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FIre and Hemlock
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She realized he had sat down on purpose near the door, and she knew, perhaps without quite understanding it, that if she ran away, it would mean he had to go back into the funeral again. She was his excuse for coming out of it, so she stayed.
A man who wants to craft himself a Janet, a girl who wants to make herself a hero, and the full three hours we spend working through the powerful fictions and terrible truths that result.
[NB: themes of grooming and child abuse are woven pretty inextricably through our conversation this episode. Also, it is Three Hours Long.]
Transcript available here, and we'll be back next week for Howl's Moving Castle with another incredible guest!
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Transcript
Introduction and 'Fire and Hemlock' Overview
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm Rebecca Framow. And I'm Emily Tesh. And today we are going to be talking about Fire and Hemlock.
00:00:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah we are. my god, I'm so nervous about this one. So, Fire and Hemlock is the book that Jones' son Colin Burrow called My Mother's Best Novel.
00:00:43
Speaker
And he's an Oxford Don professor of English, so he knows something about what he's saying. ah It's a hell of a book. It's a complicated book. It's um it's a book of the heart.
00:00:54
Speaker
I think it clearly... like She talks about writing it in terms of like writing at a white heat, being unable to stop, getting up at six in the morning to write more.
00:01:06
Speaker
ah This one clearly came from somewhere very deep and very powerful in the author. ah It's amazingly complicated. ah It has a lot of like questions and problems, not like...
00:01:19
Speaker
Not in the the there's something wrong with the book way, in the this book is hard and it's asking you to do hard things and to make sense of complicated things. Although I think I'm going to, it is also a problematic book in a way that I think is really deliberate and in a way that... On purpose.
00:01:38
Speaker
She did all that on purpose. Yes.
Art, Duality, and Literary Criticism
00:01:41
Speaker
In fact, and the other thing that really jumped out to me reading Jones's own writings about fire and hemlock, and she wrote about it quite a lot, is that there's two essays where she talks about it. One where she talks in meticulous sort of liquid depth about the layers of structure and construction and ideals and previous texts that go into it.
00:02:03
Speaker
And another where she says all of that was true, but also it wasn't like that at all. Yeah. ah And this idea of like a double layer in art of complete control and intentionality and at the same time, complete uncontroll and pure control.
00:02:21
Speaker
self emotion pouring wildly onto the page i think it's quite an important idea for fire and hemlock itself and for what's happening in fire and hemlock which above all else is a book about ah double timeline double self if you like and we're coming back to that one It's a book about the double self of, i mean, it's everything in the book is about, is doubled, is about, ah is about finding a borderline away between two poles, an intermediate space.
00:02:57
Speaker
But most, I think most of all, it's a book about how art is that other space. this is I think it's part of the reason that this is so, so personal, clearly. not sure I agree.
00:03:10
Speaker
not going to be serious when you and I disagree with each other about it. There's so many readings there are like and there are a hundred different readings. And this is one of the reasons that I've been nervous about this one.
00:03:20
Speaker
There are a hundred different readings. People have read it a hundred different ways. There's been a lot written about it. probably the Jones that has attracted the most scholarly attention in the way that say Howl's Moving Castle which we come to next in the series ah is like her most like commercially ah popularly successful book Fire and Hemlock is a book that people with lit crit brain look at and and go ooh oh I've got some things to say ah so one of the things I'm nervous about actually is that a lot of really clever people have already talked about this book and they're clearer than me yes same
00:03:54
Speaker
I don't know what the structuralists think. I'm the opposite of Missy Potter. And she knew, like, this was book is different from everything else we've done this season. She knew that this book was going to be different, I think. She structures it differently. She talks about it differently. She talks about this book more than she talks about any of her other books.
00:04:16
Speaker
She considered it her masterwork. I think it's pretty clear. ah Even aside from Colin Burroughs saying it's her masterwork, which is really quite generous of him because he's in it and not in a flattering way. We'll come back to that because it's very funny.
00:04:28
Speaker
um This book is, you know, as well as anything else, this book is a master's thesis. It's everything, you know, what she writes about it. She writes about everything that went into it. And you could structure course just on the texts that go into this book. We pulled out a reading list and we were like, I was initially planning to try and do some of the reading list. And I looked at it, was like, I don't have time.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah. bo This is like a good four or five months, nothing but reading books for fire and hemlock. We could do a whole bonus season that's just reading books for fire and hemlock.
00:05:03
Speaker
That would be amazing.
00:05:07
Speaker
but I'm gonna real quick run down the reading list because it's so long and I think it's really funny. This is every book that is mentioned in the novel, which is not all the books that she talks about as having inspired the novel. Just the books mentioned in the novel itself. Just the ones that are specifically mentioned by name in Fire and Hemlock, which is by no means all the books that are in Fire and Hemlock. Right.
00:05:26
Speaker
It is... da bo five children in it the treasure seekers willoby chase the box of delights dr the sword in the stone the hundred and one dalmatians henrietta's house black beauty sherlock holmes uncle tom's cabin the three muskette orcock just generally as a writer the lord of the ranks king arthur Books of Fairy Stories, Kim, The Man Who Was Thursday, Perilondra, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The 39 Steps, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Oxford Book of Valids, The Castle of Adventure, and The Golden Bough, with chapters laid out in excruciating detail. Yes, specific chapters of The Golden Bough, which I did actually then go to. That was the...
00:06:02
Speaker
I figured that felt so central to what she was doing. I had to go and pick at some Fraser. And then, unfortunately, Fraser is so racist that it's really hard to read um in that plumbing 19th century way. But nonetheless, I did get some useful stuff out of there. And we'll talk about that when we get there. Yes.
00:06:20
Speaker
So what is Fire and Hemlock about, Becca?
Plot and Themes of 'Fire and Hemlock'
00:06:25
Speaker
Fire and Hemlock is... let's see i'm lucky Coming of English Level. It's about a girl from a difficult home life whose parents are getting divorced and she makes friends with an older man at a funeral and they retain a connection throughout the most crucial years of her adolescence, I would say.
00:06:46
Speaker
And then that friendship turns fraught. And then she forgets him for many years and gets a whole completely different set of boring memories substituted over those crucial years when she was being shaped by this friendship.
00:07:02
Speaker
until the end of the book happens, and the beginning of the book, ah which suddenly remembers everything that's happened, realizes that she's been living out, more or less, the story of Tamlin at the most simple level ah in all along, and has to go rescue him from the evil fairies who've been dominating his life.
00:07:23
Speaker
Is that the plot? Is that the plot? Is that the plot? Okay, so Fire and Hemlock is the story of Polly's coming of age. coming of age Oh, Fire and Hemlock is a love story.
00:07:36
Speaker
Oh, Fire and Hemlock is a retelling of Tam Lin. Well, how about this? Fire and Hemlock is Lolita. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So this is the thing. There been a number of fantastic, fantastic essays written about this book.
00:07:51
Speaker
Most of them and understand the book much better than I do. Most of these essays do not talk very much about the fundamental problem of the book that I think it's not problem. the book It's the point.
00:08:04
Speaker
hello So the book is Tamlin. That is one of the things, one of the many things that the book most explicitly is. It's Tamlin, it's Thomas the Rhymer. The sections of the book, the book is broken into four parts and many chapters, and all these chapters are headed with a quote from Tamlin or Thomas the Rhymer, so you get the point.
00:08:23
Speaker
This is Tam, know, this this is the story. This is the story of a man who is in thrall to the Queen of Faerie who needs to be rescued by a young woman. This is the book of a man who is trying to build his own Janet.
00:08:34
Speaker
He knows he's in Tamlin or Thomas the Rhymer. And from the first, he's like, the only way out of this is if someone loves me enough to pull me out. So I'd better make that happen.
00:08:48
Speaker
And the person he's, I think we've decided he's 22 23 when the book when the book begins And when he is 22 or 23, he meets the protagonist who is 10 years old. Nine.
00:08:59
Speaker
She's nine. Because she's 18 at the end of the book and it's nine years later. Who is nine years old and immediately recognizes her as the Janet that he's been looking for.
00:09:11
Speaker
All of the books that we've just reeled off are books that he sends her as part of the process of creating the hero who can rescue him out of a nine-year-old girl.
00:09:22
Speaker
Right. Right. So here's a thesis for you, a reading of what's going on with Polly and Tom. This is the story of a mentor relationship and a hugely important mentor relationship, one that shapes who Polly becomes. And in fact, losing her memories of Tom as she discovers she's done at the start of the book.
00:09:45
Speaker
cuts out a huge part of who she is, a huge part of her life, all the fantasy and excitement, all the joy of her life, all these books she's loved and read that have shaped her into the person she is at the end and also the start of the book. The end is the beginning.
00:09:59
Speaker
That's T.S. Eliot. That's Four Quartets because the book is structured around four quartets. I'm going to come back to that because I think this book is also... In a way, spellcoats, let's take another run at it. um Let's take another run at several of her books, but carry on. Yeah.
00:10:15
Speaker
So Polly and Tom, Polly and Tom, it's a mentor relationship and it's and some is ah beautiful mentor relationship in some ways. It's it's the fantasy of you're a very lonely little nine-year-old girl. You're quite unhappy at home. You've got ah parents with who are divorcing and it's a very fraught and unpleasant divorce in which you are repeatedly asked to take sides.
00:10:34
Speaker
And into your life comes an adult who understands and who cares. Yes. And Tom from the first is an adult who understands and who cares and who values the things that Polly most likes about herself, her great imagination, um her ability to see the fantastic in the world and to enjoy it and to expand on it.
00:10:56
Speaker
Tom nourishes this in her, encourages it in her, sends her the kinds of books an imaginative little girl needs to grow. and that That reading list ah was overwhelmingly a list of, interestingly, I think not a list of books you'd necessarily send to a little girl in the mid 1980s when this is published, maybe to a little girl in the 1950s when Jones was a girl or teenager.
00:11:23
Speaker
Books that Diana Wynne-Jones,
Character Dynamics and Relationships
00:11:25
Speaker
notably as part of her sort of self-myth, self-creation, did not have. One of the stories that she tells frequently about herself is that she didn't have books growing up.
00:11:34
Speaker
Her parents wouldn't buy her for wouldn't buy them for for them. They had to hoard them. They had to find them where they could. And most of these children's books from that she would have liked to have in the 1950s are things she did not read until she was older and was reading them to her children.
00:11:47
Speaker
Right. And particularly, I thought it was striking that E. Nesbitt, Five Children and the Treasure Seekers, is something that comes up very, very early. And Nesbitt, I think, sometimes is underestimated as an influence on fantasy fiction generally. But Nesbitt's children books are all about children's encounters with the fantastic and the strange in their everyday lives, in their normal child worlds.
00:12:08
Speaker
Okay. So Polly gets this this beautiful wish fulfillment of, imagine a good dad, A father who cares, ah who wants you to grow, but not just a father, ah teacher a friend, someone who plays with her, who joins in her games of imagination and let's pretend, which used to be the role that her father took in his life before he left.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yes. All the way back in Dog's Body, we talked about the father-husband. Yes. ah We sure did. So but I have no, I'm still going somewhere with this. So Tom is a mentor, but Tom is clearly from the very first and quite explicitly from the very first, a potential lover.
00:12:55
Speaker
And in fact, when he comes back from that funeral where they meet very early in the book, he takes Polly back to her house and granny, Polly's grandmother looks at him,
00:13:06
Speaker
and ask the question, what's he got to do with you? Why is he interested in you? And it's very clear from the first that she's aware that this is a potentially dangerous relationship. This is an adult man taking a strong interest in a pretty little girl. And Polly's always described as pretty.
00:13:26
Speaker
Yes. This is an erotic relationship, a relationship characterized by erotic desire all the adult for the child from the beginning.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yes. One of the first things about their conversation, their first, cut there's a lot in this. I really want to take a close look at this first meeting because I think everything that happens throughout the rest of the book is prefigured in this first meeting.
00:13:50
Speaker
And one of those things is Polly. We're were're in Polly's head the entire book. This is not often Diana Wynne-Jones does a kind of shifting point of view. You slide in and out of people's heads. Not that often, actually. she she's She's a master of the close point of view.
00:14:03
Speaker
um But certainly this book feels much more so tightly narrow focused than, say, yes, yes. We are never in anyone else's head but Polly's. And Polly says, Polly, nine years old, says, she knew, of course, by this time, that she was starting to flirt with Mr. Lin.
00:14:18
Speaker
Mom would have given Polly one of her long, heavy stares if she had been there. Because one of the other things about this book that is quite clear is that Polly's mother is jealous of Polly.
00:14:29
Speaker
Polly's mother sees this beautiful little girl as a threat all throughout the book, and that... fraught relationship is one of the center poles of the book because as you've said, Diana L. Jones often doesn't rate beautiful little girls.
00:14:43
Speaker
That's not a thing that she's usually interested in. I think this book is really striking in how much and how often it dwells on Polly's beauty. On Polly's body generally. We know a lot about Polly's physicality, about her appearance, about how it changes, about how she goes through puberty.
00:15:00
Speaker
Because, right, this book is always about Polly as desire object, and she knows that about herself. She is flirting. She's doing it on purpose. And I think this is one of the times when Jones's strong insistence on child as agent, as person, as a someone fully in control of their own thoughts and beliefs and desires can be really disturbing to read. Yes.
00:15:25
Speaker
I find it profoundly disturbing. I was too old the first time I read Fire and Hemlock and like going around like general poll of my friends who read Jones. Did you read Fire and Hemlock as a 13 year old or did you read it as an adult?
00:15:39
Speaker
Because it makes a big difference to how you respond to the book. I read Fire and Hemlock for the first time when I was nine, and I was too young. I didn't get it. I did not appreciate it. I didn't enjoy it. I went back to her much more straightforward fantasy books.
00:15:52
Speaker
I read it again when I was, i think, 14 or 15, and I loved it. I identified so I didn't see anything problematic or disturbing about the book. I was exactly the right age.
00:16:03
Speaker
Then I haven't... I don't think I've read it since. Right. Because you think back on it, and you're like, oh Oh boy. But actually, I think you do you do need to go back to it. You do need to rethink it. I'm still talking about the problem of Polly and Tom, of course.
00:16:19
Speaker
ah This is the the thing that hit me when I reread it this time. It's like they are doing a specific thing, this erotically charged mental relationship between the adult and the child, in which, crucially, Polly always insists that she is treated like a boy.
00:16:35
Speaker
From the very first time she and Tom begin their let's pretend games together, Polly is absolutely certain for I'm a boy for the purpose of this game. She is pretending to be a boy.
00:16:47
Speaker
This is the the the layers of pretense and of liminality and of gender games are really baked into this book. So the first thing that Polly and Tom start to do when they meet in the garden, the the center of their connection is Polly, Polly who's been there because she's been sent in on a let's pretend game that's gotten, that she's been sort of dared to go in there by her friend Nina and we'll talk more about Nina.
00:17:11
Speaker
who is her let's pretend friend. And so she's, ah you know, Mr. Lin is an adult trying to, and they they they start to ask each other, what do you like best to do? They almost start to ask each other to do it at the same time, which is the first kind of sign of their connection.
00:17:25
Speaker
And Polly says, what I like best, apart from running and shouting and jokes and fighting, is being things. Being things? Like what? He sounded wistful and mystified. Making things like heroes up with other people than being them, Polly explained, and then they start to make up a set of heroes that they are.
00:17:43
Speaker
And the hero that Polly is, is a girl pretending to be a boy. Yes. So she i she invents these identities for herself and Tom. Tom is the hero. Tan cool.
00:17:55
Speaker
ah Notice, I think the ah the tan syllable echoing Tanamil all the way back in spell codes, echoing some other characters we've seen around the place as well. Tan cool talk will, I think. yep um uh takroy in a future although also uh she diana identifies tomlin and uh the goon erskine as coming out of the same character the same person in her head which i think is really very very tall very lonely man yes uh i will come back to that as well what was i saying so they um tan cool
00:18:28
Speaker
Tankul, right. So it's not pretending to be these heroes. Specifically, Polly is interested in actually being them. That's always how she phrases it. And being or becoming a hero. And her idea of her own alter ego, ah the girl pretending to be a boy, is that they're trainee. They are learning.
00:18:49
Speaker
heroism They are learning their place in a heroic world and becoming the adult hero with Tom Tankool as the teacher. And Tom is actually initially like quite uncomfortable with this. He's like, maybe you could be teaching me?
00:19:03
Speaker
Polly insists, no, it's got to be that way around. And that sets the tone for their relationship over the coming year, two years of story time, novel time, which brings me back to what I think is actually happening here.
00:19:18
Speaker
which is Peter Asty specifically. And I use that term, ah the classical term. ah Peter Asty is ah the relationship between an adult man and an adolescent boy in which the adult is providing mentorship and guidance and moral and intellectual growth.
00:19:39
Speaker
And the boy is providing his beauty. yeah That's it. Yeah. yeah plum And it is the relationship which is echoed in say, well, in almost all of T.H. White's ah writings, but in particular in Sword in the Stone, which is specifically noted as one of the books Tom sends to Polly.
00:19:57
Speaker
And it's the relationship which is how The philosopher Plato describes love in the symposium, you know, that foundational Western work of philosophy on love. um ah It's a heroic relationship ah and a loving relationship and a relationship not of equals but of people who each have a role to play and it's absolutely necessary for the purpose of a peterastic relationship that Polly be a boy.
00:20:24
Speaker
um And I think a lot of Fire and Hemlock is about fitting different frameworks around Polly and Tom's relationship. So this is one of them. ah The framework of the sort the chaste courtly romance is perhaps another that you wanted to bring up.
00:20:42
Speaker
Yes. ah One of the things that is not in the reading list, but that Diana Wynne-Jones talks as being kind of her. So I think quite a lot of this book, among the other things that it's doing, is meditation on the concept of hero and meditation on the idea of a female hero in particular.
00:20:58
Speaker
What does it look like to make a female to take a girl child and make her a female hero? Is that possible? How do you do it? One of the foundational texts for Diana Wynne Jones in that line is the fairy queen.
00:21:10
Speaker
ah So I'm boldly thinking that I would do some of the reading list for this book when you read some of the fairy queens. Yeah, we both picked the longest and most complicated. How far did we get? Not as far as we ought to. Again, wholesome puzzles.
00:21:24
Speaker
But one of the tensions, the fraught tensions in books, in the chivalric romance, in the first book of the fairy queen, is the idea that you have a man and a woman and they are going adventuring together and they love each other, but they cannot love each other in a physical way. If they were going to love each other in a physical way, the idea of loving each other in a physical way ruins the ethos of it. It turns what is beautiful and righteous and chaste into something that is a sin, even though they both want to do it.
00:21:54
Speaker
um that is Which is also true of the, ah the pederastic relationship. You don't actually have sex with an aristocratic boy you were raising to manhood because that would spoil his future manhood.
00:22:08
Speaker
Right. So... think about it. Oh, do you think about it? So right, this is this tension of desire, which is fine as long as it's never fulfilled, is one of the tensions that is always hovering over Polly and Tom.
