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A Tale of Time City
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Twenty Century refugee equipment. Case is open to show clothing and protective mask.
A tale of one or two cities, three or four Vivians, four to fourteen badly translated old women, and at least two hundred thousand dollars' worth of butter-pie.
Transcript available here. This is the last official episode of our eighties season, but once again we have a few bonus episodes up our sleeve -- we'll be recording a Q&A episode September 17th, so if you have thoughts or questions for us on the 80s please send them in before then!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Final Episode
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to our last formal episode for this season of 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jokes. I'm
Enthusiasm for 'A Tale of Time City'
00:00:27
Speaker
Rebecca Freybaugh. And I'm Emily Tesh and today we are talking about A Tale of Time City.
00:00:32
Speaker
Now thinking about where to start this episode, I'm going to say my list of bullet points for things I want to talk about is so long. It's a really good list. because I reread this book and I started rereading it. was like, Becca, this is not an important Jones. This is not a major Jones, but it's one of my favorites.
00:00:52
Speaker
And I got about halfway through and went, I think maybe this is a major Jones, actually.
Season Finale Choice: 'Howl's Moving Castle' vs. 'A Tale of Time City'
00:00:56
Speaker
Well, think... The thing about a Tale of Time City, so we ended last episode, I was like, man, Howl's Moving Castle would have been really good way to end the season.
00:01:04
Speaker
But the thing about Tale of Time City is I actually think Tale of Time City is a much better way to end the season because even though in some ways it's kind of thematically incoherent, it doesn't really resolve, ah it has so much in it that is thematically important both to what we've been talking about all through the 80s and what we're going to be talking about when we get to the 90s. It does feel like a turning point book.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Take on 'A Tale of Time City'
00:01:27
Speaker
Okay, so your edition of A Tale of Time City has the introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin. Yes. And you told me And I was like, why the hell would you ask Ursula Le Guin to introduce Time City of all the Diana Wynne shows that exist? Yes.
00:01:46
Speaker
Bell Codes is right there. And actually, I think, I do think I know the answer and we will get there. But ah you sent me the introduction and it is very funny because Le Guin is like, the thing about this book is that it has jokes and the jokes are really good.
Comedy in 'A Tale of Time City'
00:02:03
Speaker
And they are. That is actually one of the key things in Time City. I we started this decade with Magicians of Caprona and Jones moving into comedy. I think Time City is a masterpiece of comedy. It is laugh out loud funny.
00:02:17
Speaker
over and over. is this her funniest book so far? think the funniest so far, yes. I wouldn't make it yeah funniest of all time. She gets funnier. But she is definitely, like, this is very, very much a let's have a silly one. It is a joke a minute, and some of the jokes are obvious and some of the jokes are less obvious, and are clearly her sitting at her desk cackling to herself. There are some really good
Truth in Fantasy: Themes in Jones' Works
00:02:38
Speaker
jokes. We will talk about them as we get there.
00:02:41
Speaker
The other thing that struck me in Le Guin's introduction, actually, was... Obviously, Ursula Le Guin is famous as a writer, but to me, she is also really one of the best critics of SFF ever. She has such a sharp eye for exactly what a book is doing.
00:02:57
Speaker
um And talking about Time City and talking about Jones, she talked about intelligent truthfulness. so That's a really good summary of how Diana Wynne-Jones writes. He did it in two words and we're taking like hours and Diana Wynne-Jones is really interested in truth in fantasy.
00:03:17
Speaker
And she is.
Vivian's Introduction to Time City
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, she's so interested in it. And it comes up often, even in the beginning of this book. There are a lot of times that the protagonist, Vivian, is wandering around the sort of surreal world in which he's found herself going, well, what's real is the world that I come from, which is 1940s Britain.
00:03:35
Speaker
Is Time City true? This isn't true. Right, right. So here's first joke of the book. ah Time City, it sets itself up and sits initially in a really standard genre of British children's fiction.
00:03:49
Speaker
which is the evacuee book, of which the most famous is probably Goodnight Mr. Tom, but there are ah hundreds of them. There are so many variants on it, and the original is not Goodnight Mr. Tom.
00:04:01
Speaker
It's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was about to say, do you think Goodnight Mr. Tom is more famous than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? as evacuee an evacu but i mean I was forced to read them in school every time we did the Second World War, which for some reason was practically every year.
00:04:16
Speaker
not for some reason, I'm going to say actually the Second World War is an inflection point in British cultural identity, which is why we keep getting taught it over and over. And it's why it forms the major inflection point of this book.
00:04:27
Speaker
Yes. So our protagonist, Vivian, is 11 year old girl from London who is being evacuated to the countryside, early in the Second World War in 1940, because there is a threat of bombing against London.
Complexity Beneath Time City's Idyllic Surface
00:04:42
Speaker
And the story starts with Vivian on a train and then arriving at a country platform waiting to be picked up by Cousin Marty, whom she's never met. And this is to me, this is a Narnia joke because the Tale of Time City is also fundamentally a portal fantasy.
00:05:00
Speaker
Like Vivian spends a lot of time hopping in and out of portals to other worlds or rather to other times. And also to the time city, which is a city confusingly that exists outside of time.
00:05:14
Speaker
Yes, it's in a space. It it describes itself as sort of parked in a bit of space time that just uses the same bit of space time, recycles it over and over and over and over again. in order to create the illusion of continuous ongoing history.
00:05:31
Speaker
Right. But in fact, Time City is in a permanent mini time loop and also constantly moving backwards through human history ah in the opposite direction to the normal flow of time.
00:05:44
Speaker
Yes. So this is like the metaphysics of the book. And it's actually very complicated, but it's explained very simply and clearly. So you're like, yes, that makes sense. Yes, i would I went to look at Farrah Mendelsohn's book about this. And most most of the the chapter where she talks about Time City is composed of diagrams. Yeah. The way that Time City sits in relation to the rest of time.
00:06:03
Speaker
um Which is actually something that comes up in Le Guin's introduction. She talks about how clear it is and how simple the rules are. and And indeed, like as a matter of craft, ah you can tell that Jones is on top of her game at this point.
00:06:15
Speaker
And I mean,
Characters and Hierarchy in Time City
00:06:16
Speaker
she's going to get better. This is not even close to the most complicated book she does with time. ah But she has been interested in time and memory and multiple times and parallel times right through the 80s. We saw a lot of it in Fire and Hemlock.
00:06:30
Speaker
And here in Time City, like eventually we we go back to that evacuee train platform over and over again. ah By the end of the book, Vivian has been there on three separate occasions.
00:06:43
Speaker
And that is consequential. We will get there. Yeah. But I think other thing that's important to say about Vivian that is also going to play into how important it is what what she does it becomes later is that our first introduction to her is that she is an ordinary child who is worried she is going to get lost among all the other ordinary children because her last name is Smith.
00:07:03
Speaker
which is the most common, you know, one of the most common names that you can find in the UK. She's got her little, she's got her her gas mask and her little label. She talks about all the children being labeled like luggage and her label says Vivian Smith. And she's worried that if she doesn't lose that label that says Vivian Smith, she's going to get lost and be completely unidentifiable and no one will ever be able to find her among the hordes of other children named Smith.
00:07:25
Speaker
Right, which is actually something we've seen before. The commonest name ah is straight out of Drowned Ammit, where we had Mitt, the commonest name in Holland. ah So here we have Vivian Smith, ordinary little girl on the train platform, meets a boy who immediately claims he is her cousin, Marty, that she's come to meet. And she's like, you look a bit strange,
Parallels with 'A Tale of Two Cities'
00:07:46
Speaker
but I'm very nervous and I'm glad you're here.
00:07:49
Speaker
And he leads her off the wrong way along the train platform and takes her through a door ah or through a portal. And into somewhere she was not expecting. And Vivian finds herself in Time City.
00:08:02
Speaker
And one of the things I love about this book is the aesthetic work it's doing. ah Because this is the first time I think that Jones is really going full science fiction. Yes.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yes, it's so cool. um the The aesthetics of Time City, there's something that I think you pointed out really striking that she's and very deliberate that she's doing to show how Time City moves reverse wise through the past, which is that Vivian is constantly walking through these buildings and seeing buildings that look ultra modern to her eyes, very science fictional, and also buildings that look quite old.
00:08:35
Speaker
But the ultra modern science fictional buildings look old. There's trees growing over the top of them like they that have clearly been there hundreds of years. And the old looking buildings often look new. They
Time City's Imperial Nature
00:08:46
Speaker
look much newer than the old buildings. They clearly relate to space and time in a different way.
00:08:51
Speaker
Right. So actually the oldest layer of Time City is the ultra modern metal and glass and chrome buildings that Vivian associates with like the most modern possible aesthetic and the newer buildings are soft, mellow brick.
00:09:05
Speaker
And it... It does Vivian's head in, but so much of Time City is about this science fiction city as a lived in place that exists in time. So it's not just looking up at the, and to me, it really, the some of the descriptions really invoked like the the classics of pulp sci-fi art, right? Looking up at the towers and the domes of these gleaming metallic, strange buildings with extraordinary geometries, but also noticing how There are cracks and crumbles in these ancient modern buildings.
00:09:37
Speaker
And they are looked after, they are lived in. There are dips in the stones of steps where people have walked over and over. There's centuries of wood polish on all the wood. ah So Time City is both ultra new and incredibly old.
00:09:51
Speaker
It is also in the the grandest tradition of you know classic science fiction, it's a utopian city, or it certainly it sets itself up as a utopian city. I think one of the things that Vivian notices when she's walking around Time City for the first time.
00:10:04
Speaker
She says it's, you know, she's she's trying not to sound impressed. She says it's not much bigger than Trafalgar Square without Nelson and the Lions, but it's awfully clean. And the reaction says there was no soot or grime. The sunlight planted on clear gray stone and sparkled clean green on the grass and came dazzling off golden roofs and domes.
00:10:22
Speaker
And she asks, why is there new smoke? And don't you have pigeons? And they say there's no birds in Time City and we don't use fossil fuels. we use energy functions instead. So it's like this this ideal of a clean city that that has, you know, that runs on pure energy. There's no fossil fuels and there's no birds and there's no dirt and there's nothing sort of out of place or unexpected. And there's hardly any children.
00:10:46
Speaker
Like, the tidiness of Time City is slowly unpicked over the course of the book. This is a place that's been cleaned up to the point where it's almost dead. There's no animals, there's no children, ah there's no, like, nothing out of place is allowed.
