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Cart and Cwidder
278 Plays1 month ago
"I sing for Osfameron, I move in more than one world."
The power of art, the divided self, and Walemark.
Transcript available here. Next week will be a mid-season break, but we'll be back in two weeks with Power of Three!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Cart and Quitter' by Diana Wynne Jones
00:00:00
Speaker
Alright, hi everyone and welcome back to 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones with your hosts, I'm Emily Tesh. And I'm Rebecca Frameau, and today we're going to be talking about Cart and Quitter. Alright, so Cart and Quitter, we're into the mid-1970s now, this is what, the fourth book she's published? Yes.
00:00:21
Speaker
um And we are in the first book that she's written that is full of high fantasy, not set in our world at all, ah which is a really interesting move for a couple of reasons.
00:00:34
Speaker
ah Yeah, first of all Diana Windjones doesn't do full high fantasy and in fact apart from the Dale Mark Quartet, these four books, I don't think she ever does it again. No, I don't think so. Everything else, there's always a link back to our world. so Well, I mean we're looking forward, which we're not supposed to do.
Jones' Unique Narrative Style in High Fantasy
00:00:50
Speaker
um Everything she's done up to this point since we're looking backwards has been about the incursions of recognizable myth into the lives of ordinary kids who are just kind of going around doing ordinary kid things.
00:01:04
Speaker
I think that more of the kids in this book do feel more or less like quite ordinary kids. And they are also dealing with the incursions of myths that are recognizable to them into their daily lives, which is one of the things that I really want to talk about is the way that she kind of uses her same toolbox in this different space. But they are very much in a different high fantasy world.
00:01:29
Speaker
Uh, and she's pulling on, you know, it feels like she's pulling much more on things that she's kind of learned from other fantasists like Tolkien, who we know that she was learning to and listening to very literally. Yeah. So this is, uh,
00:01:44
Speaker
Definitely to me, Dale Mark feels like it's in conversation with Tolkien. Maybe not so much Lord of the Rings, but The Hobbit. But also with Tolkien's love of language, so much of the the world in this book is about names and places. And you can tell she's actually done a little bit of conlanging. She doesn't go into detail on it, but things like ah the hero's name is Tana Morrill.
Children's Journey Through Dalemark: Espionage and Culture
00:02:11
Speaker
um moral for short uh and we are told that the uh the more the the the moral part is a diminutive uh of tanner mill who's one of these mythical figures from earlier on if like me you went through and you read the very high fantasy thing which is the glossary at the back Absolutely. Any other Diana Wynn Jones, only in the Delmark Quartet. All sorts of things like, God, you first. They only get that in some editions. My book, my copy of this book, which I've had since, let's see, when was this published? ah This was published in 1995. There's no glossary. And I don't remember getting a glossary until I read the print of Delmark.
00:02:54
Speaker
interesting. So it might have been something that was put back in or added in to make it more high fantasy later on. Yeah, I think it has it has the glossary, it has the map like as a book, it's being packaged as a high fantasy. I do have a map.
00:03:14
Speaker
um But also in terms of being post-pulse Tolkien, it's the um the influence of Anglo-Saxon. When Jones read English in Oxford, she's done her old English and in this one it shows. um and It's so glad we have you on the podcast to talk about that. Because I'm a bunch of things that I would not have noticed and in fact had never noticed in all my years of reading these books.
00:03:38
Speaker
I mean, I'm not very good. i My old English is very much amateur, self-taught, but I did sort of pick up some of the poetry. She is, um so there's, let's talk about what the book is about. The book yeah is about, sorry. We keep forgetting to do this, but like, let's just get going. Okay. The book comes in quarter, which is by the way, a terrible title. It does what it says on the to on the tin. There are for ah three children, eventually a fourth.
00:04:07
Speaker
ah They live in a travelling cart ah with their father, Clennan the Singer, and their mother, Lenina, and the cart travels from South Dalemark to North Dalemark and back again, and in the towns along the way, the cart stops and they give musical performances, oh and they share local news, and they pass on messages, and they're clearly sort of a necessary part of the functioning of communication in this society.
00:04:36
Speaker
And the South and the North are in some kind of conflict, which more our POV character certainly doesn't know very much about or know the origins of. um And as far as he can tell, you know, his when he asks about the origins of it, his father doesn't really give him a specific description. It's all kind of lost in the sands of time. But there was a king and then there was not a king. And now there's a conflict, not an open war.
Themes of Division: North vs. South Dalemark
00:05:01
Speaker
And in fact, part of this story is about preventing an open war between North and South dellemark ah but a conflict ah certainly of culture and that comes through really clearly that the south and the north have very different fields as places to be um and a conflict as well um of I suppose
00:05:24
Speaker
belief society. um The South Dale Mark comes across as prosperous and mercantile ah and but also cold and unfriendly. The North is green and beautiful in all the descriptions we hear of it. We don't actually see very much of North Dale Mark. It seems to be almost a place that exists in the main character Morrill's mind more than it is a place that real. And we'll come back to that this idea of this place. um But two very different societies, which at the same time are the same society, they're not different countries, they're the two parts of Dale Mark, they have it they sharing the same language with same language. Yes, some orthographic differences specifically, which is really fun. um As we know, when we get a another kid, the fourth kid arrives, who's going to join them for the trip up north.
00:06:18
Speaker
ah His name is Kialin, spelled with a K. In the south it would be spelled with a C. And Morrill does not like him. He's annoying, he's stuck up, he doesn't want to do work around the cart. ah He seems to be sort of vaguely judging them all, all of the time. And this is the largest problem in Morrill's life until abruptly much larger problems arise.
00:06:40
Speaker
Right, so what becomes clear as the book goes on is that Glennon the Singer, Morrill's father, is not just a musician, a performer, ah he is the chief spy for the North, the porter, and his business in the South, as well as singing and performing. He is passing messages between revolutionaries, he is transporting refugees, and Kialan is one such ah refugee, an escaped valuable hostage, ah trying to return home to his father, who is one of the most powerful earls in the North.
00:07:10
Speaker
But none of this becomes clear to Morrill until after his father has been murdered by unknown men in the woods. And immediately upon his father being murdered, Morrill has no idea why this is happening. And also no sense that anything is going to be able to be done about it. I think there's this really great and awful line where Morrill
Loyalty, Betrayal, and Family Dynamics in the North
00:07:30
Speaker
is thinking about the fact that none of them are assuming that anything is going to be able to be done about it.
00:07:35
Speaker
And he says, uh, he says, uh, they should be angry. Clinton had been murdered. They should be trying to bring the murderers to justice, but none of them thought of it. It was out of question here in the South. The six men had been far too well dressed. So they know that somebody powerful has killed their father. And immediately after this, their mother, Lenina is like, all right, I know how we're going to fix this situation.
