If I didn’t have Christmas carols stuck in my head, I would have been singing Les Mis to myself for half this book. 🙂

The Dalemark Quartet continues, with a book that takes on more directly the issue of oppression in the South Dales. Mitt’s family is driven from their farm to the city of Holand by oppressive rents, and his father gets involved with a revolutionary society called the Free Holanders, which in turn ends up recruiting Mitt and his mother Milda, too. But when the Free Holanders decide to finally do something other than sit around and talk, things start to go very wrong very quickly.

That’s half the story; the other half belongs to Hildy and Ynen, the grandchildren of the Earl of Holand. (70% of the names in this book begin with H. Hildrida and Hadd and Harl and Harchad and Holand and Hobin and hell if I can remember the rest.) As much as it sucks to be a commoner outside the palace, it isn’t all sunshine and roses being a noble inside it, either; you never wonder where your next meal is coming from, but you do get sold off into political marriages and watch as your grandfather hangs Northerners whose only real crime was to be driven into harbor by a storm.

This book is stronger on both of the fronts that I felt were lacking in Cart and Cwidder; the plot has a lot more momentum, and the emotions are much more strongly laid out. Sure, I wanted to kick the Free Holanders in the teeth for being so blind they couldn’t stage a revolution with both hands and a map — and sometimes I wanted to kick Hobin, too, for failing to more effectively point out why joining them was a bad idea — but it’s entirely realistic stupidity, which means it frustrates me, but doesn’t make for a bad story.

Other things I liked, before we LJ-cut for spoilers: Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer. Which is to say, the tradition of making those two figures and throwing them in the harbor is fabulous. Like the word “cwidder,” it feels very plausibly real, and ends up (as the title suggests) being very relevant to the story. I also liked the largely Ruritanian feel of the story; what with the revolutionaries and all, I half-believe that if you set sail across that ocean, you’ll wash up in Westmark. 🙂

The rest goes behind the cut.

Motifs I like, done right.

This is the first book of the Dalemark Quartet, which I know I read many years ago, but out of order and sufficiently spaced out that I don’t think I realized at the time the books made up a set.

In part, this is because — although I’ve afterwards thought of them as a Proper Series — these books are no more closely linked than, say, Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. They take place in the same setting, and maybe once I get further on (I’m in the process of re-reading Drowned Ammet right now) there will be more immediate linkages, but so far there’s no sense in which any of these books is a direct sequel to one before. (The exception may come in The Crown of Dalemark, which I want to say builds on all three of its predecessors. Then again, I haven’t read the thing in probably twenty years, so my instinct is not what you’d call reliable.)

The other reason I didn’t notice, the first (and I think only) time I read these books, that they belonged together, was because . . . they never really made an impression on me. I know some people love the Dalemark series; there are a number of Yuletide requests for it this year. Glancing at them, though, they all seem to be for later books: I didn’t see a single one for Cart and Cwidder, though I might have overlooked it. I think it’s entirely possible I’ll like the later ones better — Drowned Ammet is already off to a better start — but yeah, this one didn’t do a lot for me. It’s one of the earlier books, published in 1975, and it feels like it never quite hit its stride.

Before I get to unpacking that, though, a plot summary. The title refers to the fact that the protagonist, Moril, belongs to a family of traveling singers; they travel in a cart, and he and his father both play the cwidder, which is (as near as I can tell) a made-up stringed instrument, or maybe just a made-up name for a stringed instrument. (“Cwidder” is a reasonably plausible morph of “guitar,” to my eye, though the image on my book cover looks more like a lute.) They’re traveling in the South Dales, which suffer under a repressive set of earls, and trying to make their way to the North Dales, where Moril and the other children were born, and people can live free.

Now we can move on to the spoilers.

And the LJ-cut to hide them.

This is the third book in the “Fantasyland” set, following on Dark Lord of Derkholm, about eight years after the end of that book. It is less closely linked to Tough Guide to Fantasyland, though; the tours are done, and the world is sorting itself back into some kind of order, when Derk’s youngest griffin daughter Elda goes off to wizard college.