Vivian's Evolution and Identity
00:11:01
Speaker
And Time City itself is very self-satisfied with its own beauty and cleanliness, but is refusing to acknowledge its other self.
00:11:12
Speaker
Should we talk about its other self? Absolutely. things say I have things to say. So one of the first things that happens is the first half of the book is so charming. It's delightful. And it is basically just the the joy of portal fantasy where you have this little girl in a strange new world exploring and it's full of wonders.
00:11:31
Speaker
And Vivian is constantly encountering new things and she is being shown around by this boy who introduced himself as Cousin Marty, but he is not. Technically, he didn't. He said, Cousin Marty's right around the corner. and Yeah, something like that. His name is Jonathan Lee Walker. And he it becomes pretty clear, ah more or less the crown prince of this place.
00:11:53
Speaker
Time City's government is vague. And I'm going to talk about that more in a bit. But Jonathan is from the most powerful and ancient family in the city, descended from the city's founder.
00:12:05
Speaker
And he is very, very proud of this fact. His adjective is lordly. He's constantly described as a long time a lordly boy. And the more annoying he's being, the more lordly he gets.
00:12:17
Speaker
um And Jonathan has turned up in 1940 and kidnapped Vivian under a misconception. He's been listening to the adults talking at dinner about a problem that's happening out in history.
00:12:30
Speaker
And he thinks an evil villain from Time City's legends, the Time Lady, was there on the station platform that day. And he planned an adventure. to go and get her. and Right. He's just got to reason with her. He's brought his little cousin along. He's brought his eight-year-old cousin. And it's great because Vivian comes through ah portal, meets the eight-year-old, and he's like, brilliant, you got her, and now we're going to torture you for information.
00:12:57
Speaker
yeah But it's so clear that these two boys are having fun. They're having an adventure that they've made up. They're probably quite bored and Vivian eventually figures out it's the school holidays.
00:13:10
Speaker
and they might like um And they're the only two children who live in their part of Time City. So Jonathan, who is, I think he's a year older than Vivian. He's 12 and Sam is
Character Relationships and Diversity
00:13:21
Speaker
eight. And Jonathan's like, well, I have to hang out with Sam because he's the only other child there is, even though he's so annoying.
00:13:26
Speaker
So he's gone and kidnapped himself another child. Yes. Which actually really sad. think some of what's going on here actually it is that the the children of Time City are bored and miserable and lonely. This city is not set up for children.
00:13:41
Speaker
But Jonathan believes that Vivian is this villain from Legends, the Time Lady, who seeks to destroy Time City. He's absolutely convinced of it for the first few chapters and is constantly trying to interrogate Vivian or catch her out.
00:13:54
Speaker
And the reason he thinks this is that he knows the Time Lady's name was Vivian. And in the story, she was married to the city's founder, Faber John. And Faber is Latin for Smith. So Jonathan, in his infinite wisdom, is like, she must be disguised as someone called Vivian Smith.
00:14:09
Speaker
Vivian says, I'm 11. give be eleven I don't have a husband. And he finds this 11 year old and it does not occur to him until Vivian has said several times, I don't have a husband. I am clearly too young to have a husband.
00:14:23
Speaker
That 11 year old is probably too young to be the villain of legend. Right. So Tale of Time City, Vivian is constantly being shown around by Jonathan. And one of the first things she sees is what he calls the Annuate Palace, which is where he lives.
00:14:42
Speaker
Because his dad runs the city. His dad is the Sempitern, which seems to be something like a cross between ah the prime minister and the pope. ah His job appears to be wearing silly outfits and taking part in ceremonies and also having dinner parties.
00:14:57
Speaker
And as far as I can tell, the government of Time City happens entirely at these dinner parties. Well, you know who this is also reminiscent of in Jones's work, though, is Crestomancy.
00:15:08
Speaker
He wears fancy robes and he hosts elaborate dinner parties and he does very little that actually seems to be important ah right because he's stuck doing dinner parties and having ceremonies all the time. Which is, of course, a joke about how the British government functioned for most the 20th century and in instead indeed still kind of does.
00:15:26
Speaker
I still haven't got to my actual point because I keep getting distracted by other things. but so Tale of Time City is the title of this book. And ah you read it and you're say like, wait a minute, I know that title.
00:15:37
Speaker
Because, of course, it's an echo, it's a call to another very famous book, which is A Tale of Two Cities. You're like, this book should have two cities in it. This book is telling us there are two cities from the get-go, from the title page.
00:15:51
Speaker
Where's the other one? And I would argue that a tale of time city is a tale of two cities and the other city is a ghost haunting the narrative. Literally, it is. It's never explicitly on the page. The one place that we do not go, despite all Vivian's adventures, and she goes on a lot of it adventures, is 20th century in London.
00:16:14
Speaker
You will never meet what to us and to Vivian or to Jones in the is contemporary London. But Time City and London are mirrors of each other, right down to the river that flows through the middle is the River Thames or the River Thyme.
00:16:31
Speaker
and I hit that and I was like, Diana. um but Vivian is noticing this all the time, the ancient and the modern side by side, the open spaces that remind her of Trafalgar Square.
00:16:43
Speaker
The Golden Dome. Right.
Dr. Willander's Role and Humor in History
00:16:46
Speaker
Vivian is constantly looking around Time City and she's actually she's not away from home. She is home. She is in London, but not London.
00:16:54
Speaker
And they do also they do visit the ghost of London. They go hundreds of centuries into the future and encounter ah the great ruin forest growing up through the ruins of London. They visit Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square as a wilderness of forest in the distant future. That's in the back half of the book.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah. um And in the front half of the book, um I think this, so London is the ghost that haunting Vivian and that it's the place that she came from. And it is the London's relationship to Vivian, Vivian leaving as a Londoner and going out to the country.
00:17:28
Speaker
is i think a deliberate echo of Jonathan leaving Time City and going out into history. You know, the the very first scene that we get of Vivian on the train with the evacuees, they're all looking around at the country. Vivian thinks most of them have never seen a cow before or know where milk comes from, know where food comes from, because it all gets imported into the city. goods get Things get imported into the city and now, and people and knowledge get imported out.
00:17:54
Speaker
And there's a very specific relationship there between London and its environments that I think is really deliberately echoed in the relationship between Time City and its environments, which is all of history.
00:18:07
Speaker
Right. And I think our sort of... The signal, our keynote, is the moment in the Aniwut Palace where Jonathan is casually walking through what's clearly a throne room and points out the ceremonial fan that his father has to hold some of the time to show that he's in charge.
00:18:22
Speaker
And Vivian's like, this is a giant thing made of gold with enormous diamonds in it. And Jonathan's like, yeah, that's the Koh-I-Noor and that's the Star of Africa. They were given to Time City and this in by the Icelandic Emperor in 72th century.
00:18:35
Speaker
And you're like, okay. But I'll tell you where the Koh-I-Noor diamond and the Star of Africa actually are. They're in the crown jewels. If you want to go and see them, you go to the Tower of London.
00:18:46
Speaker
And I'll tell you what they represent. They are the clearest possible symbol of imperial value extraction. The Koh-i-Noor comes from India, the Star of Africa, the Cullinan Diamond comes from South Africa.
00:19:00
Speaker
Both of them taken by the British Empire, brought back to the imperial city, the great city, used to decorate the ruler. And now here they are in Time City.
00:19:12
Speaker
And I think Time City is a straightforward parable about an imperial city that doesn't know
Critique of Time City's Historical Instability
00:19:22
Speaker
itself. ah yeah It's a city that's under threat and can't believe it's under threat.
00:19:27
Speaker
ah It's a city that sees itself as a wonderful utopian benevolent place while exploiting mercilessly all of history around it. And most importantly,
00:19:38
Speaker
It's a city that sees itself as outside history. and So we don't have history. This is the real place where we're just happy. History happens to other people. And there's so when I hit the milk line on the first page, I messaged you and I said, where does Time City get its milk?
00:19:54
Speaker
And we get the answer later on, explain. Implicitly, they're on a picnic. Vivian is on a picnic with Jonathan and Jonathan's parents because Jonathan has told his parents that she is his cousin, Vivian Lee, who was sent out into history with her parents as an observer. They're sort of on duty watching history happen. And they you know they come up with this lie that they've sent cousin Vivian home. And so Vivian is impersonating cousin Vivian.
00:20:16
Speaker
And they've all gone on a picnic. And they see a boat go down the River Tyme. And Ramona, the Jonathan's aunt, says, there goes meat from 42 century. All that, said Vivian, who pays for it.
00:20:28
Speaker
We all do, said Jonathan's mother. Time City trades in exchange. Only what we trade is knowledge, Vivian. There are records in perpetuum, erstwhile, age-long, and such like of most things the human race has ever known or done.
00:20:40
Speaker
Students come to study here. And anything anyone in history wants to know, we can tell them for a fee, provided it's something from before the date they ask, of course. Oh, we stretch a point sometimes, Jenny, Ramona said.
00:20:52
Speaker
My department gives weather forecasts, remember? Jenny laughed. Yes, an ongoing science quite often gives hints to make sure science goes the right way. But we do have to be careful about sending history wrong.
00:21:03
Speaker
We can't have all of it going unstable. So they're getting knowledge from history. They're selling it back to history. And in exchange, history gives them what they need to survive.
00:21:16
Speaker
But also history gives them all the value that there is. the museum The art museum in Time City he has every great work of art in history. ah The crown jewels of Time City have the greatest diamonds you've ever seen.
00:21:29
Speaker
Everything beautiful, special, valuable ends up in the Imperial City, which then sells it back forever. to history, ah inflated prices, having created nothing of worth, having done nothing, except existed and taken advantage of its position.
00:21:48
Speaker
Time City is a v its a venue for tourists and students who want to come and visit the city to gain some of the glamour of this idea of you know, this sort of envisioned utopia.
00:22:00
Speaker
And the students that we learn fight for the opportunity to stay in Time City, where it's safe and where it's beautiful and where you don't have to deal with the messiness of history. And it's it's quite competitive.
00:22:11
Speaker
We learned that actually one of the things that Jonathan's motivations ah for the entire book, Jonathan's sort of deep underlying fear, is that he has history agoraphobia. He's afraid of the horizon.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, he's afraid of horizon because Time City, of course, is very little. and It has no horizon. And he's terrified that when the time comes, he'll be sent out, he'll fail his exams and he'll be sent out into history and won't get to stay in Time City. And all of his relatives are like, that won't happen to you, Jonathan.
