Reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller

The story opens with Polly Whittacker packing ready to go up to Oxford. She's looking at a book and at a picture, each of which she recalls as having meant something to her in the past, and she is puzzling as to why they no longer do. Memories are becoming superimposed on other memories; she recalls things she is positive didn't actually happen. Something is clearly amiss, and suddenly Polly begins to remember, to really remember, when she was ten years old. And what she recalls is very strange. There was a funeral at the big house, Hunsdon House, which she accidentally gatecrashed, because she had been dressed in black. Here, she'd met Thomas Lynn, a young man, related to the family by marriage, very ill at ease in his surroundings and obviously unhappy at being in the house. He'd befriended her, or had she befriended him, and thus had begun a relationship of snatched meetings and fitful correspondence.

Almost immediately, it's easy to suggest that maybe Polly invented the meeting and the friendship. As she recognises herself, 'ever since she was a small girl, she had liked supposing things', so why not suppose this as well, the fascinating male friend, much older, taking care of her, a not-quite-sexual relationship for a girl on the brink of puberty. The idea of supposition is made all the more plausible by the fact that Polly is very much in need of friends. Her parents' marriage is disintegrating and much of the time they simply take no notice of her or else transfer their own grievances onto her. Indeed, the reason she is with her grandmother is because Granny was on hand to break up a fight in which Polly was literally stuck in the middle.

And there is no doubt that Thomas Lynn is an attractive man. Not classically handsome by any means, he is thin, rather stooped, wears glasses, looks like 'a very tall tortoise' according to Polly; a very safe figure in other words, but he is thoughtful and generous, apparently indulging Polly in her games of supposing and bringing the sense of fun into her life that it otherwise sadly lacks. In the following months and years, they devise a huge story in which they are trainee heroes, dealing with unlikely adventures, which have a curious habit of coming true, in part at least. And he gives her books, lots of them, supplying her with an education in fantasy literature. Only later will it become clear that he is trying to tell Polly something very important; he can't tell her outright so can only convey it through hints, in the same way that he and she quickly turn to communicating through others, to cover their tracks.

This secrecy, of course, is misconstrued. Polly is warned, over and over, to keep away from strange men; the danger is unvoiced, and as Polly sees it, non-existent, but others are mindful, including Polly's Granny, and ironically, Polly's own mother, Ivy, who understands but misinterprets the threats, so solipsistic is her own world view. More real to Polly are the twin dangers of her own home, and the mysterious Leroy family, the family at the funeral. Morton Leroy, husband of Laurel (who is Tom's ex-wife) and his son, Sebastian, dog her steps, threaten her, demand that she sever contact with Tom Lynn, then pursue her for a photograph that Tom gave her, part of his spoils from the division of property. Her own family is as dangerous. Having divorced her father, Ivy takes in a series of lodgers, for which read lovers, driving each away with her insane jealousy, but blaming her daughter for flirting with them. Finally, sent to live with her father and his new partner, Polly realises that her father is as weak as her mother has always said, for he has not told Joanna that Polly is coming to live with them, and it is clear that Joanna doesn't want her. After a couple of days, pretending it is time for her to go home, she finds herself in a strange town, with no money, no ticket. Only the timely appearance of Tom, and the other members of his string quartet, save her, when the Leroy family attack again, and only Polly's grandmother can save her from her own family, which she does (though in my view, it would be difficult to resist a woman with a cat called Mintchoc).

It's only at nineteen that Polly suddenly realises that she has lost memories, or worse, that other humdrum memories have been superimposed upon them. Everyone denies her version of events when she asks, except for her friend Fiona, who, as Polly surmises, she scarcely knew when the events were unfolding and who was therefore not considered a danger by the Leroy family, and Granny, who is a very wise woman indeed and seems to know exactly what's been going on all along.

Maureen says she was disturbed when she first saw the old cover of The Time of the Ghost, since she was on it! Clue: it's not the little beaver at the top!

So what has been going on? What we are looking at here is an incredibly complex reworking of the story of Tam Lin, the story of the young man who has been stolen away by the fairies, and his rescue by the woman who loves him, or rather, as the old version would have it, the woman who is pregnant with his child. There's always a temptation when adapting an old story to simply modernise it, add a few touches here and there, and let the story stand by itself. Retelling is all fine and well, but I always feel that the author is then following a blueprint laid out by someone else, maybe adding a grace note here and there, but not truly possessing the story. One of the great delights of Fire and Hemlock is that Diana Wynne Jones hasn't done this. It's more as though she's unpicked the fabric of the original, retained the thread and the basic pattern but then rewoven the cloth into something new and startling, retaining familiar elements but giving them a new spin, drawing out further possibilities.