00:07:59
Speaker
and turns and drives around to the house of her old flame, ah the man to whom she was once patrolled, who is in fact an Earl of the South. And it's like, right. All right. I was born into high position here in the South. I'm going to marry this man.
00:08:14
Speaker
And we're all going to be set. We're going to stay here in this earldom, and you're going to grow up to your birthright, which is to be upper-class children of the South. And we'll get Kialin home somehow. Right. So there's this sort of abrupt turn, quite early in the book, with the sudden murder of Clennan, and what Morals certainly sees as the betrayal of his mother, like Morals' personal loyalties, his feelings are for North Dalemark, for the North.
00:08:43
Speaker
um And so the children decide to go on without her without either parent. um They are going to go north by themselves and take Kialin north. Now, yes.
00:08:57
Speaker
uh and with key allen sort of posing as their fourth sibling um one of the things before we get into some of the more serious stuff in this book which is a very serious book i think in in every previous recording that we've done we've sort of stopped as we're talking about these awful things that are happening to these kids and being like this book is really funny though it's really funny you should read it this one's not that funny it's not that funny i i love this book i love dale mark i didn't when i first read it at like age nine or ten i didn't like it very much at all because it wasn't funny And it took me coming back to it a couple years later to actually, what I had learned to appreciate and how all books had to be funny, ah to really start loving Dale Mark, which now I do deeply.
00:09:36
Speaker
um But one thing that I do think is kind of funny is, and I think this is a book where our our style of looking back is going to come in really useful in a couple of ways. It's a really interesting reframing of the Ogre Downstairs problem novel about what to do when you find out that you're your parents don't get along and suddenly you have new siblings.
00:09:56
Speaker
right it's again like as a story about your adults in your life are making a lot of choices without you and you are just happy with your mother your mother has a new husband you immediately hate him because he your mother's new husband, but actually
Performance and Reality in Art: Britt's Grief
00:10:14
Speaker
he's fine. Linina's new husband is completely fine. He's nice. He's sort of a fusspot. And also you have a new step-sibling and you immediately hate them because they're new and in your life and you don't get on, you don't understand each other. But then you have to be in cahoots with each other in dangerous situations and it turns out that when your life more or less depends on them they're sort of all right. I think cahoots is actually for the first time not the word I would choose for the situation that they're in because cahoots to me says comedy and this is all very life and death and not comedy. There is a version of this book that's comedic about four kids who have to desperately you know perform
00:10:50
Speaker
attempt to put on a show across the entirety of South Dale Mark. But it's not funny, you're right. It's, first of all, every show that they put on after they leave their mother behind is very intensely about their grief and loss for their father, who was the person who held the whole show together, was a larger-than-life performer. And these are all children under the age of 15. They are not larger than life. They are much smaller than life.
00:11:16
Speaker
And they're using, you know, the one thing that they've got going for them is their grief. You know, they get out there and they say, we can't do what our father did. He was murdered and people give them money because they feel sorry for them.
00:11:29
Speaker
Absolutely. And in fact, it's interesting. So we've got three siblings, ah all of whom have great, big, long names, because Clinton says he likes a big name. ah But they know him by the nicknames of Morrill, the protagonist, who's the youngest son, 11 years old, ah his older sister, Britt, who's about 13, and Dagner, yes who's about 15.
Artistic Heritage and Family Legacy
00:11:51
Speaker
And it is Britt who is the performer, who in some ways is the most like Clinton, who is the one who uses her very real grief,
00:11:59
Speaker
to manipulate crowds to make a profit, to get them the money they need to buy food to go to the next town. ah And Morrill thinks about that at one point. um Let me grab the quote. Morrill could see she was trying not to cry, but he could also see she was making it plain to the crowd that she was trying not to cry. He marveled at the way she could use real feelings for what was in fact a show.
00:12:24
Speaker
And yes, one set that comes back because that as moral thinks more and learns more about his father about his father's sort of second secret self as a spy, he becomes more and more aware that everything about his father was a performance a show. And there was a reality in there somewhere, Glenn and clearly cared very much about his cause.
00:12:47
Speaker
ah But the reality and unreality kept feeding back into each other. Yeah, this is also, so there's a lot in this book about parents and children and what you get from your parents, how that's sort of distributed and refracted into the personalities of the children. ah This is the first book, by the way, which I think is really interesting. ah Diana Winjos is really interested in parentifying children. Everything that she's written previous to this is about kind of when we have multiple siblings or multiple kids in ah in a group,
00:13:17
Speaker
that's the oldest child that we're following, or the child who's sort of most taking care of the younger children. And here, for the first time, she's writing from the point of view of the youngest child, the child who doesn't expect to be in charge, who's happy to sit back and let the older kids take charge until they can't. So the kid who's actually first stepping up is the oldest, Dagner, who is trying really, really hard to follow in his father's footsteps and leave the group and make decisions ah And he makes a mess of it. And then he can't anymore because he's arrested and moral loses him. Right. And in fact, it is they take it in turns to try and step into clan and shoes. So Dagner tries to
00:13:58
Speaker
pass information about um a betrayal going on and manages to pass it to the person betraying ah the revolutionary network and immediately gets arrested. ah And it's a capital offence, he's going to be hanged, he's 15 years old, ah he's going to die. um And then Britt steps up and is in that very Diana-win Jones way of the female sibling, she goes, right, I'm mother,
00:14:23
Speaker
ah She does the motherly thing, she looks after the food, she sorts out the plan, she gives she tries to order moral around, um but Bryd in turn actually fails and it does eventually fall to moral.
00:14:36
Speaker
to solve their problems um with the aid of the quidda, which is the other half of this title. So one, they are children in a cart, and they have with them musical instruments called quiddas, and in particular, ah the bass quidda, the large quidda, which was Clennan's and which passes to tomorrow on Clennan's death and a quidda appears to be effectively a cello.
00:15:01
Speaker
right they and organ They also They have instruments that we would recognize. The quitter, I think, is a quitter so that we can tell it's a fantasy instrument that does fantasy things, because this quitter is, of course, or at least the big quitter that Moro inherits is, of course, magical.
Freedom and Cultural Identity Allegories
00:15:17
Speaker
I do wonder if as well it's a little bit of a language choice, a well-known choice, because cello, of course, a violoncello is an Italian word. which ah I think would stand out a little bit in Dale Mark, which is very intentional about how it uses language. That's no and it think me not going to go down the rabbit hole of what linguistic where the word or did it comes from, because that's going to stand out as much in an English context, I think, whereas cello, to me, definitely sounds like a loan word. Definitely.