00:22:40
Speaker
You're not going to be sent out to history. He's like, well, it could be because technically this is a meritocracy and all of the students are fighting to stay here. Because quite clearly what's actually happening in Time City is a very, very entrenched aristocracy.
00:22:56
Speaker
where everyone's doing exams, but the people who are from the top of the society are somehow always getting the best teachers and the most care and attention to their education, so they cannot possibly fail.
00:23:08
Speaker
And in fact, the villain of the book, insofar as it is actually a villain, is someone who was so arrogant he managed to fail anyway. yep um But also striking to me is Time City is
Architecture and History Metaphors
00:23:21
Speaker
very hierarchical.
00:23:22
Speaker
Vivian is... surrounded by servants from the moment moment she enters. And you think, well, this city that is a a utopian meritocracy, supposedly, ah where only a few people get to stay.
00:23:34
Speaker
Imagine like doing all that work to to get to stay in Time City and your job is now to run around serving food at dinner for the aristocrat who's descended from the founder.
00:23:45
Speaker
And also really striking to me, all the people with power in Time City are males. and it yeah And it's not a coincidence. I think Jones is is perfectly capable of imagining an egalitarian feminist utopia. She is telling us that this is not it. One of the many, many dinner parties that Vivian ends up attending ah is ah has a special guest and it's the world premiere from the 80th century and her husband.
00:24:13
Speaker
like So it's not that Jones can't imagine a powerful woman. It's just there aren't any here. Yes. And I think we we have to talk, i think about Elio because that leads us talking about the museum in Time City.
00:24:26
Speaker
Yes. um So one of the main sort of most important servants, as sisters, as helpers in in Jonathan and Semitron Walker's household is Elio, who is an android who was specially commissioned.
00:24:38
Speaker
um The you know androids were made, we learn, in the 100th century to help mankind go out among the stars. And Time City specially commissioned one to come to Time City because Time City collects one of every rarity. And so Elio is a rarity. And so he comes to Time City.
00:24:53
Speaker
So he is a possession. He is an imperial creation. or he's he's cut Again, he's you know he's like the Koh-i-Noor diamond. He's rare and he's special and he comes to Time City. And he's a thing.
00:25:04
Speaker
that's been bought, which I believe the technical term is slave. Right. Elio's quite happy. Elio's job is to keep the museum in the Sempertern's palace. And so one of the first images that we get of this museum is Vivian's, you know, she's been given her Time City clothes and she walks into the museum and she sees that overnight, again, this has happened over the course of one day,
00:25:27
Speaker
Her luggage and her refugee equipment and her underwear are on display in the museum labeled 20th century refugee equipment. Case is open to show clothing and protective mask.
00:25:39
Speaker
And says, you know, Vivian stared at them in outrage. The cheek, she said. She was also rather scared for how was she to get at her things when she went home. But it was worse than that somehow.
00:25:49
Speaker
It was as if someone had taken away the person she really was so that she was forced to turn into somebody else. But I won't, Vivian said angrily. I'm And this is such an unsubtle metaphor for...
00:26:03
Speaker
the way that Time City treats history and treats people who come to Time City from history is that it immediately strips them of their identity, puts that identity on display to become ah a piece of history, a footnote, an interesting ah fact that someone can walk around and see. An object and a possession.
00:26:22
Speaker
Yes. That belongs, once once it once her suit like her luggage is in a refugee exhibit, Vivian can't get it back. Yes.
Vivian's Journey Through Time
00:26:32
Speaker
So Time City has stolen her identity from her and turned it into something to look at.
00:26:39
Speaker
And made her into a perfect citizen of Time City. You know, she gets the Time City pajamas. She gets the, you know, the the rights and privileges of someone who can walk around Time City for now until she fails her exams because she doesn't know anything having come from history and gets sent back out into history again. But that's a problem for the future and not to worry about.
00:27:00
Speaker
In the meantime, she's in she's expected to act like a time citizen. Is that what we're calling them? I guess. Right. And the this identity slippage that happens to Vivian throughout the book, as she's increasingly, as the story progresses, Time City's actions...
00:27:19
Speaker
affect history and in fact time said he's quite smug about this like we're giving hints to the scientists we're making this happen we're making that happen we want it all to turn out the right way aren't we benevolent and the missing word is rulers i think it's never actually said but the implication is that these are the benevolent rulers of all of history um or they see themselves as benevolent anyway they're not doing any harm they're just making things go right um And the system is or the way they believe history works is that ah history has ah see ah nine unstable eras a sort of dotted around through the the timeline.
00:27:57
Speaker
And in the unstable eras, anything can happen. History is subject to change. But certain things do need to happen in those unstable eras in order to support the stable fixed eras that follow.
00:28:09
Speaker
And in the fixed eras, humanity flourishes and does amazing things and da da da da. But the unstable eras are unstable. And Vivian in the 20th century comes from one.
00:28:21
Speaker
And because of Time City's interference, the 20th century starts changing. So as Vivian returns again and again to that evacuee platform, she discovers the technology's changed. The clothes have changed. She no longer recognizes the people or the place.
00:28:37
Speaker
Time City takes her home away. Yes. The home that we begin, never see on the page to begin with. That home is gone when the book begins. Yeah, and it is increasingly clear, like by about halfway through the book, I think that Vivian is never going to be able to go home.
00:28:52
Speaker
yeah it's not played for tragedy I think this book could have been played for tragedy and in fact one of the reasons it's so effective as a comedy is maybe that it's walking so close to the edge of of tragic but Time City is ah a terrible parasite on history yeah and also it's London yep Yep.
00:29:15
Speaker
Yep. And also it's London. And also is to, you know, there is this sort of double consciousness there. It is warm to Vivian. It's welcoming to Vivian. Jonathan's family immediately make her at home and she immediately feels at home. And the longer she stays in Time City, the more she wants to stay in Time City, both because Time City is lovely and the people, know, she likes the people that she's met there.
00:29:38
Speaker
And because she's becoming increasingly aware That nobody else in Time City particularly cares what's happening out in history. Whereas Vivian has this constant worry in the back of her mind, World War II is going wrong. And what's happening to my parents who are still there in World War two Nobody cares about history in this city except me.
00:29:58
Speaker
So I have to stay here and keep working to fix things because no one else is going to bother about it. Right. The people of Time City ah present themselves as sort of a benevolent force in history, but actually all they care about history in history is what they can get from it.
00:30:12
Speaker
The people are not real to them. They even import their weather. I thought that was so funny when it's like, oh, we get our rain from 42th century and then we give weather predictions.
00:30:25
Speaker
And for a price, we charge for the weather predictions about the weather that we imported. and Yes, exactly. if Oh my God. um But talking about Vivian and never getting to go home for a second, I do want to talk about Vivian in context of what we've seen in the 80s of the way Diana Wynne-Jones is writing protagonists.
00:30:46
Speaker
um Because I think Vivian is actually quite a striking figure in that she is our first... female protagonist who's kind of an every girl. That's not true. Polly is an every girl. I mean, Polly is explicitly intended to be an every girl, but Polly also fits very neatly into like the category of Jonesian writer girls. Yes.
00:31:08
Speaker
Every, every female protagonist that we've had so far, I'm going to list them off. See if I'm forgetting any. There's Tanakui, who is a writer, a creator. She's, she's crafting the narrative as she goes. She's the author of arguably a story about somebody else.
00:31:21
Speaker
There is Sally in Time of the Ghost, who is both, you know, kind of a split person, but, you know, is at the end, realizes, oh, what I really want to be is a writer. No, no, no, artist, artist, artist. Painter. Yes, painter, but a creator, someone who is is telling and in creating the narrative.
00:31:39
Speaker
There's Nan, whose gift is, you know, not for magic, but for writing. There's Polly, who is... very explicitly the author, of the person who is who's creating the narrative of the story. And there's Sophie, who talks to the world around her and changes it as she goes.
00:31:53
Speaker
Vivian is none of these things. What Vivian is, is the girl out of time who lost her British home and comes back and finds it terribly changed to the way that she can't go back.
00:32:04
Speaker
She's the girl with the... She's Jamie. She's also the girl with the commonest name in London. She's Mitt. She's the girl who is finding, you know, experiencing her own, ah you know, we haven't talked about the Time Ghost yet.
00:32:19
Speaker
ah One of the things that that vi happens to Vivian when she comes into Time City Time City has these ah these things called time ghosts. Sometimes they're ah images of something that someone's done many, many, many times. These are ah habit ghosts. And sometimes there's something that someone did strikingly once.
00:32:36
Speaker
Those are once ghosts. And it happens because Time City is using the same piece of space time over and over again. ah The echoes of other things that have happened in that space time are still visible.
00:32:47
Speaker
So very early on in the story, Vivian meets or sees... her own ghost yes and as someone who's encountering her own future looking down at her she's also howard sykes um the the pattern that vivian is fitting into again she's not a particularly she's not like janet she's not particularly tomboyish i think she's compared at least once to shirley temple in the way that she looks um and moves through the world no i don't think she is i think cousin the actual real cousin vivian is shirley temple No, real cousin Vivian also is. But there's a point where Vivian herself is like, ever you know, people have often told me I'm pretty. People say I look a bit like Shirley Temple.
00:33:23
Speaker
um Right. You know, you're right. You are right. It comes up twice. ah The multiple selves thing happening here is that the number of people named Vivian in this book. I make it four.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yes, there's four. For sure. At least... But the pattern of protagonists that Vivian falls into is the sort of the young boys who are are completely normal and then get swept up on an adventure that makes them somebody significant.
00:33:53
Speaker
It's not the writer or girl. She is sliding into a different pattern of of main character. And Vivian is unquestioningly the main character of this book. But interestingly, I think we do get a character who is both, ah who is, if you like, Janet and Gwendolyn.
00:34:06
Speaker
ah We get a character who is, ah who we see first and think is a boy yeah and quite a sort of rough, tough, dangerous boy ah who is up to no good.
00:34:18
Speaker
And then that character turns out to be also capable of passing themselves the sweetest little girl with the curly hair and and like and the adorable effect. And the puff sleeves and the bows in her hair.
00:34:29
Speaker
And this character's name is Vivian. yeah just But this is the real cousin Vivian. So that is like the girl we've seen before, i think.