Symbolism and Narrative Structure
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, because it's always like, like you read it as now, you're like, what the fuck? She's nine. Yeah. Yeah, there's so much in the book that's like, what the fuck, she's nine. And I do, like, again, that tension is on purpose.
00:22:37
Speaker
It's on purpose! Because so much of the book is about places where, I'm sorry to use this word, I'm going use it a little, I can't help but use it in context this book, it's about liminality. It's about the border spaces in between where things are possible and where things are not possible.
00:22:53
Speaker
In fact, I would even go so far to say that Polly's childhood is one of the reasons it's possible for her to become the Janet because her enemy Tom's ex-wife the fairy queen Laurel ah the Titania the Maeve the Lorelei she's looking for an adult right She does know this story as well. Everyone in this story knows the story except to begin with Polly.
00:23:21
Speaker
So that one even has another girlfriend who is an adult and he says it was to throw Lauren off the scent. Polly's existence in the liminal space, in the not quite a woman, not quite not space, ah is what allows her to slip by unnoticed.
00:23:39
Speaker
Yeah, there is someone else in the story who doesn't know the story, which is Polly's grandmother. Polly's grandmother knows other stories, but doesn't know the story of Tamlin. And that's very important, I think, to the end of the book.
00:23:51
Speaker
We'll talk about that later because Polly's grandmother is ah Janet in multiple ways. ah and A failed Janet and a sister Janet. this This is a book where Jones really, really leans heavily on her doubling trick. that Every character has multiple echoes and resonances.
00:24:10
Speaker
So Polly is one of a group of three female friends, three teenage girls, Polly, Fiona and Nina. ah She's also part of ah sort of pattern of three generations of women, Granny, her mother Ivy and Polly.
00:24:24
Speaker
But then there's also the three love interests ah that Tom has, which is Polly and Mary and Laurel. right but and then they These sort of ah trios and layers ah mean that all of these characters have resonances with each other, which highlights different aspects.
00:24:42
Speaker
And Polly herself, jo Jones points out in her writings, Polly is a joke. The name Polly is from the Greek. Polly, meaning? many. yup It's a pun!
00:24:55
Speaker
but It's a pun! honestly think this is the thing about this book, right? Jones are clearly doing something really complicated and intellectual and structural, but also when it's Diana Wynne Jones, there is always fundamentally a joke that the whole thing is based on.
00:25:10
Speaker
And but Laurel and Ivy is also a pun. These are the fancy and the less fancy creeping parasitic leaves. ah Both of them I think are, mean, also they're both mom they're both mothers, stepmothers, and this is a book about child abuse.
00:25:29
Speaker
Yes. The problem of Polly and Tom it is partly that it's a book about child abuse, but also Tom is an abused child. We meet other young men in Laurel's orbit who are very clearly children she is grooming in order to destroy them.
00:25:43
Speaker
ah Polly's own experiences with her mother and with her father are horrific, are cruel, ah at one point nearly drive her to suicide.
00:25:54
Speaker
Yes. This is a book about the awful things that adults do to children. And central to it is the awful thing that Tom is doing to Polly, which is trying to turn her into someone one who loves him enough to save him.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yes, which echoes, you know, Tom and Polly are echoes of each other in multiple ways. And again, you you you mentioned but to to dive into it a little bit more explicitly. What we know about Tom's backstory is that like Polly, he was also, he ah unlike Polly, he's an orphan. He has no parents. Polly has parents. They're terrible.
00:26:27
Speaker
Tom has no parents. ah He was adopted by Laurel, who he then married when he was in a child, and she put him in a fancy boarding school. And then they married at what age is unclear, but by the time he is 22 or 23, we do know that, they are divorcing.
00:26:46
Speaker
So they must have married before then. um She has a picture of him as a child, as a boy around Polly's age, in her house. Polly doesn't recognize the picture of him because he's so young that she can't identify that this is Tom.
00:27:00
Speaker
And when he is a child, hang on, I want to find the description of the picture... Oh, yes. Hang on. I've got it. Okay, great. It was a slightly old-fashioned picture of a mischievously grinning fair-haired boy.
00:27:12
Speaker
Whoever he was, he looked older than Seb. Seb, who is, at this point in the story, Polly's question mark boyfriend in mid-teens. And he was too fair anyway. He was nobody Polly knew.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yet there was a sense of familiarity about the photo, as if the mirror trick had worked and Polly was going to know this boy sometime. Yes. Yes. And the thing about the the all right, the boy in the photograph did not have the same look as Mr. Lin at all.
00:27:37
Speaker
It was as if he was going to grow up in a different direction, a careless, lighthearted direction into someone more like Leslie Piper. So she has this picture of him taken before child abuse.
00:27:49
Speaker
And now she knows him as a man who is shaped by abuse. ah One of the most striking characteristics that she comes to again and again about Tom is that he is always apologizing.
00:27:59
Speaker
he is ah very ob she can' She's constantly telling him, be less obedient. Because whenever Polly says something, Tom will change course and do the thing that she says. ah And he has the way that he laughs is this a sort of ah guilty gulped off laughter. Like he's not supposed to laugh.
00:28:16
Speaker
She sort of notices every time he gives a normal laugh because most of his laughter is not normal. These are, I think these are pretty clear. Yeah. i What is Laurel was like?
00:28:27
Speaker
Yeah. ah But it's also striking that he responds to Polly who at this point, like when she's first noting this again, she is nine. He responds to Polly as if she's Laurel. Yeah. Um, Polly and Laurel kind of are each other in a very real way. I mean, they even physically resemble each other, which I always think thought was striking that they both have the same kind of sort of really dramatic blonde hair, which is the first thing Tom notices about Polly. And when she's coming up with her idea of...
00:28:55
Speaker
I'll be a girl pretending to be a boy. He's like, but you won't cut your hair, will you? Right. It's such beautiful hair. ah Mary Fields, his sort of screen girlfriend. Poor, poor Mary Fields, ah who exists in the book for nothing except to be a screen girlfriend and to be, mean, to fair to Tom.
00:29:13
Speaker
I do think that like, I think part of the tension of the book is that Tom knows that grooming up a Janet is not a good thing to do. right Tom knows what he's doing because it's what was done to him. So he knows it's wrong.
00:29:25
Speaker
Right. And so he is always trying to put these layers in between to make it safe. And Mary Fields is one of these layers. ah The first time that he and Polly meet up again. no it's the third time that they meet.
00:29:36
Speaker
He's like, great. We're going to go out driving and I'm going to take you to see my girlfriend, um which Polly hates. And ah Mary i the dofriend so hates girlfriend also hates. also hates. Mary Fields immediately clocks this as like, why why, this is weird. Why are you doing this?
00:29:52
Speaker
And they're like, and one of, mean, he's constantly trying to equalize their relationship in ways that I think are genuinely well-meant.
00:30:03
Speaker
And also a bit weird because they call the thing into question. One of the things I noticed on this read that I'd never noticed before, and during the first section of the book, they're writing letters back and forth. We get a lot of their letters verbatim with comical misspellings.
00:30:17
Speaker
Polly because she can't yet spell because she's nine, ten, I think ten by the time they're writing letters. And Tom because he's writing her letters back like I'm so sorry, I'm i'm all butterfingers, look at all my typos. so So the result is you get two letters that both look like equally bad versions of prose.
00:30:33
Speaker
As soon as Polly starts writing normal letters because she's learned how to spell, the typos disappear from Tom's letters. Oh my god. Oh, that's, you're right.
00:30:45
Speaker
Right, it's he's trying so hard to make them equal and everything he does to do that is actually more manipulative. Yeah. The harder you try to make this not weird, the weirder it gets.
00:30:58
Speaker
The weirder it gets. It is so weird to take a random small girl to meet your girlfriend and be like, this is Polly. Yeah, yeah. ae Why is there a Polly?
00:31:08
Speaker
Why is there Polly?
00:31:14
Speaker
It's weird. It's a weird thing to do to him. Oh, it's weird. Right.
00:31:20
Speaker
But again, like from the start, and this is what gets Polly involved in this at all. because So it turns out at the end, we'll talk more about the end later. Oh, we will.
00:31:32
Speaker
So the way the book works is that like the plot of the book, such as it is, and it is a very slice of life book. Mostly it is about Polly's day-to-day experiences of being a child and how the world of the imagination shapes them. And we know this because every time we are occasionally flashing back to Polly as a 19 year old, thinking back on all she's lost with being made to forget everything associated with Tom, which also includes forgetting everything associated with that world of imagination that he sort of nourished in her that made her life worth living over the course of the years between nine and 15. But the,
00:32:10
Speaker
the the Fantastical comes in. um The thing that makes this a fantasy book. ah Because as Polly and Tom sort of develop hero stories for each other, they they develop the myth of Tan, Cool, and Hero. They invent it back and forth.
00:32:26
Speaker
And at the very beginning, ah you know, they're trying to come up with it. And Tom says, you you tell me how it is. I don't know how it is. I've lost that gift of the imagination. Doesn't say so in so many words, but he's, you know, he's forgotten how to do it. He says, you guide me, you teach me.
00:32:39
Speaker
Again, trying to make it equal. And what that means is that Polly gets inextricably intertwined in what turns out to be Tom's fatal fairy gift that he was given as a curse on divorcing Laurel, ah the Thomas the Rhymer gift, that everything he says will come true in a sense.
00:32:57
Speaker
all of the stories that he's making up in some way become true. So as Tom and Polly go on, they're inventing this world and they keep finding weird evocations, reflections, mirror versions of this. Well, sometimes just straight up things from their story appear in real life. I think the really striking one is the horse.
00:33:18
Speaker
The horse. Let's talk about the horse. In fact, let's talk about the horse in terms of... I'm gonna talk about the horse and then I'm gonna talk about Hippolytus. then I'm gonna come back to the horse. yeah Okay, so one of the earliest things that Polly comes up with for Tom, and this is probably for their second meeting.
00:33:35
Speaker
ah So they've been exchanging letters and then Polly's mother goes down to London to see a divorce lawyer. She drops Polly off with Tom for the day while she goes to meet her lawyer. Side note, would you drop off your 10 year old daughter with a random man she met once at a funeral in London?
00:33:50
Speaker
And he's a terrible mother. um yeah but This is not a side note. This is intentional. Yes, this is a very dangerous thing to do with your child, hand her off to a stranger. Ivy is a bad mother. She doesn't care about Polly.
00:34:02
Speaker
ah But Polly has a wonderful time with Tom. yes And in the course of exchange letters, one of the things that Polly has told Tom is that he has a special horse. Tan Cool has a special horse. yep And he tamed a special horse and they've got a little myth about it. And they go out walking down the street in London and there's a horse.
00:34:20
Speaker
yep A really, really scary horse. yeah oh A literal horse charging down the street, panicked, terrified, about to trample Polly. And Tom does something heroic for the first time, as far as we can tell, in real life, in that he rescues the horse, calms it down, calls it lots of rude names, saves Polly's life in doing so. Polly's really upset with herself looking back on this later and just thinking, well, i wasn't heroic at all.
00:34:46
Speaker
I just ah just sat there and screamed. which is of course the role of the heroine. Right. To sit there and scream while he does something heroic. But Tom in turn says, no, you were because until I realised you were in danger, I couldn't do anything.
00:35:00
Speaker
Right. But this horse is not a complete surprise because Polly has seen something like it before. On the day of the funeral, when she met Tom at Hunsdon House, the house of the Fairy Queen, it was she discovered that Tom had the right to take six pictures away from the house and she helped him choose the pictures.
00:35:19
Speaker
yeah And Polly did a little bit of a trick, a little bit of a cheat. She took pictures from the pile that Tom wasn't supposed to have. um They were much better pictures. Yeah, they were better. ah One of them was the photograph of the title Fire and Hemlock, which Polly has kept ever since on her bedroom wall.
00:35:36
Speaker
ah The other five we find out about, the many of like the imaginings are structured around them. One of them is what Bolly describes as a Chinese picture of a horse, a picture of like great vividness and force.
00:35:48
Speaker
And this picture has come to life in the person of Tan Cool's horse right there on this street in London. There's a slippage from art to imagination to the real back and forth. And then a further slippage takes place as Tom eventually reveals he's sold the Chinese horse picture for a large sum of money and used it to buy a car. Which is also his horse.
00:36:14
Speaker
Yep. He drives it very heroically. He drives the car the car heroically. ah As in he's terrifying and no one should get in the car with him ever. but Which is I think a very funny commentary on hero business also. Yeah.
00:36:29
Speaker
But then by the end of the book, it's clear that the horse is also a symbol for something in Tom.
Mythology and Character Exploration
00:36:35
Speaker
It's his rage. It's his determination to survive. ah It's his panicked fleeing from Laurel and everything she represents. It's the danger ah that he can do both to himself, that he is both to himself and to others.
00:36:50
Speaker
but also the power he has to trample things under his feet, to trample Polly under his feet yeah in his race to get away. So the horse is like this wide range of symbols that runs all through the book.
00:37:01
Speaker
I did notice whether at the end you noticed that the horse's water is death again. Oh God, it is. The horse's water is death again. um Yeah, no, the horse turns out, Tom thinks the horse is a ah a locus of power for him. It turns out to be one of the things he needs to let go in order to survive.
00:37:19
Speaker
yeah And this is one of the things that that Polly brings to life through the magic of the curse, the gift. Her imagination is what gives Tom... power through this curse Laurel bestowed on him to make things real.
00:37:31
Speaker
yeah It's by using Polly ah that he can understand himself and make use of himself. Yes. But let me talk about Hippolytus. Talk about Hippolytus, yes.
00:37:43
Speaker
um Because one one thing that really struck me when I went from here back to the Golden Bough, ah which is the Hippolytus is one of the myths that Fraser is most interested in, this enormous work of early comparative anthropology. He's trying to explain his Roman myth fan fiction, which is a Greek myth fan fiction, which is about the myth of Hippolytus.
00:38:03
Speaker
Which is one that Joan never name checks in her many, many, many, many mischief name checks in this book, but it's got to be in there. Oh boy, it's got to be in there because Hippolytus is the story of a young man who is torn between two powerful women.
00:38:18
Speaker
or rather two powerful goddesses. ah He is sworn to the goddess Artemis, and he and Artemis have this very close and affectionate relationship built on mutual trust and shared interests. They go hunting together because that's what Artemis is all about. She's the goddess of the hunt, and she's the chaste goddess of the hunt.
00:38:36
Speaker
um She is the virgin goddess. She is utterly opposed to sex, and therefore Hippolytus also sets himself utterly opposed to sex. He also has nothing to do with Aphrodite. who's the goddess of love. So Hippolytus and Artemis are very, very happy together in what is clearly a romance, a chaste romance, a sort of tense and fraught chaste romance where if if they touched each other, it would spoil everything.
00:39:02
Speaker
a um ah Because it would just spoil everything Artemis is. She is the virgin, ah the maiden. Yep. but Aphrodite is furious because she's been insulted because she has the right to a part of any young man's life.
00:39:17
Speaker
And because she's so angry, she threw her agent, the mortal woman Phydra, who is Hippolytus's stepmother. huh sets about sets out to destroy Hippolytus through the power of sex.
00:39:33
Speaker
So Hippolytus' stepmother conceives a terrible desire for him. When he won't go for it, she accuses him of rape on the basis of this false accusation. His father, Theseus, arranges for that to have him destroyed by...
00:39:47
Speaker
I won't go into the details. Effectively, he's destroyed by water, god by the god Poseidon, and he's destroyed by his own horses. Hippolytus, the name Hippos is Greek for horse. He's deeply associated with being with horses, with being a horse rider, a horse tamer.
00:40:00
Speaker
ah So if that is not in the book, I will eat my hat, because ah Tom is this figure of the young man torn between the maiden and the sexy stepmother, yes who is also his wife.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yep. um Tom is destroyed by water very nearly through the agency of his own horse. In fact, very, very literally at the end, I'm jumping ahead, but the other, the parallel to Tom, the other figure who is at risk, the him or me that runs throughout this book is Seb, who is also a child at the beginning of the book.
00:40:34
Speaker
Laurel is his stepmother. Literally his stepmother. Laurel is his stepmother, and at the end of the book, he's going to take Tom's place as her doomed consort. step parents are integral to this book. And it is also a reflection of Polly, because one of the threads between Polly and Ivy, her mother, after, you know, in the first section of the book, Ivy is in the process of getting divorced from Polly's father.
00:40:57
Speaker
After that, Ivy takes in a series of lodgers, each of one of which she she hopes she's going to have true happiness with. We get this sequence most pointedly in the second one, where she takes in a lodger called David Bragg, who ah uses Polly to send little notes for his betting games. It's his one little secret that he keeps from Ivy is that he's betting he's betting pounds on the ponies.
00:41:19
Speaker
um And in order to cover this up, he pays Polly elaborate compliments about how pretty she is, what a heartbreaker she's going to be, how sad he is that he's her stepfather, and therefore he's going to have to give her away to some other young man.
00:41:32
Speaker
Polly is 11. um Polly is 11! Polly is 11 and Ivy notices and eventually decides that, uh, and it's because of a book that she receives from Tom that she thinks that Polly has gotten as a present from either her father or the lodger, David Bragg, that Polly is ruining her happiness with her boyfriend and therefore Polly has to go.
00:41:56
Speaker
And she kicks Polly out because Polly Again, Eleven is a threat. Right. And in fact, this is a this was a threat even between Polly and Ivy over Polly's actual father, Reg, um that that Polly is in some way corrupting Ivy's men to her side, taking control of them.
00:42:17
Speaker
This is actually what Ivy does, right? Ivy is the the parasitic plant. ah But again and again, Polly is blamed by her mother for attracting the sexual interest of adult men.
00:42:29
Speaker
Yes. Because she's the competition. Which maybe is part of the reason that Polly is so eager to engage in, to to be the girl pretending to be a boy.
00:42:40
Speaker
um This is always the the role that she identifies with. You know, later on, there's a play of Twelfth Night, and she's like, oh, Viola, that's hero, that's me. I'm i'm the the girl pretending to be a boy, heroically.
00:42:52
Speaker
And there's about a year after the horse incident where Polly's like, right, I was very weak during the horse incident. I've got to go become a hero. I am going to go play football with the boys and I'm going to be so good at it that they'll invite me to join the football team.
00:43:06
Speaker
Right. And this works. To be clear, Polly is great at being tomboy hero. She has a great, she turns turns out she genuinely loves athletics. This actually remains a thread in her like school life that she keeps getting involved in sports.
00:43:18
Speaker
But there's also the descriptions of her losing her beautiful little girlness. um Her hair goes into the grey rat's tails. All her clothes are too small and have holes in the knees. And then when she realises she's going to meet Tom again, she puts on the pretty dress she wore last time she saw him when she went down to London on the divorce lawyer day.
00:43:38
Speaker
And it's two sizes too small. It doesn't fit. And she looks awful. yeah And she can't stand it. She's heartbroken. She needs to be pretty to see Tom.
