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Black Maria
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What's the good of being civilized? That's what I want to know. It just means other people can break the rules and you can't.
The gender dictatorship, the horror of conformity, the limits of word power, and how to stop your mother-in-law from living rent free in your brain.
Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gnTKOU9XOofGvXZR4CdpBVJI-qYp5UqO/view?usp=sharing
And we'll be back in two weeks with A Sudden Wild Magic!
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Transcript
Introduction and Publication Debate
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the third episode of our third season of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Freymau. And I'm Emily Tesh. And today we are going to start by figuring out the title of the book we're talking about. Right, because it's had several.
00:00:37
Speaker
So the book we're talking about was published in the UK as Black Mariah in
Influences and Themes
00:00:44
Speaker
the US. I was going to ask how we were saying her name because I would say Maria, but I've been assuming that I'm wrong and it's Mariah.
00:00:54
Speaker
I've always said Maria up until last weekend when I was talking to someone one who knew Diana personally who said it was Mariah. Well, how do you say the name of the card game? Because it's based on a card game, right?
00:01:09
Speaker
The thing is I've never played the card games. yeah Not sure. You think, what am I for if not to be UK cultural consultant? All right. Well, how do you say the name of the policeman? Because I also didn't know until 10 minutes ago and you told me that a Black Maria Moriah is also a policeman, which seems really relevant. Again, I have never heard it said out loud. It is an obsolete term for a police fan. All right.
00:01:36
Speaker
Well, Let's go with Mariah. let's Let's trust the person who knew Diana since I don't trust myself. I think Diana's title was Black Mariah and her US publishers looked at that, went, hmm, no, and published it as Aunt Mariah.
00:01:51
Speaker
Yes, I actually have a British edition because my book says Black Mariah on it, which I'd forgotten because I remember that it's Aunt Mariah in the US. hmm. And this is a book about a witch.
00:02:04
Speaker
Like the Mariah of the title is an evil witch. I think this is absolutely central. Yes. ah So the premise of this one, I think this one kind of makes a set with two or perhaps three of her earlier books. It's maybe sort of the conclusion of a series that isn't a series about girl writers and gender and Evil witches and wizards.
Narrative Structure and Genre
00:02:31
Speaker
um I would also say this one is part of a double and I think I'm going to pick a different book to you. So you give us your set first. Yes. So my set is Spellcoats and Fire and Hemlock and I think also Time of the Ghost.
00:02:46
Speaker
These are a kind of run of books that I think really kind of express a train of thought about creativity and femininity and struggles with both those things. um Most specifically Spellcoats and Fire and Hemlock because like those books, ah this is a book about a girl who wants to be a writer. Like Spellcoats, it's written in first person. It's written in Medias Res in first person. The structure of this book is really interesting as far as when and what Mig is writing and how she stops to tell us when she's writing and how she's writing it and the unreliability of it as we're given to see later.
00:03:25
Speaker
But also like time of the ghost. It's about the it's a horror novel. It's very explicitly a horror novel. And it's about the horrors of everyday existence ah in a way that I think that she said she made it quite difficult to publish.
00:03:43
Speaker
I think she specifically, she found the book herself so frightening that she held it back. So this book was actually written at some point during that glorious
Recommended Readings and Parallels
00:03:53
Speaker
mid-80s floriat when she wrote everything at once because it predates in her, in writing, it predates Lives of Christopher Chant. Right.
00:04:01
Speaker
And is that, was that going to be your duology? Yes, it is. I think, I think Black Mariah and Lives of Christopher Chant go back to back and should be read back to back in that both of them are essentially about this boy-girl pair in the midst of adult cruelty and adult exploitation and adult determination to turn this central figure Christopher Chant is the boy in Black Mariah, it's the girl into something in the future.
00:04:36
Speaker
But also I think they should be read back to back because the main characters of Black Mariah are our heroine Mig, short for Margaret, aha and her brother Chris, short for Christian.
00:04:49
Speaker
aha And in the Lives of Christopher Chant, our central pair are Christopher and Millie, which is also a name that can be short for Margaret. I think our chris and milllet Christopher and Millie and Chris and Mig are mirror images of each other.
00:05:04
Speaker
i am not pulling this purely out of my arse. There is a bit where Jones talks about this in one of her essays. Let me grab it. um It's so funny. I'd never thought about the fact that it's Chris and Chris and Megan Millie.
00:05:19
Speaker
Once you see it. It was written rather before the lives of Christopher Chan and concerns itself with the same complex of ideas, except that it has a female hero, Mick. And the part that is played by the goddess as Christopher's hidden half.