00:34:41
Speaker
But our protagonist is not that. I think it's maybe the... the you're right. This is a very different take on a female protagonist for Jones. Yes. I think she's, it feels like she's kind of gained in confidence in being able to write this. yeah We knew that early on, we know that early on she chose, you know, she talks about this reflection. She chose to write deliberately about boys because it was easier. And because a girl and a boy could both open that book up and identify with that boy.
00:35:08
Speaker
And it feels like at the end of the eighty s she's gained the confidence to be like, This could be a girl. Vivian can be a girl. I feel like, yeah, I feel like 10 years earlier, this would have been a male character.
00:35:20
Speaker
Yes. And Vivian and jarviian and Jonathan would both have been boys. And this would have been a significant male friendship. instead of Yes, it really would. Instead of what we get, which is pretty clearly a future romance. i I think Vivian and Jonathan are 11 and 12.
00:35:33
Speaker
so But they're not a sibling-ish pair in any way at all. Like from the beginning, ah they are sort of push-pull in the way we've seen in, say, Howell and Sophie.
00:35:45
Speaker
Yes. Pushing back and forth with each other. But also like very early on, we get the moment where Jonathan, finally arriving back in Time City, is like, thank goodness I can take off my horrid 20th century clothes.
00:35:56
Speaker
And at the end it's like, should I look away? And then he just does not. Yeah. And then Jonathan opens up her suitcase to examine what she's got and immediately takes out her underwear and starts examining. Which will later be on display in the museum.
00:36:08
Speaker
Right. And Vivian's deeply embarrassed, but they are at the age where like, i' they're middle schoolers, right? Right. ah So puberty is not happening yet, but it is bearing down on them and they can see it coming.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I do think they read as like, give it a few years, they're going to be the most annoying teenagers. Right. Now there is, Jonathan is definitely not a brother figure because we have a new younger brother figure. This is something we've seen before. And I think this is, this is another echo of Janet, Gwendolyn and Kat.
00:36:37
Speaker
We've got Sam. am Who is such a beautifully annoying small child. he Sam is, I think, a perfectly observed eight-year-old boy. Yes. Vivian looks at him and is like, I know wherever you are, you always have one shoelace undone.
00:36:52
Speaker
And she is correct. Even in like Time City with magical future clothing that does all sorts of exciting things, like when you put it on and suddenly lights up with holographs of blue flowers, nothing, no power or technology in the world can keep Sam's shoelaces tied up.
00:37:07
Speaker
ah But also Sam is, I find him really charming as like ah an exact picture of a kind of small boy who couldn't possibly have existed in 1987 when this book was being written. LAUGHTER Jones is really interested in in thinking about how people actually live in environments, how people actually live in Time City. And one of the things that is striking is the all the cool future technology they encounter.
00:37:31
Speaker
Like they go up to Jonathan's room and Vivian says she's hungry. And Jonathan's like, OK, I'll sort that out. And he's got what is pretty clearly a Star Trek replicator. Yes, a thousand percent. Except that when you're you looking at a Star Trek replicator, it works, right? Part of the fantasy of sci-fi is like all this cool technology actually works and does what you want it to do.
00:37:50
Speaker
Jonathan looks at this and like it's battered. It's clearly been kicked a few times. It's old. It doesn't. And he's like, oh, the 20th century bit is broken. So we can't get any pizza or bubble gum. Vivian's like any what or what?
00:38:01
Speaker
Because she's from 1940s Britain. She's never met a pizza in her life. Vivian's favorite food is tinned pineapple. and Before you' arriving in Time City, she's never met anything lovelier than tinned pineapple. Which I think actually is is a nice reminder that Jones was herself, in fact, a World War II evacuee. And she lived through sweets rationing, which didn't end till I think Yes. Tinned pineapple. Yes.
00:38:25
Speaker
ah yes tinned pineapple has sugar in it. Do you know how little sugar was available in Britain in the This book has a dessert obsession that I think is actually quite relevant to themes.
00:38:37
Speaker
The butter pies. So Sam, as an eight year old, is obsessed with butter pie. And everyone I know who like read this book formatively is also obsessed with butter pie. want one. That was great. i was So this is a dessert treat from 42 century where the outsider seems to be like an ice cream, but kind of like a a caramelly buttery ice cream.
00:38:58
Speaker
And then the inside is up is hot. Yes. And then you bite through it and they mix up and it's delicious. Like every time I read it, oh, I want one. Yeah. it's Anyway. So I know people who have tried to make them. It sounds incredible.
00:39:10
Speaker
But the joke is that Sam is so obsessed with butter pies that he will you know he is a tech genius. He's a tech wizard and he's learned how to hack his accounts and hack other people's accounts to get more butter pies.
00:39:21
Speaker
love that in 1987, Jones... but in ninety eighty seven jones From first principles deduces the eight year old who exploits security hole and online banking to spend a silly amount of money on a personal obsession. You actually did the math. You have predicted the roadblock.
00:39:37
Speaker
It does. I think when you did the math, it actually plays really well into our our theory of Time City as imperial exploiter. Because we get the amount that Sam spent on butter pies in order to get his butter pie privileges taken away. Right. So john Jonathan says he spent about 100 units. And you're like, well, that sounds like a normal amount of money.
00:39:55
Speaker
And Vivian says, how much is that in my town? Two thousand pounds. And I first read this book when I was a child and i was like, OK, two thousand pounds is a lot of money, but like a normal a lot of money. But then I when I reread it this time, was wait a minute. She's from 1940. That's pre-decimalization. Let me just go and look this up a bit.
00:40:13
Speaker
Two thousand pounds in 1940 is approximately one hundred and forty three thousand pounds today. ah Just shy of two hundred thousand US dollars, which is how much this eight year old has spent on butter pie.
00:40:27
Speaker
huh. Now, things are very expensive in Time City, I would imagine, in much the same way that things are more expensive in London or in New York City than they are in, say, Vietnam, which exports lot of the goods that come to London and New York City to make up the things that we live with in our daily lives. Right.
00:40:49
Speaker
Time City is rich. Time City is appallingly filthy rich. The kind of money that you give to a small child as pocket money is life-changing sums where Vivian comes from.
00:41:02
Speaker
And this is, of course, very striking because we know that Time City does nothing. Except... take knowledge from history and sell it back to history.
00:41:12
Speaker
Yep. But Vivian is not thinking, obviously Vivian is not thinking about all this. Vivian is thinking about, well, I i would like to get home, but I know I can't go home until after I've helped solve the time city. There's another really interesting thread in this book about sort of predestination and the, and prophecy and myth and the things that you know are going to happen, but you don't know how they're going to happen.
00:41:34
Speaker
So Vivian sees the once ghost of her and Jonathan running excitedly up the stairs, chattering to each other. It's like, all right, well, clearly we're going to like each other well enough to have, you know, to be running up the stairs, chattering excitedly to each other.
00:41:48
Speaker
And we're going to have been wearing these specific clothes. We're going to be coming back from somewhere. And until that's happened, I can't go home. So I'd better go about making sure that happens and fixing this time city problem. Right.
00:41:59
Speaker
um And there's various funny sequences of her trying to figure out which outfit she was wearing, looking at all the Time City clothes she's been given, going, was it this one? Was it this one? And just not recognising any of them.
00:42:10
Speaker
Oh, speaking of Time City clothing, do we want a real quick talk about Time City and race? Yes, we do. So very, very strikingly from early on, Vivian most first meets Jonathan on the train platform and he looks normal to her, which presumably means he looks like a white British boy from the 1940s.
00:42:27
Speaker
They arrive back in Time City. He takes off his 20th century clothes. He takes off his cap because, of course, a small boy, in the his a 12-year-old in 1940 would be wearing a hat.
00:42:39
Speaker
Jonathan takes it off and his hair tumbles down. and he has It's in a pig Yes, and he has long, long hair, longer than Vivian's. And she's like, it's quite funny. i she I kind of thought boy hair just didn't grow that long. Right.
00:42:54
Speaker
And also he takes off his glasses and she sees there's something different about his eyes. She describes it as a kind of fold in his eyelids. So an epicanthic fold. And we are later told that Jonathan has Chinese ancestry.
00:43:07
Speaker
But basically, he's immediately given multiple signifiers of non-whiteness. The moment they enter Time City. Jonathan no longer passes as a white British boy. He's got long hair. His eyes look different.
00:43:18
Speaker
At one point, Sam microaggresses him about it, which is weird because Sam also has those eyes because they're cousins. Yeah. Right, exactly. and But Vivian then looks at Sam and is deeply confused trying to place him racially because she's like, whoever heard of a red-haired China man?
00:43:36
Speaker
And I think that this that's a direct quote. And I think what Jones is doing is something I have seen done elsewhere in science fiction, which is using ah the sort of markers of being mixed race or of ethnic ambiguity to try and suggest a different racial order or even a post-racial order.
00:43:55
Speaker
um I've more often seen it and I'm not going to name names on particular books, but I've more often seen it as ah in the future all humans are ambiguously brown. And I don't think it necessarily works.
00:44:06
Speaker
either done that way or done the way Jones is doing it here. But I think that's what she's trying to do and trying to signal that Time City is, although initially read by Vivian as these are people like me, their names are Sam and Jonathan, ah they look like me, i they're familiar.
00:44:22
Speaker
Time City is actually its own separate ethnicity. Time City, this is our first hint, has its own history. Yes. And but where you know the way that she names characters, I think, is quite significant. So Jonathan's father is named Ranjit Walker, and Sam's father is named Abdul Donegal. And in both these cases, we have these first names that signify coming from somewhere else, you know, coming from outside Britain, and last names that are very British. Donegal Irish.
00:44:50
Speaker
Yes, I'm sorry. But then that that's pointed in itself. you'll make You're mixing up Irish names, English names. you've got I said British, not English. I said British. I mean, Walker is an English name, but also you're mixing up South Asian names with British names. And then also the Lee that Jonathan...
00:45:09
Speaker
so proudly introduces himself turns out to be Li as as in the name of a Chinese ancestor of his. Not yeah as Vivian initially passes it, the British name Li. And when Vivian looks at Time City, a lot of what she's seeing reads like Chinese culture as described through the eyes of a nineteen confused 1940s girl.