00:43:49
Speaker
Again, she's 11. Right. But her grandmother says, she goes to her grandmother and says, can you buy me a new dress? I need to be pretty. And her grandmother says, I think jeans and a sweater would be nice.
00:44:00
Speaker
I think maybe you should wear jeans and a sweater. And she gets pants and a sweater, like nice clothes, but not a little girl dress. And that's what she feels comfortable in. Although notice ah also at this point, she sorts out the gray rat tail hair and her mother offers to cut it all off, which yeah Polly as a child is forced to this like gender performance of pretty little girlness, which is quite clear that she's not that keen on.
00:44:22
Speaker
ah And then when i Ivy offers to cut her hair, Polly, freaks out, loses it. No, you can't. I love it. I want my hair. The only thing that has changed is that we know Tom likes Polly's hair.
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah. He said so. And I thought, I read this and I thought, it's it's the thing about, like, I think I said to you that if if this book feels like heterosexuality is a trap sometimes, it's not just that Tom makes Polly into a girl, it's that he makes her want to be the girl.
00:44:56
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. But she also, he, but it's again, it's never so simple because he makes her want to be the girl, but he also makes her want to be the hero. of The hero business is what pushes Polly into becoming a hero. And I think one of the things about heroism that the book really emphasizes and is really interested in is that in order to be a hero, you can't do it for yourself. You have to do it for somebody else.
00:45:21
Speaker
There's this the sequence that is is, again, a joke, but I think prefigures a lot of the rest of the book during this year where Holly Polly is going really, really all in on hero business.
00:45:32
Speaker
And there's a school bully. And this sequence is something that reflects a lot of what jones john Jones has written about seeing the germ for this sequence over and over again, seeing the girl who beat up the school bully, a splendid Britomart of a girl, and how everyone cheered her on and realizing, oh, that's heroism.
00:45:48
Speaker
So she puts this sequence in the book. ah Polly wants to get in. the The school bully is being mean to Polly. Polly wants to fight her, but she can't do it for herself because that's not what heroes do.
00:45:59
Speaker
So she waits until she sees the school bully picking on someone else. And then she's like, great, now I have an excuse. And she marches in and beats up the school bully. ah actually she does it twice. The first time she kind of scares her off. She she basically, like, ah you know, couple smacks is enough because the s school bully is so startled to see Mildman or Polly going after And the second time they get in a real knockdown drag out fight because the school bully has gone after her friend, Nina, who at this point Polly isn't even friends with. They're not speaking to each other. Their their friendship is on and off again all throughout the book.
00:46:31
Speaker
But Polly is like, can't do that. Goes in. rescues Nina and then finds herself because Nina is so grateful that she's like oh Polly wants to be my friend again and so she has to go home with Nina and hang out with Nina.
00:46:44
Speaker
ah You said this this felt like one of the most the most sapphic Joneses, one of the most fem slashable Joneses and I agree there's Polly and Fiona who will talk about probably we booked two recording sessions for this.
00:46:58
Speaker
we would take a ride on fire and head Probably next session, Polly and Fiona. But Polly and Nina, I feel like at this particular point, this is fully like the knight and his lady. You're like, oh God, no, I've got to go back to the castle.
00:47:10
Speaker
I've got to hang out with her. It's going to be boring. And it is boring. um And it's not just the knight and the lady, but it's the knight and the wrong lady. I love Nina. ah Polly and Nina's friendship is important.
00:47:21
Speaker
So important. We will talk about why, but at this stage, Polly and Nina are at a stage where they have nothing, they don't really have any interests in common. And so having to go back with Nina and hang out with her ah because she's obliged to, because she's just rescued Nina.
00:47:35
Speaker
And because rescuing someone puts you under an obligation to them and that puts you in peril. ah That felt like, I'm looking at the sequence of like, is this Lancelot and Elaine? Like you have to go home with the wrong lady because you've saved her and that traps you into a relationship you don't want.
00:47:50
Speaker
Right. There's, which is an echo ah of like the, the, the relationship between the hero and the person the hero saves is the heart of the book, right? Right.
00:48:00
Speaker
Who gets to do the saving and who gets to be saved and how do you save them and what, are you left with after that? And why do you save them? Because Polly also didn't save Nina for Nina.
00:48:11
Speaker
She saved Nina because she was looking for an excuse to be a hero. Because a hero needs someone to save. And a person in distress needs someone to save them. It's almost transactional.
00:48:22
Speaker
And that's really core, I think, to the Tom and Polly relationship also. The way that they are constantly... you know, constantly taking it in turns to rescue each other. And it is genuine.
00:48:33
Speaker
And it is also calculated. Yeah. And this, God, this duality of reality. that I hate that. That rhymes in, like, really unprocessed. Right?
00:48:46
Speaker
but this doubled reality is from the very first. I mean, Joan signals it right away, right up front. The opening chapter, I think actually is a little bit clunky. She does the same thing much more elegantly in Hexwood in the 90s.
00:48:58
Speaker
ah But the opening chapter in which Polly is 18, 19, looking back on the past and realizing that she has two sets of memories, that chapter exists to alert us to the fact that the world can be two things at the same time.
00:49:16
Speaker
Yes. And the idea of of a world that is two things turns up over and over again. And we're given names for the the the two simultaneous, parallel, overlapping, non-overlapping yeah worlds, realities.
00:49:31
Speaker
Then they're nowhere and now here. Yes. And that is the this sort of central image of the book, the image that shapes the book. is that in that opening sequence, I think I keep talking about the sequence at the funeral as the opening sequence. You're right, there is an opening chapter.
00:49:46
Speaker
thing is that the the funeral is so good is when the book kicks off, but no, there's a frame narrative, yeah which is, i mean, maybe probably intentionally a little dry, a little dull, because this is Polly with only her dry, dull, Tom-free memories.
00:50:02
Speaker
It's only now here and not nowhere. But I'm just going to read this whole section with the vases. It's long. I'm sorry, but it is fundamental. ah So they're walking through the garden and they're coming up on this house. This book is also a gothic. Hunston house looms over it and Polly is constantly
Magic, Creativity, and Reality
00:50:18
Speaker
getting it. You know, what kicks it off is Polly entering the house she's not supposed to be in and constantly being drawn back to the big creepy house where magic lurks.
00:50:26
Speaker
And in the front of the house, there are two vases. "'Watch!' Mr. Lin's hand moved on the right-hand vase. The vase began to spin slowly, grating a little. Two, three heavy turns, and it stopped. Now Polly could see there were letters engraved on the front of the vase.
00:50:40
Speaker
"'Here!' she said. "'Now watch again,' said Mr. Lin. His big left hand spun the other vase. This one went round much more smoothly. For a while it was a grey stone blur. Then it grated, slowed and settled, and there were letters on it too.' Now, Polly read, now here. What does that mean?
00:50:57
Speaker
Mr. Lin spun both vases, one slowly, grinding and groaning, the other smooth and blurring. They both stopped at exactly the same time. Where, said the one on the left. Now, read the right-hand one, upon which Mr. Lin spun them again.
00:51:10
Speaker
This time when they stopped, the vases read, no and where. Oh, I see, said Polly, nowhere. That's clever. She moved sideways to look around the curve of the vases and found they still said nowhere that this was because the left hand vase now seemed to say now and the right hand one here from where she had moved.
00:51:25
Speaker
Both vases really said nowhere, but the letters were so arranged on them that you could never see the whole word at once on the same vase. Polly made sure by going right up to them ducking under Mr. Lin's arm and putting her head sideways to read the letters round the other side.
00:51:39
Speaker
Yes, that's right, Mr. Lin said. They both say nowhere, really. He spun them again, the slow grinding one and the fast smooth one, and this time they came up with here now. Heroes see things like that, he said.
00:51:51
Speaker
It's obviously an enchantment of some kind, Polly agreed, humoring him. It must be, he said. It sounded as if he was humoring her.
00:52:00
Speaker
Okay, before I say anything intelligent, I'm going to say something stupid. Are you ready? Yes, please. Vase sounds insane to me. It's a
00:52:12
Speaker
I know, I was thinking that even as I said and
00:52:17
Speaker
It's all right. You can't help it. I can't help it. This is important to the podcast. It's so people can tell us apart when we talk. It is really important. Okay. Now I've said the stupid thing. i will say the other thing that struck me listening to that, which is that there is a really, ah in all these double worlds and double meanings, the where now, the now here, the both phases really say nowhere.
00:52:41
Speaker
Insofar as there is a true, truth, an underlying truth, that truth is the nowhere. And what nowhere means in the context of fire and hemlock is constantly being dug into and unpacked. But nowhere is, I think, what Jones in her writing elsewhere calls the land of the imagination, the mythic space, the heroic space.
00:53:02
Speaker
Yes, that is constantly just sort of trickling out in little ways into the real world. And Polly thinks of this in these terms all throughout the course of the book. She thinks about the the world, that the Borg, the sort of dull, flat, everyday world that she's living in is the now here, and the magic, the world of the heroic, the the the mythic, as nowhere.
00:53:22
Speaker
Sorry, sorry. I just had, like, if you could see me, you would see I was clapping because I just had a thought and I feel insane. So one thing that Jane says is fundamental for structuring the whole book is the Odyssey. We haven't even really talked about that, but we will.
00:53:35
Speaker
But I just remembered where else I've seen the image of two vases. Yeah. It's Homeric. It's fucking Homeric because it is the two vases of fate that Jupiter, ah not Jupiter, Zeus, measures out fate for mortals from two vases. Of course.
00:53:54
Speaker
Two vases and you never get the full thing poured out in full measure. And it's because I've just been rereading the Iliad. There's also the image from Hesiod Pandora. It's not Pandora's box in in the original myth. It's Pandora's jug, her vase with hope in the bottom.
00:54:11
Speaker
um Which is what Polly is. Polly is Pandora. We are told that. Polly is Pandora. We're not told that in the book. We're told that in Jones's writings, but she is the girl with all the gifts. Hang on. I'm going to keep talking. I'm finding the list. Again, it's like the list of books, the list of all the things that Diana says that Polly and Tom are. Keep talking.
00:54:31
Speaker
No, I don't have anything else to say. I was just like, holy shit, that's where the vases come from. of course, it's not the only place the vases come from, but this idea of the two vases as vases of destiny, of fate, of the future, because that image of the nowhere now here, without specifically referring to those vases, comes back at the very end of the question of what's going to happen to Polly and Tom there. Where now?
00:54:54
Speaker
yeah After the full events of Tamlin, where now? yeah It comes back to the question of are we nowhere or now here? Where are we measuring out our fate from? What's it coming to? Oh my god, I feel insane.
00:55:06
Speaker
yeah Yeah, no, you're a thousand percent right. then So Diana says, Polly is Gerda in the Snow Queen, Snow White, Britomart, St. George, Pierrot, Pandora, Andromeda, Janet from Tamlin, and many more.
00:55:19
Speaker
Also, Talibachis. Tom appears to cling to the role of Odysseus, but in fact, Tom loses that role to Polly and becomes in turn Leander, Kay kidnapped by the Snow Queen, the Knight of the Moon, Ardegle, Bellerophon, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Harlequin, Perseus, Orpheus, and of course, Tamlin. Me and Polly are continually swapping active and passive roles and sharing the part of Odysseus between them.
00:55:42
Speaker
That's one thing. The other thing i want to say again, just speaking of this, that scene in the garden as prefiguring the whole of the book and speaking of fate is the first encounter that Polly has with Tom.
00:55:56
Speaker
So Polly's sitting in on this funeral. It's a funeral happening at the house. She's accidentally snuck her way in because she thinks she's following her friend Nina in as part of the you know game they're playing. for Yeah, Nina is to blame for the whole plot.
00:56:10
Speaker
Nina is to blame for the whole plot. And also Polly sneaking her way in and doing something heroic because she thinks she's following someone else doing something heroic, but in fact she is leading the way again is is part of the the power dynamic shifts that that figure the plot.
00:56:24
Speaker
So she's sitting there, a little girl, around all these adults. She sees that there's one other little boy there among all the other adults too. And one of the adults, Tom, Thomas Lynn, sees her and takes her out of the funeral. It kind of sneaks up to her and is like, let's, you know, he doesn't say anything. He just takes her hand.
00:56:41
Speaker
He was now holding out his hand to take hers and make sure she didn't get away. Feeling faded, Polly put her hand into his. It was a big hand, a huge one, and folded hers quite out of sight under its row of long fingers.
00:56:54
Speaker
And then he says to her, he takes her out and he says, I wish I could have thought of a way to get that poor boy Seb out of it too. I could see he was quite as bored as you were, but he didn't have the sense to sit near the door. Oh, God.
00:57:05
Speaker
She realized he had sat down on purpose near the door, and she knew, perhaps without quite understanding it, that if she ran away, it would mean he had to go back into the funeral again. She was his excuse for coming out of it, so she stayed.
00:57:19
Speaker
And of course the funeral is symbolically, but also in a very real way, Tom's funeral. So the way the magic at Hunsdon House works is there is this figure, Laurel, who is the fairy queen, this evil witch, and she has a husband.
00:57:37
Speaker
Morton. He's called Morton Leroy, which means death, death, the king. It's not subtle. and Incidentally, Polly's father's name is Reg, as in the king. yep i Yep.
00:57:52
Speaker
And both of them are immortal. This is pretty clearly what's going on. The way they become immortal is they prey on others.
00:58:04
Speaker
Every nine years, A young man, ah lover of laurels, is killed. to give Morton a new lease on life. This is the sacrifice of the king, which Jones helpfully gives us specific chapter references in the Golden Bough in case we want to look it up.
00:58:22
Speaker
They're just running. She's just running through chapter titles, probably reading the Golden Bough on the train going, huh, death of the king. Right. The sacrificial king, huh? Magicians as kings, you say. Anyway, um so every nine years, a young man is killed to give Morton new life.
00:58:40
Speaker
This is the death of the the the sacrificial king. Except every 81 years, it's a woman who was killed to give Laurel new life, which if you saw me covering my face right now, it's because I just realized that it is absolutely insane for Tom to say he's going to take Seb out of the funeral. and It's his mother's funeral.
00:58:58
Speaker
It's his mother's funeral. Right. It's clear. What seems to be happening is that Laurel and Morton take it in turns to basically go and acquire a target.
00:59:09
Speaker
Yes. ah Usually Laurel gets it gets a guy. Occasionally, every 81 years, ah Morton acquires a woman. And the fate of this person is to be killed after nine years later.
00:59:22
Speaker
But at this point, Tom's in the funeral. He has already been chosen as the next sacrifice. The reason he's not dying right now at the start of the book is that it just by coincidence happens to be the woman's turn.
00:59:33
Speaker
Like, this actually should have been Tom's funeral. That's really clear. And by the end of the book, the next funeral sequence at Hunsdon House, it's supposed to be Tom's funeral. And by that point, Morton has been waiting 18 years and it's ah The description descriptions of him increasingly show like ah horror, right?
00:59:55
Speaker
ah the the Sort of the collapse of man into corpse. Yes. Although it was never actually, as we learned at the end, and I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I've just realized something and I have to tell you it.
01:00:05
Speaker
um go We learned at the end that it was never actually supposed to be Tom at all. Originally, Laurel's interest was Tom has an older brother. We don't know that's true until the end. But Tom has an older brother who made a deal with Laurel to take Tom instead.
01:00:20
Speaker
So Tom has been sort of sold, has been faded into this by someone else's decision, much as Polly gets faded into it by by Tom pulling her out of the house. And his brother, this is hinted at really, really early on in the book bu when we first see his brother through a shop that Tom and Polly have made up. they've They've decided that Tom is a hero named Tan Cool and his alter ego is he runs a hardware store in a little town called Stall on the Water.
01:00:46
Speaker
And they go to Stall on the Water and there's a hardware store and there's people in it and they look at Tom and they say, oh, wow, you look just like ah the the Mr. Piper who runs the store. And Tom and Polly are aghast. Side note, it's completely insane that Mr. Piper, in order to avoid Laurel, ah has run away and changed his name. But he's changed his name to Thomas.
01:01:04
Speaker
His chase was named a top sniper. Which is the name of his younger brother who got sold to the fairy queen in his place. Like, there's a whole weird separate story happening here that is only ever hinted at.
01:01:18
Speaker
But they walk in the hardware store and there are signs all over the hardware store saying, do it yourself.
01:01:30
Speaker
so ah Tom has created an alter ego, but the alter ego, in fact, his older brother has created Tom to be his sacrificial burden and to take on the role of the sacrifice to Laurel.
01:01:41
Speaker
But the fact that it's an 81 year rather than a nine year gives him time to get away and to try and formulate an exit plan. Right. try touch Try and groom your own Janet. Try and groom your own Janet. And he's very lucky that Janet, you know, and it is fated that Polly walks into the funeral and becomes a Janet. And I do think, OK, I'm going to talk a little bit about Janet's grandmother now, because I do think that that the fate comes into it a little bit.
01:02:07
Speaker
So Polly has Jenna's grandmother, Polly's grandmother. Polly has these awful parents. The stable force in her life is her grandmother, who whenever her parents are being particularly horrible, sort of walks in and says, I'm taking her.
01:02:19
Speaker
You are not doing this. I am i am taking her home. She's responsible. She immediately flags Tomlin as bad news or as a potential threat to her daughter. And she loves Polly.
01:02:32
Speaker
And she fights for her in what I think, you know, eventually she fights to get legal guardianship with Polly. in what I think is a really direct echo of a Janet holding onto a Tam Lin. There's this ah really lovely description of her just walking in. She's like, i'm I'm just determined. I walk into offices and I sit there and I don't let them kick me out until they give me the right paperwork and say that I can have you, that I can i can be your guardian.
01:02:56
Speaker
And what we learn at the end of the book is that Polly's grandmother was one of Laurel's chosen. That ah he was a musician. She seems to like musicians. We'll talk about that. Polly's grandfather, yeah.
01:03:07
Speaker
Yeah, Polly's grandfather was a musician. And he did leave. but Polly's grandmother was pregnant with Polly's mother, or with Polly's father at the time of the nine-year sacrifice.
01:03:19
Speaker
She could have gone to Miles crass Cross and waited for him and a very classic Tamlin story, but she didn't know the story, so she couldn't do it. Which is actually, haven't seen Jones do that in a while, have we?
01:03:31
Speaker
No. This is actually a book where you need to know the story to solve the book. Except you need to, it's it's more complicated than we've ever seen her do it.
01:03:42
Speaker
Yes. Because you need to know the story But you need to know all the stories. You need to know all the resonances and the ways they interact. need to know the ways they don't work. You need to read the funny golden bow.
01:03:53
Speaker
You need to read the golden bow and you need to know where the stories are wrong. Because Tam Lin, it turns out, we'll talk about it when we get to the end, doesn't quite unlock the story. It's a little bit of a lie that it does.
01:04:04
Speaker
the The lesson that Polly needs to learn is sort of, it's, it's well, it's it's there, it's thats the thing and the opposite thing. The ending is Tam Lin and it's the opposite of Tam Lin. But I do think that the fact that Granny is a Janet, is is, you know, had a child, could have claimed her Tamlin and didn't.
