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S2 Bonus Episode 2 - DWJ Shorts of the 70s and 80s
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"She has tremendous talent, of course, or she couldn’t do it at all, but I do sometimes feel that she—well—she repeats herself. Put it like this: I think maybe Carol doesn't give herself a chance to be herself any more than she gives us."
Endless questions, out-of-control characters, silly adults and weird bad dads: this week we're discussing the playground of ideas that makes up DWJ's short fiction of the seventies and eighties.
Titles discussed include "Carruthers" (1972), "Auntie Bea's Day Out" (1978), "The Fluffy Pink Toadstool" (1979), "The Sage of Theare" (1982), "Warlock at the Wheel" (1984), "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" (1984), "No One" (1984), "The Plague of Peacocks" (1984), "Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream" (1986), "Enna Hittims" (1987), "The Fat Wizard" (1987), "The Green Stone," (1988), and "The Master" (1989). Transcript available here.
Please note: we've postponed recording our Q&A episode for the eighties until September 25th, so if you understand what's happening in 'The Master,' please write in and tell us!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Bonus Episode
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello everybody, welcome back for our second of three bonus episodes for the 80s season of Eight Days of Diana Wood Jones. This one is actually kind of a
00:00:21
Speaker
for our second of three bonus episodes for the eighty season of eight days of diana win jones is actually kind of a combo bonus episode ah for the 70s
Hosts' Introduction and Episode Plan
00:00:33
Speaker
and 80s, I guess. Oh, anyway, I'm Rebecca Framow.
00:00:36
Speaker
Rebecca Framow Becca. I'm Emily Tesh. ah I think we should aim for a total of eight bonus episodes. Oh my gosh. Rebecca Framow Over the course of our entire project. Rebecca Framow That would that would be a real satisfaction to that. And we're right on track because we had one last season.
00:00:53
Speaker
We're going to have three for this season. So if we can balance it out correctly over the next two seasons, I think we can do it. And then we can just have an entire bonus episode season. When we release the album.
00:01:08
Speaker
All I care about is getting numbers right. Not anything else such as stories or writing or reading or Diana Wynne Jones. I am a liar.
Focus on Short Stories by Diana Wynne Jones
00:01:15
Speaker
This bonus episode is about, we should say that, this bonus episode is about the short stories of the 1970s and 80s, of which there are a lot.
00:01:27
Speaker
yeah ah We're not actually doing every single one. We're skipping over the stories for younger readers. So we are focusing on the the short stories that are collected in Mixed Magics, which focuses on Crestomancy stories, and Unexpected Magic.
00:01:44
Speaker
And only those from the seventeen and 80s. I spend quite a lot of time with the Wikipedia page going, when was this actually published? and i mean The spreadsheet
Research and Planning for the Episode
00:01:54
Speaker
is a thing of beauty. We should actually post the spreadsheet when we post the episode, just in case anyone's curious.
00:01:58
Speaker
Good idea. Good idea. ah May I also say before we begin that when my, so I didn't actually own either of these short story collections. And when my copy of Mixed Magics arrived, my wife took one look at it and was like, what is happening to Crestomancy's hair?
00:02:12
Speaker
but but Why does he have the Andre Agassi Howell mullet? So you two end up with a copy of the American, I believe it's the American edition of Mixed Magics in which Howell has this beautiful mullet going on.
00:02:28
Speaker
ah You two can ask yourself this question. I love it. He's kind of doing the magic pose, arms up and there's a mullet happen. There's a party in the back there. exactly I do feel like Crestamance, he is the kind of character to have a party in the back, if anyone could. He goes everywhere in silk dressing gowns.
00:02:45
Speaker
Right, it really is the hair equivalent of a silk dressing gown. Well, no, a silk dressing gown is really a party in the front. It's a party at all times.
00:02:55
Speaker
And as we learned in which week, Grestomancy always dresses as if he's about to go to a wedding, just in case someone summons him. As they probably will.
Order and Themes of Story Discussion
00:03:04
Speaker
All right, but we're actually not starting with Crestomancy. We are going to start. So our order is a bit idiosyncratic in which we want to talk about these today, mostly because there's some stories that we really thought were interesting.
00:03:15
Speaker
And then there's some other stories that seem to fit together in sort of a simpler grouping that would be easy to talk about in a batch. So we're going to try and go mostly chronologically through the stories that are really interesting.
00:03:27
Speaker
And then at the end, we're going to talk about the ones that fit together as a batch as a batch.
Discussion of 'Carruthers' Story
00:03:31
Speaker
But the first story that we wanted to start with is actually the first story on our list, which is 1972's Carruthers, which is in Unexpected Magic.
00:03:42
Speaker
I loved this one. I thought it was so charming. Carruthers is, I'm pretty sure, ah Noel Stratfield riff. It's ballet shoes.
00:03:52
Speaker
Or there are elements of ballet shoes there. But it is a short story that deals with three sisters with a tyrannical old-fashioned father and a rather useless mother ah who are being forced to do perform femininity in the form of ballet lessons, one of whom acquires a stick.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yes. And the stick, fascinatingly, is what she immediately decides about the stick is that the stick is an instrument of vengeance on her tyrannical father because she happens to hear her grandmother saying something about a stick to beat her father with.
00:04:29
Speaker
And this is clearly... a metaphorical term, but she's a child. What really struck me in that initial conversation is a very clearly observed child overhearing adult conversation and not making sense of it.
00:04:43
Speaker
Because the grandmother is actually talking about how children should be obedient. And if they aren't obedient, you're creating a rod for your own back, which is a very grandmotherly thing to say. My grandmother used to say that.
00:04:54
Speaker
But... sir Our heroine understands it as a rod for her father's back. yep This is a stick to beat my father with. And it's named Carruthers because she misunderstands him explaining, oh, that belongs to my old friend Carruthers.
00:05:11
Speaker
Right. And so there's a lot of sort of, and this story from 1972 contains a lot of the sort of themes or like jokes that she's going to be playing with over the course of the next decade, especially in a book like The Ogre Downstairs.
00:05:25
Speaker
Yeah, which felt but it felt very ogre to me. Which is puns and jokes and literalisms and things taken sort of, ah the way that children take things at face value and change their meanings and turn them into a kind of magic for themselves.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yes. Also, thematically, how do you deal with a bad adult? Do you just hit them until they stop? ah They try this in Ogre downstairs. In fact, they try to murder him and it doesn't really work out.
00:05:52
Speaker
um You'll probably be shocked to learn that the stick to beat father plan doesn't work out either. Something much weirder happens. Right. The stick is alive. ah We're never in doubt about that.
00:06:03
Speaker
The two younger sisters are sometimes playing along with the stick being alive, sometimes a little bit dubious about it because they feel they ought to be. um But the stick Carruthers is very much alive and it's into the ballet, which our heroine is not.
00:06:19
Speaker
What was her name? What's the heroine's name? will We did not make a notes document for this one and I already regret it Yes, especially since there are so many so many short stories with just so many names. Elizabeth. remember Her name is Elizabeth.
00:06:31
Speaker
Right. So Elizabeth is the oldest sister. She's not good at ballet. She actually, in this early story, prefigures some of the sort of short fat unathletic ungraceful little girls being forced to do little girl things that we see later on like she felt a little like like a nan to me yes uh she's she's a little bit like a sophie she's talked life into this stick in a way Yes, and the cool like magic pun, that that felt very Ogre Downstairs to me. Actually, the magic is all turning on a pun. The pun is that it's a stick insect. Eventually, it hatches.
00:07:07
Speaker
The thing I think is really fun about this is, so there's kind of an interesting... gender play going on in this story because the stick Carruthers, Carruthers feels like a specific kind of masculine name to Elizabeth.
00:07:22
Speaker
ah Elizabeth uses he him pronouns for this stick. The stick loves ballet. Elizabeth hates the ballet, but Carruthers' is one passion in life is to go with Elizabeth and watch her sisters Ruth and Stephanie and the rest of the ballet class doing ballet and then it will do sort of little single-legged twirls around her bedroom.
00:07:40
Speaker
And when she fights with the stick, ah you know, the the way that she has to threaten it into good behavior is
Reflections on Diana Wynne Jones' Short Stories
00:07:46
Speaker
I won't take you to see the ballet anymore. And then, of course, the stick hatches and into a beautiful butterfly equivalent. It seems to be it's a very graceful creature that flits around like a ballerina, butterfly, fairy, etc.
00:08:03
Speaker
um And when the stick hatches, the pronouns change as it becomes this sort of very graceful flitting creature. Right, so there's there's a sort of... There's a thing about the sort change in a person.
00:08:17
Speaker
The stick is perfectly happy with itself at all times. In fact, that's one of the delights of the story, yeah is the person the very, very strong personality of this stick. Right, the stick wants to do two things, which is eat snacks from the kitchen.
00:08:31
Speaker
Don't ask how it eats. ah Very unclear. You provide it with food and the food disappears. um This is another ogre downstairs thing, there's a lot of the sort of jokes about how an inanimate object eats, you really don't want to think about it.
00:08:42
Speaker
And the stick wants to watch ballet. And Elizabeth wants the stick to go attack her father and keeps saying, what are you going to go beat a stick to beat father with? And Grothers is like, actually, whatever, I don't care. And this story is, I think, incident number one of what I'm going to call Burglar Watch, which is when Steve Jones in the back third going, shit.
00:09:04
Speaker
stakes. What's this even all about? An incident of some kind. And a burglar appears! Before the burglar appears, though, ah well there's another intruder into the house, which is Elizabeth's awful little boy cousin.
00:09:20
Speaker
This is the other sort of early gender commentary we get in this story. The awful little boy cousin appears. Elizabeth thinks, oh good, a friend that I can do something that's not ballet with, because her sisters love you know both are
Transition to the Next Story
00:09:34
Speaker
obsessed with the ballet.
00:09:35
Speaker
um And the boy doesn't want anything to do with her until his friend, he goes off for a day with his friend, and he comes back, and he says, Dave here wants you to be his girlfriend, Elizabeth. Tell him I've already booked you.
00:09:46
Speaker
And from then on, she is her awful little cousin's quote unquote girlfriend, which seems to mean, hang on, I'm going to find the quote.
00:09:56
Speaker
All right. So being Stephen's girlfriend was rather like being Stephanie, her littlest sister, under the middle sister's arrangements Elizabeth discovered. It seemed to mean that she was allowed to carry Stephen's sweater, to sit at the bottom of a tree to catch him in case he fell, to be an Indian woman, an almost lifeless role when they played cowboys and Indians, and to sit for cramped hours switching electric trains when she was told.