00:15:48
Speaker
um but yeah that brings me back to actually uh jones's sort of use of old english of anglo-saxon the of course the the the the dead giveaway is the name of the world dale mark uh the dales obviously are the dales uh there's the urs of the north dales and the south dales and this is this word for a valley for a green place uh but this central word mark ah That is Old English, Anglo-Saxon, mark, ah border, division, boundary. As in ah the marches, the Welsh marches, which are the border between ah England and Wales and which has lots of picturesque castles because it was historically a site of lots and lots of conflict.
00:16:34
Speaker
ah Which is so I guess that brings us back to the signifiers of the whole overall sort of political spectrum of Dale Mark It's funny when you were looking at the list of books that we had to look at for this season ah I think we said this before, the first thing you said was, oh look at all these books about the troubles, because Denmark of course has a north and a south. This is something that I never thought I'd really get when I was a kid, because as an American child we have a very different context for a divided north and a south.
00:17:04
Speaker
um i never you can actually use both the i the the Northern Ireland lens and the American lens to examine this book. So give us an American take on North and South Dalemark. How does it how did it read you? So North, yeah very, very directly from the beginning, we're told that the North is free, and the South is not free.
00:17:25
Speaker
we have this card that's smuggling a child who proud um keen is Kialin is described as having a very brown complexion, that's the word that she uses, which is typical of North Denmark and not typical of South Denmark. He's also blonde and blue eyed,
00:17:40
Speaker
So I think that, you know, there's ambiguity and sort of like it's not a very, you know, direct sort of racial picture the way that it might be if it was a modern book. But there is a ah distinct physical difference between these kids, although not so much of one that they can't pass Kialin off as their very tan sibling when they're running around.
00:17:59
Speaker
um Anyway, they're smuggling him up north and there's a ton of imagery in the words and the music that's been used to talk about freedom and revolution in the south. ah Very early on in the book, Dagner, who's the sibling that he's he's this most creative sibling in a way, he's the sibling that composes. um And he sings a song about a blackbird about a blackbird singing for freedom.
00:18:27
Speaker
and how nice it is to to walk in the woods and be free. I should have grabbed this quote and I don't have it um for the exact lyrics of Dagner's song, but Clennon says, ah you can't sing like that. You can't sing that here in the South. All right, it's, come with me, come with me. The Blackbird asks you, follow me. And Clennon says, you can't say that because that is exactly an echo of the freedom songs that people would use in the South. They never dared say a thing straight out. So it was all put sideways.
00:18:55
Speaker
Follow the Lark was one, Free is Air and Secret another one, and the best known was Come Up the Dale with Me, and the lords here still hang a man on the spot for singing words like that. And to me, again, 12 years old, that seemed very directly an echo of the way that music and coded music was used for the Underground Railroad here in you know the American context, the American Civil War. And of course, this is an Underground Railroad. like Specifically, what they are doing is ah transporting someone ah who is escaping from a horrendous situation in the south. What becomes clear is that Kialan and his older brother Konian were shipwrecked in a southern port, ah immediately captured. And because they were such high value political prisoners, the older brother Konian was killed, hanged in front of Kialan and Kialan was only spared because he's 14, which is just a year too young to be tried as an adult. and sir um So Kialan actually, from the first time we meet him when Morrill finds him very, very annoying,
00:19:55
Speaker
ah he is deeply sunk in grief, which becomes clear as we go on. We'll come back to that thinking about then these lenses so you can talk about the um American lens and I think it's a ah really true reading honestly I think that's got to be in there as well in the in the inspiration for Delmarque but for me coming from ah an Irish family I did look at this one go oh that is about Ireland ah that is about a country divided between one half which is free and one half which is marked by
00:20:29
Speaker
whispers, arrests, people being unjustly arrested. Remember, again, this is the 1970s. This is the age of internment in Northern Ireland of political prisoners and suspected members of the IRA. This, to me, it felt like it was a book influenced by the struggle in Northern Ireland. And it's also, I mean, she's just come off writing Dog's Body as the item. And she's so interested in this book, like the sequence where Dagner is arrested.
Jones' Personal Influence on Themes and Characters
00:20:59
Speaker
And we start thinking about jails and prisons, and Morrill is experiencing what it's like to be inside a prison and
00:21:07
Speaker
the how how people sort of change as soon as the whether or not they're guilty or innocent as soon as they're suspected of crime. Right. really har The abuse of political prisoners ah is deeply in this book. And so is actually the experience of my father has been killed because he is a suspected agent for the other side.
00:21:29
Speaker
yes So, Glennon and Kathleen's father um um in Dog's Body share this trait of dead dad question mark terrorist uh-huh and both of them as soon as you know they experience this this loss and then find themselves acting out really dramatically in ways they wouldn't otherwise do i actually didn't see this until i was looking at faramendelson's book who pulls out the quote you know the moment that kathleen when she loses which finds out her father's dead and she starts she immediately she goes into her awful
00:22:06
Speaker
guardian mother's studio and start smashing plates does acts of, and you know, incredible violence that she hadn't been able to bring herself to before and then runs away. And moral when he's pushed to the last straw, also does an act of incredible violence. Right, it's that moment when a child pushed past their limits by the injustices heaped on top of them, finally starts fighting back.
00:22:30
Speaker
It's great. It's really satisfying. By the way, give us the title of the meddlesome book just so that our listeners can ah go and pick it up if they are interested in German scholarship. Absolutely, which you definitely should. ah It is called Dan Owen Jones, The Fantastic Tradition and Children's Literature by Farrah Mendelssohn, which was published in 2006. Yeah, do pick that up if you get the chance. So, there's an American lens you can use to examine North and South Denmark. There is an Irish lens, but we were talking about it and I went, what is this? Yeah, you blew my side with this. What is wrong? So, yeah, I will use my superpowers as a person who lives here. Wales,
00:23:11
Speaker
The country of Wales is designed divided into North Wales and South Wales. In the United Kingdom, if you're talking about the Dales, you are talking about Wales. In Jones, as is obvious from her name, she's a Jones, she was the daughter of a Welsh father. She would did not describe herself as Welsh and there's a um I mean, in the same way that I wouldn't describe myself as Irish, despite having an Irish mother, ah because cultural identity is complex and made of where you grew up. So in her personal essays and reflections, Jones describes the experience of visiting um her grandfather in Wales as a child and being the little English girl in a Welsh village, and not even being able to talk to the other children, because of course they spoke Welsh and she didn't.
00:24:00
Speaker
And that ah awesome Welsh grandfather, who was a famous Methodist preacher, appears several times in her books, if you're looking out for him. Yes, all of the members of her family appear several times. so i we're goingnna talk about But one thing that really sort of jumped out at me once I started thinking in terms of North and South Wales is that North Wales is rural, green, beautiful. ah There are more Welsh speakers in South Wales because South Wales is where the population is.
00:24:29
Speaker
ah But you're more likely to actually like encounter people using Welsh in day-to-day life in the north, um because there's more of a concentration of Welsh speech there. ah Whereas South Wales is ah more urban, more populated, more prosperous, has the cities of Cardiff and Swansea. So I thought, well, what if Delmark is Wales?