01:04:22
Speaker
And that child is Polly's father, who his besetting sin is he lives in a land of make-believe always. He will not tell the truth because he is too afraid of upsetting people. ah he He creates a fantasy world for himself, ah which is one of the things that, you know, he and lo and Ivy, I'm going to do that.
01:04:40
Speaker
You're meant to do that. no But... Both have, you know, their their flaws exacerbate each other. They make each other worse. But they create Polly, the child who, you know, Polly's grandmother could have saved her her Thomas and didn't. And I do think that fate has come down a bit to Polly to bring her to Hunston House, to draw her in, to make her the fated person who can save Tom.
01:05:05
Speaker
because heroes are fated. That is true. Heroes are chosen. They are special. They are picked out. And at the same time, Jones is quite firm. hero can be in everyone and every woman, a poly.
01:05:20
Speaker
Yes. many And one for me, one of the most touching moments in the book is actually quite late in the game when Polly realises that one of the boys she knows, ah Leslie Piper, who is son of this hub ah who who is in fact Tom's nephew, has already been chosen out by a Laurel as her next victim.
01:05:38
Speaker
ah But Leslie has a girlfriend and that girlfriend is Polly's old friend, Nina. And Polly realises I should have warned Nina and told Nina to hold on to Leslie because Polly instantly sees that Nina could be a Janet.
01:05:50
Speaker
the I mean, Polly's own mother, Ivy, the way her love for Reg manifest is trying to hold on to him and cling to him. Which is the the Janet move, right?
01:06:02
Speaker
Hold him and don't let go. um but that Every one of these women who is an echo of Polly could be the Janet hero, but also there's something not quite right.
01:06:14
Speaker
about that model of heroism, about just holding on. Yeah, should we talk about Nina? I really want to talk about Nina. and How long have we got this session? I would say we've got about 20 minutes and then the rest for next time.
01:06:27
Speaker
so Okay, let's talk Nina. So Nina is, Polly, as you've said, has two friends, Nina and Fiona. Nina is there from the beginning of the book. Fiona comes in later and that's important. When the book begins, Polly and Nina are friends because Nina is a type that we've seen in various books before, she is, I think, an echo most directly of Nan and Witch Week.
01:06:47
Speaker
um She's plump, she has glasses, she has frizzy hair, she has an enormous imagination. And Polly is jealous of her. Polly admired and envied Nina desperately, both Nina's looks and her bold, madcap disposition.
01:07:00
Speaker
Polly at the time was trying to eat a packet of biscuits every day in order to get fat like Nina. I've got a say also, I think Nina's probably not white. I think this is another case of a non-white, non-protagonist friend, just because it's such a small detail.
01:07:13
Speaker
ah You go to Nina's house and it smells of spices. And I'm like, in England in the 80s? i' was cutting the spices as I think probably that that and just details like the the the frizzy hair, the house full of spices. i think this is probably meant to be a non-white girl.
01:07:31
Speaker
Oh, I did not pick up on that, but I think you're probably right. Which makes some of the stuff with Nina ah little bit more interesting, a little bit more problem.
01:07:40
Speaker
But the other thing important about the early dynamic of Polly and Nina, you know, Nina has these wild games of make believe and she pushes Polly into them and says, ah if you if you don't do this, I won't be your friend.
01:07:51
Speaker
And Polly says it was not really that she was afraid Nina would stop being her friend, though she was a little. It was more that she could not seem to break out of her prim timid self in those days and be properly adventurous without Nina's threats to galvanize her.
01:08:03
Speaker
So Nina is what pushes Polly towards towards heroism. towards everything that that pictureses that that happens in the rest of the book. i've said that multiple times. And in the other set of memories, she's quite startled to realize that she's forgotten Nina almost entirely in her her boring memories.
01:08:20
Speaker
ah Nina is not there past their elementary school days. And when she meets Nina on the street, Nina's like, why are you talking to me? We haven't spoken. Why are you suddenly interested in me now? Despite the fact that she and Nina are not really that close friends throughout the rest of the book, they keep intersecting with each other's lives, ah but they don't always get each other. They're kind of at cross purposes to each other.
01:08:41
Speaker
But the thing about Nina that I think is really important is that Nina is never ashamed of anything. Right. Nina by the late book is clearly like, is the 1980s.
01:08:51
Speaker
She's gone alternative. She's dyed her hair green. She's wearing weird clothes. She's got a cool boyfriend. She's a cool person, but also she's totally shameless. She knows what she wants and she's never ashamed of what she wants, which earlier in the book, ah we get Nina hitting puberty in earnest before Polly does and suddenly going boy crazy and being mocked by her classmates and called Nympho Nina.
01:09:16
Speaker
And she doesn't care. She knows what she wants.
01:09:20
Speaker
And I think, actually, the book is is remarkably kind to Nina with her strangeness, her shamelessness, her aggressive sexuality, her flirtatiousness, her courage, because shame is an important part of the way that Laurel eventually takes control of Polly and tries to prevent her from being a hero.
01:09:41
Speaker
Shame is the opposite of heroism, because if you're a hero, you have to be prepared to feel a bit silly. Yes. And Nina's shamelessness is heroic. And to keep Polly out of heroism, it's necessary that she forget having a friendship with Nina.
01:09:56
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. And I think you said something really important earlier when we were talking about this book, which is that despite the fact that there is ah threat of sexual menace running from men that runs through this book very subtly towards Polly at all times, all the direct harm, all the direct damage comes from women controlling Polly.
01:10:17
Speaker
It is her mother kicking her out of the house because ah she is blaming Polly for the way that David Bragg is acting. It's Laurel who ah makes Polly feel ashamed of hanging on to Tom.
01:10:30
Speaker
It is her father's stepmother who, you know, the worst the worst moment in perhaps Polly's entire life comes after her mother has kicked her out. And she goes, ah she says, your father's going to have you.
01:10:41
Speaker
And her father has expressed an interest in having her. But Polly gets to her father's house where her father has a new wife who has ah white, white house and a ah white, white rug that you can't bring food on in case it gets on the carpets.
01:10:54
Speaker
And it becomes very clear that he has not told his new wife that Polly is coming to stay, that has no wife that she has no idea <unk> that Polly is coming to stay. And that subsequently, when it becomes clear that she doesn't want Polly to stay, she yeah know that that she would never want Polly to stay, both Polly and her father are too ashamed to say anything about it.
01:11:14
Speaker
And so her father lets her leave. She has no money. She has no ticket. She has no way to get home. She has no home to go back to. Ivy's kicked her out. ah And so she, i think, I forgot whether she's 11 or 12 at this point, but she wanders the streets of Bristol by herself until she comes to a bridge.
01:11:33
Speaker
The Clifford Suspension Bridge, which is a famous suicide spot. And Polly knows it's a suicide spot because her father was telling her the ghost stories about it earlier in the earlier in the visit. And she stands there and she wonders whether the girl who wanted to jump was feeling something like this. And she stands there for a long, long time.
01:11:51
Speaker
And the only reason that she doesn't jump, I think it's pretty clear, is that she sees Mr. Morton Leroy is standing at the edge of the bridge, enjoying the idea that she will. um But it's shame that it's it's it's shame that brings her there. It's because she is too embarrassed and proud to tell her father that she has no money and no way to get home, to tell her father's wife that she was expected to stay, that this was going to be her home.
01:12:17
Speaker
to tell her mother that her father doesn't want her. there's There's all of these these forces of sort of shame. and It's shame, but also it's it's being unloved. And it's the moment at which Polly feels most unloved and most unwanted in the whole book when it's really clear that there's nobody who's willing to fight for her or to hold on to her yeah at this point, that her father is absolutely not going to... ah put a toe out of line to interfere with his new girlfriend's ah perfectly organized life for Polly's sake, that her mother will always choose her latest latest as lodger over her daughter, will always regard Polly as a threat.
01:12:57
Speaker
ah There's nobody who wants her. Which is not true. Her grandmother wants her and loves her, but she in that moment it's true. In that moment it's how she feels, that she's been totally failed by her parents.
01:13:10
Speaker
And I go go for it. What saves her is that she knows Tom. Yes. I think this is the moment for all we've said about the fact that Tom is using Polly. He is. And it's uncomfortable.
01:13:21
Speaker
It is. I think it's pretty clear that in this, this is the clearest moment that knowing Tom, that having someone like Tom in her life throughout her adolescence is what saves Polly in a very real way.
01:13:32
Speaker
It's having someone who does genuinely love and care about her. And that's, I think that's really important that I don't, I'm not sure if Tom intends to love and care about Polly when he starts out, he's, he's in it to save himself. yes He's doing this to save himself. ah He lets her steer,
01:13:50
Speaker
ah which is partly maybe an equalizing move, but equally letting Polly be in charge of their relationship is a way to figure her out who she is and what she wants and how he can get what he wants from her. Yeah. um But by the time she's in...
01:14:05
Speaker
they encounter each other in Bristol. I think i think Tom does love Polly. How? Question mark? Should he? Big question mark. But he does. He loves her. He's the only one who thinks of calling her grandmother.
01:14:17
Speaker
Yes. Danny has always been pretty firmly anti-Tom. ah But Tom is not Ashamed. Yes. And Granny, and this is the moment after this, that Granny says, I'm ashamed.
01:14:31
Speaker
Your Tom, who I've always mistrusted, behaved better than my Reg. He was a better father to you that day. And future husband. A kind of father-husband figure. Is he...
01:14:44
Speaker
but ah the quick After the Bristol sequence as well, that we get the embrace but between Polly and Tom. That's where it is when they part after that. And Tom gives her a weird little hug on the train platform and puts his hand in her hair.
01:14:58
Speaker
And that, I think, is the moment of transition. if you like, from father to husband. yeah And they both feel it, I think, because after that is when Tom starts trying to push Polly away.
01:15:09
Speaker
Yes, and when Polly starts going through puberty and starts trying to pull Tom closer. But the other thing that happens in Bristol that we need to talk about is the monster, because this is the most overt magic that happens in the book. It is when they are in Bristol, when Tom is trying to get Polly to the train station so she can go home to her grandmother.
01:15:29
Speaker
that they are chased by a monster out of their stories, which is, oh, we haven't talked about the quartet. I know. Can we like pin in the monster, discuss the quartet, come back to the monster?
01:15:44
Speaker
um Possibly next session because we're a bit short on time now. Yes. Because the quartet is, I think the quartet is actually Tom's second attempt to save himself. Yes. And in every, maybe in every way it's a more admirable attempt to save himself. It doesn't work and it was never going to work.
01:16:02
Speaker
yeah But Tom from Divorcing Laurel, he is a cellist, he's a musician. People made fun of us for talking about the quitter in Carton Quitter as a cello. They're right. It's not. It's probably a crotter, which is a traditional Welsh musical instrument.
01:16:16
Speaker
But I do think cello, question mark, is fair because Diana Wynne-Jones crazy about cello music. Anyway, Tom is a cellist. ah He plays in the British Philharmonic Orchestra.
01:16:30
Speaker
It's clear if Polly actually gets glimpses of them sort of on their world tour and she gets glimpses of the audience, it's clear that Laurel and Morton are keeping tabs on Tom he hasn't actually escaped them. it's I think it's implied that they got him this job.
01:16:43
Speaker
Yes. Tom then chooses to leave the orchestra and sort of strike out on his own and ah with a quartet. But the reason he chooses ah is he asks Polly for help.
01:16:59
Speaker
Yes, he's already kind of picked out some people he thinks would be good members of the quartet. And, you know, I think it's important about the cello. The cello is not a solo instrument. It's hard to be a solo cellist. Tom cannot ever rescue himself by going and becoming a famous solo cellist.
01:17:13
Speaker
But they've been making up this game. Polly has decided that tom that Tan Cool has three friends. Tan Thayer, Tan Hanavar, and Tan Odell. She knows all about Tan Thayer and Tan Hanavar. She can pick out exactly what they look like.
01:17:27
Speaker
She knows nothing about Tan Odell. And so when the the second time that Polly comes to visit Tom, this is in fact the time he brings her to bring meet his girlfriend and it's weird. But the first thing he does is put her put down in front of her a picture of the Philharmonic and say, can you find Tan Thayer and Tan Hanavar and Tan O'Dell as a joke?
01:17:47
Speaker
And she finds the first two really easily. She picks out two violin players, one after the other, like, that's him, that's him. Because, of course, the world of the imagination is not just the world of the imagination, especially in Tom's world, where he's got this gift of telling truth, whether he means it or not.
01:18:05
Speaker
ah Polly can identify Tom's fellow heroes, but she still can't find Tan or Del. And then Tom says, did you ever think it might be a woman? Polly has never thought it might be a woman.
01:18:16
Speaker
Polly has no models for female heroism. I think that's really important. Tan Odell, who is Tom's friend Anne, who we think is probably a lesbian. um I think, yeah, because interestingly, Anne is the only person whom Polly is ever positive about Tom, like having any kind of relationship with.
01:18:35
Speaker
Polly's like, could you marry her? She's not into that. She has her own ideas about such things. I think it's ah not really that subtle. I think Anne is pretty clearly a lesbian.
01:18:48
Speaker
um But the she knows that Tano Del Anne is a blank in her mind. She cannot imagine such a person. She cannot imagine a girl hero when she imagines herself as a hero. She has to imagine herself as a girl pretending to be a boy.
01:19:00
Speaker
And then we get and Tana Odell is a really striking figure in the book. She's not in the book very much, but she plays a sort of unique role. Again, as you said, it's sort of the only positive relationship that Tom has with woman outside of with Polly, arguably.
01:19:14
Speaker
um yeah question mark question mark question mark what the fuck she's also a kind of betwixt in between her gift is memory uh we find out that's her heroic gift and so so it also is in the real world her literal magical gift she is a leroy she is one of this magical fairy family puff on her mother's side enough that it's actually anne's memory that originally triggers Polly's recovery of her memories in the first chapter as a story by Anne.
01:19:45
Speaker
as it turns out, not by Anne, but with Anne's name still on it. starts the cascade of there's something out of place here. Like Polly, Anne sort of a little bit in between in a bunch of different ways. She's not 100% one thing or another.
01:19:57
Speaker
And so that that's another echo in the book. I don't think they're a threesome with Anne. I think that most of the echoes come in threes. I think Polly and Anne are just echoes of each other. think you're right. But Polly can't imagine her.
01:20:10
Speaker
She doesn't know that there's an echo that this could be. Tom has to tell her that imagine a woman. yeah It's one of the few times it's very clearly Tom in charge of directing Polly's imagination. But the minute he does, oh, it's her.
01:20:24
Speaker
I see her. get it now. Yeah, yeah. And so that's the quartet. And so Tom leaves. And I do think there is something about, i want meant I meant to talk about this with regards to the pictures too.
01:20:35
Speaker
One of the things that I think we've seen Diana Wynne Jones be really interested in is the sort of the way creativity influences each other across, the way the metaphors work across boundaries, across art and music and writing and theater.
01:20:47
Speaker
All these things feed into each other. The pictures influence the stories that Polly is telling influence the real world. the music that Tom plays, the fact that he is a musician, and you know is is one of his heroic attributes.
01:20:58
Speaker
There's a really beautiful bit ah where Polly is in a play. She's playing Piero. And there's, ah I know we don't have much time, but I really, really feel the need to read it out because I think that this is, the way that Polly is in the play is a metaphor for the way Diana feels when a book is going right.
01:21:14
Speaker
So they they have the dress rehearsal, everything's going wrong. And then the second night, Polly turned slowly through Piero's first cartwheel with her legs dropping just as they should, and she had a sudden sense as she turned that she was part of a transparent, charmed pattern in which everything had to go in the one right way because that was the only way it could go.
01:21:33
Speaker
She came out of the cartwheel and went on her knees to Kirstie Jefferson, who's the girl playing ah Columbine, in her love interest, with her drooping sleeves imploringly raised. The violin sang along. And the audience began going, oh, half jeeringly at Piero, but half on his side too.
01:21:49
Speaker
They went on doing it and that was right as well. The pattern had been there always, even though they were all making it just at that moment. that' That's art. Yeah. And that is also Polly's heroic gift, which is the gift of not just pretending, but being.
01:22:05
Speaker
Yes. Both at once. Let's stop there. for this session. Yes. We'll be back. And we'll come back and we'll talk about the monster next time. Sounds good. See you in two days. The rest of you will hear this in like two seconds.
01:22:25
Speaker
Hello, and we are the same as we were. you've You've been listening to this the whole time. It's two seconds for you. It's two days later for us. And I have accidentally locked myself in the room where I record.
01:22:37
Speaker
So I can't leave until we figure out the ending of Fire and Hemlock. There will be no escape until you understand fire and hemlock. Completely and in its entirety. That's right, no problems ever. live there now.
01:22:54
Speaker
It's true, we're just going to keep doing this forever. Okay, it does actually feel really weird to be ah recording in a second session because normally what we do is record in a single session, 90 minutes at the end at which we go, oh my god, we didn't even cover that.
01:23:08
Speaker
Right, just kind of made a list. I've made a list of we didn't even cover XYZ ABC and we're going to get to all of them and it's going to be great. But I remember where we left off. We left off with monsters. We left off quite literally with Tom and Folly being chased by a monster made out of newspaper down the streets of Bristol.
01:23:25
Speaker
Right. Right, because we were talking about the quartet and we were talking about the monster and we were talking about the Bristol episode, which I think is central to the book, is a real turning point in the book. It's the emotional turning point. It is the moment when Tom, if you like, slips firmly forward From father to husband?
01:23:45
Speaker
Right. It's the moment when Polly starts calling Mr. Lynn, her weird adult friend, Tom, a person that she thinks she might be able to relate relate to as an equal, despite all the strong efforts that Tom, Mr. Lynn has been making at that point beforehand to try and put the ball in her court, try and keep their relationship one in which she holds as much power as she wants.
01:24:06
Speaker
And this has been very uncomfortable for both of them. And it's now about to become very uncomfortable in the other direction as Polly's like, yes, I am an equal. Let's be in a romantic relationship. but i ah talk about Let's talk about the monster. You wanted to talk about the monster.
01:24:22
Speaker
Right. So I think this monster is really interesting. It is the first time that we get the something that unambiguously is magic interfering in this book.
01:24:33
Speaker
the Previously, we've seen paul the things that Polly and Tom make up have come true in sort of weird, strange, implausible coincidences, but nothing that is actively supernatural. You know, they go to a town and they see the shop that ah matches the shop that they've described to be the secret background for Tan Cool, the hero figure that they had made up.
01:24:58
Speaker
But it's an ordinary shop. It's a very normal shop. And in fact, the shop turns out to have a normal explanation, which is that Tom's older brother has been secretly living there and changed his name.
01:25:08
Speaker
It's a normal explanation, are you sure? alright Maybe it's not normal, but it is a non, sort of a non-supernatural explanation because it's revealed eventually that Tom Piper is Tom's older brother and that Laurel has sort of put him there as part of the bargain.