00:10:19
Speaker
It also seemed to mean that Stephen was allowed to talk to her in the same bullying way father used to mother and aunt Anne, and to frown whenever Elizabeth made any kind of suggestion. There did not seem to be any advantages to the post at all.
00:10:31
Speaker
After two days, Elizabeth was wishing she knew how to stop being Stephen's girlfriend, but the post seemed to be a permanent one.
00:10:40
Speaker
this is what heterosexuality is. I love this because this is such an early story but actually you can see here the seeds of say Seb in Fire and Hemlock. Here is this boy who has declared you love interest and you're stuck with him and it's very boring.
00:10:57
Speaker
How do you get him to go away? Yeah. It's also, I think, relevantly to the time when she's writing it, we talked a little bit last week with Farah about Astrid as this sort of very early and yet most angry feminism yeah feminist character in Diana Wynne-Jones' work. Just kind of this clear illustration of the disadvantages of marriage.
00:11:21
Speaker
And this this feels like a child-sized version of the same thing. Yes, which actually you do then get Elizabeth reflecting on her parents' marriage and realising that her father is both very, very old-fashioned and wrong.
00:11:40
Speaker
Yes. like Her anger with him starts really early. like Her anger is that the inciting isn't a story she wants a stick to beat father with. But the more we learn about him, the more clear it is that he does in fact deserve to be beaten with a stick. He won't be.
00:11:55
Speaker
ah What he gets instead is perhaps the emotional stick of discovering that ah Cousin Stephen, is it Stephen? It is, yeah, Cousin Stephen. Yeah, they're all called Stephen and Stephanie. This is early Jones doing Echoing Names, which I'm really difficult to keep track of. Cousin Stephen is actually a useless little one little monster, and Elizabeth is the brave one who eventually defeats a burglar.
00:12:20
Speaker
Right, with the help of her others. Yeah. yeah her beautiful hatched stick insect that gracefully twirls around and distracts and alarms the burglars until she can wake the household.
00:12:31
Speaker
At which point, you know, the burglars having ended up in the obligatory comedy pile, her father says, oh, Stephen, you must have been so brave. And of course it all comes clear that Stephen was in fact hiding in the other room during this entire incident.
00:12:44
Speaker
And Elizabeth was the brave one. Carruthers flits away to do whatever beautiful hatched ballerina stick insects do with the rest of their lives. Yeah, it's a perfectly charming little story.
00:12:55
Speaker
ah In terms of the core thematic stuff, it is gender the the compulsory heterosexuality. I do love that she calls it a post.
00:13:06
Speaker
It's like being assigned to the civil service.
00:13:11
Speaker
Right. She's been given a job because that's what it is. Being Stephen's girlfriend is is is a set of responsibilities. And they're very, very tiresome responsibilities. Yes. um But above all, it's it's the the silly, unreasonable adult who is wrong about everything and whose mind won't be changed and you will just have to work around them.
00:13:32
Speaker
And that is a very Jonesian concept. Right. How do you as a child work around this idiot with power over you? It's something that you're stuck with.
00:13:44
Speaker
in a lot of these stories is the the figure of the unreasonable adult who is in the way because they're an adult and because you are a child.
00:13:55
Speaker
And we're going to see various different ways of handling that adult. But if you read just one of the unreasonable adult stories, I think Carruthers is a really good choice, both because it has a bit more meat on its bones, I think, than a lot of them.
00:14:10
Speaker
um And because just as the the first of the shorts, It really prefigures, I think, some of the charm of the shorts, which is the way you see Diana Wynne-Jones just playing around with ideas that are then going to get used in these full-length books.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah, I have to say we read what 13, 14, 15 short stories here and by the end of it was like Becca I'm just not sure the short story is Diana Wynne Jones' form.
00:14:36
Speaker
There are some of these which are good stories but none of them rise anywhere near the heights of what she can do in a longer book. No, I think there are a couple that I really liked.
00:14:48
Speaker
And then there are a couple others where i was like, there's something really interesting going on here. And you're clearly going to pick a piece out of it and use it in a book. oh Some of these really do feel like experiments messing around, what I call noodling, when you just open up a word doc and see what you can do.
00:15:04
Speaker
yep Some of them don't work at all. I think there's a few where I'm like, Really? Yeah. ah But Carruthers is, I agree, ah good one to start with.
00:15:16
Speaker
It's early. It's interesting. You can see the ideas that she's using will come back in The Ogre Downstairs, where she just made everyone boys. That's not true. There's Ginny, but Ginny did not learn any of the lessons of Elizabeth in Carruthers.
00:15:30
Speaker
Right. Actually, i also thought this one prefigured Time of the Ghost, with the the three sisters wrestling with their weird parents who don't get it. Yeah. And their power dynamics with each other. Like, it's it's all jokes here, but there's some some very fun but incisive little jokes about, you know, like when the boy comes and Stephanie has to move into her sister's bedroom and her middle sister has a very, ah very nice setup where the youngest sister does everything she tells her to do. And then Stephanie moves in and suddenly this power dynamic is completely upended and nobody likes it.
00:16:06
Speaker
But speaking of gender, I think the next story that we wanted to talk about, so all the rest of the 70s stories really are this kind of mean adult gets their comeuppance.
00:16:19
Speaker
And we'll talk about them kind of as a block later. That's that's the batch, the silly adult stories. right um like there There are more than just the ones we read because there also a lot of the ones for younger readers, Angus Flint and the Four Grannies and and um what's the other one? Chairperson. Those are all the same kind of story as well. right joe This is sort of Jones's default mode.
00:16:40
Speaker
And it really does feel like a sort of exercising of like a vengeance impulse. I've met somebody I didn't like, and now I'm going to figure out how to get the book come up. and Some of these are so vindictive.
00:16:54
Speaker
We'll come to them properly later. Let's talk about the stories with a bit more in them. What are we going to next? We're going all the way up to the 80s. Probably the next one that we talk about should be Sage of Thier, but I think we're going to do Dragon Reserve Home 8 so we can talk about Sage of Thier and Carol O'Neill.
00:17:09
Speaker
together a little bit more as part of this Crestomancy set. And Dragon Reserve Home 8, I think actually follows really nicely on Carruthers because it is another stab at doing interesting things with gender.
00:17:21
Speaker
um Yes, I loved this one. I read it and was like, where's the rest of the book? I think this was my second favorite after Carol O'Neill. It just felt like there was so much substance here. I think so far mentioned this one,
00:17:35
Speaker
last week as being a story that didn't feel like Diana Wynne Jones. That is true actually because I read it and i was like this is the opening of a Tamora Pierce. Right. And quite a late Tamora Pierce because it's doing some interesting stuff with sex and gender.
00:17:48
Speaker
But the voice is so clearly Diana. um It actually felt So to me, this one felt situated, it's going to be really hard not to look forward in some of these because so many of these are really playing with ideas that are going to come up later.
00:18:01
Speaker
This one fiat felt to me situated like exactly in between Spellcoats and Hexwood. And yeah you put those two together and come up with something completely different.
00:18:13
Speaker
There's a piece of the Merlin Conspiracy in there as well. I kept seeing the Merlin Conspiracy, which is really, which... It's partly because the Merlin Conspiracy, I think, had everything in the kitchen. That's a big book.
00:18:23
Speaker
um But Dragon Reserve Home 8, let's take it on its own terms rather than in terms of the books that prefigures, although there are many. Dragon Reserve Home 8 tells the story of, oh God, the names. We should have written down everyone's names. We should have written down everybody's name.
00:18:38
Speaker
ah Hang on, I'll grab it. ah So the heroine of Dragon Reserve Home 8. It's first person. It's first person. Siglin!
00:18:49
Speaker
She's Siglin! but Right, because it's Norse. Yeah, we're doing Vikings. And I do think actually the the Norse, the the Viking world, is so the Norse world is something Jones goes back to as a source, as a well quite a few times. and It's deep in the roots of Dalemark. It's where she starts for eight days of luke So Siglin is the daughter, and we discover quite quickly, the heiress of a sort of prosperous middle class family on a world, a farming world that is one of a collection of worlds ruled over, question mark, by the Dragonate.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yes. And this particular- And all of this is set up so fast and so light touch. You're like, this is the beginning of a great big fantasy book. No, it's a short story. Right. And it's also like we learn very early on within the first couple of pages, he sort of very deftly sets up the mix of technology and magic that's going into this world because it starts with Siglin watching out the window, watching a van, a car,
00:19:49
Speaker
ah come bouncing up the hall up up the road and her mother says oh it's the dragonet and we learn that there are in fact dragons so so we we know that this is situated in this kind of uneasy space.
00:20:03
Speaker
Right and that that's what feels very Jones about it actually is that para that you've simultaneously got so sights you could see looking out your window in the 1980s in an English suburb and this world of dragons and parallel universes and green hills i was really struck by the sense of place in this one actually there's hardly any of it there and yet i had such a clear image of what was going on yeah so dragon reserve home 8 also sets up very quickly the family works differently in this world siglin is ah the daughter and that makes her the heir of her mother so we know then that this is
00:20:44
Speaker
a matriarchy, that property goes in the maternal line in this world, and then she starts talking about her fathers, and you realize that this is a matriarchy ah with ah polygamy in it, in which women marry multiple husbands.
00:20:59
Speaker
Right, and I think it's thrown off pretty early on as well that part of the reason for this is that there are just a lot more men than women so women have a status uh and and that sort of uh is what has presumably led to this polyandry situation yeah and that this is unusual among the worlds that are ruled by the dragon it because the dragon it riders come and are immediately confused by it until someone has to remind them this is the polyandry world Yeah, and they're like, oh, your primitive customs.
00:21:30
Speaker
right Which gives you a really, like, a two-line exchange, gives you a really clear sense of how this hierarchy, this ruling force, works with the worlds it controls.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yes. And ah we know that Sigrun has a little brother, who dreams of joining the Dragonet because that's a way to status and power as ah young man on this world that is sort of ah impossible to achieve you just stay on this world and don't join this inter-world police force, military force, even though, as we also quickly learned, one big what part of what this force actually does is go around to various worlds and identify witches or hexes and execute them.
00:22:17
Speaker
And Siglin is a witch. Right. This is a sort of mage hunting force. And the whole story revolves around an incident that happened earlier in which Siglin did some magic in front of other people and somebody has reported her.