00:24:49
Speaker
webu Well, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. And I actually went, wait a second, wait a second, but she's got all this English, she's got this word mark in the center of her book, the center of her country, ah the marches, the borders, and Diana Wynne Jones, English daughter of a Welsh father, has that sort of border in her own thoughts, if you like, or in her own experiences.
00:25:11
Speaker
as being an outsider in a Welsh village, but also in some way perhaps an outsider in England. And there's the myth of the Lost King, which again, I never thought about in terms of Arthuriana until you pointed this out. But then as soon as you said it, it's like, right, Laurel's name is literally us, fan, Berlin, to now,
00:25:29
Speaker
Right, so I went, what if instead, if we want to ah sort of put real world lenses on this fantasy world, which is obviously all of these things and none of them, but what if we imagine that Northdale Mark is Wales and Southdale Mark is England, this prosperous mercantile place, this more heavily armed place, Southdale Mark has guns, the North does not.
00:25:53
Speaker
well this cold and unfriendly place and La Nina becomes this cold English aristocrat as opposed to Clennan's sort of expansive warmth, which Morin always thinks of as a northern quality. Oh my gosh, can we talk about La Nina though? Yes, we can and we shall. But read in that way, Delmok seems to be almost a a a metaphor for two parts of Jones's own heritage and history.
00:26:20
Speaker
And given that the main character moral throughout the book struggles with being a divided person, a person in two halves, is what his father's dying words to him as he tells moral he's in two halves, and he needs to bring them together somehow. yeah I wondered if the the two halves of Dale Mark were speaking as well to the the fairly common United Kingdom experience of ah having pieces of yourself from all over the place. A United Kingdom but also a divided kingdom very much. Yeah, absolutely. And Morrill is a very divided character.
Complex Relationships: Clennan and La Nina
00:26:57
Speaker
And a divided character doesn't like to think of himself that way. And mean he does think of himself that way frequently, but he, at least at the beginning of the book, as you said, identifies himself so much more
00:27:08
Speaker
with Clinton and with the big expansive idealized North where everyone is equal and everyone talks freely to each other. But we do learn if Clinton is sort of the representative of the North here, we do learn that that's something of a pretense or at least and perhaps not the entire truth. because And nothing that Clinton does or says is the entire truth. I mean, it's always all the truth. And it's always all a little bit of a lie. He's always putting on a show.
00:27:37
Speaker
And we also learn through Clennan's relationship with Lanina. Do we want to tell the story of how Clennan and Lanina met? I think it's important to understanding these characters. Yeah. ah So Clennan tells a story early on, which we learned that he's told hundreds of times, which is I think a very familiar experience that anyone has with their parents of them telling the same story hundreds of times. of When he met Lanina, which was he was hired to play at her wedding.
00:28:06
Speaker
She was a an aristocratic southerner. She was about to marry ah the Earl Ganner, ah who Clinton makes a point of getting his name consistently wrong as part of the joke of the story. And he saw La Nina, decided that he was in love with her at first sight, and played the big quitter for her, the big magic quitter that when you play it expresses truths?
00:28:31
Speaker
question changes the minds of people around you causes them to believe that the quitter is magic. He thinks of it as just a quitter. And indeed, Glenn does reveal that actually, this is the only time he's ever able to use the magic in the quitter. Yes, is to make Lenina fall in love with him. He plays for Lenina. He asks Lenina in a song if she'll marry him instead.
00:28:56
Speaker
ah He meets her afterwards. She says yes. And then he plays a very, very clever trick on Earl Ganner. Ganner says, how can I reward you for your wonderful playing? He says, give me what you have in your hand, which is, of course, he's holding La Nina's hand and often away they go.
00:29:11
Speaker
And what becomes increasingly clear over the rest of the book is that La Nina is miserable ever after this. He's, you know, Clinton tells the story over and over again, and La Nina is silent in the way that she's always silent. And things always almost come to a head that night. They're passing by Earl Ganners, ah like the turnoff to Earl Ganners' house. And Clinton says, you know, feeling the tension build, feeling that La Nina is even more silent than usual. He kind of dares her to leave if she wants.
00:29:41
Speaker
And there's a really fraught charge moment that makes all the children really uncomfortable. And then La Nina says, Clennan, you're an idiot. And everyone laughs except La Nina. And things go on as normal.
00:29:52
Speaker
But it is totally clear that La Nina is still miserable. She's not staying with Glennon for love. um And in fact, this, this did make me think of Dog's Body as well, this idea of like this sexual ah passion, this immediate romantic love as something without much lasting power, without much force to it, like beyond that, that magical moment that first night, La Nina and Glennon are not well matched. And she is very, very unhappy to be living in a cart.
00:30:21
Speaker
she is very, very unhappy to be working against the South for Claire and remember, she's a southern aristocrat and she is working to undermine the power of the southern aristocrats. She's unhappy to have her children brought up in a life where they never wear shoes and where at one point, Britt gets a new pair of boots after Lenina marries Ghana and finally goes back to her old life, she gets good clothes for her children. And then we won't wear them because she might spoil them. Right, they're too nice.
00:30:46
Speaker
Right, so this life of poverty and hard work and risk, they're taking a huge risk taking their children with them ah every time they travel to the south on essentially ah destabilizing revolutionary mission. They've got their 11 year old in the back as they're passing out messages that would get them all hanged. And this is terrifying for I think for any mother would be horrified at this.
00:31:11
Speaker
And I'd like to go back a second to the dog's body comparison, which I think is really apt. Because in a lot of ways, and one of the things that I sort of regret saying, not saying on our dog's body episode is that when you look at dog's body from the point of view of the companion who is sort of shackled to, to serious, we might get a very different book. And I think we can, Linina is in many ways, I think a mirror of the companion. She's also described as very pale and very cold in the same way that the companion is.
00:31:36
Speaker
But unlike the the sort of partner mother, evil mother figures in Dog's Body, Leena is a good mother. She does her duty. She says, she's horrible. She's having characteristics. She is very, very, very honourable. Even when she is having a horrible time, she does what she said she would do. And she takes care of the kids. You know, she's she says, I've gone barefoot and I've learned to cook and make music.
00:32:01
Speaker
I've lived in a cart on all weathers and never complained. I've mended and cleaned and looked after you all. There were things your father did that I didn't agree with at all, but I never argued with him or crossed him." She is doing her best more, I think, than I would do in that situation. ah and you know Her concept of duty, I think, is probably not, it's not my concept of duty. But it is, she's doing her concept of duty and she is taking care of the kids. She is you know parenting these kids in the best way that she knows how.