01:25:23
Speaker
This is all something that could happen as just part of the weird conspiracy and the weird hold and control that Laurel and the Hunsdon House are trying to exert over Tom's life. ah There's a version of this book that's all gothic where there is no supernatural explanation for that.
01:25:39
Speaker
The horse gets released, the horse that echoes the horse that they've made up for Tancool that echoes the horse in the painting. Horses get released all the time. ah Maybe not all the time. It's not the commonest thing to happen, but it's just about within the realm of plausibility that there is a rampaging horse running through the streets of London. I mean, this has actually happened. I can find you a news story.
01:25:59
Speaker
It's not usually and it's escaped from the circus, but it's just about within... plausibility that there is, the world is ordinary.
01:26:11
Speaker
And I think that's important to like the, the nowhere now here, the double memories, the double world that Polly lives in, that there is, a totally ordinary explanation for everything.
01:26:22
Speaker
Right, and part of, I think, the magic of Nowhere now here is being able to see the magic in the ordinary. There's this really lovely description of Polly's grandmother gives her an opal ah early in the book, and this opal is significant in a number of ways.
01:26:39
Speaker
But the way that she describes it is she's told Polly that opals were really a thin slice out of a certain kind of rock bent over a crystal to bring the colors out. If water got between the rock and the crystal, the colors went out.
01:26:49
Speaker
So that made me sort of look at everything that happens in this book. Anytime Polly is sort of looking at the world and thinking, well, here's where the magic is. Here's where it isn't. as you know, now here is sort of the, or nowhere is sort of the the ah crystal that goes over the rock, right? But the reality of the rock is there. And then you you put the slice of crystal, we put the magic over it to make you see it in a certain way.
01:27:10
Speaker
That way is magical. And that's often what feels like is happening with these supernatural incidents that are only seen magical because of the way that Polly and Tom know to look at them. They know to look at them through the realm of fiction because it matches the fiction that they've made up.
01:27:24
Speaker
But the the newspaper monster is different. So they're walking through the streets. They're trying to get Polly out of town. ah She has to go home to her grandmother. This is after the horrible sequence with her father where he's essentially abandoned her.
01:27:36
Speaker
And it says her dreamlike feeling at once became the feeling of pure nightmare. For a moment, as you do in nightmares, she could not move. In the middle of the dark little street, the pattering rubbish was slowly piling upon itself, floating slowly and deliberately into a nightmare shape.
01:27:51
Speaker
It could have been a trick of the wind, but it was not. It was too deliberate. Plastic cups, peanut packets, leaves, and old wrappers were winding upwards, putting themselves in place as parts of a huge bear-like shape.
01:28:02
Speaker
As Polly watched, a piece of newspaper rose like a slow ghost to make the creature a staring face. Tom seized her wrist while she stared and pulled her away among the tower buildings. They did not exactly run, but they went in long strides as fast as they could walk.
01:28:16
Speaker
Both of them kept looking back. The creature of rubbish was following, billowing on pattering man-like legs." This is not something that could be explained away at the end in the sort of like conspiracy theory breakdown of this book.
01:28:28
Speaker
This is magic. ah Right. This is, I think, the moment where it's clearest that the the nowhere, the the magical layer is, if you like, the true layer underneath. Yes.
01:28:38
Speaker
And not only is, but it is not just is it magic. ah The way in which it echoes the stories that Tom and Polly have been writing this time is that they have written that one of Tom's friends ah has a terrible habit of changing shape when he doesn't want to.
01:28:52
Speaker
And so various of his friends almost kill him frequently because he's always changing shape into monsters. So they're pursued through the streets by this horrible creature made up out of text, made up out of old, thrown away text. Oh, I didn't catch that. Yeah. Okay, carry on.
01:29:08
Speaker
And then at the end, know, after they they they fight it, they have to fight it to get away. They hit it with the car. And then it turns out that they've hit his friend from the quartet with the car. This monster that was pursuing them was, ah you know, whatever layer of magic it was seems to have been to make the one of the heroes look like a monster and make them feel like they were being chased by someone who meant them well, which I don't really know how to unpack that, but I think it's really interesting in terms of these sort of layers of power. like there's There's a slippage, I think, because that I think it's pretty clear that the monster is an actual threat. If they had turned around and gone, oh, Sam, it's you, they would have been in very deep trouble.
01:29:50
Speaker
right The monster is the work of Mr. Morton Leroy, ah who is using, the magic of that layer of fiction, that that that hidden world, Polly and Tom's world, against them. And that is something Morton Leroy does again and again.
01:30:06
Speaker
And it comes back in the fairground sequence where, again, it that it's an act of fiction, of Polly's fiction that comes to life in the worst possible way. Yes. yeah We have talk about that fiction of Polly's.
01:30:18
Speaker
Yes. It's one of the most, I think, striking and significant parts of the book. But the other thing I'll say about the sequence is I do think this image might possibly come out of the Fairy Queen again. The very first monster that ah the hero, of the Knight Red Cross, fights in the Fairy Queen is made up in part out of heresy pamphlets.
01:30:35
Speaker
ah Because fairy queen is ah is a religious allegory. So i don't I don't necessarily think that ah these newspapers and old rubbish bins are heresy. I think possibly she just thought it was a cool image and stole it a little bit.
01:30:48
Speaker
And it is a cool image. It's very haunting. ah But I do think the fact that this is a monster out of text that ah chases them through the streets that they have made up out of their texts is not subtle.
01:31:01
Speaker
Right, it's pretty clear how the magic is working. It's like a fairly straightforward explanation of how magic works within the world of fire and hemlock. It works through text, out of text. It works through seeing the layer of the story laid over the mundane reality.
01:31:18
Speaker
And it's not it's not that the reality is the wrong word. The layer of the story is what's real. Yes, it actually, which reminds me of what you said about Archer's Goon, actually, that sense of the real world and the Bristol sequence is very, very rooted in the real world.
01:31:36
Speaker
Yes, even more so than the rest of Polly's life. I think we've got a specific city. We've got specific streets. Jones lived in Bristol for a lot of her life. yeah And it's Bristol that Polly is moving around this particular real place. You could follow her journey on a map. You could move through ah these this landscape. You could reach the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the suicide spot.
01:31:57
Speaker
yeah oh That world is actually the one that's sort of cracking apart to reveal the truth underneath, which is a bit text. Yes.
01:32:07
Speaker
And at the end, when they are leaving... So this this sequence, I think, also... because like we've so and changes the dynamics in a couple of ways, because they've now experienced something... Tom has rescued her. That's unambiguous. He's saved her from this horrible fate of just sort of wandering around Bristol forever, feeling completely alone and unloved.
01:32:25
Speaker
She has started to think of him as an integral part of her life. She started calling him Tom. Also, at the end, they fought this monster together, this unambiguous monster, so they know that something that links them together... is more than than normal, right? They have this connection of that is unambiguously magic.
01:32:41
Speaker
And at the end of this sequence, this also is where she has her first long conversation with Seb, who is the sort of the other main figure that ties her to Hunston House.
01:32:52
Speaker
So we haven't really talked much about Seb, but he is a child and he's the other child in the funeral. He's the son of Morton Leroy. He's about two years older than Polly. I forget whether he's two or three years older.
01:33:06
Speaker
I think he's three years older because I think he's he's meant to be in full form for 15 when she's 11, 12. Yes. And so at the end of this sequence, when Tom is sort of trying to rush her on the train and get her out, they've had, you know, and Tom actually, he hits his friend with the car.
01:33:21
Speaker
And he doesn't, once he's realized that he's hit with the car, he doesn't stop. He's like, I have to get you to the train station. I think my friend will be fine. I hope my friend will be fine. But worse things will happen if I don't get you to the train station. Let's let's separate and and break the magic first.
01:33:36
Speaker
So they they both are like, okay, this is this is the most important thing that's happening. And at the train station, they run into the Leroy's. Is that
Romantic and Artistic Development
01:33:43
Speaker
before or after the embrace? I think the embrace at the train station is incredibly important.
01:33:48
Speaker
You're right. The embrace happens. The embrace happens. And then i believe at the time, I'm trying to remember what order does it happen? Is it at the time of the embrace? And then Mr. Leroy comes up.
01:34:01
Speaker
No, it's, he embraces her after he embraces her when he's putting her on the train. And mashing her face into his anorak and his hand in her hair. And that I think is the first moment of like,
01:34:14
Speaker
explicitly this is a romantic relationship. that Tom might not want it to be, but it is. Yes. And that's when he puts but he puts her on the train with Seb because they run into Mr. Leroy and Mr. Leroy says, oh, my son's also just up from London.
01:34:32
Speaker
And why doesn't he see her home to her grandmother? And so Polly gets on the train with Seb. Is this now? Now I'm doubting myself. No, this this is now.
01:34:44
Speaker
Because this this is when, probably, this is when Seb falls in love with Polly. um Yes. and she's No, no, you know what? No, I'm wrong. It's earlier. It's earlier that she gets on the train with Seb, I think.
01:34:57
Speaker
Seb does start following her around after this. But there's an earlier trip to London. where they run into Seb. It's after the trip where she beats Anne, where they run into Seb. Okay, okay. Yeah, no, that makes more sense.
01:35:13
Speaker
Because you wouldn't really want to spoil the moment of connection at the end of the bristel track Bristol sequence with the other boyfriend.
01:35:24
Speaker
The other boyfriend. Let's talk about Seb. Let's talk about Seb. So, as well, Polly has a lot of suitors. in Firing the Block, which makes sense because, among other things, she is the fairy queen or a double of the fairy queen. And one thing the fairy queen all always has is men hanging around admiring her.
01:35:43
Speaker
So Polly, from the beginning of the book, as well as attracting the sexual interest of adult men, which she clearly does, ah is attracting the interest of boys her own age, or rather not her own age. I don't think boys Polly's own age even exists in this book.
01:35:57
Speaker
that Unless she's playing football with them. No, Leslie is Polly's own age. ah But Leslie, and we'll talk about Leslie as well, but Leslie and Polly don't really, like, he's not really her suitor. She's not really his. They're parallels in a very different way.
01:36:12
Speaker
Right. But Seb turns up from very early on. he's ah He's in that funeral in the first chapter. Tom talks about not being able to get him out in a way which takes on a double meaning later on.
01:36:25
Speaker
ah And then Seb starts, after the funeral, basically straight away, Seb starts following Polly around and it becomes clear that he's been set to watch her.
01:36:36
Speaker
like right From the moment that Polly was at that funeral, she has got the attention of Laurel and the powers of Hunsdon House. They're always watching her from the time she's nine or 10. There's never a point at which Tom has really fully sort of slipped her past their gaze.
01:36:52
Speaker
So, Seb was keeping a track of Polly and we actually find out about this from Polly's friend Nina, who as usual in the early part of the book, Nina is actually the impetus ah behind understanding that something weird's going on and you can respond weirdly to it and you can be frightened by it and you can say this is not normal.
01:37:09
Speaker
Nina is also the one who points, she says to Polly all the time, you're meeting up with strange men and Polly's like, these are not strange men, these are these are my friends, this is normal and Nina's like, this is not normal.
01:37:20
Speaker
Right, so Nina believes that she's the one being followed because she's seeing Seb everywhere. and And in the sort of reversal of their usual dynamic, Polly says, let's go and talk to him about it. Let's confront him. And they go and speak to Seb. And have you got the quote?
01:37:36
Speaker
You know, here it is. I've got it. ah So Nina and Polly talking to Seb and they get on the subject of basically go to hell, leave us alone. ah And they have a little bit of like very childish back and forth because they're all children.
01:37:49
Speaker
right And it's mostly Nina taking the lead because she is actually the tough and cool one who who comes up with cool comebacks in a hurry. but She says, hell's not boring. Nina said smartly. She hated not being the center of attention.
01:38:02
Speaker
There's devils with forks and flames and thousands of sinners. You won't have a dull moment when you go there. I'm not planning to go there. Seb said, I told you to shut up. I'm planning not to, he said to Polly.
01:38:14
Speaker
And I told you, you owe me. Yeah. So from the beginning, and we already read out the quote at the beginning when Tom pulls Polly out of the funeral and says, I would have got that kid Seb out too if but he'd had the if he'd been if he'd sat near the door, but I couldn't think of a way to do it.
01:38:31
Speaker
Tom and Seb both know that it's one or the other of them who's going to be the next the next one who gets sent to hell to extend the life of Morton Leroy. As it turns out, that's not 100% how it plays out. Seb is doomed to a different fate.
01:38:44
Speaker
But they're both aware, and Seb is a child. And they both look at Polly. Like, Tom identifies Polly as a way out, because she wanders into Hunston House, and she gets herself entangled in this business, and that means that she can pull someone out.
01:38:56
Speaker
And Seb looks at Tom, looking at Polly, and is like, Wait, wait, wait. No, I could do that.
01:39:04
Speaker
That could be my way out. So Seb and... First, Seb shows up mostly warn Polly, but when they get on the They get put on the train together, and Polly expects Seb to ignore her because he's an older boy and older boys are not interested in girls of 11.
01:39:17
Speaker
But in fact, Seb seems determined to make conversation in a way that really confuses her. And it's incredibly awkward. And eventually, Polly sort of polly sort of in like a brainwave, was like, wait, I know one thing about Seb, which she does for reasons we haven't actually talked about. She's broken into his house. She's seen his bedroom.
01:39:38
Speaker
We'll come back to that. Right. Various Polly crimes have happened already. um the polly know But knows that Seb likes music. So he asks him one question.
01:39:50
Speaker
What bands do you listen to? What groups do you like? It's something like that. It's one question. And this is a 15-year-old boy who gets one bit of positive attention from this small girl who appears to be genuinely interested in something he cares about.
01:40:04
Speaker
And that is it for Seb. He is doomed to YA boyfriend status from that point onwards. He talks for a solid hour. about the things he is interested in. Polly sort of nodding and smiling the whole time. She never got a chance to ask anything, said the All Polly was able to do was nod and listen.
01:40:24
Speaker
And at the end of this, he invites her to the school disco. Yep. And she's like, oh my god, I'm going to the school disco with a 15-year-old boy and goes into a full panic spiral about what you wear to a school disco that she, in fact, didn never ends up going to.
01:40:39
Speaker
They have this, like, he is such a YA boyfriend. We're reading the text and we're like, he'd be a plausible YA boyfriend in, like, a Margaret Mayhew book, for example. like this This is tomba age-appropriate.
01:40:53
Speaker
Like, yes, here's your spooky older boyfriend who's mixed up in something terrible and has a horrible debt to the fairy queen and needs to be rescued. But he's not in his 20s. He's more or less the right age for you.
01:41:09
Speaker
at But because, mean, the book, so it's hard not to, look as an adult, it's hard not to look at Seb sympathetically. Polly thinks Seb is devastatingly boring.
01:41:19
Speaker
um At first she sort of gets over the idea that, oh, cool older boy is interested in me. And then what he does is he turns up at her house and he's like, let's make out. And they make out and it doesn't, it's boring. It doesn't do anything for her.
01:41:32
Speaker
Doesn't do anything for her. And I also feel a great deal of sympathy empathyme for this. The descriptions of Polly putting up with Seb kissing her are, I remember feeling like this at 15 with my first boyfriend.
01:41:43
Speaker
One of the ways in which Polly does read kind of gay. Debbie is really tall, good-looking, popular and important like head boy of the fancy boys' school, high-status teenage boyfriend material.
01:42:00
Speaker
yes ah And he's wildly into her, that's really clear. He's constantly like... talking to her, inviting her to things. Late in the book, at the time when Polly is 19, he's proposed to her. He suggests that they get married.
01:42:13
Speaker
And and like he's clearly really sincere and wants her all for himself and in a way back to go back Yes. Polly's just like... I just feel sorry for him. Like she lets Seb kiss her because it's so awkward to tell him she'd rather not.
01:42:28
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Again, sorry to my teenage boyfriend. I don't remember your name, but I do remember this emotion.
01:42:36
Speaker
ah But it is a he's a bad. Well, she does also kiss Leslie and she's like, well, Leslie is the son of Tom Piper. So ah Tom Lynn's nephew and he goes around kissing everybody. So he and Polly kiss.
01:42:48
Speaker
She's like, well, that's a bit nicer than kissing Sam. But, you know, Leslie kisses everybody. So it doesn't feel as special. It's like, no, Polly, I must kiss you. i have a laser focus on you. But neither of them really do much for her.
01:43:00
Speaker
And think it's an open question whether Seb's focus on Polly. Like, I do think it's at least 50% because he has identified her as this is a way out.
01:43:12
Speaker
If i hang on to you and I get you to hang on to me, then you can you can haul me out of Huntsdon Douse and I can live a normal life. I don't have to be doomed to go to hell. He says very early on in the book, he's trying not to go to hell and this is a way for it.
01:43:25
Speaker
But I do also think that he's genuinely attached to Polly. We see him arguing with his father ah couple of times when his father has set up, you know, a magical Polly trap. And we hear these ambiguous conversations between the Leroy men that are obviously meant to indicate that Seb is angry that ah his father has set up some kind of harm to Polly.
01:43:44
Speaker
um So I do think that Seb tries to save her from various traps that his father has set, very seldom successfully because Polly just doesn't listen to him. Polly just doesn't care about him.
01:43:56
Speaker
She does not care about him at all. um And ah so in the end of Reflections, the Book of Diana Wynne-Jones essay, there is sort of a coda by her son, Colin Burroughs, who very clearly identifies himself as Seb.
01:44:12
Speaker
He says, you know, I was into the doors and I was into photography. And there's this sort of unpleasant character who shows up in Fire and Hemlock. And I guess to my mother at that point, i might have must i i was very into I was very fond of my grandmother, who my mother didn't like.
01:44:27
Speaker
And I suppose I must have seemed kind of chilly to my mother at that age. Which is an interesting thing to think about when looking at this. child that Polly at least does view very unsympathetically.
01:44:40
Speaker
i don't think the book necessarily views him unsympathetically. I think the book feels quite sorry for Seb or rather that we as adult readers, I find it really hard not to be sorry for Seb who does indeed effectively go to hell.
01:44:53
Speaker
Who spends his whole adolescence clinging desperately to a girl who never really loved him and ends up betraying him and choosing someone else over him. Yeah. um Like,
01:45:06
Speaker
Poor kid. Yeah, poor kid. But the difference between Seb and Tom, and I think the reason that Seb is never viewed as, never really has a chance at getting, you know, at getting Polly to feel about him the way she does about Tom, is that Seb just holds on to Polly. He doesn't listen to her. He attempts, you know, he sort of like lets, you know, he he he makes romantic advances on her that she's not interested in and doesn't want.
01:45:31
Speaker
He doesn't let her come towards him. He doesn't let her take the lead in any way. he He's not interested in Polly as a person. like at no break like Seb doesn't seem to know anything about her writing or her theatre, her art.
01:45:45
Speaker
Seb doesn't seem to know anything about the books she likes, the things she's passionate about. There's no actual connection except that he was a boy and she was a girl and and she's the girl who's there who could save him.