00:45:27
Speaker
The pajamas as outfits is something you see a lot in like early... sort of early 20th century British descriptions of you know East Asian outfits the the hair you know she's she's very confusively trying to describe dumplings a lot of the time but she does spend a lot of time talking about I've been given some food and I don't understand it Vivian really likes the dumplings but is not so keen on the seaweed soup and it's the other thing as well that the the the food is sort of ambiguously and variously East Asian rather than specifically Chinese um which is very like
00:46:02
Speaker
white British author writing about yes the Orient to signify that we're in the future now. And I think a lot of the ways, you know, what we've talked about this book is kind of looking forward towards the 90s. And you know we're not supposed to look forward too much.
00:46:16
Speaker
But I do think that you can see in Time City a lot of both Diana Wynne Jones's interest in writing about imperial exploitation about extraction of resources ah that we're going to see come up a lot in the 90s and also the kind of failure modes of the way that she is a essentially mid-century, 20th century British author who has mostly lived all of her life in the UK trying to write about this theme, write about this topic and sort of not always succeeding and coming over her own just kind of. in it then that we we are we are but We are coming up actually on sort of peak Jones Orientalism phase in the early ninety
00:46:56
Speaker
Yes. and We can't look more than that, but there there is there there's interesting stuff to say about it when we get there. And this is, is I think you're right, sort of the the first story. first take on it. Yes. But anyway, so Vivian is, has has, you know, she's wearing her Time City pajamas um and she's going to school to learn about Time City, which is where she meets Dr. Willander. My favorite character!
00:47:20
Speaker
okay He's so good. This is so good. I'm going to say this is, I think, almost certainly ah Diana Wynne-Jones portrait. So we know that Danowyn Jones put real people she knew into her books all the time. We've seen it plenty of times.
00:47:35
Speaker
I think this is a specific guy. And I think given the Narnia joke at the start of the book, and indeed at the end of the book, it comes back. I think this guy is probably C.S. Lewis, because let me tell you.
00:47:47
Speaker
Here's what happens. Vivian has to go and see this tutor. So Jonathan takes her up an extremely confusing library, ah multiple, multiple flights of stairs in and out of a complicated building, some feeling very ancient, some feeling very new.
00:48:05
Speaker
And they end up in a little nook ah in the very top and back of the building full of more books than she's ever seen in her whole life. and also the scariest and most intelligent person she's ever met in her whole life.
00:48:18
Speaker
And this unbelievably brilliant person is going to teach her the absolute basics of a language she knows nothing about. Yep, this is an Oxford supervision. This is exactly what it is.
00:48:31
Speaker
I have been this person sitting there with like the world expert on Greek composition being like, I should not be doing ancient Greek. This teacher is wasted on me. this teaching this is But anyway, I do think Dr. Olanda must be at least in part a portrait of C.S. Lewis, who was, of course, a great medievalist yeah and a great teacher.
00:48:49
Speaker
I think probably Lewis rather than Tolkien. Jones talks talks about being taught by both, but yeah. i know I know enough about Tolkien to be like, that's not him. No, it's definitely not the portrait of Tolkien.
00:49:00
Speaker
um And what Dr. Willander is going to teach her is ah He is going to help her learn to teach. He gives her a sheet of paper and a set of universal symbols and is like, all right, learn these and translate this.
00:49:11
Speaker
And before we talk about the translation scene, I would like to talk about the myth translation throughout the course of this book. Because I think that there is a running theme of, in this book about history, in this book about people who are kind of looking at history and extrapolating facts from it and selling them back, about how easy it is to get those things wrong when you were looking at through a filter.
00:49:31
Speaker
So the first myth that we get is the myth of the time lady who quarreled, the evil time lady who quarreled with her husband and sent him to sleep under the city while she went out into history to send things are wrong. Now we know by the end of the book, almost everything about that will be proven to be gotten exactly backwards.
00:49:45
Speaker
But it's a familiar sort of story. You know, you have the the time lady and the, you know you have the the founders of the city, the the heroic king and his wife, who is sort of evil. It's a figure we've seen in Diana Wynne Jones before. I mean, this is Arthurian, right?
00:50:01
Speaker
yeah this is This is King Arthur and and Morgan Le Fay. Yep. Yep. ah So that's the first myth that we get. And it's not questioned, I think, until really quite near the end. The second thing that we get that won't be questioned until quite near the end is Vivian sees a time ghost that's a very famous time ghost running up the stairs at the center of the city.
00:50:21
Speaker
um He does this every day. This ghost goes up the stairs and is fighting and struggling and crawling. Something is holding him back and he never quite reaches the top of the stairs. And Vivian and all the onlookers watch this and everyone's like, oh my god, I hope he gets to the top of the stairs. He's clearly trying so hard. This is clearly the thing that we want him to do.
00:50:39
Speaker
And by the time you get to the end of this book, Vivian will be watching this man try and get up the stairs and going, oh my god, I hope he doesn't get there. um Because everything about the context is wrong because she doesn't have the context to understand what's actually happening. All they have is this piece of myth.
00:50:53
Speaker
Now we get to the translation scene where Dr. Willander gives Vivian a piece of paper and she attempts to use these symbols to try and understand it. It's a beautiful scene. It is the funniest scene i to my mind in the whole book. I laugh out loud every time.
00:51:10
Speaker
Do you want to just read it out? You can be Vivian. All right. All right. You do the Willander paragraphs. So he's given her this this paper and she's trying to translate it. "'One large blacksmith threw four coffins about,' she read. "'Jonathan hastily stuffed a doubled-up length of pigtail into his mouth. "'Oh, did he?' Dr. Willander said placidly.
00:51:30
Speaker
"'To show off his strength, I suppose. Carry on.' "'So that they turned into four very old women,' Vivian read. "'One went rusty for smoothing clothes. "'Two went white in moderately cheap jewellery.' Three of them turned yellow and got expensive, and another four were dense and low in the tables.
00:51:45
Speaker
So now there were ten coffins, Dr. Willander said. Or maybe ten strange elderly ladies. Some of these were doing the laundry, while the rest pranced about in cheap necklaces. I suppose the yellow ones caught jaundice at the sight, while the stupid ones crawled under the furniture in order not to look.
00:52:01
Speaker
Is there any more of this lively narrative? A bit, Vivian said. Four more were full of electricity, but they were insulated with policemen so the town could learn philosophy for at least a year.
00:52:11
Speaker
Four more old women. And an unspecified number of police, Dr. Willander remarked. The blacksmith makes at least 15. I hope he paid the police for wrapping themselves around the electrical old ladies. It sounds painful.
00:52:25
Speaker
Or are you implying that the police were electrocuted, thus supplying the townsfolk with a valuable moral lesson? I don't know, Vivian said hopelessly. But just what, asked Dr. Willander, do you think your multitudes of old women were really doing?
00:52:41
Speaker
I've no idea, Vivian confessed. People don't usually write nonsense, Dr. Willander remarked, still placidly puffing at his pipe. Pass the paper to Jonathan, perhaps he can tell us what all these people were up to.
00:52:52
Speaker
Jonathan took the paper out of Vivian's hand, he looked at it, and stuffed another lump of pigtail into his mouth, tears trickled from under the flicker of his eye function. Jonathan considers it to be a tragedy, Dr. Willander growled sadly.
00:53:05
Speaker
Sorry, I can't laugh at this treatment. The police were killed by high voltage crones. Here, I'll read it. He plucked the paper out of Jonathan's shaking fist and read. The great Faber-John made four containers or caskets and hid each of them in one of the four ages of the world. He turned to Vivian.
00:53:24
Speaker
Faber does indeed mean Smith and the symbol is the same, but your old ladies came about because you took no notice of the double age symbol, which always means time or an age of the world if it's female. To continue.
00:53:34
Speaker
He read, "'The casket made of iron he concealed in the age of iron, the second which was of silver he hid in the silver age, and the third which was pure gold in the age of gold. The fourth container was of lead and hidden in the same manner.
00:53:46
Speaker
He filled these four caskets with the greater part of his power and appointed to each one a special guardian. In this way he ensured that Time City would endure through a whole platonic year.' "'There,' he said to Vivian, "'that makes perfect sense to me and supplies Jonathan with another of the legends he likes so much.' Perfect scene.
00:54:04
Speaker
No notes. No notes. And also this is, of course, the first of several scenes, actually, in which Dr. Olanda helpfully hands our protagonists the plot. right In fact, he does this so consistently, you can almost suspect him of setting them up for it because he's just told them the real secret of of what's going wrong in Time City.
00:54:23
Speaker
There are characters. polarities, caskets containing the power of Faber-John, the founder. They've been hidden in ages of the world and they need to be protected for Time City to survive.
00:54:38
Speaker
And something is going wrong with the caskets. And yeah Vivian and Jonathan look at this and they're like, have to time travel through history and find these caskets and tell the guardians to protect them better, guess.
00:54:52
Speaker
ah They want the guardians to give them the caskets to bring to Time City to keep safe, which is a patently insane plan because they are 11 years old. and And this actually brings us to I think this is like the the back half of the book is Vivian and Jonathan and Sam, but honestly, mostly Vivian and Jonathan. Mm-hmm. go on adventures through history, ah visiting different times on a quest to collect former guffins to bring them back to Time City and save the day.
00:55:17
Speaker
And it is, I think, much less effective than the part of the book that was just Vivian exploring this parallel parable city, which is and is not London.
00:55:28
Speaker
Yes, it's a fun book. There's a lot of great bits in it. And it's also, I think, a book that, and we're not again, we're not supposed to look forward. but We'll have a lot to say about the various ages of the world that Vivian visits when we hit the 90s, because some of the stuff, I think, like, I think that this back half of the book really feels like like Diana Wynne-Jones just kind of tossing around ideas that she's going to pick up again later and expand out more. You read the back half of Time City, you're like, wow, I can't wait to reread Hexwood.
00:55:57
Speaker
Exactly. ah This is which we've had before, actually, this feeling of Jones doing a dry run. And I think in some ways the book Time City reminds me of on a structural level is Power of Three um in that it's also a book that takes a turn at the halfway point. It's also a book that does some big swings and some big misses.
00:56:17
Speaker
And it's also a book that I feel like she then runs at again and tries again. Yeah, I think you're right. And I do also think that, I think i think you pointed this out first, ah there is something really interesting about the history hopping here, which is that it feels like the world hopping in her other books, in her fantasy books.