00:22:34
Speaker
And the question of who's reported her and why and what exactly happened is the tension of the story. And the dragon at Bringwatt, they let Siglin believe...
00:22:45
Speaker
ah is a lie detector. So she is forced to ah step very carefully as she tries to explain her side of the story. Right. Which brings us to Orm. Right.
00:22:57
Speaker
so the backstory incident, the inciting incident, is that Sigrun's brother sort of dared her to go onto the dragon reserve, which is near their house, where Sigrun doesn't go because ah there is in fact a prophecy. Sigrun is a child of prophecy.
00:23:13
Speaker
Her mother was told when she was born that the dragons would take her. So she's been taught, which obviously is you know kind of a pun on both the dragons, the real live dragons and the dragonettes. But nonetheless, she goes off, she's dared to go off to the dragon reserve, and so she goes.
00:23:30
Speaker
And there they meet Orm, the strange, theoretically half-mad, menacing dragon keeper, who begins what seems to be a kind of sexual harassment game.
00:23:46
Speaker
He scares them with a dragon. and has the dragon kind of stand over them, stand over Siglin specifically, Neil is there but kind of helpless, and won't let her up unless she agrees to kiss him.
00:23:58
Speaker
Right, and Siglin, as part of her magic ability, can read minds so she can see in Orm's mind the memory of him kissing her mother. We're very similar setup with the dragon standing over them in what seems like a menacing way.
00:24:11
Speaker
So Siglin is horrified, terrified, and uses magic in a way she didn't know she could ah to throw the dragon and Orm off her and runs away.
00:24:22
Speaker
And this is what happened, but she has to somehow explain it to the dragon without including, I ran away from a dragon and I survived because I used magic to stop it from chasing me. Right.
00:24:33
Speaker
Which she attempts to do and doesn't do very well. It doesn't work. She gets loaded up into the van. The dragon it is going to take her away. And her little brother because he was a witness. It's really clear at this point that the Dragonite are nasty, dangerous, evil.
00:24:49
Speaker
um that the The sort of anti-magic hunting that they do is cruel and indiscriminate. Yes. Even though... So we have... There are five members of the Dragonite who come.
00:25:00
Speaker
And we get them pretty clearly distinguished from each other. There are a couple younger ones who seem bit more sympathetic. There are a couple older ones. There's one from Siglin's homeworld, who's kind of an apprentice dragonette, who has sort of a different relationship because he's young and because he's he's in this kind of same situation of being from this culture.
00:25:21
Speaker
And then there are a couple of older ones that are very clearly fully bought in to A Hex Must Die. Yes. And one thing that really struck me was the the sense of threat, that like the tension in this story is so good.
00:25:35
Speaker
ah The tension over what exactly happened with Orn, what exactly Siglin's going to do, if anything, to get out of this. But also the threat to Siglin's whole family, the fact that they're going to go after her little brother as well for a witness, the fact they keep asking her which of her mother's husbands is really her father. And Siglin, quite correctly, by her own culture standards, says they're all my father.
00:25:57
Speaker
They are my fathers. um But of course, what they're really asking is, where did your magic come from? Did you inherit it from someone? Should we go after them next? Yes, so there's a threat against Siglin's whole family, everyone who knows her, everyone who's connected to her.
00:26:14
Speaker
And the it's it's horrifying. There's a real horror to this tension as Siglin and her brother are loaded up in the van and taken away. And you're really like, how is Siglin going to get out of this one?
00:26:26
Speaker
And I would argue that we're actually on incident number two of Burglar Watch is how Siglin gets out of this one.
00:26:36
Speaker
Which is the worlds are also... The other thing that the dragonet do that is actually sort of useful, hypothetically, is there are... The worlds seem to be at constant risk of being attacked by slavers who have some kind of telepathic power to make people obey them, come into their ships, be taken away, which is part what drives the prejudice against witches.
00:26:59
Speaker
Yeah. Because the their telepathic mind powers are a scary thing associated with these awful people who do this awful thing. um So the burglars attack, sorry, the slavers attack um and use their telepathic mind powers to mind control everyone into their evil spaceship.
00:27:16
Speaker
You've got that real like balance of of fantasy and sci-fi stuff just all mixed together and here's Siglin in a little green van being driven off like in something straight out of the nineteen eighty s Right.
00:27:29
Speaker
And Siglin uses her Heg, her magical powers, ah to counter what the slavers are doing ah to fight off the mind control for herself and for the dragon at...
00:27:42
Speaker
soldiers. They are effectively soldiers, I think. Yes. ah She's very scornful, actually, because at first she thinks they're just running away. They're just trying to get everybody to safety. Conveniently, also the two worst and meanest, like sort of most entrenched soldiers die in the first attack.
00:27:56
Speaker
So they're left with just the more sympathetic soldiers. Perfectly reasonable. Happens all the time. Right. um But yeah, so... Siglin saves all their lives and saves them all from the slavers. And then they're like, well, now we have to get back to, oh, no, headquarters is gone. The slavers have conquered all the world. It's just us left. What do we do?
00:28:16
Speaker
And this is the bit where I was really like, ah, yeah this this is a takeoff point for the rest of the book because they're going to go up to the dragon reserve. and use the dragons to fight evil. We're all going to be dragon riders and that's why it's called the Dragoner. I was like, yes, I too have read Anne McCaffrey.
00:28:33
Speaker
ah It does rule. It does rule. But they look when we go to the dragon reserve, though, is when we re-encounter the dragon keeper, Orm, and the but consequences of the initial incident finally play out.
00:28:47
Speaker
So what we learn about Orm and about Orm's threat And Orm, the fact that Orm tattled on her, essentially, to to the cops to tell her that then but she was Heg and doom her to death, is that Orm is her father.
00:29:04
Speaker
Orm was married to her mother. her There's a brief passing reference to the fact that her mother originally had four husbands and then they divorced. because Orm is sort of a weird guy.
00:29:16
Speaker
Because Orm is an evil wizard who lives in the hills with the dragons, I think. Right. But it seems to be that the vision that she had earlier of her mother and Orm kissing was a consensual relationship, and that his game, question mark, with her demanding a kiss, question mark, was paternal, question mark. Yes.
00:29:40
Speaker
Come and give daddy a kiss. 14 year old girl who doesn't know I'm her father. Although it's implied that Orm thinks she knows. Right. Which doesn't make it less weird.
00:29:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's still weird. And Orm's reporting her to the dragon cops, the dragonet, is because he was so angry that she would hurt a dragon. Not him. He's genuinely very upset that she used magic against a dragon.
00:30:07
Speaker
Meanwhile, the dragon itself comes and apologizes and says, I thought it was just a game. I didn't realize you were legitimately scared during this incident. Let's be friends. Right. What becomes super, super clear is that, yes, magic can be inherited from your father. For example, your father, the evil dragon wizard.
00:30:23
Speaker
Right. He's definitely where you got all your magic from and you can both talk to dragons and ride on them. Right. Which is going to be really useful when fighting the slavers. But it does mean that now you have to sort of cooperate and be in the resistance with your father, the evil dragon wizard.
00:30:37
Speaker
Right. And then that's the end of the story. Yeah. We're not doing the rest of this book. Diana has not the slightest interest in writing this ah giant dragon wizard space opera.
00:30:48
Speaker
Which is really too bad. It's such a shame. I want that giant dragon wizard space opera. But also I can see why she didn't write it. Because this kind of rallying the resistance, becoming a great dragon rider, is a fantasy story that exists and we've seen it before.
00:31:05
Speaker
There's not much there to like... subvert? Yeah. There's not much for her to play with. Right. Where she she's done, she's really, I think she's sort of like really deftly sketched out this world and this setup and just sort of got it out of her head and been like, right, you can fill in the rest.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. oh Obviously, the rest makes perfect sense to us, and we would love to read it. It's a great story, but I agree with Farah. It doesn't necessarily feel like a Diana Wynne-Jones story.
00:31:34
Speaker
And it resolves itself. The problem with it being a short story is that a lot of these tensions that are sort of really strong and crackling and interesting between these forces that don't like each other for good reason that now have to come together to be in the resistance, ah the Dragonet and Siglin and her mother and orm and the little brother and all these people who now suddenly have to work together, having five minutes ago been at threat to each other's life, all have to get resolved very quickly. We all have to kind of, you know, but the story has to kind of gesture at the idea that it's all going to be okay among these people.
00:32:09
Speaker
which I don't necessarily believe, and I'd like to see more of that play out. I think what really struck me in this story, though, is the figure of Orm. ah he He jumps out of the whole thing. Yes. um ah What a villain?
00:32:23
Speaker
Question mark. Father? Question mark. Sexual threat? Question mark. Yeah. Like, this is... Like we've talked before about the father-husband as a thing that comes up a lot in Jones. It's in Sirius.
00:32:38
Speaker
ah Your father is your husband is your dog. It's in Tom and Polly in Fire and Hemlock where this, imagine a man who cares and wants you to grow. and then when you've grown up, he'll kiss you.
00:32:51
Speaker
like, okay, okay. Okay. hu ah But in Orm, I think we see it maybe for the first time played straightforwardly as this is just horrific.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yes. This is scary and it's threatening. And the final note on Orm is that, and so the as as is often the case, this is a first person story. Siglin, like many of Diana Wynne Jones' protagonists, is writing all of this down as it happens in a memo book.
00:33:21
Speaker
And Siglin says, orm isn't mad at all he's afraid of people knowing he's hag he still won't admit he is and think that's why he left mother and mother doesn't admit she was ever married to him i don't blame orme for being scared stiff that the mother's other husband would find out he was Hegg, but I'm not sure I shall ever like Orm all the same.
00:33:40
Speaker
So that's the final note on Orm, is, well, I understand some of why this happened, and some of the reasons that he had for doing what he was doing, but... yeah
00:33:52
Speaker
And I think also it's really hard not to look forward when you see a character named Orm and he's a dragon man, because that's kind of a big thing in Hexwood, Orm the dragon.
00:34:03
Speaker
We will come back to that. um So I think you and I were primed to read him as a villain. Yes. and And that for me certainly made the, and he's your dad,
00:34:15
Speaker
twist, hit harder. Yeah. And make it, honestly, it makes it all worse. Yes. It makes it worse that he's her dad.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yes. Because actually your dad jumping on you with a dragon and making you give him a kiss before you're allowed to leave is also bad. In fact, it's very, very bad. And then turning you into the cops for not behaving the way he wants you to behave.