01:45:59
Speaker
Right. he's cast He's cast her as heroine, but not as Polly. Yeah, there's this really interesting part where he takes photos. So Seb is into photography as well as music. ah Tom was also into photography, which is another mirror between them. There was a period of time when...
01:46:14
Speaker
Both Tom and his brother, I think it's mentioned briefly, were into photography and they took a lot of pictures, some of which Laurel ended up later in able to use. He takes pictures of Polly and her grandmother and it says he'd done things with strong light and dark shadows that made Polly and Granny look like two white-haired witches.
01:46:29
Speaker
Well, you see, Seb explained to Polly, you're not beautiful or pretty, but your face is interesting and I've brought out the interest. ah Which is a very funny bit of negging, first of all, from... mys Because it's click extremely clear that Polly is beautiful, is very beautiful. Everyone recognizes Polly is beautiful.
01:46:46
Speaker
Seb is like, well, you're not beautiful, but you're interesting. You compel me somehow, strangely. And Granny says, when he's noticed that there are other people in the world beside himself, there might be no harm in Master Sebastian, but I'm prejudiced. He comes from that house.
01:47:00
Speaker
So there is a hint that, you know, Seb's crime is that he is 14 or 15. ah Yeah, he's a pretentious teenage boy of a type we've all met, I'm sure. All met or some some of us have been.
01:47:12
Speaker
and there's nothing wrong with being a pretentious teenage boy. Yeah. But, but, and he's also a pretentious teenage boy who has not learned about real love in any real way, right? Real love, real friendship.
01:47:25
Speaker
He has grown up with the Leroys. I mean, I guess we don't know what his mother was like, but we do know that his mother was sacrificed to keep his father and stepmother alive. So that probably ah was not particularly fun for him or a particularly good model of forming a relationship.
01:47:43
Speaker
Mm-hmm. it's I think the ah Polly's final word on Seb is that Seb loved like he was holding a grudge. Yeah. Yeah. Which is this idea of love as something you cling to. yeah Love as sort of a poison that sits in you.
01:47:59
Speaker
Ivy's kind of love, actually. Yeah, hold here you're right. Ivy and Seb are sort of mirrors in their own way. But he's not a romantic figure. In many other books he would be a romantic figure, and in this book he simply isn't.
01:48:12
Speaker
And the reason I wanted to link, I was wrong about when Seb starts high-key becoming romantically interested in Polly, but I do think that to come back to the monster and the embrace, the section after that is when the book really starts, when Polly really starts becoming interested in romance.
01:48:29
Speaker
capital R and it starts seeping into her relationship with Tom. It starts seeping into her creativity, into everything that she does. Yeah. Should we talk about sexy backs? Let's talk about Polly's writing.
01:48:42
Speaker
ah So Polly is an artist in various ways. And actually I think some of the most compelling writing about art isn't about Polly's writing. It's about her performance. It's her theater.
01:48:52
Speaker
ah But Polly also writes because she has been making up these stories with Tom, ah the stories of Tan Cool and his adventures with his friends and his assistant hero. Polly ah takes on the role of the scribe, the storyteller, and starts to write the adventures down.
01:49:09
Speaker
And she's doing this from very, very early on in the story. And we do get, I have to say, I don't really enjoy the comedy Misspellings Child, Polly. Yes. ah Storytelling, but we do get some of her early examples of storytelling and some of Tom's typewritten accidentally on purpose typoed. Right.
01:49:25
Speaker
um responses but by the time polly is getting serious about this storytelling we get what i actually found i found quite moving yes a description of a little girl writing a really really long fantasy book yes oh yes this is familiar this is what little girls do at least all the ones i know because everyone i know is a fantasy writer oh a hundred percent And it's so recognizable. She reads Lord of the Rings and then writes a really, really long version of the story, which is just Lord of the Rings, but worse. Okay, so what happens first is she tells she tells Tom, she you know they've they've made up this the Obisip, which is this sort of... ah
01:50:08
Speaker
MacGuffin that the heroes are questing after. And she writes a version of the story. This isn't the really big long one, but she does write a story in which the Obasip is the ring, is it is a magic ring that they're questing after.
01:50:18
Speaker
And Tom writes back to her and says, stop reading Lord of the Rings. This is just Lord of the Rings. um Which I do think it's very funny that this is a bit that... ah this obvious I don't think this is a problem that Diana Wendones had. Most of this the writing bits, I think, are very clearly looking at the self, looking at Diana Wendones' writing process.
01:50:35
Speaker
But I do think this is a call-out of the various fantasy authors in the 80s who are just writing Lord of the Rings, because the 80s is when this is starting to happen. And she's very annoyed about it. We know that she hasn't in her essays.
01:50:45
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know. I think there is something to say about the way in which Tolkien's work does have a distorting effect on like all the fantasy writing that's coming after it. yeah And I don't know that Jones is completely immune. I think Diana Wynne Jones did feel called upon to write a long series set in the secondary world with a vast amount of her of her old English scholarship sort of baked into the background. yes Just to prove that she could do it. yes like Just because she could do it well doesn't mean she was not also doing the thing. All right Fair point. Fair point.
01:51:20
Speaker
um But then she starts writing the big one. The passage where she decides to do this says, remembering how scornful Mr. Lin had been at her borrowing from Tolkien, Polly decided to let her imagination take her where it would.
01:51:31
Speaker
All she knew at the start was that it was an account of how Hero came to be Tan Cool's assistant, and then their quest together for the Obasept. The result was that the story got huge. Small extra stories sprouted off and everywhere, giving detailed histories of every character who appeared.
01:51:45
Speaker
Hero herself became a king's daughter who had to run away from home because of the machinations of her beautiful but evil girl cousin. Tan Cool found her wandering in disguise and made her his assistant, thinking she was a boy.
01:51:56
Speaker
From there, it became an epic... Polly was rating it most of that school year, almost until her 14th birthday, on and off with numerous interruptions from real life. ah Most of those interruptions are Seb. The next bit I have quoted is Polly was continually trying to get rid of Seb or at least invade his grabbing and kissing her.
01:52:14
Speaker
So she's writing romance. Please stop snoking me. I am trying to write my 700,000 word epic. Exactly. She is inventing romance in her fiction. And romance in real life is an annoyance and an interruption.
01:52:27
Speaker
ah but Meanwhile, in fiction, tan Cool and Hero are having quite a time. Oh, yes. She's also, this is around the time that she's acting in Twelfth Night. She's desperate to play the part of Viola, but that instead goes in goes to Christy Jefferson, the prettiest ghoul in school, who's only relevant in that Polly and Nina both have big crushes on Christy Jefferson.
01:52:47
Speaker
so she was she But she does learn from Shakespeare. says, Shakespeare, she discovered, borrowed plots for his plays from all over the place. So there, Mr. Lin. first It's legal to borrow. I'll try to give him talking if I want ah The longer she spent copying, the more she admired it. Some parts were really good.
01:53:04
Speaker
The part in particular where Tan Cool is wounded in the shoulder and Hiro has to dress the wound. She strips off Tan Cool's armor and sees the smooth, powerful muscles rippling under the silken skin of his back.
01:53:15
Speaker
Wonderful. Polly went round and admiring to herself. ah Oh, God. Okay, this... I'll tell you what this makes me think of. And...
01:53:27
Speaker
Ellen Montgomery, oh Emily of New Moon. yeah. ah Which is also a book featuring a relationship between a young woman who dreams of writing and a much older man who sort of guides her development creatively and also judges her development creatively.
01:53:46
Speaker
But Polly, like Emily of New Moon, Polly, like Emily has gone head over heels into something I think perfectly natural for a 13 year old girl. yep She likes the sexy stuff. yup yeah Like she's got this character who's very handsome and very cool and she's and very brave and very exciting.
01:54:09
Speaker
And then her character gets to take his shirt off. And they do a little her comfort. It's a classic. It's a classic for a reason. But what Polly writes ah her like ah good copy of her epic, and as she has always done for years now, she sends what she's created to Tom.
01:54:31
Speaker
want you to imagine that you are Tom's age. What, is he 25, 26 at this point? Yep, yep. You've received this gigantic 700,000 word epic.
01:54:43
Speaker
Written by a 13 year old. A 13 year old girl who you've befriended some years ago, writing her self-insert fan fiction about yeah how she got to take your shirt off. Yep, yep.
01:54:54
Speaker
Yes, I think is the point at which Tom goes, oh shit, am I a monster? yeah yu Yep, yep, yep. And he's right, this is an oh shit moment. A thousand percent.
01:55:06
Speaker
Because this is a confession on Bolly's part, but not just that she loves him, which I think is already clear, but that she is sexually attracted to him. She's into him. She's obsessed. yeah She is getting rid of her boyfriend and like trying to get get out of his rights to to write more story about her and Tom. Yes. And what she actually says to Seb when she gets rid of him is, you just don't know what I'm like. I told you to stop bothering me.
01:55:30
Speaker
Go away and don't come back for a year. I'm too young, she says Seb. And then... sends the 700,000 word epic to Tom Lin. And Tom Lin writes back two words, sentimental drivel.
01:55:44
Speaker
And that is actually the the Emily of New Moon chime to me because that's what Dean says to Emily. He accuses her of sentimentality. ah so ah Which is possibly the most brutal thing a man whose opinion you value could say to a young woman. Yes, and she's furious.
01:56:04
Speaker
ah She stomps around. She imagines him breaking his cello. She imagines stomping on all his cellos. ah She gets news several days later that he has broken one of his cellos. Yeah, because she's got... but There's a magic in their relationship that the what what they dream of comes true and where Polly becomes angry.
01:56:23
Speaker
And heartbroken, I think. She's rejected and it hurts. Yes. And she does have that gives her power to hurt because Polly is also an echo of her mother and of Laurel. And she she can hurt Tom.
01:56:36
Speaker
And this is sort of one of the ways in which they're the power dynamics in their relationship do roll back and forth, despite the big glaring one of the 12 year age gap. which is that Polly has a magic power and she can use it to wound and injure because of her hurt feelings, because Tom is trying to do the right thing, which is distance himself from a 13 year old.
01:56:55
Speaker
Right. But also that, that, uh, sentimental drivel is not just distancing. It is also, I think, uh, a true from Tom's point of view yes ah assessment of the work she's done. Yes.
01:57:09
Speaker
Which is true that 13 year old girls do quite often write sentimental dribble. Yeah, so he... I wrote so much sentimental dribble as a teenager. So at this point, they're trying not to. They've had this elaborate game where they're trying not to write to each other too directly because the Leroy's will find out.
01:57:28
Speaker
So Polly gets a letter back via one of Tom's friends from the quartet. I'm going to read out this letter. I think it's beautiful and terrible. It's so brutal. It's brutal. Right.
01:57:39
Speaker
polly wishes you for reasons i can't understand ah human back he says there matters you should consider too a particularly glaring example he invites you he says to this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves there you will see back Backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt.
01:58:00
Speaker
You will find, he says, yellow skin, black heads, pimples, enlarged pores, and tufts of hair. This is making me ill. But Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, holes, and midg bites, and floppy rolls of skin.
01:58:14
Speaker
Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples unless with goose flesh. In fact, He defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers.
01:58:26
Speaker
I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can.
01:58:35
Speaker
Honestly, it's That is such a weird letter to write to a 13 year old girl and an even weirder letter to make your friend write for you to a 13 year old girl. But Tom feels he has to say it.
01:58:47
Speaker
It's not just that he's rejecting. He's not just rejecting Polly's feelings like out of the goodness of his heart. ah He's rejecting the way she's approaching those feelings. that This is not true.
01:59:01
Speaker
true. Right. Because he's also, his his goal is still, despite the fact that he has you know sort of taken alarm at the increasing romance in their friendship and is trying to squash that, he's still trying to shape her into the hero who can save him.
01:59:15
Speaker
And I think one of the things that Diana Wynne-Jones believes about heroes, believes about the act of creativity as heroism, is that it has to be true. It can't be sentimental. And you are the one, I think, who said...
01:59:27
Speaker
that this book is sort of a rerun on Dalemark. um And this is something we see throughout Dalemark. This is the quitter, the buzzy sound of the quitter. Truth is the fire that fetches thunder. Yeah, that's that's the words for Dalemark. I do really feel ah that Dalemark is echoed all through ah Fire and Hemlock.
01:59:48
Speaker
Not least in the underlying structure of the four quartets, which Jones explicitly points to as what what she's working with in Fire and Hemlock, but which is pretty clearly, as we discussed last season after being pointed at it by a brilliant listener, pretty clearly what's going on with Denmark as well.
02:00:03
Speaker
But also... I think in particular, Fire and Hemlock to me feels like Spellcoats over again and a little to the left. What I mean by that is that Spellcoats has the storyteller girl as the sort of central figure whose power to tell the story reshapes the story.
02:00:23
Speaker
And that is Polly's power also. But Spellcoats also has the story of the sad man who is bound. Tannemil. The Piper.
02:00:34
Speaker
Tannemil the Piper, yes. Presumably Tannemil's little brother. No, I think Tannemil and Tannemil must echo each other. And Tannemil has this romance that saves him, and it's a romance with ah the main character's older sister, Robin.
02:00:48
Speaker
And in Spellcoats, we get it all via the sort of the gap between Tanakui and Robin ah gives us the romance one step removed.
02:00:59
Speaker
Tanakui is embarrassed by the romance. She doesn't quite get the romance. She thinks it's a bit strange, the romance. Fire and Hemlock puts us right in, if you like, in Robin's head, in Robin's place as the the young girl rescuing the ancient power.
02:01:18
Speaker
Tomlin is not quite as ancient to power as Tannermill, but I think that is, that's also an age gap relationship. um ae Go on. Oh, I do think that ah Tom would love if, if there could be two polys, right? If there's the, the, the romantic poly who's already an adult,
02:01:37
Speaker
and the brilliant creative child, because that's what Tanakui is. Robin is not really the one who rescues Tanamil. Tanakui rescues Tanamil with her writing, with her creativity, with her art. But there's no question. Who gets to marry Robin?
02:01:50
Speaker
Who's age appropriate. Age appropriate, and who is beautiful, and who isn't appropriate. you know Even though there's an age gap there, she has an appropriate romantic interest. She's ready for marriage. But Fire and Hemlock puts those two people together in ways that are very uncomfortable for everybody.
02:02:05
Speaker
Including Tom, but not Polly. I think that's important. Polly is never uncomfortable with who she is, with what she wants, with her own desires. Polly knew from page one she was flirting. Yes. ah Polly has always loved Tom.
02:02:19
Speaker
Tom's eventual admission that he's always loved Polly is weird as hell, but it's a victory for Polly. And this is a a time I think when Diana Wynne Jones' commitment to taking children seriously as agents of their own narrative, as active and driving their own stories, ah can be really difficult for an adult reader to accept.
02:02:42
Speaker
Because she was nine. Because she was nine. there is, I think, I want to, I'm going to take a quick zig zig zigzag and talk about Fiona, who is probably, because I think it's crucial to how ah Diana Jones is thinking about teens, teen sexuality, teen love,
02:02:58
Speaker
ah throughout this book. So Polly has this friend, Fiona. ah She makes friends with her right at the point when all this is starting to go down with Tom, when she's about to have a break with Tom, which is important because that's going to be the link, that the thread that allows her to pull ah pull Tom back into her life, to pull her memories back into her life later on, is that she has this new friendship that hasn't been sort of wound into the story of Polly and Tom.
02:03:20
Speaker
Diana Jones describes Fiona as sensible, unlike Nina, who's sort of getting, ah you know, who's who's very fun, who's, you know, has these big ideas, who's larger than life, who's shameless, but who's always doing kind of wacky things.
02:03:32
Speaker
ah Fiona and Polly are simpatico. They're they're both kind of late bloomers. They like similar books. They're both determined to go to university and they end up with roommates at Oxford. And they end up roommates at Oxford. It's a lovely friendship.
02:03:44
Speaker
There's sort of a reference casually in one of the intervening chapters to that weird thing that Fiona did when she was a teenager. And eventually we find out that what Fiona did when she was 15 is her father had a visiting German businessman and Fiona fell passionately in love with him and ran away followed him to Germany to try and get him to fall in love with her.
02:04:03
Speaker
And he, of course, sent her right back to England. And this was the, you know, the great wound and tragedy in Fiona's life was that she had this passionate love for this German businessman who didn't speak English. And she's the sensible one out of the East Coast. She's the sensible one. She's the sensible one.
02:04:20
Speaker
Nina and Leslie, meanwhile, are kissing everybody, ah going off and having all kinds of flirtations, all kinds of romantic encounters. Again, it's a bit silly, but the narrative looks at them very fondly.
02:04:32
Speaker
I think, and Leslie, who is Tom's nephew, is also has is being cultivated by Laurel. Laurel, who was the older woman to Tom, has now become the older woman to Leslie.
02:04:44
Speaker
And it's a bit horrifying and everyone's a bit horrified by this, but there's no shade on Leslie for this. I think that the book thinks it's and it is normal for teenagers to want to have sex with adults.
02:04:55
Speaker
This is a thing that teenagers do. It's not normal or good or appropriate for adults to want to or try to have sex with them back. But you have to make space for teenagers to want that because they will want that no matter what.
02:05:07
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's it. This book is interested in sort of asymmetric desire and asymmetric power. and the ways in which teenagers experience it, whether you like it or not, and what is the right adult response to it.
02:05:23
Speaker
It's yes like, if you think about ah someone like Polly's stepfather, David, and the sort of asymmetric desire between them, which in in that case is mostly from David's end.
02:05:35
Speaker
right hu He's handling it wrong. yes Even though he never acts on the desire beyond giving Polly some uncomfortable compliments, which is actually too young to realize they're uncomfortable.
02:05:46
Speaker
right most Her mother realizes it's uncomfortable and she blames Polly for it. yep But Laurel is essentially a serial abuser, a serial groomer. She picks Polly.
02:05:58
Speaker
boys, young boys, she builds them up into the person she needs them to be and then she destroys them, which coincidentally, not coincidentally, is exactly what Tom is doing to Polly. He's picked a young girl and is raising her up into the person he needs.
02:06:17
Speaker
yep yeah He's doing what Laurel did to him. yeah And the question is, so so what exactly is the difference between a Laurel and a Tom? Yeah, yeah.
02:06:27
Speaker
And I think there is something quite, you know, that's ah the figurative moving to the literal, right? And what Laurel does to these boys. She targets them when she's teenagers. She steals their life metaphorically by taking their childhood, taking their future and molding it to shape her needs and preferences.
02:06:44
Speaker
ah And then she takes their life literally by sacrificing them to hell. But the theft has already occurred. She is,
Manipulation and Control
02:06:52
Speaker
you know, you see that in the the difference between what Tom looks like in the photograph as a child who it seemed was going to grow up into someone sort of laughing and jolly and and carefree and what we see Tom as now, which is another abuser in the making.
02:07:07
Speaker
Yeah.