00:56:34
Speaker
So when Vivian and Jonathan, they're they're going to these places that are familiar topographically, but look different from anything they recognize, which again, feels like Jamie, you know, visiting the same field in the same, you know, over and over and over again in alternate worlds,
00:56:50
Speaker
And, you know, in one case, it's a plain of grass and another place, it's a great city. And, you know, when when Vivian and Jonathan go to future London, it's the topography of familiar London, but it's completely different. And in this case, it's not an alternate universe. It's a time displaced universe.
00:57:05
Speaker
But in some ways, those are the same thing. When you look at history and time, the way that Diana Wynne-Jones is looking at history and time in Time City is all happening at once. Every different time is a different universe.
00:57:17
Speaker
Yeah, and they are from Time City able to visit these different worlds which are separate and which ah unless you have the power of Time City, their magic technology of time locks, if you're in one, you're trapped in it permanently. You are stuck in your own time and it's only these time locks and time powers that let you sort of skip around between them.
00:57:39
Speaker
So are they really are effectively parallel universes all running at once. And we don't really get a coherent narrative of the 200,000 years of history ah that Time City knows about. We get, you know, kind of tidbits. And a lot of them are quite clearly jokes.
00:57:56
Speaker
There's, ah what's the line about, you i can name you. Yes, there's a point where like they tried to they're trying to figure out where one of the caskets is. And their hint is it's in the ruins of a great city that fell. And Jonathan goes, well, I can name 40 great cities that fell, starting with Troy and ending with Minneapolis. Right.
00:58:12
Speaker
Right. Again, it's a joke. And, you know, you look at the list of of bits of history that ah that that Vivian is meant to learn. And half of it is just horrors, you know, World War Four, mind wars, etc. And the other half is just like, well, I'm i'm throwing dartboards at it for private jokes. Icelandic Empire begins.
00:58:31
Speaker
Revolt of Canada. ah The demise of Europe. um And it's like, we don't, there's no sense that these things are connected to each other necessarily. They're just, they're they're things that happen over the course of the great expanse that is history.
00:58:44
Speaker
Except that in the end, the end of history on Earth, as we know it, is that humanity takes to the stars and leaves nobody behind. and that's sort of the the theory of history as as we get it in the, you know, running along in the background of Time City. it's It's really striking as well. It kind of Time City runs backward, right?
00:59:04
Speaker
Runs backwards through history, but also history itself seems to run backwards. So we end up with like knights and jousting in the like the very latest part of history they visit, which is very near the end their The Age of Gold.
00:59:14
Speaker
Which I think you pointed out that we get the Age of Iron, the Age of Silver, and the Age of Gold. i was like, oh, she's doing Hesiod. Right. this is in This is in the ancient Greek writer Hesiod talks about the ages of man and has a map of history in which the age of gold is the age when gods walked the earth and then it came down to the age of silver and then the age of iron.
00:59:36
Speaker
um And this idea of ah humanity weakening and changing over time. But Joseph's doing it backwards, saying the age of gold comes last, actually Yes, but for Time it's don't she's doing that.
00:59:48
Speaker
Right, because they're going the other way around. Incidentally, the idea of this going backwards through time, aging backwards is also in T.H. White. Yep. That's what Merlin's doing. It's another bit of Arthuriana.
01:00:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think Arthuriana is actually buried quite deep in the DNA of this one. And we'll come to the surface in Hexwood. We've got to stop looking forward, but it's so hard to talk about Time City and not talk about Hexwood. Absolutely.
01:00:13
Speaker
But anyway, so they go, they get these caskets along the way. This is, this is not, I think, thematically important. It's just, again, another joke she couldn't resist. ah Jonathan meets a ah ah handsome student named Leon, ah who runs around in a little tiny kilt with brawny legs.
01:00:28
Speaker
And essentially, you know, like lures Jonathan into telling him everything that's happened. And then turns out to be a minion of the evil ones and turns a gun on them. And they send him to the 15th century where to a place called Vinci right so the alt yeah his name is Leon Hardy and eventually ah it turns out he was working for the bad guys all along and he threatens Jonathan Vivian points a gun at them and it's very very scary And then the android Elio comes to the rescue. And actually in the back half of the book, quite a lot of the plot is done by Elio.
01:01:00
Speaker
yeah Vivian and Jonathan are just kind of there. and it' like And here also is this super intelligent, super strong, super fast individual who will be doing all the actual stuff and making all the plans from here on in.
01:01:12
Speaker
It's true, but I do think that Elio stands in really interestingly for, like, he's a really interesting symbol of Time City in a lot of ways. Because, you know, as we've talked about, he is a a treasure acquired by Time City. He is, but he's also, he maintains the museum of Time City. He's, you know, he's he's there putting things into the museum and sort of acting as guardian of Time City's role as as as history center, as British Museum.
01:01:38
Speaker
And throughout, as we increasingly hit the end of the book, we see Elio thinks of himself as very superior to normal humans. You know, he's like, obviously, I have a vast intellect and I'll be doing this much better than you. And so when he sees two 11 year olds trying to save Time City, he's like, right, well, this will all go correctly if I, a super intelligent android, come along with the two 11 year olds and start things out for them.
01:02:01
Speaker
And the first thing that happens Elio is he gets injured. He does not recognize that he's been injured. It takes him like he's like, ah, it was but a scratch. I am functioning normally. And then five pages later, they're like, what does a scratch mean to you, Elio? And he goes, well, it's about two feet long, about six centimeters wide. And they're like, Elio, that is serious. That is a problem. blood This never occurred to me. I've never been injured before. I assumed that I was just meant to go on functioning normally.
01:02:27
Speaker
This is what's happening to Time City. Time City is crumbling under the feet of the children as they walk around. And Vivian notes everybody acting normally. Nobody taking it. Right. By the end of the book, like the the stones of the street are literally shaking apart. and And still nobody wants to acknowledge there's actually a problem. And it's not clear that...
01:02:47
Speaker
Okay, I will say it is clear that that Time City knows there's a problem, but what they are doing to fix it is not the right thing because they have misunderstood the myths, the legends, the um the non-history, the lack of history of Time City.
01:03:03
Speaker
And this is something that Dr. Willander actually tells our main characters. Time City has a history just like anywhere else. Time City is not outside history.
01:03:13
Speaker
Nobody gets to be outside history. That's not a thing. um Dr. Willander is, I think, the moral center of the book. And he says this. yeah It's clear that he said it many times before. And Jonathan's very bored. But is, I think, the most important thing he says. He he tells them not only it does Time City have history, it has unstable history. Time City is an unstable era, just like all these unstable eras that they sneer at.
01:03:36
Speaker
and allow to like collapse into various wars and horrors. Time City is the same. It looks boring. It has the same ceremonies every day. It has predictable weather. It's imported from somewhere else. But the actual history doesn't stay the same from day to day. The reason we don't have reliable records is because they wouldn't remain accurate.
01:03:55
Speaker
And this is important, I think, to the the overall shape of what the book is trying to say about history. time and about history and about memory which is a really like the the 1980s theme for Diana Wynne Jones and the time time city says the past is unstable the narrative is ephemeral the story is not what you think it is time city says tomorrow's ghosts are the best clue you've got
01:04:25
Speaker
But most of all, Time City says, you better start believing in history because you're living in it. Right. That is also like the, the the this it this is Jones like staring London directly in the face. and The London of her childhood, where the city she was evacuated from.
01:04:44
Speaker
And she talks about this in her her biographography ah and her autobiography. She says the world suddenly went mad. It's the experience of history coming to the imperial city that thought it was so safe and thought it was so stable.
01:04:57
Speaker
The bombs can fall here just like anywhere else. Yep. Yep, there's the the quote that that Vivian says when they're they're running around, they're looking at a ceremony, and Dr. Willander has this very funny line where he's like, well, obviously we have the ceremonies, so people will think that there's something predictable and boring that's going to happen every day, because they're like, ah, know what ceremony is going to happen, so I know what Tadaro is going to hold.
01:05:17
Speaker
But this is human-imposed, it's not real. um Anyway, they're running around and ah Sam says, we can see the ceremony next year, never mind. And Vivian says, but I can't, just as Jonathan said, there may not be a next year unless we can find that casket.
01:05:32
Speaker
This made Vivian think Jonathan's the only person in the city who isn't like Sam. Sam thinks it's all right deep down. I know Sam's little, but even Elio thinks everything will be all right and everybody else is carrying on just as usual, even though they must know there's a crisis, as if Time City is going to go on forever.
01:05:47
Speaker
I suppose there's not much else most of them can do. but you'd think some of them would be worried. And what happens, I'm just thinking of this now, literally, what happens is they go to they go back again to the train platform to try and catch the villains as they're you know in the process of running to make off with one of the caskets.
01:06:06
Speaker
And they literally bring the evacuation, the war, the refugees to Time City. It comes crashing in on them. Yeah. In fact, this is the intrusion of the real world.
01:06:17
Speaker
Uh-huh. but And It is also, I mean, that is brilliant. The moment when the third time they go back to the train platform that Vivian left at the start of the book, it's completely unrecognisable. The train technology has changed. It's labelled that it's got radioactive fuel.
01:06:33
Speaker
ah The 20th century has gone completely wrong. And right at the moment that they're leaving, the train gets bombed and there's a huge explosion. And then all the evacuees come running into Time City.
01:06:45
Speaker
500 Londoners from going, is going on? What they say is, is this heaven? Is that an angel? Which again, is this- This is so, so funny.
01:06:57
Speaker
When you point about- This is the only line to the Narnia joke. This, yes. But the whole book is one long Narnia joke ending with the end of the last battle where there's a train accident and all the evacuees go to heaven.
01:07:10
Speaker
Except it's not heaven, it's Time City. And C.S. Lewis is there. Yep. And also, so is Sam's dad, the ultimate cop of Time City, ah who looks at all these children and says, get rid of them. These children are history. What are they doing here?
01:07:25
Speaker
ah Right. There's real all cops and bastards energy um from Sam's dad, who sort of, I think, is the ultimate symbol of Time City as authority. Right? Mm-hmm.
01:07:36
Speaker
And he is the character who Vivian is most impressed by as like, that's an authority figure. All right. ah When she first meets him. And he seems like a nice dad. ah Like he's very proud of Sam, but we do discover he hits Sam when Sam is being naughty ah because time city only looks like a utopia. In fact, this is still a place where your father hits you.