00:34:41
Speaker
Yes, the the the cops who will kill you, to be clear. but The cops who will kill you. Although again, the very end of the story is, you know, in order to kind of smooth things over and be like, well, these people are going to work together and it's fine. It's her mother storing me up to the dragon and saying, why do you put eggs to death anyway? And the the nice chief dragon at man saying, oh, I'd have got your daughter off somehow, you know.
00:35:03
Speaker
Yeah, sure you would. Sure you would. And Orm laughing in the distance, cackling like a she-drakes young ones. Sort of on the surface, a good, a happy ending, a good note to end on. um Kind of an uneasy note to end on.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah. Uneasy is, I think, the word. I think this was one of the stories that sort of stuck in my head most of the ones we read. Same. Also, God, i love I love the polyandry setup. I wish she'd done that again.
00:35:30
Speaker
was great. know. I love the relationship between Siglin and her mother's three husbands and how she secretly has one that she wishes was her father, even though you're not supposed to ah There's a little bonding moment that she has with the other dragon at the one from her world where...
00:35:46
Speaker
She's like, you know, she' she's trying to get him to understand that she won't know, that get the dragon dragon it to understand that she doesn't know which one is her father. And she looks at the other, at the the dragon at one who's from her world and says, I bet and if you ever found out you wished you didn't. And he was like, yeah, I did. I wish I wish i hadn't.
00:36:03
Speaker
So there's this kind of understanding, this this cultural connection is also really interesting. Yeah. Good story. I like that one. The next two that we're going talk about, I think are also both good stories. This is...
00:36:16
Speaker
The Sage of Their and I think both of our favorite from this batch, Carol O'Near's 100th Dream. we We pregame our discussions on Discord and the Carol O'Near thread is like hundreds and hundreds of messages of us just being like, we like this one so much.
00:36:32
Speaker
But let's deal with Sage first. Both of these are Crestomancy stories. And if you um sort of position them in the Crestomancy canon, it's put the publication canon they come in between magicians of caprona and witch week i think no caro uh caro lanier is after witch week yes uh sage is before and for all that i for all that i agree with you that i don't think the short is diana windows the form I do think if she'd wanted, she could have kicked off half a dozen, a dozen Crestomancy stories.
00:37:05
Speaker
Because the form of the Crestomancy story kind of works in a way a lot of her other short fiction doesn't. It's like a Sherlock Holmes story. You know, you have a problem, you can set up the problem pretty concisely.
00:37:16
Speaker
And then Crestomancy is going to come in and we know who he is and we know how he's going to fix it. And he's going to fix it in some way that's interesting and satisfying. And then the story can be done. Right, that is exactly the pattern of a Crestomancy story. And it's a pattern of more or less of the Crestomancy books as well, quite a lot of them, though there are exceptions.
00:37:34
Speaker
yeah But certainly it's the pattern of both Magicians of Caprona and Witch Week. So both the 1980s Crestomancy novels follow this same model that we also see in Sage of Thea and Carol Aneer's Hundredth Dream. Right. Specifically, it's a child has a problem.
00:37:50
Speaker
Crestomancy gets involved in the problem. Crestomancy fixes the problem by encouraging the child to be more who they were already. Yeah. Sage of Fear is about that and also about the...
00:38:04
Speaker
inherently the idea that the gods ain't shit yes it's a very early gods ain't shit so it's what 1982 sage yeah it does feel or this one does feel to me like an aborted attempt at a longer book that's actually a sequel to um charmed life like we got a little cat cameo yeah i love the cat cameo but sage of the are deals with a young man who is prophesied to bring about the dissolution of the gods in his world where the gods are very ordered and in control and the gods are so upset by this they decide the solution is to send him to another world where he can dissolve their problems now in the way of prophecy the god who is most concerned about this is the sort of like these are all very clearly greek god equivalents the god who most concerned about this is the god apollo who's like there's this prophecy of the the sage of dissolution is going to appear and and destroy everything and then of course it turns out the prophecy refers to his own son because that's how prophecies do
00:38:58
Speaker
Absolutely. So our hero Thasper is sent to another world. in kind of stasis and seven years go by and then still in stasis he's discovered by Crestomancy who is like well you can't stay here takes him back to the original world as a he's ah I think three-year-old and he is adopted by a loving family and brought up happily until he is a teenager when he starts to hear about the amazing preaching being done by this mysterious person the sage of the art yes
00:39:28
Speaker
And he runs all around trying to, you know, he's been special gift is that he asked questions. He questions everything. And so he hears about the sage who started questioning the gods and it blows his mind. He's like, oh, my God, the wisdom.
00:39:44
Speaker
And he starts running around really earnestly attempting to fanboy this sage and join his cult. But no matter where he goes, the sage is always just left right ahead of him.
00:39:55
Speaker
Right. And also the houses keep catching fire. And the houses keep catching fire. And people are always leaving these meetings saying, oh, wow, what what wisdom. How brilliant.
00:40:06
Speaker
But he never seemed to really directly... talk to anyone who can tell him exactly where to find the sage face to face. Right. And eventually it all gets so confusing that he summons Crestomancy who like Sherlock Holmes arrives to explain what's happened. In a dressing gown.
00:40:24
Speaker
In a dressing gown. Good dressing gown. It's like it's um and they all go up to see the gods. Crestomancy has to borrow, they all wear, the the particular sartorial custom of this world is they all wear turbans.
00:40:36
Speaker
um And he has to, Crestomancy has to borrow Thasper's turban and use it as a belt because his dressing gown is hanging open. Classic Crestomancy. It's is's always delightful to see Crestomancy turn up, see what he's wearing this time right and how it's wrong for the situation. Right.
00:40:55
Speaker
And he's got a cold, I think. He's also got a cold when he shows up, and so he's sort of blowing his nose and coughing at the gods. And he eat they show up, they charge up to the gods. Thasper notices that the god of the sun seems weirdly happy to see him for some reason. He gives him like little voice. We don't actually deal with that at any Not at all.
00:41:12
Speaker
And Christomancy explains that by kicking Thasper out into another world and putting him in stasis for seven years, they've sort of locked themselves in with the prophecy where the prop the sage has to start preaching at a certain time, but Thasper's not old enough to start preaching.
00:41:27
Speaker
So... The events are happening without him. It's happening anyway, but FASPA's not there. Right. And we're into, like, Joan's interest in timelines and prophecies. Stuff we saw in Tale of Time City where you you end up locked in ah Even when it becomes nonsensical, you can't escape right fix the pattern of time. Stable and unstable eras.
00:41:48
Speaker
Yes! Fear is a stable era. Things have to happen as they're written. One thing I really enjoyed about this story is some of Thasper's questions do feel like Jones reflecting on writing.
00:41:59
Speaker
like Especially when you get Thasper in childhood going, actually, i love rules. I'm really into rules and so are all my friends because you can make up more and more and more rules and then play a game with them.
00:42:11
Speaker
And... which is a sort of a childhood games thing to do is to make up more and more arbitrary and strange rules and that's part of the fun and Thassma calls it a framework for the mind to climb about in right the words on the wall by the sage are if rules make a framework for the mind to climb about in why should the mind not climb right out again says the sage of dissolution Right, but this did feel to me like a comment on genre?
00:42:39
Speaker
Yeah. On genre fiction or maybe on children's fiction. There are expectations, there are things you are meant to do in this kind of story, in this kind of book. But why though? This is around the same time as Homeward Bounders and it also feels kind of like a play on some of these same ideas.
00:42:56
Speaker
We have rules. What are they for? Who's putting them in place? Why do you have to follow them? What if you just said, actually, I don't want to? Right. And then the final question the the sage is faced with, which is not resolved by the story and indeed cannot be, ah is if you have physically seen the gods and know they exist, how are you supposed to question them?
00:43:17
Speaker
right And Crestamante says, well, that's your problem. What was to that effect? ah What Crestomancy says is so what Dasper says is, how can I preach dissolution?
00:43:28
Speaker
How can I not believe in the gods when I have seen them for myself? Crestomancy with his terrible cold says, that's a question you certainly should be asking. down to fear and ask it. oh Which I think is really fun as an ending, because I do think that this this sort of marks a turning point for, ah or is or at least part of the turning point for Diana Wynne-Jones from the 70s, which are full of sort of numinous divine situations where a human can somewhat intervene, but is not called upon to say, why should we listen to these people?
00:44:00
Speaker
The gods in the 70s. Dalemark. Dalemark. Dalemark has gods and needs gods. And that's always been very clearly like a part of its fundamental building blocks.
00:44:11
Speaker
Right. to the 80s, where you have ah Time of the Ghost and Homeward Bounders and these very sinister figures that have set themselves up as gods that should not be ob obeyed.
00:44:23
Speaker
And I think, you know, you get this great question, which is, how can I go down and preach don't believe in the gods when the gods are here and I've seen them? Which is a great question for a fantasy writer who's well, gods are really useful for my books. But also I kind of don't believe in them on a moral level. But also it is it's a question that sort of requires an answer to do with disobedience. with Like, yes, maybe the gods do exist.
00:44:48
Speaker
That doesn't mean you have to listen to them. Right. Something like a god exists, but do you what makes it a god? Do you have to treat it as a god? That's just your dad who abandoned you when you were a child.
00:44:59
Speaker
Right! It's the bad dad again! ah bad and ah the it. The bad dad is such a consistent figure in these short stories. We had him in Carruthers, we've had a bad dad in Orm. Oh my god, have we had a bad dad in Orm.
00:45:15
Speaker
And now here we have bad dad's son dad, who had good intentions, but you know, wasn't going to spare his son. Right. When it meant ah uprooting everything that makes his own life good and interesting and and ordered.
00:45:30
Speaker
Meanwhile, we have the ocean, which I think is funny given Diana Wynne-Jones' water obsession. um We have the ocean as a chaotic, flamboyant, somewhat gender ambiguous figure who's the one who keeps turning up and saying, hey, maybe dissolution is all right. Maybe it's fine if we're all doomed.
00:45:48
Speaker
So that is Sage. And so I'm just, we, we, yeah we, no, we've got to keep moving along. I think. My segue to Carol O'Neill is Carol O'Neill doesn't have a bad dad. She has a bad mom. Her dad's fine. He just wants to go fish.
00:46:00
Speaker
Carol O'Neill's 100th Dream feels to me like a statement of creative position. Yes. And it's one of the ones that feels most comprehensively like a short story.