00:32:29
Speaker
despite the fact that she's deeply unhappy doing. I gotta say if I was about to marry someone very well off that I loved and I was carted off by magic by someone who lived in a cart, I would be furious. Yeah, absolutely. And this is interesting because I think it's actually quite rare in Jones's books for the narrative to show any sympathy to this cold, unfeeling mother figure. And La Nina's deep unhappiness ah is so seldom acknowledged. I think the companion must have been very unhappy with Sirius because he sounds like a little pain to live with. du Yeah.
Jones' Personal Mythology and Storytelling
00:33:05
Speaker
And like we because we get to see La Nina after she does change her life and go back to what she was used to, we suddenly see her laughing. She's talking to him. She's having fun. She's, she's happy with her life again. And over the course of the book, moral, you know, moral at first is deeply resentful. How could she go and do this immediately after his father was dead?
00:33:26
Speaker
But increasingly over the course of the book, well, first he talks to Dagner, who is much more like Lanina than Moro is. And Dagner would have been probably quite happy staying with Lanina and with Ganner if it weren't for his responsibility to get Kialin up north. And by talking with Dagner and having these conversations, Moro was sort of increasingly able to appreciate how unhappy his mother was, but how loyal she'd been, and what her own particular virtues were that he, you know, he'd sort of taken for granted.
00:33:54
Speaker
Right. um And I think this kind of brings us to what we've been calling when we talked about it, the myth of Diana. So Diana Wynne Jones wrote a lot of books in her life, 33 books that we are planning to read through. ah And In all of them, she says this openly in her essays, she puts slices of real people. um So for example, the family that David goes to live with in eight days with Luke is a family that Jones lived with briefly for a term before there was room for her in a boarding house, her boarding school. It's incredibly funny, because I think she says, I don't think any of them ever recognize that I put them in. And then you get her son at the very end of reflections going, yes, of course, I recognize myself immediately. I think she was really annoyed at me at that point.
00:34:40
Speaker
Right. And I actually think it must have been a little bit unnerving, alarming, a little bit risky to talk to Anna Wynn-Jones and God knows, maybe you'll end up in her next book. ah But one figure that appears over and over in Jones's work is the companion, is her is Duffy, I think she is one of these as well, um is this cold, unfeeling, sexually powerful, abusive mother.
00:35:10
Speaker
And unhappy. And unhappy always. Oh, unhappy. um And it is fair to say that all of these are slices, pieces, portraits of Dinoine Jones's own mother. ah Just as the very sort of ah charismatic, performative father figure who's putting out his charm in various ways, who's always putting on a little bit of a pretense.
00:35:39
Speaker
does have a fair number of echoes of the way Diana describes her own father. Absolutely. It's tricky to to I don't I don't want to turn our conversations into armchair psychology, but sometimes it's hard to avoid it because with Diana, we do does kind of feel that she was so fucked up about her childhood. She wrote 33 books to process it and did not.
00:36:02
Speaker
and never not once I was gonna say, if ever processes it, I think it almost feels like she comes closest here at the very beginning where she's able to say, look how unhappy Lenina was.
00:36:15
Speaker
This is the kindest she ever is to the Lanina figure. um And actually, I mean, I felt very moved by it. I felt deeply sorry for Lanina and her honor and her misery. um But in terms of sort of the myth of Diana, I think the reason we called it that was because it's from an essay by her son Colin Burroughs.
00:36:34
Speaker
who talked about the fusion of the completely ordinary and the completely magical was entirely typical of my mother's way of writing. It was also how she looked at reality. Normality could never just be normality. So she got caught in traffic on the M25. It was not because it's one of the busiest roads in Europe.
00:36:51
Speaker
it's because she had her own particular travel jinx. And this idea of ah the mythologising of Jones's own life constantly coming through in her work. um You can kind of feel the annoyance there in that in that way. It's actually quite difficult to have as a trait for your mother to have. a At least quite You said I think right before we logged on, you were like, oh, Dino and Jones is Clennan, which is true.
Artistic Identity and Legacy in Music
00:37:22
Speaker
I think you can see her in a lot of characters in this book, including in all the siblings, but definitely she's also Clennan. Right, she's the performer. but I think I think above all, she's moral, but we'll come back to that.
00:37:34
Speaker
Or maybe we'll talk about it now. No, I wanted to just speaking about Jones's parents and the way she describes them. So they were both teachers. Annoying Jones, brilliant name, very Welsh name. Annoying Jones seems to have been this huge, expansive, ah magical personality. And his wife was um a very, very clever woman who did not on the whole wish to spend her life cooking and cleaning for this man.
00:38:02
Speaker
who didn't enjoy motherhood. That seems to have been very clear, she was not a happy mother. And the two of them together ran an educational institution in a weird little village. um And the way Jones describes her childhood is that she was parentified, she and her younger sisters lived in a shack at the back of the garden. um She had to stay up all night looking after her sisters when they were ill because her parents wouldn't do anything. You can see anger bleeding through when she writes about it. ah But interestingly, um again, going back to her son's remarks on the on the story, so that's not how my aunts remember it. And of course, the younger siblings in a family with a parentified eldest do experience their parents differently. 100%. And we've seen that come up this idea of the parentified eldest, the parentified child, as we've said, it's in ochre downstairs, it's in dog's body,
00:38:57
Speaker
It's here again to a certain extent in Delmark, but it's here in Delmark because the parents are gone for reasons that are outside of their control to a certain extent. Yeah, I think in this one, Clennan and Lanina are less out and out culpable than say the parental figures in dog's body, or um in eight days of Luke. Yeah, and then La Nina both have other concerns, other things they care about, and good and important things that they care about, like Clinton's desire to fight for the values of the north is something moral agrees with. But it doesn't mean that like, he loses his father, his father is murdered one morning next to next to a lake when he's slightly drunk. And moral is just left
00:39:45
Speaker
to stagger on as best he can, carrying his father's a huge bass quitter. Right. And then he loses his mother, although ah he spends, you you know, he even from from the first part when basically they run away, they run away on the morning of the Nina's wedding. And he spends a lot of the book thinking, did my mother abandon me? Or did I abandon her? Have we? Which of us did wrong by the other?
00:40:09
Speaker
And sort of comes to the conclusion that he is the one who abandoned her because he couldn't bring himself to live in the way that she wanted him to live. Yeah, absolutely. um And so this is part of Morrell's existence in two halves, I think, the way he's torn between his mother and his father, um much more drawn to his father, perhaps, but perhaps also aware that his mother is much more worthy of sympathy. Yes.
00:40:35
Speaker
And that sort of gives us a backwards view on Clinton, who is this idealized figure, as perhaps slightly less idealized than he looks through Morrill's eyes. They're both complicated people, but whole and interesting people in a way that's hard to see when you're their child. Yeah, that's it, exactly. And where is the... there's as a bit where Morrill is thinking about how he and his siblings all are different parts of their parents.
