| The Official | Diana Wynne Jones | Website |
| Charmed Lives fanzine, issue 3, New Year 1999 |
Charmed Lives 4 Charmed Lives 2 Charmed Lives 1 |
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edited and unless otherwise indicated, written by Meredith
This is just a short (and hastily produced) issue. I am pressed for time, resources, just about everything. The only things that aren’t pressed are my clothes, because there’s not enough time to do the ironing and I hate it anyway. Although there’s not much in this fanzine, I wanted to get it out now so that there is not too long a gap between issues. A gap is a flexible thing, and so too are fanzine deadlines. But as I have been told by at least two long-established science fiction fans, it is pretty good going to manage to produce two issues of a fanzine, let along the magic third number. So I won’t feel guilty about doing a short one this time round. I would like to make this fanzine an archive of Diana Wynne Jones’s books and other stuff. So as well as the book list on the back, which seems to grow every time I do it, I plan to write short summaries of each book, chosen completely at random.I know this could become hopelessly anally retentive. But to hold Freud at bay, I argue that those of us who love the books never mind hearing what other people have to say about them, even if it’s just a description – of what happens, not: this one is about 5 inches by 8 inches and has a red cover ... And for those who haven’t already read every single one of Diana’s books, a short description might be quite useful as a taster of something to look forward to in future. I find bare lists of books extremely irritating. If I know I like the author’s work, I know I will (eventually) read them all. But I like to have a little bit of advance information to work with. The other reason I particularly did not want to delay this issue any longer, is because I am desperate to spread the word about Diana Wynne Jones’s new book, The Dark Lord of Derkholm, one of the best books I read last year, and one which should win DWJ a host of new readers. It’s not billed as a children’s book, so should not suffer from the ghetto-isation of anything aimed at kids, and the brightly-coloured, packed cover picture should appeal to the hordes of readers who, thanks to Terry Pratchett, will read comic fantasy. I hope that this book will bring DWJ a wider audience than ever before. Diana Wynne Jones has got a soon-to-be-royal reader. Apparently Sophie Rhys-Jones was inspired, at the age of ten, to form a coven at school by a book called – The Ogre Downstairs. I got this bit of royal-watching info from The Sun newspaper, which someone had left in the office coffee-room, honest, guv. (Being The Sun, they had to get something wrong. The description of the book was completely incorrect!) Diana was ill last year and spent some time in hospital. I hope she is fully recovered now and able to return to writing with full vigour.
by Neil Gaiman I discovered Diana Wynne Jones, rather like Stout Cortez (me, that is, not Diana), who on a peak in Darien and so forth noticed, rather to his surprise I expect, a new land hove into view, in a small Sussex book shop in 1981, with a book called CHARMED LIFE, published by Puffin. It was a remarkable, assured, and utterly delightful novel, which juggled parallel worlds, magic, children, criminals, and a book of matches with wit, imagination, and an authorial point of view that reminded me a little of E. Nesbit, and a little of P. G. Wodehouse, but which was undoubtedly, uniquely Diana Wynne Jones - deft and delightful, intricately plotted, and, above all, fun. There. Diana had been discovered. She didn't know it at the time. In fact, Diana didn't know she'd been discovered until 1985, at the British Fantasy Convention, in Birmingham. In the meantime, I'd read most of the available Diana Wynne Jones books, and had only one regret, viz. and to wit, that I had not read them when I was a child. I wanted these books to have coloured my childhood. I wanted to have read and reread them until the pages fell out. I read ARCHER'S GOON, which may be the finest mixture of fantasy and science fiction and God-knows-what anyone's ever done, and THE OGRE DOWNSTAIRS (which really is the best modern E. Nesbit anyone's done) and EIGHT DAYS OF LUKE, which has Norse gods in it and which, structurally, I wish I'd written, and WITCH WEEK, and WILKIN'S TOOTH and DOGSBODY and THE TIME OF THE GHOST, which is the darkest, most dangerous - most autobiographical - of Diana's books, and I wrote enthusiastic reviews of them, and told my friends. 1985. British Fantasy Convention. Right. Diana was Guest of Honour, and it was the first convention she had ever been to, in any capacity. I saw her, standing nervously in the bar (British conventions happen in the bar), at the start of the convention, in the manner of one who has never been to a convention before and has not a clue what to expect, and I told her that I had just read THE TIME OF THE GHOST and how good it was, and then she bought me a drink, and then I told her how good ARCHER'S GOON was, and she bought me another drink. . . (Diana has since been to many convention. I don't think it would work anymore.) We became friends during the convention, and have stayed friends ever since. It was some years later that she told me that I was the first adult (not a librarian, teacher, or family member anyway) to have read her work, and to have loved it - or at least, the first adult to have told her this. If so, I was the first of an enormous number of intelligent adults who have found in Diana's books a wise, funny, occasionally very scary, consistently delightful author - and who have told her so - something you may also get a chance to do, during this Boskone. I've known Diana for a decade now. She is wise and funny, accessible, and unpretentious (although she knows precisely how good she is, and will suffer fools only up to a point). (How good is she? Well, the indispensable Clute-Nicholls ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION describes her as "probably the premier UK writer of children's fantasy today".) Things that Diana writes come true (ask her: she'll tell you). As a child she had close encounters with Arthur Ransome (an irascible gentleman who came to complain about the noise), and her sister was swatted by Beatrix Potter for swinging on her gate; Diana, when small, personally erased - by hand - many irreplacable Ruskin pencil drawings; at university she heard C. S. Lewis lecture, and in all probability she watched J. R. R. Tolkien potter about the quad (I have no real source for this. I am improvising here); and she wrote her first books, as quite a young girl, for herself and her sisters, as they didn't have any (their father, in a fit of not-uncharacteristic economy, had, when they requested books, bought them a classic children's library that, he decided were meant to last them the rest of their childhood, doling out a book a year). She's written horror (AUNT MARIA, FIRE AND HEMLOCK), science fiction (A TALE OF TIME CITY, THE HOMEWARD BOUNDERS), humour (CHAIR PERSON), fantasy (the DALEMARK books), and her own unique mixture of the above (HEXWOOD, HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE). Diana's last few years have been marred by ill health, much of it assisted, created, or caused by incompetent medical professionals. I am delighted that she's well enough to come to Boskone, where you get the opportunity, much like Stout Cortez, or Amerigo Vespucci, or even Vasco da Gama, to discover her for yourself. Article copyright 1995 by Neil Gaiman. "Boskone" is a registered service mark of the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.
DARK LORD OF DERKHOLM reviewed This book was a real joy to read. It is a classic DWJ, in that every page is stuffed with incident or humour, characters come alive, and there are so many threads in the plot that as ever, it is almost a miracle that DWJ can pull them all together by the end.  On
a world with ambient magic, where mythical creatures co-exist with
humans, Mr Chesney's tour groups from another planet create regular
havoc. Nobody wants him and his tourists, demanding by the terms of
their powerful contract all the themes of fantasy: an Evil King and a
Glamorous Enchantress, an enslavement episode, a nunnery to be sacked
...When the wizard Derk is unwillingly appointed this year's Dark Lord, in charge of organising all the forces of evil to give a good show for the tourists, things go drastically wrong. Derk's family of humans and griffins have to take over his duties as Dark Lord, but while muddling along, they might just possibly find a way to stop Chesney. As a novel, Dark Lord cannot strictly be called a sequel to The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. But, it clearly grew out of DWJ's not-always-gentle views on the way so many authors churn out tired old motifs of fantasy in a tired old way. So, she takes all the themes, does something refreshing and different with them, and has a gentle laugh at the whole genre. For example, this is one of the few books where a deus ex machina is genuinely appropriate. Some of the episodes are more "adult" than are often found in DWJ's books. The callous, careless cruelty of Mr Chesney, who marks some tourists down as expendable (much like the crewmen in Star Trek), and is most displeased if they survive their tour. The viciousness of the soldiers when they turn on Derk's family. The battles and the treachery leading to the gladiators' arena. Although this book is pure fun, I felt that it had a serious point. Greedy Western consumers of land, minerals or holiday experiences, are destroying homes and cultures in several places around the world. I often think it's a great pity that indiginous peoples haven't got a griffin or dragon they can call upon to repel tourists. There's also a rites-of-passage theme. All Derk's children, whether human or griffin, have got lessons to learn, as indeed do Derk and his wife, Mara. But the serious stuff never gets in the way of Diana's great skill - to tell a good story and to tell it so well that you can't stop turning the pages. The comic touches are glorious, but are never forced or contrived. For example, the dwarves behave so weirdly that the really peculiar name of one of them just seems on par for the course. I loved such asides as the children sulking over who gets to play the Wild Hunt, the carnivorous sheep, and the sudden squeamishness of the first tour group who were supposed to kill the Dark Lord. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Go and get it and enjoy. Published by Victor Gollancz, 1998, ISBN 0 575 066768
David hates his relatives so much that he tries to curse them. Suddenly the earth breaks open and Luke appears, swearing that David’s magical words have freed him from captivity. Now David has to help Luke stay free, at the same time coping with the un-cursed relatives.The Norse gods provide the background theme for this lively book.
Jamie’s curiosity led him into trouble when he spied on Them and was cast out to walk the bounds between worlds. He meets wonderful people and marvellous lands before he finds out how to defeat Them. A powerful story, whose sadness is leavened by light episodes.
They keep telling us to get in touch with our bodies. Mine isn’t all that communicative, but I heard from it the other day when I said, "Body, how would you like to go to the early morning class in vigorous aerobics?" Loud and clear, my body said, "Listen, bitch ... do it and you die!" News | Autobiography | Picture Gallery | Book List | A-Z of Related Worlds | Articles/Talks | Interview | Book Swap | Leave a Question | Other DWJ sites | Contact Meredith |
