon House, which leads to Polly rather oddly becoming friends with a man there, Thomas Lynn. Over the years that follow, they keep in touch mostly by letters; Tom sends Polly books, and they both send each other chunks of badly-typed manuscript for the story they are jointly making up, about the hero Tan Coul and his young sidekick trainee-hero Hero (as Polly points out to Tom, it is a girl's name -- if you're Greek, that is). Meanwhile, Polly's home life is falling apart, and Tom is struggling to make a career as a cellist.
Perfectly normal. Except for the weird shit.
The narrative slides back and forth in time, between Polly as a nineteen-year-old getting ready to go back to school for the year and Polly as a growing child. Nineteen-year-old Polly can't escape the feeling that there's something wrong with her memories, and so she's going back through them, trying to spot where they went astray. And as she goes, she uncovers more and more things that she had totally forgotten about -- things that contradict the past she's remembered all along -- and she becomes more and more desperate to figure out what happened to leave her with two full sets of the last nine years.
There are things about this book that still give me chills, even after fifteen years. The Nowhere vases, for example, which give names to the sections of the book: they can be spun so that the observer sees the phrases "Now Here," "Where Now?," and "Nowhere." The paper in the alleys, when Tom is trying to get Polly to the train station. The relentless veneer of everything being totally normal when it's totally not. Laurel.
This is the book that made me want to tell stories, and the book that taught me not to feel too bad about the sentimental idiocies I committed in the early ones. If "Tam Lin" ever appears in one of my novels (and there's one, not to be written any time soon, where it might), Fire and Hemlock will be to blame for that too. Or to credit. When I grow up, I wanna be as good a storyteller as Diana Wynne Jones is.