00:41:02
Speaker
He had to admit he had deserted Lenina. He had gone off and left her when she had been trying to make them happy. And going off like that, he'd been trying to deny the southern part of him all the strict, honourable things, which were the good aspect of the South. It did not do to deny them, even though he had only been doing it out of loyalty to Clennan. Clennan was all performance. So that's not quite the bit I was thinking of, but I do think it's relevant to to what we're saying here because it's all part of moral sort of divided self. Yeah.
00:41:30
Speaker
And it's also part of the divided self. We want to talk about the different siblings and the way they experience art because that also ties in with that sort of divided self. All of the the siblings are artists, but all of them are different kinds of artists.
00:41:45
Speaker
And it's it's very much a book about art creation performance. So sort of starting with the family show, which Glennon runs entirely his own way. And it becomes clear later on that actually, Glennon has almost been holding his children back from finding their full potential.
00:42:01
Speaker
by insisting on doing the show his way, even though his way is very good. right So to begin with, the family musical performance ah is, Glennon does a ah great big loud booming voice, Glennon tells the stories, Glennon calls out what they're doing next, he is that both the the but he's the ringmaster as well as the star performer.
00:42:21
Speaker
He puts Daguerre on for a little bit to perform his own compositions, then pulls him off again. He puts Brit on to sing, then pulls her off again. He gets moral to perform some of the what are called the old songs, which are revealed as compositions from centuries ago ah by the- Moral doesn't do solos. Right. He doesn't as in income you know in conversation with his father, as a partner to his father, but unlike Daguerre and Brit, he doesn't get put on the stage to sing by himself.
00:42:49
Speaker
Right. He's the youngest, and he's not ready. Or perhaps he's not being allowed to be ready. So the old songs are supposedly the work of this legendary musician, Osfameron. And Morul is actually named after him. His full name is... Definitely not, Merlin.
00:43:05
Speaker
Yep, Tanimoral Ospamaron. And in ah one of the stories Clennan tells early on in the book, ah we hear the tale of how Ospamaron used his magic to call the dead back to life, ah the Adon, the heir to Delmarche Crown, um and then to make the mountains move to create a border between the south and the north.
00:43:29
Speaker
and moral is deeply interested in these stories. And he's constantly thinking about how different his own dull, ordinary, everyday life to the the world of myth and story that Ospamaron inhabits. But when he performs Ospamaron songs, he does not like them. And I am going to pull one of these out because it really jumped out at me. Yeah.
00:43:51
Speaker
So the first verse of Ospamaron's song we hear quite early in the book, the adon's hall was open, through it, swallows darted, the soul flies through life. Ospamaron in his mind's eye knew it, the bird's life is not the man's life. And this is what I was saying earlier about the the the English influences on this book. This is this is out of venerable bead.
00:44:14
Speaker
because this is the famous image of the life of the the pagan soul being like a swallow flying through a lighted hall, um that minute of existence and then gone. So that is the first verse and we get that and then there's, it's not until quite a lot later in the book that when Morals performing that we actually hear the second verse of the song. So at first Ospamram brings up this idea of life as a flash that's then gone again. But then, Osfamaron walks in the eye of his mind. The blackbird flew there. He would not let the blackbird's song go by. His mind's life can keep the bird there. This is Jones' original poetry here, and that's actually not something she does very much, but that verse to me seems to read us about the power of art to create
00:45:11
Speaker
immortality, um a lasting ah power, ah something that stands sort of outside the immediate, the normal, the, um if you like, the the doomed, everyday life, follow dice, the minute it leaves the hall. Ospamaron keeps the Blackbird, Blackbird song in his mind, and so keeps it alive.
00:45:33
Speaker
Yeah, and there's something about the way that... moral is so he loves the myths, but he can't he doesn't want to perform them directly as they are. He doesn't enjoy performing the old songs in the old style. Midway through, when he gets you know he has to go on stage,
00:45:49
Speaker
for the first time on his own, and hes able to ah sort of he on the song in a different way. He does a different kind of performance, not yet being yet expert and not anyway liking the noise the old fingering made.
00:46:06
Speaker
He found he had been unconsciously modifying it into a star which was not old, not new, but different. Osfameron's jerky rhythms became smoother, a moral felt that if he could have spared time to attend to them, he might almost have understood the words.
00:46:19
Speaker
Yeah, and this is so reminiscent of the way that Diana would do it herself and her essays about pulling old myths into contemporary stories talks about the need to make those stories contemporary in order to get through to children. ah She can't, you know, she talks about story time and how story time is always the present time. She doesn't want to write Arthur Iana that's set in the age of Arthur or about Knights in Shining Armor. She doesn't want to write a Norse myth story that's set in, you know, Old Norway. She wants to set it now in the present so that she can put her own particular present-day slant on it and and pull out what's still relevant contemporarily.
00:46:56
Speaker
Right. And what really comes out as the as you read the end of the book is that moral has spent his whole time thinking, oh, everything's gone so ordinary in
Morrell's Journey: Artistic Voice and Truth
00:47:04
Speaker
Delmark. Nowadays, nobody is going around ah making mountains move. And then the climax of the book moral makes the mountains move using the power of the Twitter. Also, he discovers that he is ospamaron, that Kialin, who he's been transporting north this whole time is the Aedon, because that is always the title of the heir of this northern earl. And his sister Manalia Bryd, his sister Bryd is also Manalia Bryd, who's this other legendary figure. Actually, he's been living in myth the whole time that what he thought was ordinary, everyday, boring life was always deeply mythic. And this brings me to um the moment when Morrow encounters Kialin's father at last and shows him the magical quiddah.
00:47:46
Speaker
And ah the Earl says, I used to think Clennam was boasting when he said it was Osmemorhons, but I wasn't much of a hand at the old writing in those days. His square, practical-looking finger pointed to a line of swirls and dots made of slivers of mother of pearl. Here it says, I sing for Osmemorhon. And there, his finger moved to another line of signs, it says, I move in more than one world. Yeah.
00:48:12
Speaker
that I think is the killer line for this book. It's moving in more than one world, moving in both the everyday world and the mythic world, because they come closer and become the same thing, moving in both the world of the North and the South in Dale Mark, moving between the two halves of who moral is, that is how you create art.
00:48:35
Speaker
with power. You could almost say it's now here and also nowhere. That's jumping ahead! And one thing, so we've talked about Dagner, who's the oldest sibling, who makes new songs, which is the thing that Morrill thinks he can't do. And Dagner is also the only one of the siblings whose name does not show up in any of the myths. Like Dagner also has a long name, it's Daskadlin Hen Dagner.