As I said before, I’m a sucker for the younger generation finding out just what they’re capable of. As a result, I really like Year of the Griffin, just for watching the protagonists deal with each other’s problems — Claudia’s jinx, the assassins after Felim, the dwarven rebellion that sent Ruskin, and so on. It’s amazing what you can do with a card catalogue and a bit of intellectual curiosity . . . .

I kind of want to kick Corkoran in the head for being so obsessed with his moonshot, even if I totally believe in that dynamic, academically speaking — the professor who’s more concerned with his pet project than with teaching. Wehrmacht I want to kick even more, for sheer incompetence. But they aren’t generally malevolent (not like Mr. Chesney in Dark Lord), and I’m not expected to sympathize with them as protagonists, so I can deal with that impulse. I quite Elda and Lukin and Olga and Claudia and Felim and Ruskin, and that’s the part that matters.

I’ve fallen behind on these, I’m afraid — the posting more than the reading. So, without further ado:

Dark Lord of Derkholm is the playing-out of the ideas treated encyclopedically in Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Derk and his family live in a fantasy world that has, for the last forty years or so, been playing host to Tours from another dimension, sending them hither and yon across the landscape in quest of clues to overthrow the Dark Lord. But the Tours are bankrupting their world; they’re sacking cities, trampling crops, laying waste to the countryside, and forcing everybody to fulfill the expectations (read: conform to the stereotypes) of these otherworldly visitors. The people in charge of setting things up for the Tours want to bring them to an end once and for all, so they appoint a wizard named Derk to play the role of this year’s Dark Lord, and his untrained, fourteen-year-old son Blade to be the Wizard Guide for the final Tour.

This is a fairly sprawling book. At 517 pages in my (mass-market) edition, it may well be her longest; I think only A Sudden Wild Magic comes close to challenging that. Dark Lord reminds me of that one a bit, just in terms of narrative scope. There’s a lot of stuff going on in here, as Querida, the High Chancellor of the wizard’s college, tries to manipulate things into going badly enough to end the Tours, and Derk and Blade (along with the rest of their family) run themselves to the point of ragged and beyond trying to do their jobs right.

I think my favorite stuff in here involves Derk’s family. There are so many neglected and abused children in her books, it’s refreshing to get something like this or the Montanas in The Magicians of Caprona, where there are a lot of people who may squabble, but ultimately love each other quite a lot. I did want to smack Derk sometimes; his tendency to retreat from unpleasant things into fantasies of new creatures reminded me a bit of Erg in “Four Grannies,” though he had much better reason for it. But I like his kids a lot, both the human ones and the griffins.

I suppose I should put the rest of this behind a cut.

(more…)

This book is single-handedly responsible for a 900% reduction in the frequency of stew in fantasy novels.

(True fact: there used to be stew in the doppelganger books. I took it out because of Diana Wynne Jones.)

It is not, in the normal way of things, a book really meant to be read cover-to-cover. It isn’t a novel; it’s an encyclopedia, mocking the tropes and formulas of quest fantasy, from Adept (“one who has taken what amouts to the Postgraduate Course in MAGIC”) to Zombies (“these are just the UNDEAD, except nastier, more pitiable, and generally easier to kill”). Oh, sorry — you don’t start with Adept, you always, always start with THE MAP. (“It will be there. No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one.”)

I decided to read it cover-to-cover anyway, because if I’m going to do a completist read-through of her work, then dammit, I’m going to be thorough about it. And it’s still entertaining; it just takes a while, compared to a novel of similar length. It also forms useful, though not completely necessary, background for Dark Lord of Derkholm, which takes the idea of the quest-fantasy protagonist being a Tourist and runs for the end zone. But for that, you’ll have to wait for another post.

Charmain Baker gets sent, against her will, to look after the house of her Great-Uncle William, who is also the Royal Wizard of Norland, while he’s away being cured of illness. The house turns out to have all kinds of dimensions not immediately obvious to the naked eye, but there are problems from rebellious kobolds and a dangerous lubbock, as well as difficulties for the Kingdom of Norland, which is very nearly bankrupt.

(Random aside: can I just say how distracting the lubbock was to me? So far as I can determine, that’s not anything from folklore. And I associate the name with a rather dreary city in Texas, known to me mostly because a) it’s where we stopped for lunch on road trips to Arizona, and b) it’s the home of Texas Tech University, from whence came the various correspondence courses I did in high school. So yeah, that’s what I kept thinking about.)