I think this is particularly evident in the multi-layered nature of the story. Reading it is rather like peeling an onion; each time I read it, I feel I am reaching through to a new layer. To begin with, it's very simple to read the novel as being the story of a little girl who has a friend with whom she invents improbably adventures, and who is there to sustain her when her own life becomes intolerable. For Polly, Tom Lynn can be like a very wonderful uncle, who gives her books, nurturing those aspects of her character that her parents neglect, and in some ways he is as much her father as Granny becomes her mother, taking the trouble to turn up for school concerts and so on. And of course, he and the other members of the quartet are undoubtably the heroes Polly has envisaged them as, when they save her from being lost in Bristol.

On another level, there is no doubt that there is foul work afoot in fairyland, so the novel takes on the aspect of an adventure story, the sort in which parents are mysteriously absent while the action is carried out. However, in such stories, parents are benignly absent whereas here they have withdrawn almost without realising what they are doing, unable to bear the added responsibility of a child and thus are not there to provide security when Polly comes home from her adventures. Worse, they even deny that it could have happened. But if her parents are malignantly absent, then what exactly is Thomas Lynn? I don't think we can doubt that he does genuinely care for Polly, but once one accepts that the Leroy family is indeed unearthly, then assuming that one is familiar with how they operate, as Granny is but can't explain, as Thomas is but can't explain, as Polly ought to be after all the books Tom has given her in order to try to explain it, then one has to question, as Granny does, what exactly he is up to?

Laurel is the Fairy Queen (Eudora Mabel Lorelei Perry Lynn - the clues are all there in her name, as indeed they are in the name of her consorts, at this stage Morton and Sebastian Leroy) and her consort is a human man taken into her household for a period of time before being used up and spat out. Tom, however, has managed to escape the power of the family to some extent, and is managing to strengthen his position through his friendship with Polly, who is taking on the function of the girl in the original ballad, holding onto her lover through his shape-shifting. Except, of course, that Tom has instigated this in order to escape, fuelling Granny's suspicions about him using Polly, and it cannot be denied that he also uses other people in order to create a smokescreen around Polly herself. And until Polly was encouraged to forget, she had kept him safe, more or less, through her storytelling. Now, at last, she's returning to Hunsdon House to stop Tom offering up his life in order that Morton, the King, may live on.

And at its deepest level, at least the deepest I've yet reached, Fire and Hemlock is a love story of a most unlikely kind. In the midst of the complications of wordplay which oblige both Tom and Polly to deny that which they most care about in order to secure its safety, they have fallen in love over the years. What was initially friendship has ripened. In fact, Fire and Hemlock is as much about the process of growing up, of reaching maturity, as it is about Faeryland. The fairies are caught up in the need to maintain their immortality and their means become increasingly desperate; it's almost a metaphor for a time in which youth and vitality are prized above wisdom and maturity, to be maintained at whatever cost.

But the subtleties don't end there; the book is constructed as a musical quartet, thus honouring the classical quartet who are among its main characters, while Diana Wynne Jones also employs some very clever word play on the word 'Nowhere', to chart the progress of the book and its heroine.

It's so easy to dismiss fantasy as a trivial literature, suitable only for children, with the implicit message that it's not really worth that much generally, and certainly not as a literature for adults. Which only goes to show how little such critics understand. I've read this book a number of times in the twelve years since it came out, and every time I have found something new in it, something which has illuminated my understanding of the book and remade it for me. I respond to it on many levels. I admire it as a technical tour de force, but I turn to it often as a source of comfort, knowing that Polly will reach her happy ever after and that on the way she will have Tom Lynn guiding her, and though I know the story, each reread brings new satisfaction. There aren't many books I can say that of.

• Diana Wynne Jones in her own words - Interviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller
• Neil Gaiman's thank you poem
• I Blame It On The Parents - Parents and children in the books of Diana Wynne Jones. Article by Chris Hill
• Fire And Hemlock - by Maureen Kincaid Speller
• The Ogre Downstairs - Reviewed by Arwyn Finnie, with illustrations by Ailse and Duncan Finnie
• Rats and Things - Meredith and creepy-crawlies
• Further Along The Bookshelf - Penny Hill's other favourite children's books

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