00:49:01
Speaker
which presumably comes from some other story, but he's not part of the myth of the Aedon and Asfameron and Menaliabrid. He writes new songs, he's not interpreting the old songs, and he gets arrested and packed off in the middle of the story. He can't be allowed to continue, he's not part of this myth as much as he's doing something new and interesting and contemporary, that's not what the book is doing. Right, because the book is about retreading the myths and making them new. And there there is in fact the moment when moral realizes that fails to realise even as he's doing it, he is composing something new. So his final performance, at the end of the book, they are running for the north running for the fortress that guards the northern border, just ahead of the first line of the southern invasion, created by the actual villain of the book, who we barely mentioned.
00:49:47
Speaker
i hate He's not very important, is the thing. He doesn't actually do very much. So much a sort of tight and close family drama. But the actual thing is mostly important as part of the family drama because he's La Nina's cousin. Right. he's And ah one of the things that moral is uncomfortable about is the similarities between him and La Nina and therefore between him and moral himself. ah hu Right. So they are running for the border ahead of Earl Tholian's invading army.
00:50:14
Speaker
um And they are only just going to make it. And this is the point at which Morrill is finally understanding what he can do with the power of the Quiddah. So he performs a marching song, which makes it seem as if there are far more northern soldiers than there actually are. But even that isn't enough. And they make it just to the border and then the horse. Oh, no, the horse either the horse that Morrill loves who's been their guide throughout this whole book.
00:50:44
Speaker
Right. And this sort of is what is genuinely a major character from the first page. It's the family's very sensible, intelligent horse who has a nose for a good campsite, a nose for danger. And when you live in a cart, your horse matters. And moral in particular feels real closeness to this horse. And this actually I think does run again a dog's body and this closeness between children and animals, both of whom are victims of whatever the adults around them are doing.
00:51:14
Speaker
and can't really exercise control. And there are multiple seasons where Oedob is like, we're in trouble, we need to leave. And the very most people who do not listen, and then something happens. If they'd only listened to Oedob, none of this book would have happened. True.
00:51:29
Speaker
absolutely true. ah But anyway, so at this sort of final desperate escape from the invading Southern Army, Olog panics because he's surrounded by soldiers and shouting and confusion. And this is a lot for any horse. ah He very sensible thing to do in that situation, honestly. Yeah, ah he rears and by sheer bad luck, a stray bullet from the Southern Army goes through the horse's head and the horse is killed.
00:51:55
Speaker
um and good the big brown body falls down at Morrill's feet and that is when Morrill loses his temper. He says that does it. He's lost his father, he's lost his mother, he's lost his older brother and now they've killed his horse and this is the point at which Morrill climbs up the hills. He doesn't go into the fort, he climbs up on the hill so he can see the whole invading army and he starts to play the quiddah and he performs something new that is his own. and He doesn't realise that it's new and his own as he's performing it because it's too important just to perform it as it is. And it's something that's true. And that's what he's realised about the quitter is that its power comes from telling the truth, the power of art, if you like comes from telling the truth.
00:52:40
Speaker
But it's almost, it's sort of the truth, but it's not quite the truth. He sings, and at the end, the magic spell is he speaks all the horrible things that have happened to them. He speaks of the injustices that have happened to Kialin and Konian. He talks about the murder of his father. He talks about the arrest of his brother and the war. He doesn't talk about the horse. Right. When it's all about the horse.
00:53:05
Speaker
so he In fact, later, he feels guilty about this. He thinks he's cheated the quitter that actually, if you use art to tell a truth that isn't the whole truth, it's going to come back for you. It's going to get you some way. I love, I love the poem. Again, um Jones is writing in her own words, but it this is Anglo-Saxon, the literature of poetry. So it's like, yeah, Arlen and Konyan were caught in a storm. The one you hanged in Holland had not harmed any anyone, nor had Kialin when you caught him. This is for Konyan first.
00:53:36
Speaker
Unlucky Clennan lies by a lake in Markind. The singer used stab on suspicion only and prevented him performing. This is for the porter, Clennan. There was no mercy shown by the magistrate in Neifdale to Dastgandal and Handagner. There was death in the south and weeping in the uplands. Now war comes north and all through Tholian. This is for Tholian.
00:53:59
Speaker
She knows what she's doing. ah that's absolutely i mean She has such fun with language in this book. She doesn't usually get to do the Tolkien thing of writing her own poetry. Yeah, and she's really, really enjoying herself.
00:54:14
Speaker
Morrell's not enjoying himself. Morrell sings the song and then the mountains come down and crush numerous people. Morrell's body count is higher than anybody else's in Tehano and Jones so far. Right. ah So Morrell literally does what his ancestor, the the wizard Osfamaron, did centuries before and uses magic to make the mountains move and create a new border between North and South and right. He crushes this invading army so that Olab has company in death.
00:54:44
Speaker
And it is pretty spectacular, and pretty horrible. And moral immediately afterwards says, I just did something awful, didn't I burst into tears? Because he did. Merle Absolutely. He knows he he feels the power of what he's done. And he knows deeply profoundly that he did it because he was sad about his horse.
00:55:06
Speaker
But I think, although Morrell himself feels that he's done something wrong, I don't know that the narrative agrees with him. I think this is a book about, again,
00:55:17
Speaker
injustices happening to children. And had the point that children will eventually reach after enough injustices heaped on them. Yes, the book has deep sympathy for morals break for morals. he is a renant And it's weird because okay, I think if Delmarque was written today, a contemporary ah genre would be trying to make it a YA book. So they couldn't age them all up a bit. I'm trying to make more of a high fantasy book.
00:55:44
Speaker
ah So it couldn't there be a bit more of ah the politics, the drama, um the world building. Can we see a bit more of that? But they've said it's a very, very, the word I keep coming back to is simple. It's a very simple story. It's a very tightly focused story. It's just these children on their cart with the quitter. There's the title. I do hate that. and so I do think ah you instead. I don't like it. i But it's this very, very simple and focused story about a child who loses everything, becoming and more and more unhappy. And then, like one step to the left, a fantasy drama is happening worthy of any YA story, you could make Kialin the hero. um yeah you can You could make Britt the heroine. And in fact, Jones's
00:56:32
Speaker
ah editor tried to encourage her for book two to write a book about bread. And George just refused. ah Book two is much more interesting than that. Yes, I'm very excited to get there, which we will in just a couple of episodes. We will. But carton quitter is so I'm trying to find a word as I it's simple. It's usually simple.
00:56:57
Speaker
it is about the suffering of this one child and the enormous consequences of that suffering expressed through art. And it's not, I think it's really important to say, it's not a classic hero's journey. It's not, you know, it's been compared to Tolkien and we've compared it a bit to Tolkien, but it's it's not really a Tolkien kind of fantasy. Oh, not at all. No, on a language level, yes. But on ah on a storytelling level, no, that's not what she's doing at all.