Like Castle in the Air, this is less a direct sequel, more a related book. Howl, Sophie, and Calcifer appear (and their influence is more apparent than in Castle), but mostly they’re there to facilitate someone else’s story — in this case, Charmain’s.

I wish I liked her better.

I remember picking this book up when it hit the shelves, and being delighted when I saw that it was a sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle.

I also remember being really, really confused as to how it could possibly be a sequel. For more than half the book, the only visible connection is a couple of passing references to Ingary. (There’s much more than that going on, of course, but it doesn’t become obvious until fairly late.)

For that first half or so, the real connection is more a matter of style. Just as Howl’s Moving Castle played around a bit with fairy-tale tropes — eldest of three, setting out to seek one’s fortune, etc — Castle in the Air plays around with tropes from the Arabian Nights. Abdullah is a very different character from Sophie, and his conflict is likewise different; the story is more centrally about him solving his problem (and dealing with a larger one in the process), rather than Sophie solving a larger problem (and getting her own resolved in the process). But there’s a similar feel to the two stories, and I’m quite fond of Castle in the Air, if not so fond as I am of the original.

On to the spoilers!

(more…)

Another short story collection. Two of the stories in here are repeats from collections I’ve previously read: “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” (in Warlock at the Wheel) and “The Sage of Theare” (in both that and Mixed Magics). The other five are new, in the sense that I haven’t read them before; I didn’t think to approach these things in publication order.

“The Master” didn’t do a lot for me; it felt a little too weird and disjointed, not drawing together until the end, and even then not enough. That scene gave the story a point, but didn’t do anything to put previous events in context.

“Enna Hittims” got me off on the wrong foot with the way Anne’s parents took care of her — or rather, failed to — when she was seriously ill with the mumps. This might be the neglected-child version of what I’ve started thinking of as the Goon Problem: I don’t mind the titular character in Archer’s Goon being horrible at people, because the novel both fleshes out that situation and waters it down with other narrative material, but I dislike that motif when it shows up in condensed form in DWJ’s short fiction. Anne being left to more or less starve, and then being laughed at by her father for the disfigurement brought on by the mumps, really rubbed me the wrong way, even though some of the kids in the novels suffer far worse. The end was touching, though.

“The Girl Who Loved the Sun” was pretty good, in a tragic and deeply disturbed way.

“What the Cat Told Me” is fun but not memorable; the plot is fairly mundane, lifted up a touch by the narrative voice of the cat.

“Nad and Dan Adn Quaffy” I remember reading before, and it still doesn’t do a lot for me. As with my complaint about the stories in Stopping for a Spell and Warlock at the Wheel, the magic is too random and unexplained, and the running motif with the typos doesn’t amuse me enough. I do like the line about pretending to be the captain of a starship, though.

Heather, a girl whose parents are curators for a “British Trust” (i.e. National Trust) estate, accidentally calls forth a Jacobean-era man known as Wild Robert, who runs around wreaking havoc with magic.

This book is short enough that I suspect in technical terms it’s only a novelette — no more than fifteen thousand words, and probably less. It could easily have been included in one of DWJ’s collections of short fiction, rather than being published independently. But it’s a pleasant enough story; I found it much nicer than the stories compiled in Stopping for a Spell, which were also put out as individual books.

As for spoilers . . . .

(more…)

I said at the end of my last post that I wasn’t sure if I’d ever read Hexwood before. I can say now that I’m 99% I hadn’t — because surely I would have remembered The One Where Diana Wynne Jones Wrote an Episode of Doctor Who.

Seriously, how else am I supposed to describe a book that has dragons, robots, medieval knights, evil galactic overlords, a girl with four not-so-imaginary voices in her head, and a simulation device that might end up assimilating the entire planet Earth? Plus a story that doesn’t quite go according to normal linear chronology. I pity the poor soul who had to write cover copy for this thing. Here’s what my edition has:

Strange things happen at Hexwood Farm. From her window, Ann Staveley watches person after person disappear through the farm’s gate — and never come out again. Later, in the woods nearby, she meets a tormented sorcerer, who seems to have arisen from a centuries-long sleep. But Ann knows she saw him enter the farm just that morning. Meanwhile, time keeps shifting in the woods, where a small boy — or perhaps a teenager — has encountered a robot and a dragon. Long before the end of their adventure, the strangeness of Hexwood has spread from Earth right out to the center of the galaxy.