00:46:13
Speaker
There could not be more Carol O'Neill. It is exactly the right length as it is. Yes. um It tells a story of a little girl and I think She's maybe meant to be sort of nine or ten.
00:46:25
Speaker
It's really unclear. It says that she started dreaming when she's seven. She's old enough to be putting a lot of romance in her dreams, but I don't think we've ever, and she's on her hundredth dream. So you can maybe guess at some math there.
00:46:36
Speaker
Yeah, but ah maybe as old as 13, but this is a girl in the middle grade age group. Right. um And this is a little girl who dreams and her dreams are bottled by dream wizards and sold and wildly popular.
00:46:50
Speaker
And they have made her very, very successful. And more to the point, they have made her family very, very wealthy. Yes. Yes. ah So Carol Annier gets to 99 Dreams, bottled and sold, making a huge fortune, and she is now an empire. She has merchandise. She has standard patter, she does when she is ah being interviewed by the newspapers.
00:47:12
Speaker
ah She is, in fact, a professional author, a successful professional author of Dreams, of the fantastic. And it really does feel like Jones is reflecting on what it means to be a professional creative right and the hypocrisies involved and the stupidities involved. yeah Carol gets to her hundredth dream and she can't do it. She tries to dream and it's not happening.
00:47:36
Speaker
Her mother has ordered a nice bottle of champagne to celebrate her hundredth dream and everything. Right. So Taryn is taken to all the best specialists and all the best doctors and all the best psychologists and nobody can help. So finally, Carol's dad says, well, I was at school with a chap cos now who's now Crestomancy, which is actually, I think, our first hint of Crestomancy as someone who was once at school.
00:47:58
Speaker
Yes, someone who got into scrapes while he was at school. I think what her father says is, not only did he used to be at school, he lost his first life because I hit him around the head with a cricket bat.
00:48:09
Speaker
This is pre-Christopher Chand. Right, you I think you can really see Joan starting fall. fill out the outlines of Crestomancy as a character and not just as tall, dark and handsome shows up at the end to be very, very funny.
00:48:23
Speaker
Right. So, Carol is taken to see Crestomancy. She is, ah involves ah quite a lot of dodging journalists along the way. There's ah a trick they have to do with a train.
00:48:35
Speaker
In fact, some of what Carol's whole deal is, is less professional author and more child star. yeah So Jones is sort of doing both at once and thinking about you know the way a child star is treated. Carol is isolated. She doesn't go to school.
00:48:48
Speaker
ah She spends all her time with her very overbearing, very enthusiastic person. and supportive mama. They put a lot of time on how she gets dressed to meet Crestomancy. Neither of them had met anyone before who was more important than Carol.
00:49:01
Speaker
And not only does she have a beautiful dress and petticoats and boots, and she has a brooch that says, a monogrammed brooch that says Carol in diamonds. Right. And at this point you're like, Diana, oh, I see we're doing class again. oh Because Carol and her mother, although they don't know it, come off as intensely vulgar as people who don't know the proper way to behave when you've got lots and lots of money because they've never had it before, presumably. Well, Mama's never had it before. Carol is not the person responsible for these outfits. It's very clearly all about Mama and her ambition and her bottle of champagne and her pink silk dress.
00:49:39
Speaker
um And sort of that there's a nasty little jab in the story, I think, at Mama who encounters a rather overdressed, plain-looking woman and doesn't realize that it's Crestomancy's wife.
00:49:50
Speaker
Right. And this is the kind of thing that you can do with the fact that it's a Crestomancy story, because, of course, we as readers see ah a plain-looking woman who shows up to greet them. They're like, oh, hello, Millie. Someone's about to take you for granted again. It's kind of your whole thing.
00:50:05
Speaker
So, Carol is taken to see Crestomancy and she finds it very annoying trying to talk to him because the whole time she's trying to describe her process as a dreamer, as an artist, there are some children in a swimming pool somewhere shouting and making a lot of noise and it's really interrupting.
00:50:23
Speaker
So Carol is quite annoyed, especially because she has a rather good story she tells about her dreams and her process and she's like... So dreams come and I can't control how they come. And I go on a magical journey and an adventure and it could be anything. It could be anywhere. And I have to say that reading this as a...
00:50:44
Speaker
As a professional creative who has been asked the question, so tell us how you write your book. She's like, okay, well, I can tell you a story about that. and Carol is telling a little story or what you might more accurately call a lie. Crestomancy catches her out. He's like, well, you've said that dreams come however you want. You can't control it, but you dream it for precisely half an hour every day. Right. Which of those is true?
00:51:10
Speaker
And she have an answer. Yeah. they they They move on from there, having been thoroughly flummoxed ah by hard questions about her creative work as work, not as a mystical thing that happens to her, but as regimented work that she does and controls and has her responsibility for. it Yes.
00:51:30
Speaker
They say, all right, let's, Chris Manzi says, let's see you do a dream. So Carol goes into her dreams where she wakes up and she's wearing a swimsuit, which really annoys her. So she puts herself in her fancy outfit with her monogram brooch to show that she's in charge.
00:51:45
Speaker
right And it becomes very clear that Carol is the boss of Dreamworld. And she knows quite a lot more about how it all works than she's been letting on. And she's marching about looking for the characters. Her staff.
00:51:58
Speaker
Her people. Yeah, she calls them her people. And actually, I think staff is the word. And she eventually finds them sitting in the most real looking caravan in this dream fairground she's come up with, variously gambling, smoking and getting drunk.
00:52:14
Speaker
and incredibly pissed off and they are on strike. Right. ah So to be clear, just going to read out real quick what the cast normally do, because I do think that this is a really fun example of the kind of genre skewering that Diana Wynne Jones going to really get into in the ninety s So Carol only had six main characters working for her.
00:52:32
Speaker
There was Francis, tall and fair and handsome, with a beautiful baritone voice, who did all the heroes. He always ended up marrying the gentle but spirited Lucy, who was fair to you and very pretty. Then there was Melville, who was thin and dark, with an evil white face, who did all the villains.
00:52:47
Speaker
Melville was so good at being a baddie that Carol often used him several times in one dream. But he was always the gentleman, which was why polite Mr. Mindelbaum had reminded Carol of Melville. The other three were Bimbo, who was oldish and did all the wise old men, pathetic cripples, and weak tyrants.
00:53:01
Speaker
Martha, who was the older woman and did the ants, mothers, and wicked queens, either straight wicked or with hearts of gold. And Paul, who was small and boyish looking. Paul's speciality was the faithful boy assistant, though he did second baddie too and tended to get killed quite often in both kinds of parts.
00:53:16
Speaker
So we've got this set. We've got the hero. We've got the heroine. We've got the evil older woman. We've got the plucky boy or evil boy. We've got a generic old man.
00:53:27
Speaker
And we've got the polite villain. This is the only one that Carol actually likes. And when she turns up, he's making fudge while the rest are all complaining about her. And I really enjoy this as this is a call out for us all.
00:53:40
Speaker
Yes. I think a lot of writers do have people they go back to, wells they go back to, have concepts they go back to. You can see it sometimes. ah Occasionally, just for fun, I like to to track what I'll call Draco across all of the last 20 years of fantasy fiction it's not necessarily fair to call him Draco because sometimes he is Spike right um but he's there a lot
00:54:10
Speaker
he shows up with great frequency Yeah, we will see them. But I think Carol's problem or Carol's crime is not so much that she's using these people over and over and over again.
00:54:22
Speaker
That is not the problem that the story is trying to resolve. Because I think that Diana knows that it's necessary. She also does this. She's talked about and we've talked about how the same person in different facets will show up across her different books used in different ways.
00:54:35
Speaker
The crime is that she doesn't actually like any of them except Melville. Right. And she, I mean, they're on strike. They want credit. they want they Credits, presumably, in her dreams.
00:54:46
Speaker
ah They want breaks. They want holidays. They want they better working conditions and a bigger slice of the pie, says Paul, the boyish one, who is their shop steward. And I read this slide. was like, oh, hello, Mitt. There you are.
00:55:00
Speaker
Yeah. No, I loved this as ah very sort of sharp look at creativity I guess a creative work and the what what I think the metaphor of the story is is that Carol's Carol's well has run dry she is not going to get anything else out of these people um they're not very interesting she's dreamed about them for 99 dreams already she doesn't like most of them With the exception of Melville, she doesn't really like any of them. She doesn't actually know very much about them. It becomes clear that Lucy is absolutely roaring drunk and sobbing and she can't stand Frances and Frances can't stand her and they've had to get married 99 times. Yep.
00:55:42
Speaker
Martha, the evil older woman, turns out to be not evil and also not older and also to have feminist views about ah being forced to marry Frances 99 times. Right.
00:55:54
Speaker
Bimbo stupider than she thought. like theres there's There's a lot that she doesn't know about them or couldn't see about them. There's a lot of things that she hasn't been fair to her own characters in turning them into these flat caricatures that she's repeating over and over.
00:56:11
Speaker
And she doesn't know how to do anything else. Because part of that is that she herself hasn't been having any new experiences. It seems pretty clear that Carol's ideas, again, she started when she was seven, are a largely recycled from other people's ideas, things that she's reading, things that she's seen and not in any way drawn from experiences that she's having.
00:56:34
Speaker
There's a, ah you know, Christomancy makes a comment about the Arabian setting and the 96th dream was awful, even making allowances for how young you are. No, Diana will not remember that for later. On the other hand, your fairground in the latest Dream Team to show the makings of a real gift.
00:56:49
Speaker
And we know that Carol has recently been to a fair and that the the fairground setting is something that she did actually see and was able to draw on. So part of the reason that she's overworking these people, these archetypes that she's come up with, is because she's got nothing to add to them. She's not bringing anything of her own to this this stable of characters that she's got.
00:57:09
Speaker
Right. And the only actual way to resolve Carol's problem is to stop. She needs to stop dreaming, being wildly successful, recycling the same. Crestomancey calls it slush. yeah ah But he also does this in quite a complimentary way. he says, I enjoy your real creative gift. He points out his ward, Janet, enjoys it too. None of the others do.
00:57:33
Speaker
Like we get little glimpse of of Cat, Robin and Julia who do not like Carol's slush. But I think that's really fun. Chris Amanty's point seems to be, yes, if slush, why not good slush?