01:07:56
Speaker
And Vivian stands up to him when he starts saying these children are history. She starts screaming back at him and he raises his hand to hit her. And it's yeah it's the mask off moment for Time City, I think.
01:08:10
Speaker
This is what Time City really is. It is a powerful man who will hurt children and doesn't care because they're just history. Yes. Vivian says they're not history, they're real people.
01:08:22
Speaker
You people in Time City make me sick the way you sit here studying things. You never raise a finger to help anyone. This is all Time City's fault anyway, it was you that tinkered with history. And now it's gone critical and people like these kids are getting hurt all over time and all you think about is getting your beastly observers out.
01:08:38
Speaker
What do you expect me to do about that? Mr. Donicle roared back. There must be over 500 damn children here. The evacuees were now in a ring all around them, staring and listening, but Vivian was too angry to feel shy.
01:08:49
Speaker
Then look after them, she screamed in Mr. Donicle's face. You've got things in Time City to help the whole human race. It won't hurt you to help just these few. There are far too few children in this city anyway. It's a disgrace.
01:09:01
Speaker
And she's right. And she's right. And this is, I think, one of the reasons Vivian is the protagonist of this book is she steps into its moral centre. She takes the place of the person who can direct Time City to what it ought to be and isn't and has failed to be.
01:09:20
Speaker
ah The question of what it ought to be is still quite a big... I don't think I've ever read an Imperial City parable that has has managed to resolve the problems of Empire, and I don't think this one does it either. I actually think this moment between Divian and Mr. Donegal maybe the most thematically... Like, this is the moment where it feels like maybe the the plot is going to click into place and the book is going to kind of come together.
01:09:40
Speaker
And then I would argue that it doesn't really. It does something a bit different. So we are at the one hour and ten minutes into our recording. Shall we talk about the ending?
01:09:51
Speaker
Let's talk about the ending. Okay. The plot mechanics, such as they are, is that eventually the four caskets, the four MacGuffins, get brought back to Time City by the Guardians. All the three of them were out in history and are brought back by the three Guardians, whom Vivian and Jonathan have met in the course of, like, darting about history trying to find them.
01:10:12
Speaker
The iron casket and the silver casket have been stolen by the bad guys. The gold casket is brought back by the Watcher of Gold, who at noon on the last day of Time City starts to climb the stairs up to the tower, which is this famous ghost that Vivian has seen before.
01:10:29
Speaker
At this point, Vivian and Jonathan finally figure out where the lead casket in Time City was hidden all along. they They've worked out that the... Caskets are basically motors.
01:10:40
Speaker
The one in time city ah acts as a motor to power it backwards through history and the other three sort of charge it up as it hits them. And the lead casket is therefore the strongest of the four. And ah they realize that it is in fact a mysterious ah egg-shaped time-traveling object that they've been using for the whole book to dart about history. This is their secret time travel ah toy.
01:11:04
Speaker
But they realize this while they are being held prisoner by the book's villains who arrive in full villain form. I've got to say, the book's villains are really funny, but they are just very much, and now here are some bad guys.
01:11:17
Speaker
Right. well They turn up like, it turns out they are Jonathan's evil uncle. You can't go wrong with an evil uncle. And he turns up in 19th century. There are also many ways in which this book is looking forward to lives of Christopher Champs.
01:11:31
Speaker
Right. Turns up in a 1940s suit and a trilby. And we've had the whole through the whole book. We've had Vivian is a film buff. She loves films. This guy is a film villain. This is a bad guy from like a gangster film.
01:11:44
Speaker
yeah Very, very clearly. And his name is Viv. He's actually another Vivian. he's um um And he he comes with his wife, who is the daughter of one of the Icelandic emperors from the 72nd century.
01:11:56
Speaker
ah So this is a beautiful bombshell blonde with very red lipstick, we are told. And faint foreign accent.
Villains and Their Schemes
01:12:03
Speaker
And a faint foreign accent. i like, yes, I have heard this villain before as well. This this is from ah this is upon this is like a a Bond girl evil version.
01:12:11
Speaker
um hu but And with them is their daughter, the real cousin Vivian, whom our Vivian has been in imprisoning impersonating all this time, ah who is a horrible little ultra feminine monster who is has been disguising herself as a boy because she's the one who's been running around helping to steal the caskets.
01:12:29
Speaker
yeah And the idea of these three is they believe they are entitled to rule Time City. And I think, unlike every other person in Time City, they also see Time City for what it is, which is a way for them to enjoy and exploit wealth and power.
01:12:45
Speaker
Right, one of the first signs of, you know, as they're wandering around kind of expositing about their plans as they go, Vivli the Elder is like, well, we're going to be charging history a lot more for their information from now on. I want them all to know what it's worth.
01:12:58
Speaker
And they sort of sashay around. They kill a couple of people. I do actually think this is quite an example of, you know, at the end of Archer's Goon, when Quentin's like, I love an old-fashioned type, they just kind of run away with me. I think...
01:13:10
Speaker
Then these film villains come on and Diana's like, ooh, some film villains. She's having a little bit too much fun. They do keep monologuing about their evil plans. And, um right.
01:13:23
Speaker
So, ah Jonathan and Vivian are being held hostage by these guys who are who are fully intending to kill them. Yes. um and They want to keep Sam alive to marry off to evil Vivian to ensure that the Lee dynasty continues on.
01:13:38
Speaker
Right. So, you know, they're really evil because they're they're explicitly aristocratic as opposed to the rest of Time City, which is just implicitly aristocratic, right which is fine. yeah
The Children's Puzzle Solving
01:13:48
Speaker
Or is it?
01:13:48
Speaker
Anyway, at this point, ah the children, sad, exhausted, finally solve the puzzle of the book and are like, oh, the lead casket was that time egg we've been using all along. And Sam, the smallest, ah sneaks out of the... They've been imp imprisoned inside the works of a giant clock.
01:14:07
Speaker
its like as As a set piece, it's fantastic. Oh, it's beautiful. um As a climax to the book, it's like, and now this small child will leave the book. And come back later having fixed everything.
01:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's really quite striking that Vivian and Jonathan solve the puzzle of the plot. And then they said they're standing there watching Sam do the exciting thing, which is sneak out through the possibly deadly workings of the clock to try and escape.
01:14:30
Speaker
And Vivian and Jonathan just kind of stand there for the rest of the book while the plot resolves itself around about Yeah. So Sam sneaks out and recovers the ah the time egg, which is the lead casket, and it gets given to Dr. Willander.
01:14:45
Speaker
And Dr. Willander, once he's holding it, remembers his true identity, which is the guardian of the lead casket. and finally understands who he really is and uses it to prevent the guardian of the gold casket from going up the stairs and giving it to the bad guys um or walking into the trap the bad guys have set. So it turns out that the the time goes to everyone so wanted to get up the stairs.
01:15:10
Speaker
Actually, again, that was exactly backwards. We don't want him to get up. We want we want him not to do that. right Anyway, I'm not going to go into too much depth because I really want to get to my big theory.
Defeating the Villains and Guardians' Role
01:15:21
Speaker
period Point is, once bad guys are defeated, Dr. Olanda and the other three guardians all come together and they join together the the four caskets and it turns out they unite into one casket and at the same moment these four guardians unite into one a single person.
01:15:38
Speaker
instead of being four guys, he's one guy who has elements of all of them. and i think elements quite literally. It's gold, silver, and light. It's alchemy. And there is another joke here.
01:15:50
Speaker
I do have to point it out. ah We have here a figure who is ah initially introduced crotchety old man, but in fact has multiple selves, a time traveler who is revealed ultimately...
01:16:05
Speaker
he This is Faber John, the founder of the city. That means he's married to the Time Lady, which makes him the Time Lord. ah We met him as Dr. Willander. I would say perhaps he is doctor
01:16:20
Speaker
I'm going to lay a guess. I don't know enough about early Doctor Who's, but I'm going to lay a guess you could make you could match those Guardians that they meet to early Doctor Who actors. ah I'd have to go and check.
01:16:31
Speaker
At least one of them is a familiar Jonesian character, though, because they got the the the Keeper of the Silver, she points out explicitly in Reflections, is the same character as Hal from Hal from Living Castle, which is hilarious to me because like he ah we meet him and he's like, I'm very sad.
01:16:47
Speaker
I'm very, very sad. Can I tell you my poem?
01:16:51
Speaker
My Iliad fanfic. my we We just learned a little bit more about Hal, who actually does like poetry. yeah Anyway, um so Dr. Olanda is revealed as the rightful ruler of Time City, Faber-John, now reunited into his true
Faber-John and the Time Lady
01:17:11
Speaker
self.
01:17:11
Speaker
But then wait, who was that person asleep under the city this whole time? she wakes up and he goes, time lady, my wife. ah So again, the myth was exactly backwards.
01:17:24
Speaker
The once and future king is back, but he's not the one who was sleeping in the tomb waiting. That was the girl. He's the one who went out into history. Which I do think is coming on the heels of Fire and Hemlock and Hell's Moving Castle.
01:17:37
Speaker
This again is Diana Wynne-Jones working her way into writing about a female hero and talking about how talking sort of explain obliquely about how difficult that is to do because immediately the myth is going to reshape itself so that she's the villain who goes out to history and he's asleep under the city waiting to save him.
01:17:52
Speaker
Right, exactly. um And I think What happens in there, basically, is that Faber-John and the Time Lady take over the plot and explain what's going to happen. Yes. And they say, we're going to hang around for the next few centuries ruling the city, everything's going fine, we're going to renew it, we're going to sort it all out.
01:18:06
Speaker
um It's pretty clear that ah the Time Lady is actually the one in charge, in that they then have a trial sequence for all the various time crimes everyone's been doing, specifically for Vivian's time crimes.
01:18:18
Speaker
but She's now existed in multiple places, ah and the same in the same place and multiple times, like This is very destabilizing for time itself. And it's the time lady who is the judge.
01:18:29
Speaker
There is also the very funny moment where Faberjohn makes his great speech to the city like, oh, the return of the king.
Vivian's Time Crimes and Identity
01:18:35
Speaker
What's he going to say? says, sorry for the inconvenience, everyone. Right. That's it.
01:18:40
Speaker
it's he says ah he he's been listening to the critique he says everyone is that next time rob we're going to time said he has trade so long with the fixed error that it thought it was fixed itself we'd got very selfish and far too safe it took someone quite young and from an unstable era to point that out in future we're going to be of use Chronologue is going to study what we can do and Patrol is going to think of ways to do that.