Me, I would say that the story concerns a device called a Bannus, which was designed to aid in decision-making: given suitable starting parameters, it simulates every possible set of outcomes. It was built by a race of people called the Reigners, five of whom are now basically the aforementioned evil galactic overlords; when a Bannus left on Earth gets out of control, they rush to try and shut it down, but instead the Bannus keeps trapping everything within its simulation.

Does that make any sense? I can’t tell. This book is extremely hard to summarize, and moderately confusing to read, too. I did enjoy it, but you’ve got to be willing to let go of linearity, and be okay with the fact that many of the characters spend most of the book being totally adrift as to who anybody is and what order they’re encountering each other in.

Maybe spoilers will help. Then again, maybe not.

The hidden leaders of magical society on Earth discover that a neighboring universe is using our world as an experimental laboratory: siccing problems (like global warming) on us with the intent of seeing how we cope with them. They mount an expedition to put an end to the problem.

My recollection is that when I was a kid, most of Diana Wynne Jones’ work was shelved in the children’s department; this book, however, was in the nascent Young Adult section. It’s certainly aimed at an older readership. The only work of Jones’ I can think of that’s comparable is Deep Secret, a later (and more successful) book. This one doesn’t seem to be anybody’s favorite — though I could be wrong — and a great many people don’t like it at all. So bear that in mind when you decide whether to read the spoilers that follow.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Like Witch’s Business/Wilkin’s Tooth, I’m not sure why this book got retitled. My guess is they wanted something that might at least vaguely signal fantasy, as Aunt Maria could be any kind of book at all, but it doesn’t work very well; the book makes only one use of the phrase, in the first paragraph of the book (comparing their family situation to the card game Hearts, aka Black Maria), and to a U.S. eye it otherwise calls up weird, semi-racial connotations. Or at least it does for me, because fantasy so often uses “black” to signal “evil.”

Anyway, the book. It falls into the “somebody is utterly horrible under the guise of being perfectly reasonable; long-suffering protagonists put up with it for too long” sub-genre of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, but as I’ve said in previous posts, it works better here than it does in the short stories. Telling that story at book-length means other aspects come in, diluting the horrible behavior and making it less unrelentingly awful. (Though it’s still plenty awful. Aunt Maria, so far as I’m qualified to tell, is a master of the Manipulation Handbook.)

The general setup for the plot is that Mig and her family (mother and brother) get suckered into spending their Easter holiday visiting — read, waiting hand and foot on — Aunt Maria, who is actually the aunt of Mig and Chris’s recently-deceased father. When they get to Cranbury-on-Sea, they find the town is deeply weird, with zombie-like men, weird clone-like orphan children, and a bevy of old ladies who seem to form some kind of ruling cabal. They rapidly figure out that the surface niceness covers some stuff that isn’t nice at all.

Spoilers!

Another slight entry. (I almost combined it with the post on Yes, Dear, but decided to keep all the books in separate posts, for the sake of organization.)

This is a straight-up retelling of the “Puss in Boots” tale, with no particular alteration that I could spot. My copy, which I think was produced for World Book Day, has some nice running illustrated borders at the top and bottom, and small images of the characters scattered throughout. It’s moderately attractive, and so if you want to own a copy of this story, and prefer Diana Wynne Jones’ style to Perrault’s (which, really, why wouldn’t you), then it’s worth having.

Not much to say about this one. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the only straight-up picture book Diana Wynne Jones ever wrote. That being a genre I’m almost completely ignorant of, I’m more or less completely unqualified to judge whether this one’s any good.

The story, such as it is, concerns a girl who finds a magic leaf, but nobody in her family will believe her about it. The artwork is pleasing enough. If you have a small person in your acquaintance and you want to get them started on DWJ as early as possible, you might have use for this book; otherwise, it’s far too slight to really be appreciated in the same way as her other work.