00:57:26
Speaker
Yes, and it's not a coming of age story. I'm going to go back to the Mendelssohn book again, ah which says I think quite rightly that Jones refuses to allow epiphanies like Moro's realization that he's in two halves to form passages into adulthood. Adulthood is not wondrous. um it's It's not about, it's not a YA. It's not about Moro going through these experiences and coming out and as ah as an adult. The end of the book is that Moro goes off into another apprenticeship.
00:57:52
Speaker
he's going to leave and go off and learn you know with another singer to do what he loves best, which is continue traveling between the North and South. Neither is the right place for him. I found fascinating because Morrill spends the whole book daydreaming of the North, but the North he imagines, this sort of green, warm place where he walks under rowan trees, doesn't exist. When we all see the North, they arrive at Hanart, which Morrill has always longed to go to. It's ah it's a big bustling city.
00:58:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's a lovely city. It's a friendly place. ah He likes it there. The culture suits him better than the south. But it's not what he dreamed of this sort of mythic place in his mind doesn't exist in either of the real Dale marks.
Conclusion: Self-Discovery and Cultural Heritage
00:58:36
Speaker
It is another world if you like a mythic world. And when he dreams of it at various points, which he does during the first part of the book, the magical quitter makes a sort of awful muzzy out of tune sound. Because the quitter knows that the sort of the North that he's imagining is not the truth. And it's not even the kind of part truth or adapted truth that he uses at the end. It's not yeah the kind of artistic half truth. It's just nostalgia for a place that doesn't exist. Merle It has to be true to have power. um That's what keeps coming out of this to me. um But that that is and then moral chooses to leave this character who's in two halves, Clennan
00:59:16
Speaker
tells him he's got to bring his two halves, his divided self together to fight his power. Actually, moral goes on being divided, he doesn't belong in the south, he gets north and finds he doesn't belong in the north either. yeah A person of two worlds, a person also of like this mythic art world in the real world, a traveller, an outsider, wherever he goes, and he stays that way. And he chooses to leave alongside ah the singer Hesterfan, rather than try to make a life for himself in the north. Yeah, Clinton is wrong, and Clinton is wrong several times in this book. I think the one true thing that the villain Tholian says, at one point he says to Morrill, never try to carry on like your father, it's stupid and it never pays. If I had copied my father, I wouldn't be here with an army. Now we don't want Tholian to be here with an army, but so much of this book is about
01:00:06
Speaker
the children of Clennan attempting to copy Clennan in their various ways and failing because none of them are quite like Clennan and none of them can immediately step into Clennan's shoes and become him. And trying to do that undoes them one by one, until moral at last has to completely reject his father's advice in order to come into his own power. Right, you can't be your father, you can only be yourself. And there is, I've lost the quote, but it's a moment when moral thinks he's going to have to find out who he is and then do it that way.
01:00:34
Speaker
ah But he doesn't know yet. And you're right, it's not YA. He doesn't find out by the end. He does unlock the magical power of the quitter. But it's not really a happy moment. He's scared of it. He's ter terrified. As he should be because he has, again, this is a very, very high body count for an 11 year old. Yeah.
01:00:53
Speaker
um I think we should say, by the way, though, that the body count, while we're thoroughly spoiling the book, in the end the body count does not include Dagner. Dagner ends up fine. Yeah, that's very important to me. Dagner is fine. Dagner is, in fact, the Earl, the new Earl, because Tholian died and all his heirs died, and only Dagner still has cousins. This is one of the actual genuine points of comedy in the book. He turns out he's like, hey, i guess what? I'm the new Earl. Nothing will possess them to have me.
01:01:21
Speaker
and But he also is, Dagner is rescued by La Nina and La Nina's new husband. um Right, so La Nina's choice of going to her first love, going to the life of power that she was born for, going to a southern aristocrat is what saves Dagner. ah Because within the world the south to get him out of that prison, you need that power. um And La Nina's choice to embrace that power is the only reason Dagner survives. that's And La Nina It's just so much more sympathetic to this cold mother figure than she ever is elsewhere. And Lanina sends a letter at the end. She sends a letter to her children up north. Oh, it's so sad. Really heartbreaking. So first, Dagna says, well, she heard that the mountains moved and said, oh, they must have got north then. So there's that awareness that Lanina does actually understand something about moral that no one else did. Lanina hears the mountains and moved and goes, ah, that must have been moral.
01:02:16
Speaker
um So there is this understanding of his power and and his his magical abilities no one else knows about. But Alina sends the letter and describes how happy she is, and the life she's having and the wonderful time she's having with Ghana and everything she's up to and this beautiful country she's living in, which is of course the country of her childhood.
01:02:36
Speaker
And Britt is very moved and says what a lovely letter, I'll keep it forever. And Morrill says it could have come from a distant acquaintance. Right. There's this way in which, again, Morrill is the one who abandoned La Nina. La Nina has an abandoned Morrill. She hears what he's done and understands him instantly. She's his mother.
01:02:52
Speaker
but he's eleven and even though he's come to this point of
Discussion Wrap-up and Episode Preview
01:02:57
Speaker
understanding the parts of himself that are likely and he uses that at the end when they're trying to get away from tholigan and he sort of unlocks this very cool calm southern as like intellectual unemotional, unemotional part. I'll tell you what it is. It's the part where moral thinks that he is a better liar than either of his siblings because he can keep that cool head. And this is in no way like self criticism or morals part. Lying at this point would save them. He's a really expert liar. I think actually to me it is reminiscent of the character of Luke in Eight Days of Luke. Oh yeah.
01:03:37
Speaker
A moral, of course, is another character who is a a young boy with red hair and a vague and dreamy expression. A terrible magic capable of terrible things and able to lie. You're not officially doing ah Jones's short story, Carol Anair's 100th Dream. And if we were, we wouldn't be doing it yet because it's written a lot later. But that is a so story about reusing characters in your heart. And I think Jones might have reused this one. Yeah.
01:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's another connection I never would have thought to make until you pointed it out, but I think you're 100% right. But then, despite the fact that he he's able to access the parts of himself that are like La Nina and value them, at the end he still can't make that connection to her. We, the reader, are able to see all the ways in which she can connect to him. But he reads the letter and it's like it could have been written from anybody.
01:04:29
Speaker
Right. But divided self is never resolved. And in fact, almost can't be resolved if moral is to go on being who he is, the the artist he wants to be. Yeah.
01:04:41
Speaker
Should we call it that? Let's call it there. Thank you guys ah for listening once again. um If you've got, we now have, or officially our podcast is up on various platforms. You can subscribe to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you'd like to. And if you have questions or thoughts for us, you can email us at eight days of Diana at gmail dot.com. And next week we'll be doing a power of three. Is that right? yes Power of three next and then into Drowned Ammon and Charmed Life. yes oh the late seventies are good I'm really excited for these ones. Me too. Alright, see you next week.
01:05:16
Speaker
you next week