01:19:03
Speaker
Have you got that? I'm Sam's father. You can start your inquiry now. So they're like, yes, we've been doing it wrong. We're going to fix everything. We're going to committee about it. by eight And Dad.
01:19:17
Speaker
Yeah. I think the book is not interested in resolving the question of what do you do about the Imperial Parasite City? Or at least it doesn't want to do the answer, which is destroy it completely.
01:19:29
Speaker
Yes. Which it doesn't want to go into tragic mode because I think it's it's clear that in many ways the the destruction of Time City would be a tragedy. Vivian keeps looking at it and thinking, what about all these people? What about all these amazing things that are here?
01:19:42
Speaker
What are we going to do? And of course, Time City is destroyed, Vivian also has no home to go back to because of what's happened to the 20th century in her absence. I still haven't done my theory. Yes, do your theory. Do it.
01:19:53
Speaker
like Okay, okay, okay, okay. Here's the thing. Time City... It's quite hard for me to read without also reading into it the slightly better book which is in my head. But I do think that that slightly better book was possibly in Diana Wynne Jones' head as well.
01:20:07
Speaker
But she didn't do it yet. She's going to do it. The 90s are coming. The 90s is my favourite decade in Jones' work. decade But there is, I think, enough hinted at here to construct a suggestion of what's actually going on that is not explicitly dug into in the book, which is who the hell is the Time Lady?
01:20:27
Speaker
Who is this woman? We're told her name is Vivian. In fact, we're told by Jonathan, the first thing we hear about her is her name is Vivian Smith. yep And there are so many Vivians in the book because they're all named after her.
01:20:41
Speaker
We discover when we finally meet her that we have in fact seen her before. She has been spirit traveling through history. We met her in the Age of Gold when she just straight up did some magic.
01:20:52
Speaker
and they And they sort of look at her and go, how the hell did you do that? she's like... Time is very long and we're near the end of it. She is at least 250 centuries old.
01:21:04
Speaker
So that she's this weird, magical, immortal, strange person. ah The natural ruler of Time City, the person who directs how it's going to go. And her name is Vivian Smith.
01:21:19
Speaker
I think our Vivian, our protagonist, is the Time Lady. I think we are told multiple times that Time City is a time loop. We are told, in fact, in My End is My Beginning, which is that favourite T.S. Eliot line of Jones's.
01:21:34
Speaker
I think we are seeing the beginning of the Time Lady's life in Vivian's discovery of herself as the moral center of time city as the person who it can't be like this we have to do it differently yes and also every time vivian encounters the time lady what she thinks is that looks like my mom yep Over and over, her reaction to seeing the time lady, when she sees the sleeping ah form of the time lady in the city, she's like, that looks like my mum asleep.
01:22:01
Speaker
When she meets the time lady spirit travelling in the Age of Gold, she reacts to her as if it's her mum. She thinks she's like my mum or she's like Jonathan's mum. But ah one person who your mum might be is you but older.
01:22:16
Speaker
Yep. You but a lot older. I think Vivian is the time lady. I think this is a time loop story that doesn't quite revolve into the final like twizzle twiddle of the time loop.
01:22:27
Speaker
Yes. um Which gives us a really interesting question of then who the hell is Faber-John? Who's this other guy? we do have another Jonathan in the book.
01:22:39
Speaker
Right. Who's been set up as a future potential romantic interest for Vivian. And it would be really funny. would be incredibly funny. Which is part of why I think that must be at least what the hint is here.
01:22:55
Speaker
Because I've never known Diana Wynne-Jones resist a joke. Yes. A thousand percent. And I do think that also, like I was, you told me your theory at the beginning, what we were starting to read the beginning of this book.
01:23:05
Speaker
And I'm reading the end, like that does, if you go that extra mile, that sort of makes the the strange shape of the ending. where Vivian and Jonathan sit back and watch the powerful adult figures come out and save the day and set everything right and sort of start making decisions by fiat about everything that's happened and everyone that's been in the book make a lot more sense because that's something she usually resists the temptation to have an adult come in and fix everything.
01:23:34
Speaker
Even in, you know, the the two sort of godlike figures that... ah The Time Lady and Faber-John most resemble, I think, are Amet and Libby Beer in Drowned Amet. And again, there are echoes of Drowned Amet. There's echoes of Mitt in Vivian, the most common name in the world.
01:23:49
Speaker
And I think the other echo of Mitt in Vivian, if you buy into this theory, which I do... is that throughout the book, Vivian is vivian is could be anybody. She is an every girl. She is an ordinary person who, by stepping onto the path of myth, by looking at the the time ghost and saying, well, I've got to be that time ghost, by going back to her own time over and over again, by putting herself in the position of, you know, by by visiting, you know, kind of the same space and time so often that she becomes a powerful bearer of cronoms throughout history.
01:24:19
Speaker
oh but Put a pin in that, by the way. Yes. But carry on. ah Puts herself in the position of becoming the person who is going to be the mythic figure, the Time Lady that she will eventually become. In which case, that that it makes more sense that Faber, Jon and the Time Lady are the people doing all the fixing at the end of the book because they all are our protagonists.
01:24:40
Speaker
Plus 250 centuries. Exactly. Like, Ammit and Libby Beer in Drowned Ammit, they never directly do anything as dramatic as what Faye Bredon and the Time Lady do. They can only help Mitt when he's helping himself.
01:24:52
Speaker
ah Which is not true at the end of Time City, unless it is. Right. But i want to I want to finish by coming back to my first
Unresolved Ending and Themes
01:25:00
Speaker
question. Why would you ask Ursula Le Guin to write introduction for this book?
01:25:04
Speaker
yeah so And this ties into what we discover about Vivian. So it turns out that the adults in Time City did have a a theory and a plan for what was going wrong with the time city with Time City and how to fix it.
01:25:15
Speaker
It was incorrect, but they had discovered that there was a person... who was destabilizing all of history and this person was loaded with cronons which is uh fantasy science speak for doing weird time stuff um appearing over and over again in the same place this person was deeply disruptive wherever they went and they pinpointed the source and a little girl called vivian smith So in fact, Jonathan, who initially eavesdropping on conversations, thought they were talking about the Time Lady and went and kidnapped the wrong person.
01:25:47
Speaker
In fact, kidnapped the right person. right Time City was always planning to abduct Vivian Smith. And the plan was to take her out of the 20th century, which is her home, which is where her parents are.
01:25:59
Speaker
and place her with a foster family somewhere stable. And we have seen this several times in Tale of Time City, taking someone from where they belong and sending them out to history as an exile, which is a death sentence.
01:26:14
Speaker
Yep. Because you are going to die out there in history in that place you didn't come from never able to return home. And this is what they're planning to do to Vivian all along. This is again, the mask off Time City. They think if they do this to Vivian, ah that will save the city and protect it because they've dealt with the source of the instability.
01:26:32
Speaker
And there is a great moment discussing this plan where an adult character who all through the book has been a bit boring and a bit annoying stands up and said, I want it on the record.
01:26:43
Speaker
I thought this plan was barbarous. Yes. And we are told that this is actually, yes, it's always been an insane and evil thing to do to exile someone from their own time and place, their own home, the place they belong.
01:26:58
Speaker
It's barbarous and time city which sees itself as the ultimate of human civilization is barbarian because of what it wanted to do to vivian and but what it wants to do to vivian right is turn her into a load-bearing innocent child
01:27:18
Speaker
if we destroy the life of this child who has done nothing wrong then our city can go on being a utopia forever And I was like, is this fucking Armelas?
01:27:30
Speaker
What I think is very funny is that clearly they went to Ursula Le Guin and were like, would you like to comment on Time City as a failed utopian ah el Utopian City project? And Ursula Le Guin said, no, what I want to talk about is the fact that it's very funny, which is right, because I do think that if you're talking about the book as metaphor, if you're talking about the, you know, sort of the thematic weight of the book, it fails in some significant ways. You know, the ending of the book, much like the way the ending of Witch Week kind of falls down under the weight of its themes.
01:27:57
Speaker
The end of Time City is, well, for Jonathan's family loves Vivian. So instead of being exiled from her home forever in history, she's exiled from her home forever in Time City. And she says, well, what about my parents? And they say, well, we'll look into that. Maybe we'll be able to bring them here.
01:28:10
Speaker
People disappear in wars, so it's fine. So that's all right then. So don't worry about it. And like the ending of the book feels very don't worry about it. This is a happy ending. This has been a funny book.
01:28:20
Speaker
And it is a very, very funny book. It's a very charming book. It's a delightful book. It is also a book that sets up a lot of thematic questions and it's not really interested at all in solving. Right. And I in my heart, I long for the like part three of the book.
01:28:36
Speaker
that doesn't exist, which is like the fire and hemlock sequence of Vivian growing up ah from 11 to 18 and coming into her own and being like, well, where Do I have to fix everything?
01:28:51
Speaker
I thought the time lady was fixed. That's me? im long for that. You've planted this longing in my heart and I will never be free of it now. going to think of this every time i read Time City going forward.
01:29:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I've longed for it for years. So let everybody be tortured with me. a Tale of Time City, almost an extremely good book.
Season Conclusion and Future Plans
01:29:14
Speaker
Yes. Definitely very funny book. Yes. And we will be coming back, I think, to many of the themes raised in Time City when we do our next season in the 90s. Thank you all for listening to us through the 80s. We've had such an incredible time talking about this set of books.
01:29:31
Speaker
ah This is our, by the way, our cheat season, because technically the the next book, the one we're going to start the 90s with is Lives of Christopher Chan, which technically is the last book of the 80s. That's our the one way that we had to to move things around to make the math work out to have eight books a season.
01:29:45
Speaker
ah but it also it makes it makes It makes more sense to set Christopher Chan next to Castle in the Air, which is what we're going to I cannot wait. um So yeah, thank you very much, Becca, for a fantastic season talking about all my favorite books with me again. Thank you again for doing this with me. It's been such a delight.
01:30:03
Speaker
ah We will probably have, after all these have aired, we're pre-recording everything, um but after all these aired, we'll probably have a couple of bonus episodes before we do season three properly. So look forward to those when they happen at a time yet to be determined.
01:30:16
Speaker
And otherwise, yeah, thank you for doing this with me, Anne, and thank you for listening to us, everybody. Thank you all very much. All right. See you next season. you next season. Bye.