00:57:45
Speaker
Right. I also love that Janet is the one who likes the slush because we know that Janet is the tomboy. And I think it's really funny and that Janet is also like, yes, the romantic fairground dream. Yeah, it's so cute.
00:57:57
Speaker
But the actual solution to Carol's problem is that first she needs to let her people go. yeah um and in fact, this is where we get another cameo from Tonino from Magicians of the Caprona, whose power is making other people's magic stronger.
00:58:14
Speaker
Carol has this magic of making dreams seem seem real. Tonino... using his gift enhances it and all her people burst out into the real world where they immediately start going to restaurants, playing golf and jumping in the sea.
00:58:28
Speaker
ah Her cast of thousands yeah is what Carol's always called it. But in fact, most of them had never seemed like real people to her at all, apart from those six. So that cast of thousands is released to go and do real people things.
00:58:40
Speaker
Her actual characters are also released. and With one exception, I think they're not coming back. Yep. And the only one who even wants to stick around is Melville, who is the only one she likes and finds interesting. Who is this tall, thin, faintly gothic villain ah who you bring him out and stand him next to Crest de Mancy. And I think Diana is laughing herself a bit here.
00:59:07
Speaker
Because I have to say as well, this tall, thin, polite individual, this is the the keeper of the Guardian the Silver from Time City with his poem, ah who is, of course, we know from Jones' own essays, the same person as Hal of Hal's Moving Castle.
00:59:24
Speaker
um She reuses this guy a lot. yes um But here's his origin. And what Carol has to say to him is, listen, I think in order to do you justice,
00:59:35
Speaker
I need to learn a bit more about people. I need to go and do some stuff for a bit. So the last scene of the book is Carol actually going and going off to put on her swimsuit and go swimming with all the Crestomancy kids, which is really cute.
00:59:52
Speaker
It's so cute, but it's what she needs. It's to actually have experiences of her own, not recycling other people's work or other people's ideas or her own ideas that she never really cared about that much to begin with anyway.
01:00:06
Speaker
It's going and doing something real to to to if you like, fill up the car right well you trust before you start trying to dream your hundredth dream. yeah And this story is written in 1986, which is not quite but nearly the halfway point of Jones's career.
01:00:25
Speaker
And I think she is very much talking to herself. yeah As a side effect, she is talking to all of us. yeah I've got to say, if Carol had been on LiveJournal in about 2005, she would have realized that she could make Melville and Frances kiss and never looked back. And then she would have done it a hundred times and then they would have gone on strike from it. But what Melville says about Carol...
01:00:51
Speaker
is she has tremendous talent, of course, or she couldn't do it at all, but I do sometimes feel that she, well, she repeats herself. Put it like this. I think maybe Carol doesn't give herself a chance to be herself any more than she gives us.
01:01:06
Speaker
So that's sort of the takeaway of the story is that in order to be the writer that you could be, you also have to give yourself scope to be the fullest person that you can be.
01:01:17
Speaker
Which is annoying because that's such hard work. It's such hard work! But I do think it is a true lesson. I was i was very struck in Farrah's book that we talked about last time by framing of Jones as like ah long creative writing lesson for her readers. yeah It's never more clear than here. Well, this is very much a story with a moral. The moral is go swimming with your friends, you idiot. Right.
01:01:42
Speaker
Jones is not talking to the general child reader. Jones knows who her readers are and they are bookish kids. They need to put the book down and go swimming. If you're going to read one story from this batch, I think it's got to be Carol O'Neill.
01:01:55
Speaker
As much as I i love Dragon Reserve and and think it's rich and fun, but Carol O'Neill is the one that feels like a thesis statement. It feels like an integral part of the canon in a way that the others aren't necessarily.
01:02:07
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. And I think it's as we move into the 90s, which is the meta decade and the remix decade and the rethink decade. I think having Carol Lanier in our thoughts, the ways in which Jones refills the well, you have to have experiences as well as writing about experiences in order to do anything at all.
01:02:30
Speaker
yeah um I think it's always worth keeping Carol Lanier in mind. Now, Carol Lanier is not the only story about creativity in this batch. Because we also have- Anna Hittims! Anna Hittims.
01:02:41
Speaker
The following year, and they they i they are pretty much back to back, but Anna Hittims really caught my attention by opening with a girl called Anne who is sick in bed and had nothing to do And i'd like I've read this book.
01:02:54
Speaker
Right. but This is ah even more clearly, I think, than any of the others. This is a dry run for Hexwood. Yep. A part for the opening of Hexwood, which is about a girl called Anne who is sick in bed with nothing to do.
01:03:06
Speaker
ah Right. This Anne is so bored, she invents a fictional character who is herself. This is a self-insert character. And all Anne does is turn her name backwards. We can remember Anne's name because the title of the story is her name backwards. She's Anne Smith, which is how she gets Anna Hiddens, who is like a Xena figure. actually checked. I double checked. I was like, Xena can't have been out when the story was written, and it deemed it wasn't. But Xena is also a loving riff on all the stuff that Anna Hiddens is a loving riff on.
01:03:33
Speaker
She's this like strong, powerful, dark-haired woman with a sword that can kill anything. And the very first thing that she does is kill her parents for exploiting her and go out and and seek her fortune. And she has this blonde kind of weak sidekick, this blonde woman called Melina, I think.
01:03:48
Speaker
And then like a- A called Spike, whose thing is he has a spike. Right. And they run around and have high fantasy adventures on a land that is based on the contours of Anne's lap while she's sick in bed.
01:04:01
Speaker
Right. And then Anne gets so into them, she starts drawing pictures of them. And then worryingly, they seem to come to life. And then very worryingly, it turns out that having a monstrous, like magic sword wielded by a bloodthirsty lady with no particular interest in talking about it, who murdered her own parents, is a bit alarming when it's in your bedroom.
01:04:25
Speaker
um So Anna Hittim's has been told, or the story that Anne's been telling is that there is an evil wizard causing all the problems in Ennahitim's life. Ennahitim sort of looks up, sees a giant face in the sky up above her and recognizes that giant is the one we have to defeat.
01:04:44
Speaker
And I found this very funny. is Yes, an evil wizard causing all your problems is another word for the author. Absolutely. It is kind of a very, a little evocation of the primal struggle between creator and creative.
01:04:58
Speaker
And in a way that I think would not happen in one of the books. This is a primal struggle. And the only way to resolve the Enhidim's problem is to squash Enhidim's her friends.
01:05:09
Speaker
Yeah. Which indeed is what happens. There's a whole lot of basically comedy slapstick running about the house. We're on Home Invader watch again. Yeah, in fact, I would describe Anna Hittim as a kind of burglar. Yes. ah In that she causes disaster in the home.
01:05:25
Speaker
And the defences are all sort of funny stuff Anne sort of strapping tea towels to her legs and using kitchen equipment as shields and weapons and trying to think of a way to get Anna Hittim out the cat flap where she gets run over by Anne's dad's car.
01:05:42
Speaker
Right. It's sort of a fun little story, but the way that this really sharp and interesting premise kind of collapses into slapstick, it's like, alright, well you had an idea and then you didn't really know where to go with that. Yeah, got one joke, I've told the joke, can stop storing it? He actually has the joke, in fact, in the end, the final punchline is Anne looking down and being like, ah yes, I was working with magic markers, I should have expected.
01:06:05
Speaker
and so back Which is which ah another pun, it's more ogre downstairs nonsense. Right, exactly. But there's something really interesting about the beginning of this story that doesn't quite resolve, which I think is also the way that we felt about a story which in structure this sort of resembles, which is no one.
01:06:25
Speaker
Yes. No one is... It's an artificial intelligence story. It's a robot story. A robot is brought to ah the house of a wealthy family and given orders ah to care for the young master.
01:06:40
Speaker
And it's set, I think, in 2185. So I have to admit the opening made me laugh because it starts with... It starts with a sort of... somebody trying to use the right honorable Mrs. something ah ah MP in the Europe question. I haven't got the exact quote. I bet Becca does. Yes. Becca, she's predicted Brexit, but she got the date wrong. It happened sooner than that.
01:07:05
Speaker
It was the anti-European organization that wished to wish to make use of Mrs. Scantian. Yes. So no one is the name that this family gives to the robot who's brought in to run the household.
01:07:18
Speaker
And no one has been trained in how to look after an old house because this family is old money. But nobody's told him that actually the house has all been updated and is bang up to date. So it's full of modern machines that he doesn't understand at all.
01:07:30
Speaker
Plus, there's some sort of mysterious creature in the house causing problems on purpose. That creature is called someone. Yeah, there's a lot of this. ah So a lot of this is the power struggle between no one and someone about who gets to be running the house and someone very clearly feels that it's them.
01:07:47
Speaker
and someone is implied to be a cat, you know they're constantly just disappearing out of sight, they like milk, um before eventually... Oh, I thought it was a fairy! No, it's a fairy! I think that's the joke! It starts as a cat and then you're like, oh wait, no, it's a household fairy! Right, right.
01:08:04
Speaker
And someone is sort of the the ancient spirit of the the house, the the household brownie, which is the same thing as having a robot servant. Right. And you wonder how this conflict can possibly be resolved Diana, want you to have the answer are for you. It's a burglar!
01:08:20
Speaker
Technically, these ones are kidnappers. But so were the slavers, technically. So I think that's fine. ah Yeah, they've come to kidnap the young master and the whole house and all the machines and all the ah all someone's fairy powers all team up to make these people's lives very miserable. and And it's a very similar sort of slapstick to the end of Enahidim's. It's what's in your house.
01:08:39
Speaker
How can you use it? How can you bring it to the defense of your home? There's some you know very clever little jokes, clever clever bits of I'm going to use this household implement or this in this case, their high tech advanced future household implements in an unexpected way.
01:08:53
Speaker
What I think is interesting about this kind of repeated vein for Jones, it's not my favorite mold of her story. I tend to think that it's, you know, the the slapstick kind of, you know, I think it did feel the joke outstayed it's welcome for this one for me. Right.
01:09:06
Speaker
But we're in the mid 80s, which is her most house period. I think we're in amongst Archer's Goon and Howl's Moving Castle and all these books about houses that reflect their owners and how going into someone's house is really understanding them better than you can just by looking at them as a person.
01:09:25
Speaker
I do think there's kind of a thematic link there between that and all these stories about home invasion. Right. Jones really is interested in the domestic as a fantasy space.
01:09:37
Speaker
um Fantasy is not out there in the world and you have to go looking for it on a quest. Fantasy is coming into your house and or it's already in your house and you have to deal with it somehow, whether you like it or not. Right.