02:07:09
Speaker
It's really like, it's really dark, this book. I mean, like done yeah there this is such a though a completely useless thing to say as a point of analysis, but oh my God, it hits.
02:07:21
Speaker
And actually, i think the the focus on Leslie as essentially a happy boy, right? Yeah. when we Every time we meet Leslie, he is cheerful, he is delightful, ah he's wonderful and everyone loves him. His mother adores him because he's great.
02:07:36
Speaker
He has lots of girlfriends. ah They call him Sexy Leslie. They call him Georgie Porgie, which made me laugh a lot. Yes. Porgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.
02:07:48
Speaker
Insofar as he has a serious girlfriend, it's Nina, which is like, seems like a and and a nice parallel. ah These are two people who are happy in themselves, free to be themselves, however ridiculous that self is.
02:08:03
Speaker
Right, neither Leslie, if they grow up and end up together long term, are going to be that gloriously polyamorous couple who are always bringing home new people to each other and having a wonderful time with it.
02:08:14
Speaker
Right, that's really, really clear. But then Laurel involves herself in Leslie's life and Leslie begins to get Squirrelly. he yes He has secrets.
02:08:24
Speaker
He feels guilty. He tries to hide things. And we only see the very edges of this, but we see the ways in which Laurel's grooming of Leslie is changing him and changing.
02:08:35
Speaker
You're right, robbing him of the person he could have been. Yes. And we see this, I think that Leslie and Polly are very clearly mirrored. And we see this in sort of the next major thing that happens after the sexy back sequence is the lead up, the thing, the lead up to the big break.
02:08:51
Speaker
It's ah the quartet invite Polly and, well, they invite Polly out for lunch because they're going to make a CD and they're very excited and they want to celebrate. And the first thing they say is, Polly, bring a friend.
02:09:03
Speaker
Bring an age-appropriate friend. And Polly wants to bring Fiona. She can't bring Fiona. Fiona's got the chickenpox. So instead, Tom invites Leslie, an age-appropriate friend. um And they both turn up, and they go they all go together to an amusement park.
02:09:20
Speaker
And Polly, and Tom's girlfriend is there too, by the way. ah She's not having a great time. It's a weird experience. It's always a weird experience for poor Mary Fields. um And Polly drinks some champagne, gets quite shameless, hangs on Tom's arm and giggles at him like she sees older girls doing. She's like, oh, I see i see why nina Nina likes to hang on people's arms. ah it It gives you a chance to show them what a nice bosom you've got.
02:09:48
Speaker
This is clearly mortifying for everybody else. And Tom is very clearly trying to be like, go, go, go hang out with Leslie. Go do the tunnel of love with Leslie. And what Polly thinks, it's very clear that Tom is saying Leslie's are for Polly's.
02:10:00
Speaker
This is an age appropriate relationship. This is a parallel relationship. You two go off with each other and leave the adults alone. But unfortunately, Polly is obsessed with Tom and has also wound her fate in with Tom.
02:10:14
Speaker
So despite the fact that Tom was trying to shake her off throughout this whole time, they end up going into the haunted house together. And then the haunted house attacks them. And she has to save Tom from a portcullis falling down on his back, which injures And then she has to tend to his wound.
02:10:30
Speaker
Because what Polly makes up through the through tom through Tom's gift always comes true. So Polly is forced to confront the difference between the sentimental romantic hurt comfort moment and someone you love just got very seriously hurt right in front of you.
02:10:48
Speaker
Right. And in fact, what Tom says while he's bleeding out the back is, you are now about to see a human back.
02:10:57
Speaker
Tom is really hung up on this and I think it also sort points us to try as he might, Tom is not disinterested. Tom is not able to shove Polly off onto an appropriate partner.
02:11:07
Speaker
Tom wants Polly to notice what's real about him. He doesn't want to be subsumed into her her fantastic, her romantic, tan cool figure.
02:11:19
Speaker
He wants Polly to look at his back and notice that he's just a normal bloke's back. Yeah. Tom, this looks awful, she says. And he says, but how about the bit round the edges, Tom said, almost jeeringly.
02:11:31
Speaker
And he's mocking both of them. He's mocking her for being sentimental about backs and having this romance idea in her head. And he's mocking himself for caring about what a 14-year-old thinks about his back.
02:11:45
Speaker
um This is also the bit, by the way, where we found out when talking about Leslie, ah Tom says, I feel responsible for Leslie having a weird time at school. I told his mother how good the music was there, but I didn't dream she'd take me seriously. I hated the place when Laurel sent me there.
02:12:01
Speaker
Laurel sent you. And Tom says, my parents had died and we'd nothing. I was in council care when Laurel almost adopted me. I know how Leslie felt. He knows how Leslie feels. This is what was happening to him is happening to Leslie right now.
02:12:13
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And he has just made one very ineffective stab and pulled him out of it. Yeah. so they, they tend, they tend the back and then they get rushed away from each other. Cause Tom has to go to the hospital.
02:12:28
Speaker
In the company of Mary Fields, who is a nurse, poor Mary Fields. Poor Mary Fields. Leslie and Polly are so mean about her. Leslie says, I hate that Mary Fields. Leslie, what have you got against Mary Fields?
02:12:40
Speaker
Yeah. I know what Polly has against Mary Fields and Polly even thinks she hates her, but she knows she's nice. She's nice and she's normal. Although there is again, a weird, again, a weird age gap relationship that goes on because later on, shortly after this, Polly loses all her memory of Tom. When she's trying to find her memory of Tom again, she calls up Mary Fields.
02:12:58
Speaker
ah She says, because the way that Mary Fields and Tom got to know each other was Mary Fields bought the horse off Tom, the runaway horse that that was part of their hero business. And she says, who sold you that horse? And Mary Field says, oh, Seb Leroy did.
02:13:11
Speaker
And why are you calling me up and asking me about my boyfriends? So Seb has also been dating Mary Field. to Well, Seb is trying to basically follow Tom's lead, I think, in how the hell do I get out of this?
02:13:26
Speaker
Right. Well, maybe it's Polly and maybe it's this horse woman. I don't know. But there's, there's, you know, every, every relationship in this book, I think is mirrored between there's an age appropriate one and an age inappropriate one. And that's all happening at once.
02:13:39
Speaker
think I do think that Seb is, ah one thing Seb always is as a mirror for his father, Morton Leroy. And what's clear is that Laurel uses Morton as a way to control other women.
02:13:50
Speaker
That for example, she got Morton. Seb's mother, the sacrifice start of the book by temporarily divorcing in quotation marks Morton. So he went up and picked up another woman.
02:14:02
Speaker
yeah Then that was the woman that they used to ah renew Laurel's eternal youth. but Yeah, Laurel's tragically heterosexual. Yeah, Seb in the same way is being used by the Leroy's, by the fairy court ah to control the women in Tom's life, to control take control of Polly, to take control of Mary Fields, to keep an eye on them and send to keep them in the orbit of Laurel and Morton. And in fact, ah in her post The Break With Tom, Polly has memories of like meeting Seb's parents as his girlfriend.
02:14:36
Speaker
Yeah. seeing Seb get congratulated by his father on this very clever idea. And of course, without her memory, she has no idea what's so special or clever about the idea of dating her.
02:14:47
Speaker
But in fact, Seb has done something clever, putting Polly under his control for the fairy family. And the other clever thing Seb does is the next thing that happens, which is... one of the other stories, there are so many stories underlying this.
02:15:01
Speaker
One of the other stories that we get told to us in detail is East of the Sun, West of the Moon. um Or the story of Cupid and Psyche, which is the story of a girl who has a magical boyfriend, which she can't look at too closely.
02:15:13
Speaker
And then her evil stepsisters tell her... but you should look at him. Just take a look. Just find out who he really is. And she does. And that ruins everything. And he's sent away from her and she has to go questing after him again. Yeah.
02:15:27
Speaker
And I have to say, the horrible pun involved in Cupid and Psyche. Oh my God. Which is in Jones's essay. She's like, yes, Tom is obviously Cupid. I mean, who is blind and goes to work with a bow? And you're like, Tom the cellist who wears glasses.
02:15:43
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Yep. That was terrible. Thank you, Diana. Thank you, Diana. No matter how serious she's being, she's always joking. Oh, a thousand percent.
02:15:53
Speaker
Even this book is funny. It's excruciating. Most of the times it's funny or when it's excruciatingly funny, like with the backs. back But it is funny. But she, Tom has sent Polly a book of fairy stories and Polly as younger at 11 or 12 was like, ugh, fairy stories.
02:16:07
Speaker
And Tom's like, read them. There's something true in all of them. And Polly reads East of the Sun, West of the Moon and is like, I don't know what that's for because I can't read. I'm trying to read
02:16:19
Speaker
her And Seb comes to Polly after the incident with the back and the fun house where they did, you know, they very heroically rescued each other. And this is... And Polly did get to see Tom with his shirt off.
02:16:31
Speaker
And Polly did get to see Tom with his shirt off. ah Polly, I think, feels like this has pushed them apart, but I think it's in the in danger of bringing them closer. And so Seb says...
02:16:43
Speaker
Why don't you ask Tom what's up with him, really? Why don't you ask... Why don't you just try and find out everything there is to know about Tom? Why don't you ask... He always calls him Old Tom, which is such a, like, little... a pointed little bit.
02:16:55
Speaker
And Polly says, he won't say. And Seb says, I told you he was obstinate, but you must know how to get round to that. There are ways and ways of asking, aren't there? If you really want to know, you have to ask him the right way and make it impossible for him not to answer somehow.
02:17:10
Speaker
So, Seb... has stepped in and said, take his agency away, force him to tell you everything he knows about him. ah Steal this information. Polly's like, yes, I will.
02:17:20
Speaker
I learned nothing from the stories that Tom has told me. but Right, but also this is an echo of the way Ivy seeks to possess every scrap of information about the men in her life. So this is what Polly's mother does to first Polly's father and then to her subsequent boyfriends, is try to control their whole lives by controlling ah by knowing everything about them.
02:17:43
Speaker
Yes. And this is Polly's like next move, her next desire. She wants to know everything about Tom. Yes. And I do think it's no, as in the euphemistic no as well. And I think that's quite strongly implied in the text because Polly doesn't just go off as a, right, I shall find out everything about Tom. She's like, should get some more advice. And she goes and asks Nina.
02:18:04
Speaker
Right. And Nina, of course, says ah Nina gives the rich chuckle she had cultivated to replace her giggle. If you mean anything like I think you mean, why not? Where's the harm?
02:18:14
Speaker
What's wrong with finding out things? Nina clearly thinks that Polly is talking about having sex with somebody. And it's like, yeah, do it. Great. ah Nina doesn't know that what Polly is talking about is ah stealing knowledge, non-consensually, from somebody, which is what she does.
02:18:35
Speaker
And that... Destroys things. Right. What Polly does is cast a spell. Yes. um And this is ah the clearest moment we have of Polly as like precise echo, both of Ivy and of Laurel.
02:18:50
Speaker
She is the witch queen trying to take total control of someone's life. And she does it by doing magic. She uses little photograph of Tom, which she stole from Laurel.
02:19:02
Speaker
ah She uses the fire and hemlock picture, which she, as a photograph, she acquired as part of those initial six pictures they took away from the house. One of them was a photograph of fire and hemlock and Tom gave it to Polly to keep and she's kept it ever since, hung up over her bed.
02:19:17
Speaker
This photograph is revealed to be, not at this point, Polly seems to instinctively know at this point, but we don't, have it confirmed for certain later on, this photograph is part of a charm which Laurel created to control Tom.
02:19:32
Speaker
yeah It has a lock of his hair hidden behind it inside the frame. ah It is in fact the Oberkippt, the quest object from the Tan Cool stories. It is the the creation of sympathetic magic that's used to control Tom.
02:19:48
Speaker
And Polynes is that. Yep. And she burns it all up in the state of greatest excitement. She remembered seeing her own face vivid and almost laughing reflected in the glass of the fire and hemlock picture while she struck a match and lit one corner of the postcard that says sentimental drivel on it. wow She's burning the the truth that Tom gave her.
02:20:11
Speaker
ah burning that up so that she can force truth. she He gave her truth. That's not the truth that she wants. She wants a different truth, and so she is burning that truth up to create the link between them so she can ask him for the real truth.
02:20:22
Speaker
Which she doesn't get. The magic works, but she doesn't get answers. Instead, what she gets is ah week later, Laurel taking her aside and saying, poor Tom, he's been so embarrassed by you.
02:20:37
Speaker
You were a little girl and children always adore poor Tom. You're embarrassing him. You got a crush on him and he's going to die in
Memory, Loss, and Rediscovery
02:20:45
Speaker
about four years. So can't and leave him alone.
02:20:48
Speaker
Now, the thing is that all of this is true. Polly yeah is very embarrassing. I think that's pretty clear at the the amusement park sequence where she gets drunk. And also, I think the um the sentimental drivel, the the romantic 700,000 word epic about Tan Cool and Hero and but and the shirtless.
02:21:08
Speaker
but but couple yeah It's embarrassing. It's deeply embarrassing. And it is sentimental drivel. And Tom is going to die in four years because Laurel ended up to kill him. But that's not how Laurel works. um Because what Joan says in ah in her essay about this is Laurel is a type of person who everyone's met one of these.
02:21:28
Speaker
a woman who mixes fact and fiction impartially for her own ends. yeah And the fiction. but Laurel layers over the facts is Tom has cancer.
02:21:38
Speaker
It's incurable. How awful, ah how difficult for him in this really hard time. He's also got this embarrassing little girl hanging off him. ah how We all love him so much. How could you treat him this way? And this is sentimental drivel.
02:21:54
Speaker
yeah This is playing on strong emotion to hide the truth. And I think, um sentimentality is something I think about a lot, something I worry about in my own work. and Oh, yes. ah when you are Especially when you are dealing with the realm of the fantastic, it's very easy to tip over into pure sentimentality, ah which is when you are more interested in the aesthetic power of emotion than what you're actually saying with it.
02:22:21
Speaker
um Yes. and Laurel's lie, her her enormously sentimental lie and like, oh no, he's got terminal cancer. How awful.
02:22:33
Speaker
This is. And all of the stalking that we've been doing of him is just because we care about him so much it is because of the terminal cancer. But this is all about like, oh, don't you feel terrible for him? But is this true? Is this what's actually happening? Is it what Tom wants Polly to hear or to know?
02:22:52
Speaker
No, because sentimentality is a way in which Laurel controls the narrative yeah and prevents Polly from telling her own story and understanding what the story is actually doing.
02:23:06
Speaker
yeah sentimentality sort of floods the narrative and I use flood advisedly this is the the image of death and water is about is coming back is always coming back sentimentality floods the narrative ah with falsehood with distractions and allows Laurel to make a bargain with Polly that she doesn't understand she's making Laurel says won't you promise to forget poor Tom and Polly is so embarrassed she feels so silly And that shame and silliness is one of the things she knows, has always known that a hero needs to move past. But no, Polly feels so silly. She says, yes, I'll forget him.
02:23:50
Speaker
And that is why she has two sets of memories, because that is where Laurel moves from the ordinary, the the the but now here abusive power,
02:24:04
Speaker
to the nowhere abusive power. That is Laurel's magic that she can physically really really make Polly completely forget that she ever knew Tom Lynn. Yes, and what Polly says afterwards was she had done it to herself and deserved it all, even being engaged to Seb, for not having the sense to remember something Tom had said himself, that being a hero means ignoring how silly you feel.
02:24:27
Speaker
She had let Laurel embarrass her into a state in which she could not even think straight. She had been just like Ivy, a miser who thought her horde was being taken away. And she had been after revenge because Tom had hurt her.
02:24:41
Speaker
And so then she has four ordinary years where she has no connection with Thomas Lynn at all. And these are basically skipped over because there is no story there.
02:24:52
Speaker
There's nothing there. Polly's life becomes empty without Tom in it. Well, not completely empty. I mean, she has a friendship with Fiona. She has an age appropriate boyfriend in the form of Seb.
02:25:03
Speaker
ah She goes off to Oxford. She accomplishes things. She has a career ahead of her. But she doesn't have this, the underlying thread of magic, which Tom put in her life.
02:25:15
Speaker
And I think crucially, she has no art. We hear nothing about her creativity, her doing anything creative over the course of those four years. The the previous part of the book is filled with various expressions of Polly's creativity. She's writing, she's doing theater.
02:25:29
Speaker
None of that happens in the next four years, even despite the fact that she and Fiona met doing theater. Right. No, you're absolutely right. It disappears. The the um sort of the light, the magic disappears from her world along with her her love for Tom. Yeah.
02:25:45
Speaker
Yep. ah But then she happens one day to be reading a short story. by Anne, ten ah who who who is the one the one member of the quartet who has the power of memory and who has a little bit of power because she's half Leroy or half Perry.
02:26:00
Speaker
And that's enough to start tugging on the thread that she then spends the rest of, you that then the book happens, that the story comes back. Because almost all this book is is told in flashback and only in the very, very final sequence that we're actually acting in the present moment.
02:26:16
Speaker
of story time. So she does her detective work. She goes around and she tugs on every thread she can to try and get confirmation that Thomas Lynn existed, that he was real, that he wasn't just a product of her imagination.
02:26:27
Speaker
That thread ends up being Fiona. Fiona, who never actually met Tom because she had chicken pox the day they would have met, but who, I think this is really cute, ah was obsessed enough with wanting to be Polly's friend at the time. There's a time that they were in the first play together, the Piero play, and Tom came to see it with Mary to to see Polly perform.
02:26:47
Speaker
And even though Fiona and Polly weren't frenzied at that point, Fiona followed her to watch her meet with this weird older man because she wanted to be Polly's friend and know everything about her. Polly and Fiona are really cute.
02:26:59
Speaker
And so she remembers Polly having this weird man who came to see her at the play. And that is enough to prove to Polly that Thomas Lynn is real. ah And then she can she can chase him down and find out, remember all the stories that he gave her.
02:27:13
Speaker
Find out about Tam Lynn and Thomas the Piper, ah Thomas the Rhymer, sorry. And figure out what she needs to do, which is go to a crossroads and hold on And that's the way to solve the story, right?
02:27:29
Speaker
Right. So here we go back to that sort of very early Jonesian technique of here is the myth. You finally found the correct story. ah And unlike sort of early takes on this, unlike say Dog's Body where we are read the Mabinogion early in the book and then that's the answer.
02:27:49
Speaker
ah Here you spend quite a lot of the books that of with Polly flailing around looking for, wait, what story am I in? Which of these many, many books Tom sent me is the book? Is it all of them?
02:28:00
Speaker
How do I use this? ah But we eventually get to a sequence where Polly and Granny are talking specifically about a but particular story and Granny is like, read the bit that's instructions.
02:28:16
Speaker
Right. And Granny says, I wish I'd had this bit. If I'd had this story, if I'd known this story, I could have rescued your grandfather. So Polly is like, okay, I go and follow the instructions.
