| The Official | Diana Wynne Jones | Website |
| Charmed Lives fanzine, issue 2, nearly midsummer 1998 |
Charmed Lives 3 Charmed Lives 1 Complete Fanzine Index |
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about Diana Wynne Jonesby Penny Hill"Dewdrops on noses and Whiskas on kittens..." Err, well something like that anyway. Those of you who dislike sentimentality would be advised to be duly warned by the title and to move on to other articles, for in this article I will abandon my fashionably languid pose, to sing forth unashamedly my praise of what I like best in the works of Diana Wynne Jones. 1: Realistic characters The child protagonists in DWJ’s books are believable people and believable children. They are not adults or heroes squashed into a child’s body. Unlike Enid Blyton’s nauseatingly perfect brats, they bicker, act irrationally and naively believe that everything will make sense when they’ve grown up and can do what they like. In The Ogre Downstairs we are watching from Caspar and Johnny’s point of view and so their dislike of Malcolm and Douglas seems reasonable, until Caspar and Malcolm swap places and we are both forced to see things from Malcolm’s point of view. In The Homeward Bounders, Jamie is so caught up with his own problems that he refuses to accept that there could be any reason for Helen to be in a bad mood (when she has been forced into exile and has had to become a Homeward Bounder too...). The adults are no heroes either. Unlike much children’s fiction where the presence of a friendly adult means that problems and responsibilities can be relinquished, DWJ’s adults are experts at being useless. They may ignore their children in The Time of The Ghost and abandon them in Fire and Hemlock or like Quentin in Archer’s Goon become "passengers" leading to inverted parenting. They are also real people with their own pre-occupations and agendas - Mig’s parents in Black Maria are not going to get back together just because their children want them to. These imperfect parents mean that the plot can happen even in "normal" circumstances, because those normal circumstances are sufficiently dangerous and insecure for the type of adventure that can usually only flourish once the forces of order (adults) have left the stage. 2: "almost" worlds DWJ specialises in creating believable worlds that are similar to ours but not quite the same. Sometimes this is based on alternate history as in Witch Week where - well perhaps I’d better not tell you the difference as part of the fun is trying to work it out before you’re told. Other times the worlds are clearly based on magic like the arrangement of the universe in Deep Secret. Even Jamie’s 19th century England in The Homeward Bounders is close to but somehow not identical with historical reality. 3: intersections of magic with reality Magic is a common theme in the worlds of DWJ. Sometimes the background is recognisably that of our world but it intersects with other worlds where magic is possible. This is true of Deep Secret and A Sudden Wild Magic where there is a definite physical boundary between the worlds. In The Ogre Downstairs the magic intrudes through the chemistry set whereas in The Time of The Ghost the girls succeed in creating their own magic. The magic is believable because it is used sparingly by the author and always has consequences for the characters. It is never the deus ex machina. 4: Damn fine plotting with a twist How can I put this? I am constantly surprised by the endings in DWJ’s books and yet when I reach them and consider the process through which that ending has been reached, I find it all hangs together, it makes internal sense. It’s like reaching the end of a "Who-dunnit?" and realising that the clues were there all along, but we have been successfully misdirected. In Howl’s Moving Castle, all the missing characters are re-assembled by the end of the novel and we feel we should have spotted where and who they were earlier in the story. Arguably DWJ’s most complicated structure is the plotting of Fire and Hemlock (the first DWJ book I read as an adult). The false memories are eventually stripped away by means of an extended flashback that changes our understanding of all that comes after. Perception is everything, as we find out when we try to interpret the title picture. 5: humour Trying to give the flavour of someone else’s humour is almost impossible so I will content myself with two examples. There’s the fine observational humour in the description of Howl’s bathroom:- "Sophie winced from the toilet, flinched at the colour of the bath, recoiled from green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shrivelled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances." Okay, so I’m unsure whether or not the green weed is an exaggeration - but it adds excellent comic effect to a beautifully balanced Augustan sentence. In another, more surreal style there’s the wonderful magic conga line in A Sudden Wild Magic whose words change from:- "Let’s all do the conga - ah!" to "Bets and balls and bonkers - ah!" to "Can’t stand it all much longer - AH!" to "Wronger still and wronger - AH!" to "The High Head is a plonker - AH!" depending on who’s singing at the time and what they think the words should be. (I confess that it was to show my appreciation of this passage that I did my embarrassing admiring fan bit and bought DWJ a pint at last year’s Novacon.) 6: just a little romance When I told Chris that point 6 was Romance he said "But there isn’t much romance in Diana Wynne Jones’ stuff." "Exactly," I replied. "And that’s why I like it. When it is there it works." Not every bickering couple ends up together, nor do people necessarily get it together with the people they want. We do not get the cosy pairings-off we think we should expect. This adds value to the romantic endings we do get. I feel it makes sense when Sophie and Howl come together, and that the resolution of Fire and Hemlock has been sufficiently hard-earned to be satisfying. And finally Putting together all of the above, I would have to say that overall what I like most is that feeling of expectation and excitement when you pick up a new DWJ book, the impatience to get home, put the kettle on and start reading. In fact if you’ll excuse me now, I feel a burning urge to re-read all the books I’ve just mentioned along with several that I wanted to mention but couldn’t without being repetitive. See you later...
edited and unless otherwise indicated, written by Meredith
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