01:09:49
Speaker
You brought it in, in the case of Anna Hiddens, you made up the fantasy and pulled it into your house. because you didn't like your life the way it was. And perhaps the fantasy is a little too much of an alteration from the norm.
01:10:02
Speaker
Right. So yeah, I think no one and Ennahitim sit very clearly together as problems in your house, fantasy problems in your house.
01:10:12
Speaker
Yep. One thing I do think is fun about Ennahitim is real quick before we move on. ah is that you mentioned that ah this really prefigures Hexwood very clearly, the girl named Anne sick in bed. And the Anna Hiddim's trio that she draws maps really neatly onto the trio in Hexwood of V'Erin and her blonde cousin that everyone thinks is is much more feminine and useless than V'Erin.
01:10:36
Speaker
ah even though she's not, and Martin, her scrawny little brother who who has a wizened little face. ah That is kind of how the the boy Spike is described in this. so which is also Which is also Paul the shop steward in Carolineer's dream.
01:10:50
Speaker
ah hundred And Mitt Hitson. The boy who is not quite a boy. yeah So it is, you know, it's it's kind of fun to think about and drawing the people, you know, this vision of the people that she really is Hexwood or will be in Hexwood a couple of years later. Right. And I think that brings us to the master.
01:11:09
Speaker
Yeah. I fucking love this one. But also what the hell? I have no idea what's happening in it, but I'm fascinated. um Oh, we skipped the Green Stone. Do we want to do the Green Stone first? That's it. Let's do the Green Stone real quick. I do think the Master and the Green Stone sit together a little bit. If we're talking about fantasy coming home, fantasy coming into your life, both the Master and the Green Stone are about women trying... They're not about children or or teenagers or you know trying to protect their their the houses of their childhood.
01:11:40
Speaker
They're about women trying to do their normal jobs, adult professional women. who have unexpected fantastical events intrude upon their professional lives. ah The Greenstone, to be fair, these are expected fantastical events because the Greenstone is set in what looks to me like fantasy land.
01:11:59
Speaker
Yes. um Generic fantasy land, capital F. Capital f i mean this is ah Greenstone is a 1988 story, so we are before the Wheel of Time, but we are in Peak Eddings and Terry Brooks.
01:12:14
Speaker
ah we This is the age of the fantasy doorstopper. And we know Joan's read some of them and didn't like them. California fantasy is what she calls them.
01:12:26
Speaker
Which is really cruel. Very cruel very funny. ah And of course she herself has things to say in Fire and Hemlock about her the the the tendency to redo Tolkien.
01:12:40
Speaker
not as well right um anyway the green stone uh starts with our heroine the cleric don't think she's given a name her job is to write everything down on the quest to make sure it's all going right uh so she has to try and clearly all the people in this in yard figure out who they are what their names are why they're there and which one is the wizard and the story is a lot of very obvious lot of running around and being like well this one is obviously the hero this one is obviously the wizard etc I can tell from their robes and the their their trappings and so on my favourite part was actually when she turned around and was just faced with a wool of ah barbarian woman in leather bikini at face heights and you're like yes ah there she is and a head of
01:13:33
Speaker
Right. So our poor cleric runs around the Indiana and eventually encounters a guy called Basileus, which if you know any Greek, unfortunately, ruins the rest of the story for you. Sometimes Diana needs to actually resist these jokes a little bit. Basileus is the Greek word for king.
01:13:48
Speaker
This guy is the king in disguise. He might be the one sending them all on the quest. At the end of the story, he stands up and announces he doesn't need to anymore. And everyone gets really cross and starts demanding their wages and back pay and credit.
01:14:01
Speaker
And it's the union strike again. I do think these people should unionize. i thought I think Jones thinks these people should unionize. Except... that several of them are not there to unionize are not even there to be on the quest at all the king stands up and says don't worry we found the thing we were going to be questing for and then they promptly steal it and the cleric and run away you're like oh where's the rest of the book and it's not there yeah jones has made the told the joke she wants to tell and that's it right it's you know again this is the kind of thing that she's going to be doing long form in the 90s this feels like a dry run
01:14:33
Speaker
I really feel like in the late 80s, early 90s, Jones is looking at a adult SFF more and more. She is yeah perhaps seeing herself less as a children's writer, although she is still very much a children's writer and she can do it very well. But i think that mode is perhaps starting to run dry for her.
01:14:53
Speaker
We're going to come to the batch stories in a minute. um Yes. Which definitely ran dry for me. And I think she is thinking about what else she can do and what else she can play with. And she is starting to play with contemporary adult SFF and doing some interesting things with it.
01:15:09
Speaker
Now, I don't really know what the master is a dry run for, but I want to know because I want the rest of this story. I swear it's in Merlin Conspiracy.
The Mysterious House Story
01:15:19
Speaker
I don't.
01:15:21
Speaker
Among other things. um But this, the master starts with a heroine who is a vet getting a call that there's a problem and she needs to go to place.
01:15:32
Speaker
So, so far, so story set up. But our heroine goes to place and she discovers a woman with her throat torn out. And then a weird spooky house where there are lots of magical experiments set up inside and the sky is different if you go out into the garden. I was like, this is Romanov's house.
01:15:49
Speaker
This is Romanov's house. This is a house punched together from different worlds in Merlin Conspiracy. I recognize this weird house. um the weird The weird wizard's house, of course, is not just there. The weird wizard's house is Howl's Castle. Absolutely.
01:16:03
Speaker
The place that is other places also. Yes. um Which also actually is Hunston House in um Fire and Hemlock. Yeah. So our heroine goes to this place that other places and there she encounters the fool.
01:16:17
Speaker
And he is explicitly called a fool. I think he's meant to be dressed as a fool. or at least like that was the impression I got and I was reading this one quite quickly and eventually he he introduced himself as I think Eggbert or Eggsy or something like that? He's just egg. He's just egg which is weird. Sorry, egg. He's eggs plural. He's eggs plural and the fool seems to belong to the house but won't explain anything about it.
01:16:42
Speaker
no He is, sorry I have his description. He is be very tall and thin and ungainly. His feet were in big laced boots, jigging a silent, ingratiating dance on the pine needles, and the rest of his clothes were a dull brown and close-fitting.
01:16:55
Speaker
His huge hands came out to me placatingly. I am egg-burt, he says. It's the goon! You may call me eggs. He grinned all over his small, inane face under his close crop of straw-fair hair. That is the goon. That is just the goon.
01:17:09
Speaker
It is the goon. It's also the grown-up version of Mitt in Delmarc. is described very similarly to this. I am pretty sure that this is just Jones describing a sexy man for her.
01:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, I do think you're right. But also, this is... I feel like there's a lot to say about the Jonesian masculine. We talked about the heroic masculine a lot in the 70s, but also the the father in Diana Wynne Jones, the husband in Diana Wynne Jones, the sexual threat in Diana Wynne Jones...
01:17:43
Speaker
Whatever the hell this guy is. Eggs is a sexual threat. Yes, he is. So Eggs is an idiot or seems to be an idiot. Seems to be. And from the first description, I'm like squinting at this man. like Because we've read a lot of Diana Wynne Jones at this point. right And there are moments when our heroine catches out of the corner of her eye the the glimpse of a different expression on his face. Right. A kind of intelligence that he is not showing her.
01:18:11
Speaker
And I think that Jones, I think the reason I think you're right about a sexy man is that I think Jones finds a hidden intelligence very sexy. Yes. And she's right. That is sexy. So our heroine basically has to negotiat navigate this weird house, um find what the problem is that she's been called to deal with, which seems to be three wolves in the garden who are starving.
01:18:35
Speaker
Yes. ah She's like, we've got to feed these wolves. And we haven't read Black Maria yet. But this this image of the starving wolves at the door of the house is one we're going to see again.
01:18:48
Speaker
And these three wolves all have human names. the the the The fool knows them. He calls them Annie and Theo and Hugh. yeah ah It is never explained exactly who the wolves are or why they're there or what the hell all that was about, except we do find out that Annie, who is the the she-wolf and the biggest and scariest, is the person who tore out the throat of the previous young woman who came to this house.
01:19:11
Speaker
right And she did it because that woman was trying to steal her mate, at which point you're like, okay. We also know that between Theo and Hugh, Hugh seems to think he's a house pet. He wants to come in and eat on the floor.
01:19:26
Speaker
He puts his chin on her knee. Theo gets very agitated and alarmed and unhappy any time Hugh acts like a house pet. We don't get this explained to either, but it makes for all these incredibly tense scenes where you have this one wolf who is acting quite heartrendingly like a house pet and wants to come up, wants to be pet, wants to be fed, wants to, you know, cuddle up to you.
01:19:48
Speaker
And then this other wolf sitting and staring and waiting to tear your throat out. And it is this ah very intense description of simultaneous appeal and threat. Which is, of course, what's also going on with the fool in the background, who is both very sweet and charming and very clearly ah sexual threat who is trying to angle for, do I get to marry you now?
01:20:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And it's scary. And it's scary. It's big and scary. The story is called The Master. And the main the main thing our heroine spends most of the story doing is trying to figure out who or what or where the master is and how she can talk to him to figure out what's going on.
01:20:30
Speaker
And I think that, you know, Beauty and the Beast is in the DNA of this story. And Red Riding Hood is in the DNA of this story. There's a kind of dark fairy tale rift running through it. At the end, she seems to figure it out.
01:20:45
Speaker
and seems to summon the master up out from inside Eggs the Fool. At which point, Andy comes in and says, you're trying to steal my mage.
01:20:56
Speaker
At which point she wakes up. And it was all a dream. And you're like, oh, Diana, you didn't you decided not to write the rest of this one either, did you? It was all a dream. And then she says, but I've just got this call to go to this house that seems like the one in my dream. So I'm writing it all down in case I end up with my throat torn out. This is what happened to me. And you're like, what?
01:21:17
Speaker
What?
Theme of Silly Adults and Consequences
01:21:18
Speaker
And that's it. That's the story. That's it. That's the story. Yeah, the main the main thing I got out of that one was this this this figure of the man who is an idiot, who is cleverer than you think and cleverer than he wants you to think, ah who is very tall with big hands and and and and a ah weird little smile, ah who is also possibly a wolf.
01:21:38
Speaker
Yeah. Who is possibly a dog. yeah And then at that point, like, are we back to Sirius? Are we back to the father-husband? Is this man also your father?