02:28:27
Speaker
ah She needs to go to the crossroads. We've known from early on that Miles Cross is the name of the train station in her town. So she goes to the train station and she sees the Leroys come and go. She sees the young men come and go. And finally she sees the musicians arrive and it is the quartet.
02:28:46
Speaker
Tom and his three friends and none of them appear to remember or recognize her. And there's a very moving sequence of Polly finally standing up to feeling silly with embarrassment.
02:28:58
Speaker
She gets on the train with Tom, even though it's deeply embarrassing and All of them are incredibly embarrassed for her. Yes. ah Tom has to pretend not to know her. This is laid on him. They go back and forth where he's like, I don't know who you are. Why you hanging on to me?
02:29:15
Speaker
It's everything that Laurel said was true that he's now had to make true. And Polly pushes through. She is determined and until she eventually is able to to to break through to kind of ah she's she's determined enough to to push him to force him to admit that he does remember her because he accidentally says her name.
02:29:33
Speaker
And she, at that point, she starts laughing. And she says, he says, he realizes he's made a mistake. He says, do you happen to remark what your name was? She says, no, i didn't. And you know it. And of course, my name isn't Polly, as you also know.
02:29:45
Speaker
It's Hero. i am the hero. have been making the identity. Yes. Yes. And so, right, she's done it, right? Now all she has to do is hang on. That's that's what the story of Tamron tells us. She got there. She hung on to him. She made him remember
Resolution and Relationship Dynamics
02:30:01
Speaker
her. that They acknowledge their relationship to each other at this point. And at this point, it is fully a romance. They get to Hunsdon House and they are embracing and kissing outside the gate.
02:30:12
Speaker
It has always been a romance. Tom says, I've always loved your hair, which is so uncomfortable. Yeah. but Like Polly, Polly's fine with it. Polly loves it.
02:30:22
Speaker
And again, I think, you know, the the book is about being two things at once. This is a, it has always been ah romance. It has always been a friendship. It has always been ah and kind of abuse. And it has always been the thing that rescued both of them. And all of those things are packed in together. You can't extricate them.
02:30:40
Speaker
Absolutely. that That's really well put. Nice one, Becca. Yeah, always been everything. i like that that is yeah it's always been everything Yeah, all of those.
02:30:52
Speaker
Nowhere and now, here and where now. Right, but we still haven't actually solved the book. Yeah, I can't leave this room until we do Oh my god, we've been at this for over an hour. can't leave this room.
02:31:04
Speaker
I can't leave this room until we do it. All right, so the ending. What does the ending of Fire and Amalek mean? Right, let's go over the facts.
02:31:14
Speaker
ah They are in the garden, they are back in a garden party at Hunsdon House as they were at the very beginning of the book. Tom and the quartet are the servants, they are playing music for the Leroy Perrys as they eat small sandwiches and stand around making small talk in pretty dresses.
02:31:32
Speaker
ah Laurel in the center of it ah is sitting ah on a swing chair like a throne ah with Leslie beside her, ah Leslie with a head in her lap.
02:31:43
Speaker
and her la um very clearly i think actually the kidnapped boy in Midsummer Night's Dream Titania's fairy boy Titania's mortal boy who she wants that's there as well and the quartet perform and they perform brilliantly and for my money one of the most chilling moments in this whole sequence is when a random party guest says they always do something like this Yeah.
02:32:12
Speaker
And it's clear that this has happened so many times that every boy whom Laurel has groomed and abused and killed was a person of great potential, a performer, perhaps a musician, perhaps an artist, perhaps someone who is being robbed of their life, their future, and their talent by the fairy queen seducers.
02:32:35
Speaker
Yes. And Seb says at this point, seeing Polly clinging on to Tom, it was between me and him. It always was. And Tom used you too. Surely you understand, Polly. If they don't take him, they'll take me instead.
02:32:49
Speaker
And Polly thinks of the way Seb had gripped her arm and she did see that Seb had been afraid for most of his life. But we still don't feel sorry for him. I mean, we feel sorry for him. The book doesn't appear to.
02:33:02
Speaker
yeah does it? I don't know. I think Seb is a very, is a tragic figure, actually, and his fate is a tragic one. Yes. So, by complicated mechanism I am not quite sure I understand, Polly challenges Laurel.
02:33:19
Speaker
Wait, first, real quick, ah before Polly challenges Laurel, Tom's older brother shows up, reveals that he's been his older brother all along, attempts to get Leslie out of there is summarily dismissed because he made a bargain with Laurel to take Tom instead of him.
02:33:35
Speaker
He can't therefore now offer himself up instead of Leslie, who is his son, because Laurel never makes bargains with people more than once. Which is important because Polly has already made a bargain with Laurel. She made that agreement to forget. So in fact, Polly has no right ah to make enough to to challenge her again.
02:33:51
Speaker
Exactly. Enter Charles Piper, exit Charles Piper. Goodbye, Charles but Thank you. You've done your plot roll. um Do it yourself. But ah now now, nonetheless, Polly has a chance to manipulate the rules because it turns out that not Laurel, but Morton Leroy has been breaking the rules by trying to hurt Polly. There's a little bit of an echo of Homeward Bounders in here. If you find a way in which they're cheating, you can leverage that.
02:34:21
Speaker
you can You can crack it open, but you can't cheat back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. I do find it interesting that actually the the the the way it cracks open is that because Morton's been targeting Polly and he doesn't have the right to do that um because only Laurel is allowed to hurt Polly.
02:34:39
Speaker
perhaps Yes. ah This which we talked about in our sort of we do pregame all these discussions. We have to. oh yes so much We talked about which week and the invisible dividing line that goes down the classroom between the genders and the boys are allowed to pick on boys and the girls are allowed to pick on girls.
02:34:57
Speaker
But you're not allowed to cross the line except to be nasty to Brian Wentworth. um Yeah, I would argue that in the scheme of Fire and Hemlock, Seb is possibly Brian Wentworth. Oh, anyone can be nasty to him. You're right.
02:35:10
Speaker
And he is nasty himself. Morten has been targeting Polly. He's been trying to hurt her. He tried to, he tried to sort of ah manipulate her into committing suicide. He chased after her with the weird monster in Bristol.
02:35:23
Speaker
ah The portcullis incident, Tom saved Polly because that was aimed at her. And Morten has been doing this apparently out of terror that what Tom and Polly are doing will work.
02:35:35
Speaker
ah Because if Tom is not sacrificed, is not sent to hell, ah it's implied that it's Morton who gets it. Yep.
02:35:46
Speaker
ah And meanwhile, Seb thinks it's going to be him. In fact, it seems clear that it's going to be Morton and what that doom Seb to is becoming the next Morton. And in fact, what Morton has been doing all this time is just pushing them closer. Everything that he's done, which I think is important to the ending too, right? Everything that he's done to try and pull them apart, to remove Polly from the equation, to push them away, has in fact pushed had the opposite effect, has pushed them closer together, ah has interwoven their their creativity,
02:36:14
Speaker
ah has made Tom seem more exciting to Polly, more dangerous and ah more compelling. Right. But because Polly points out this breaking of the rules, ah Laurel then says, well...
02:36:26
Speaker
We can set up a contest. Polly herself is not directly involved. It is Tom versus Morton. ah One of them has to go to hell in the form of a mysterious swimming pool full ah full of mysterious and spooky water.
02:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, death is always water. Here it is. ah One of them has to go to hell. ah And they are allowed to use anything that's really theirs to help them. Specifically, what she says is Tom can use anything that's really his and whatever he uses, Morton can use its exact equivalent.
02:37:02
Speaker
um This is where the book gets weird and hard to parse. Yes. Yes. Many, many essays have been written trying to parse what happens next. So Tom starts trying to summon things to help him. He summons his cello.
02:37:16
Speaker
Surely his music is really his. Surely his cello is really his. But summoning his cello seems to push him closer to the void at the center of the swimming pool, the hole, and push Morton further away.
02:37:28
Speaker
And so Polly, looking at this, realizes there's been a cheat somehow, that anything that Tom calls to try and use that's really his, somehow pushes him more towards death instead of further away from it.
02:37:41
Speaker
Then he tries to summon the horse, death and water and the horse, and the the symbol of his rage and his desperation to escape. Yes, the whole... And that pushes him down as well.
02:37:53
Speaker
And a symbol of the fiction that he and Polly have been writing together as well. It's one of the first things that came that they experienced. It is the first thing that they experienced that came true. I think it is important that Morton is allowed to use the exact equivalent because that's what's that's what Morton has been doing all along, right? Throughout the book, Tom's own gift gifts are worked against him and forced against him.
02:38:15
Speaker
yeah Anything that Tom has because he belongs to Laurel, anything he has can be used against him by Laurel and her earned her husband. Yes.
02:38:26
Speaker
What the book says specifically is Tom on his own could not send Mr. Leroy to the pool. Any help sent Tom there instead. Out of the smear, the one clear thing was Laurel sitting upright in her seat watching Tom with a small grave smile.
02:38:40
Speaker
Laurel with chilly malicious logic had made sure there was only one way Tom could win. All right, Polly thought, so the only way to win is to lose. I'll have to lose. And she walks into the pool and she tells Tom the exact truth about their relationship.
02:38:56
Speaker
ah She says it was an even worse mistake the way you used me. You took me over as a child to save your own skin. Which is true.
02:39:07
Speaker
That's 100% what he did. And it's what was done to him as well. Yes. you know He knew exactly how bad it was when he did it because that's what he was trying to get away from. Truth between two people always cuts two ways, is what Polly thinks as she does this. And as she pushes Tom away from her in order to convince him that he can't use her and he can't use anything to get him out of hell.
02:39:32
Speaker
And in doing that, pushes Mr. Leroy towards hell and him. So why does everything that is truly Tom's push him closer to hell?
02:39:48
Speaker
What is the logic there? Oh, God. I don't... So I've read two explanations of this. I'm going to just... ah read While we were prepping for this. One explanation that I read ah from Lila Garrett's essay that...
02:40:03
Speaker
that Hell is also creativity. Nowhere is nowhere. Nowhere is nowhere. That that that the the bottom of the pool is both the the creative magic that causes their gift and the doorway to doom. And because it's both those things, using his creativity, anything that's associated with that, pushes Tom closer closer to it. It's pulling him towards it.
02:40:26
Speaker
Yeah. The other explanation, ah which I quite like from Farrah Mendelsohn, that it is that Tom is relying on sentimentality.
02:40:38
Speaker
That that is what dooms him as he's pulling things. she She actually compares this to the end of Time of the Ghost, which I do think this book is another, as much as it's an echo of Dale Mark, it's also an echo of Time of the Ghost, to Imogen giving up her career in order to escape from under the thumb of powerful goddess.
02:40:57
Speaker
the the dream of an imagined career in order to... Oh! Because it's actually the what the cello represents and what the horse represents are both things that aren't real or that are a mixture of fact and fiction.
02:41:14
Speaker
Tom's rage is real, but what he's upset about is the life he never had and will never get to have. And that's not real. that's That's an imagined future. right And the cello works in the same way, representing a career he hasn't had yet. Like, what has Tom actually got that real that's real?
02:41:32
Speaker
Because when he when he creates fiction, that can be used against him because that's the nature of his gift from Laurel. Right. And again, i don't think it's an exact map to Time of the Ghost because Imogen never wanted her career. Her career is not just unreal, but it's been forced on... The dream of her career has been kind of forced on her by her mother, who in that book is the Laurel equivalent.
02:41:51
Speaker
And all of these things, again, in Fire and Hemlock, which is a book that always exists in two opposite ways at once, all of these things are both fiction and true. that His music belongs to him, but it was also a gift from Laurel.
02:42:05
Speaker
the His anger and his creativity belong to him, but they've also been taken and worked by Laurel. And Polly belongs, he's made Polly, but Polly is also her own person who has a right to take herself back.
02:42:19
Speaker
which is what she does. So I guess that's the closest thing can make to an understanding of what's happening here. why Why Tom sort of dooms himself until Polly breaks them apart?
02:42:32
Speaker
I think in some ways the climax of this book works more on an emotional level than a logical one, as much as the text dwells on the chilly logic of what Laurel's doing and how Polly is countering it.
02:42:43
Speaker
I think the emotional climax here is that there has to be some kind of answer to the book's core problem, core question, which is why is an adult man interested a little girl?
02:42:57
Speaker
What has Tom been doing to Polly? And the sentimental answer, the answer that Polly made for herself most sentimentally, was that it was a beautiful romance from the very beginning, that that she was rescued after the rejection of her father, the evil king. Yeah.
02:43:16
Speaker
yes by this wonderful man who trained her up to be a hero. And then their relationship began to change. And she saw him shirtless and it was very sexy. 700,000 words, hurt comfort, rated. Let's not talk about the rating.
02:43:30
Speaker
But that's a sentimental version of this story because the truth is that there is always, there has always been something terrible about Tom and Polly. And until...
02:43:43
Speaker
Polly ah acknowledges that their relationship cannot be based on anything true. yeah Yeah, I think you're right. Polly rejects the sentimental construction of their relationship that she had in which she is Janet and she's happy to be Janet and she's overjoyed to have Tom tell her that he always loved her hair.
02:44:05
Speaker
She rejects that version of their relationship for one in which Tom has been using her all along, which is true. One in which Polly is her own person, not just Tom's creation, which is true.
02:44:18
Speaker
ah For one in which Polly deserves to get away from him and to have her own life. She's young. she's She's got a career ahead of her. She doesn't need him. She doesn't belong to him.
02:44:30
Speaker
All of this is true. And this is what she says to him. And it hurts like hell. It really hurts him because it's true. And he wasn't expecting it. Polly says he'd have been completely sure of her.
02:44:43
Speaker
And he had no right to be sure of this girl who he'd abused and groomed and raised up, who he trained as a hero. Yeah. um Polly tells him the truth and the truth belongs to him.
02:45:00
Speaker
Yeah. Truth belongs to him. And cannot be used against him by Laurel and ah Leroy because it was already true. Yes. They can't turn it into a horrible truth that turns on him because it's already a horrible truth that's turning on him.
02:45:16
Speaker
um shit In fact, Polly is, if you like, she's beating Laurel. She's taking Laurel's place. She's the one who hurts Tom with the truth. and And that...
02:45:29
Speaker
emotionally has to be the climax because that's the only way that their relationship can ever become anything true. But it can, I don't know if I'm fully making sense here, but I think that's what's happening, that it's ah an emotional answer to the book rather than a logical one. And if we get bogged down in what exactly the details of Laurel's bargain, we're just going to confuse ourselves.
02:45:51
Speaker
Right. Well, and the other way in which it's an emotional answer, it's an emotional answer to the question of how, A text makes a hero because Polly takes as her guide Tamlin, which says in order to love, in order to save someone, to possess someone, you have to hold on.
02:46:07
Speaker
In this book, a thing is always the thing and it's opposite. You have to simultaneously love me and stuff. simultaneously holding on and letting go. What Polly says at the very end is if to love someone enough to let them go, you had to let them go forever if you did not love them that much.
02:46:24
Speaker
You have to do this impossible thing of shamelessly holding on as hard as you can, ah never letting go, and always 100% being able to let go, let that person go be their own person, or it's not love.
02:46:38
Speaker
I mean, this is really ah almost the triumph of Tom's hero training sequence, right? He has trained up Polly into a person who doesn't need him, who doesn't even want him, who is a hero in her own right without him. Yeah.
02:46:54
Speaker
What I find striking at the very end, ah so every chapter, ah the whole book has been structured around these sort of four movements, the four quartets, and then there is a coda, a final chapter.
02:47:09
Speaker
Every chapter in this book has a little quotation from Tamlin or Thomas the Rhymer ah to begin it. ah quota the the quota the quote The quote for the coder ah is, is um they shaped him in her arms at last, a mother naked man.
02:47:26
Speaker
And I think that is really what Polly does to Tom by telling him the truth. She strips him naked. which is an actual truth between them.
02:47:37
Speaker
Not sentimental drivel, which was true, but not the whole truth. right but Not Polly's witchy attempt to snatch truth she had no right to. She has every right to the truth of what Tom's done to her, to the relationship between them.
02:47:52
Speaker
And she has rendered Tom his true self, which if you call Tam Lin as the shapeshifter, right? It's impossible, changing at the end. To turn him back into a man, her man, he has to be who he truly is, which is the man who has done this terrible thing to a child.
02:48:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And because that truth is laid bare, because they've acknowledged the truth and that has to that has to go on being true. It has to be true forever.
02:48:22
Speaker
She can't not mean it. She can't pretend it's not true. Yeah, it will never not be the case that Tom is a monster. But now that it's there, it's it's it's been put on the table.
02:48:34
Speaker
They've acknowledged it and internalized it. And they can move beyond it because the truth has been... The truth is real. And their relationship can also be real. The ending of this book famously says, it's quite impossible.
02:48:49
Speaker
For you, the only way to behave well was to behave badly. For me, the only way to win was to lose. You weren't to know me and I wasn't to remember you. If two people can't get together anywhere...
02:49:00
Speaker
You think, Tom said with a chivalry laugh, nowhere? Yes, and if it's not true nowhere, it has to be somewhere. We've got her either way. This is an extraordinary piece of logic chopping from Polly, but to be fair, she is the fairy queen, and that is what the fairy queen does. She's Laurel's double and echo.
02:49:18
Speaker
But this um the idea of the movement from now here to nowhere to where now... is yeah where Polly finds the solution. ah this is ah I think it is a cheat.
02:49:31
Speaker
It is a cheat, but Laurel's cheated all the way through, why not Polly? yeah To say that there is some way, so somehow, in which their relationship can survive, built on the truth of how awful their history is.
02:49:46
Speaker
yeah Did we do it? Did we sell fire in Hemlock? I don't think so. Will they ever let you out of this room? I don't know. i don't know. but I think we better call the episode there because I don't think we can do any better.
02:49:59
Speaker
Yeah, sounds good.
Conclusion and Future Plans
02:50:01
Speaker
Oh, ah so next week we'll be doing, we're we're we're we're moving to a different mode. We're going to be doing Hell's Moving Castle. We're going to have a guest on that one. We're very excited about that.
02:50:10
Speaker
Also, we've just found out, I don't know when this is going to come out in context of the timeline of the Hugos, but we've just found out that we're apparently a Hugo-nominated podcast, which is very exciting.
02:50:23
Speaker
ah So thank you very much to those who nominated Eight Days of Diana for a Hugo Award. because like, wow, yeah what this is the work I am proudest of from the last year. I think we've done really good work, yeah an author we love, but thank you very, very much for listening and thank you for supporting us.
02:50:43
Speaker
And if you do find yourself voting for the Hugos, depending on when this comes out, you may already have voted for the Hugos or they may not even be open yet. But if you feel like it, you could vote for this podcast. At some time in the past or future. Time is always funny in Diana Wood Joe. it It's especially funny in Fire and Hemlock.
02:51:00
Speaker
So if now here you find that you're voting for the Hugo's path, do it and otherwise do it nowhere.
02:51:09
Speaker
All right. Let's call it there. but right. See next time. See you next time. Bye.