01:21:52
Speaker
Any of these things could be true. But if dear listeners, if you have any idea what the hell is going on it actually meant to be going on in the Master, please let us know. I'm desperate to solve this one.
01:22:05
Speaker
And I have no real collective coherent working theories at the moment. Right. And that, I think, takes us through all the actual stories of the 70s and 80s, and we now have maybe 10 minutes to deal with a whole bunch of silly adults getting their comeuppance.
01:22:21
Speaker
Right. so I'm just going to read off, I think, all the ones that we're including in silly adults getting their comeuppance. I mean, we've talked about Carruthers, but I think Carruthers in this mold. And then we've got Auntie B's Day out, the fluffy pink toadstool, ah the plague of peacocks, warlock at the wheel, and the fat wizard.
01:22:38
Speaker
Yep. And all of these follow pattern in which there is an adult who is stupid or ignorant or unkind or silly is, I think, the key word. These adults are always silly. Auntie B wants to go to the beach but makes the children carry millions and millions of bags.
01:22:57
Speaker
In the fluffy pink toadstool, mother gets a craze for being everything natural and makes them throw away all their clothes so they can wear only natural clothes. Now, I do think that the silly adult, the depiction of the silly adult kind of escalates in venom.
01:23:11
Speaker
Auntie B and mother are silly but harmless. we love you know When they get in trouble, we do want to get them out of that trouble, even though they're so annoying. The real fun of Auntie B actually is ah they go to an island where they're not supposed to be and there's a sign saying, trespassers will be sorry.
01:23:28
Speaker
And then as they sit on the island and Auntie B is like, this is a lovely day on the beach. The island turns into every other kind of island it can think of, up to and including the island in the middle of the roundabout the end of their road, but also an iceberg.
01:23:40
Speaker
It's a traffic island. It's an island at the zoo. ah It's an island in the Caribbean. It's an island in the Antarctic Ocean. And you're just like, okay, this is like the this multiple worlds feeling. Right. The island could be any island.
01:23:55
Speaker
Right. This exploration of a place that is many places. And it doesn't like you. And it doesn't like you is, I think, a really, you know, this is an idea that she'll be playing with onwards. I love the island in Antipi, but I also love that Antipi is not actually sorry. Antipi mothers all these trials with a remarkable applause.
01:24:13
Speaker
And the family ends up getting phone calls from all over the world being like, can you come and collect this bag with your name on it from the millions of bags that Aunty B packed this morning? Right. And it's all monkeyy's at the zoo ate all your sandwiches right but's all places like, you know, the USSR calls up and says, is this a bomb? And they're like, no, it's our sandwiches.
01:24:34
Speaker
ah So it's silly and it's fun, but it's kind of good-hearted. And the fluffy pink toadstool as well is kind of, you know, mother is annoying with her craze and she gets over the craze and that's that. You get to the Plague of Peacocks and I would say Warlock at the Wheel is is more or less good-hearted as well. This is the Crestomancy one.
01:24:52
Speaker
ah It's one of Gwendolyn's so <unk>endolen teacher or, you seedy little magic users ah goes off to another world and gets... it It's... It's Ransom of Red Chief. It's just Ransom of Red Chief. He goes to another world and he gets bullied by a child having accidentally kidnapped this child.
01:25:08
Speaker
Yeah, and it is really just of these feel like power fantasies for children. Right. The one thing actually that ah about Warlock at the Wheel, which you hated when I pointed this out.
01:25:20
Speaker
I did hate this. I hated this a lot. So it's a child and a dog. And at the end, we learned that the dog is Cathayac demon hunting dog, which of course, Joris from Homeward Bounders speaks with a Cathayac twang and hunts demons. So this dog comes from a different book and a different cosmology.
01:25:38
Speaker
which is The kind of dog is from Homeward Bounders, but it's in Crestomancy. But if Crestomancy existed in the Homeward Bounders universe, he would fix it. Right. Crestomancy cannot exist in Homeward Bounders universe.
01:25:51
Speaker
um But this is the kind of joke that I think she would never let herself do in a book. But in a short story, I think it really kind of elementizes the way the short stories kind of don't count for her. You can do a little joke like that to make yourself laugh. You can put a dog from Joris's world and you know and give it to one of Gwendolyn's seedy little wizards and that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's just a joke.
01:26:11
Speaker
Yeah. But Plague of Peacocks and Fat Wizard both feel sort of increasingly mean-spirited about the silly animals. Oh, they are. they Those are vindictive.
01:26:22
Speaker
Yes. Plague of Peacocks, I was like, so you have some neighbors you don't like, Diana. Uh-huh. The Plague of Peacocks describes, so and it's, actually, I it, it's like, well, this is a very Tory story in that its it sits well with the standard English trope about, oh, yeah.
01:26:39
Speaker
interfering people lefties so plague of peacocks is about an annoying couple who moves through a neighborhood and start doing and start caring and they do a little village newsletter about how much they care uh and they care so much that they gather up everyone's pets who they say are being mistreated and take them to the vet to be put down yeah okay immediately is like wow you are escalating Yeah.
01:27:06
Speaker
And the actual, the the the world of the village is is quite charming. And I think the real protagonist of the story is sort of the collection of married women, the various misis who are being plagued by these neighbours, ah all of whom have their own rich inner lives. And one of them is constantly rereading the account of Monte Cristo.
01:27:26
Speaker
And another is a typist typing up someone else's experimental novel and not thinking it's very good. And and your your as eyes said these these women have real have lives and feelings that revolve around books.
01:27:37
Speaker
ah But no, these people showed up and started caring. Terrible. Worst thing a person can do. Worst thing a person could do because what it actually is saying these people are sticking their noses in where they're not wanted and and don't understand us.
01:27:52
Speaker
ah These are outsiders. So they are punished with peacocks. The end. Right. And the, they're, what they're actually punished with is ah a small child who can't be who and an uncontrollable small child with some kind of magical power that they just kind of launch at the, this is actually the similarity between Warlock at the Wheel and Plague of Peacocks.
01:28:11
Speaker
I think Auntie B and Fluffy Pink Toadstool are both from the point of view of the children trying to figure out how to assert themselves and for others against these overbearing adults. Plague of Peacocks and Warlock at the Wheel are both, from the perspective of adults, looking at an uncontrollable child and being like, well, that child is a weapon. A weapon of mass destruction.
01:28:33
Speaker
Right. That child will deal with the annoying person for me. Right. And then we get to the fat wizard. The fat wizard actually made me quite angry ah because it has the look of something that...
01:28:46
Speaker
Like, it's it's another one that's set in a small village. The village is well drawn. It's got a lot of different people in it. The heroine is, you know, a young girl is learning witchcraft from her aunt. There's a lot of that's interesting in the setup and that it all collapses into just such absolute vindictiveness against this, the villain of the story, the fat wizard, whose villainy is that he is fat and trying to go on a diet.
01:29:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that's just it. That's the joke. and it's not that It's not that funny. but there's To be fair, it's also pretty vindictive about the attractive woman.
01:29:20
Speaker
Doesn't like her either. She wears too much makeup. Look at that dress. ah So she gets turned into a pig as well. yeah and event And the heroine in the story gets to go off and study magic somewhere else.
01:29:31
Speaker
Where she's not constantly turning people into pigs. Not be in this community on it anymore. And all the people doesn't like get turned into bacon. Yeah. um I do wonder if i did actually wonder this is a metaphor for ah Jones like, well, I don't like you, but I will write you into stories. You are food for my work.
01:29:49
Speaker
Yes. I'm the author and you were bacon. Yeah. Again, this is the level of just kind of like pat meanness here, you know, in 20 pages, we can dispatch all these people into bacon, is something that I don't think, again, she'd ever let herself do in a book.
01:30:06
Speaker
But I think that she finds it satisfying to just dash it off in a short story. I agree. And i think I think we've said this before. Diana Wynne-Jones is not really a particularly kind author. If you were getting a portrait of you put into a Jones book, be prepared to wince.
01:30:23
Speaker
Yeah. um she and part of her her unkindness is a sort of determined commitment to unsentimentality like she will see the bad in things and also I think I think I respect this in her writing she is She wants children's books in particular to be honest about when things are bad and it's not okay. Right. And when people behave badly and stupidly, when adults are silly and infuriating and you can't stand
Anticipation for 90s Works and Q&A Preview
01:30:54
Speaker
them.
01:30:54
Speaker
Right. um And that honesty is part of the strength of her work. But in a story like this, it does just collapse into a real, really mean spirited feeling.
01:31:07
Speaker
However, all that said, although, you know, I don't think that we loved this particular batch of silly adult stories. It did make me really excited to go forward into the 90s and look at, you know, the way that some of these ideas that she's dashing off and throwing into these 80s stories and seeing what sticks and what she's going to do with them when she really gets her teeth into them in long form.
01:31:30
Speaker
It does feel like So many of these stories are just from the 1980s, along with so many of her most famous books. It just feels like it was a period of of amazing creative growth.
01:31:42
Speaker
yeah And then she is she is laying the groundwork for what are going to be real masterworks in the 90s. Like, I've said this before, the 90s is my favorite decade in her work.
01:31:52
Speaker
She does just such extraordinary stuff. I really can't wait. At least half these stories in some way felt to me like they were looking forward to Hexwood.
01:32:04
Speaker
I cannot wait for Hexwood. We've been talking about not trying not to talk about Hexwood since the first episode. We can't wait. We can't wait until.
01:32:15
Speaker
ah So this has been Diana Wynne-Jones' short stories of the 1970s and 80s. At some future date, we will probably return and do ah the stories of the 90s and the 2000s, although there are far fewer.
01:32:28
Speaker
Yes, but some of them are longer. I'm excited to talk about ah the last Crestomancy story in my mullet Crestomancy volume. We will get there. At a future point. Until then, next, ah not next week, sorry, I have the date in my calendar when we're going to be recording our Q&A episode, and I want to give it to you accurately so that you know when the deadline is to send us questions.
01:32:52
Speaker
We will be recording our Q&A episode on the 17th. Scratch that, it'll be the 25th. Thursday, the 25th. So we've already got some great questions, but get us any more before then at 8daysofdiana at gmail.com.
01:33:08
Speaker
And we will look forward to... And then, yeah, then it's the 90s. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Thank you very much listening, everybody. And thank you, Becca.
01:33:18
Speaker
Yes. Thank you, Em. Bye. Bye.