00:05:33
Speaker
And this is Jones referring back to her ideas about your hidden half of the other gender. is here played by Mig's brother, Chris. Because it was written fairly early on, at the time I was finding a new freedom to write from a female point of view, it concerns itself with the way a traditional female role affects a female hero. So yes, you're absolutely right. It's also definitely in a set with Fire and Hemlock, which I think we we agreed at the time feels like a follow-on from Spellcodes. Yeah.
Arthurian Influences and Gender Roles
00:06:01
Speaker
Although I have one more argument to make actually about it. So I think that it was probably written... in between ah Tale of Time City and Christopher Chant. And the reason that I think this is that I think it also follows on thematically from Tale of Time City in that this is also a book about a Barrow King. And this is about buried ruler.
00:06:22
Speaker
We'll get to him later. It's a book with sort of hidden Arthurian influences. We had a question. um Yeah. We had a question on our Q&A about Vivian the Time Lady putting Faber-John under the hill.
00:06:37
Speaker
um That just happens in this book. The same thing happens. ah What didn't happen in Tale of Time City. and we can We can spoil it now because it was so funny to me when you realized ah the character who puts ah Barrow King under the hill is named Naomi Laker. Uh-huh.
00:06:56
Speaker
Well, we we cracked this, I think, part and part because you cracked that Naomi is Nimue. I was like, is Laker the ladies of the lake? All of these witches are named Laker because they're ladies of the lake?
00:07:10
Speaker
I think that must be it. Although, notably, no lake. Instead, are absolutely central in Black Mariah as an image is the sea. yeah So this book is set in a genteel but decaying seaside town somewhere on the south coast of England.
00:07:29
Speaker
At least I think it must be the South Coast because I've been to a lot of these that they have very similar melancholy feel. um And it's some of ah Diana's most evocative place writing. Yeah, I think you're right. I think the one of the things, one of the many things that must be a little bit in this book is Rode Dahl's The Witches, which is, of course, about a secret coven of witches that lives in the decaying seaside town of Bournemouth and turns the protagonist, the little boy protagonist into an animal.
00:07:59
Speaker
Mm hmm. Another thing that I think must be in here is there was a whole sequence of 1980s feminist Arthuriana, of which the most famous, which I haven't read since I was a teenager, was Marion Zimmer Bradley's ah The Mists of Avalon. Bradley, profoundly unpleasant person in real life. Yes. ah But the book at the time, very influential. And I think these sort of, I'm trying so hard not to be too mean.
00:08:28
Speaker
at the time But I think Diana is talking to a certain tendency towards fantasy, witchy, goddessy, matriarchy stories. Yep. Yep.
00:08:40
Speaker
I mean, we've we've seen her sort of thinking about turning matriarchs around in her head earlier, right? Because we've we've just come off reading Dragon Reserve Home 8, which is kind of ah a thoughtful, world-building-y version of a matriarchy.
00:08:54
Speaker
But this feels like matriarchy as an argument about matriarchy. Yes, and I think the book makes a lot more sense if you read it as an argument and if you read it as perhaps a satire. Yes.
00:09:06
Speaker
And the other thing that I think this book is has to be at least a little bit in response to is The Stepford Vibes, which yes came out mid-1970s. So to set up what actually happens, the book begins with Meg explaining that her father has just left her mother for a woman named Verena Bland and taken the car and then promptly gone to visit his great aunt in the town of Cranberry-on-Sea and fallen off cliff and died.
00:09:35
Speaker
And as a result, the great aunt, lonely little old lady, has become very concerned about what's going on with the rest of the Lakers, with Mig and her brother and her mother.
00:09:45
Speaker
And she calls up and wants to talk for them hours every day. And Mig is usually the one who handles this and has sort of concocted a whole little set of polite tactful lies that she tells Aunt Mariah to keep her off their backs and to make sure that she's not too concerned about all of them, which is I think our first specific example of word magic as used by Mig in the book.
00:10:09
Speaker
But one day she's out, her mother answers the phone instead, and Mig comes home to find that her mother has guiltily volunteered to take the whole family to Cranberry-on-Sea over Easter holidays to stay with Aunt Mariah.
Aunt Mariah's Control and Gender Norms
00:10:23
Speaker
And Cranberry-on-Sea is a strange town. It's one of those very, you know, genteel, decaying seaside towns, and everything seems normal, maybe a little bit too normal.
00:10:39
Speaker
Maybe everybody is a little bit too much like each other. Yes, and there are no children, and there's always a feeling of being watched. And one phrase that comes back again and again is the lace curtains twitching. So as you walk past any house in Cranberry, somebody is looking out at you from behind the lace curtains covering their windows. Which is also one of the first chapter images in the Stepford Wives, actually.
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah, but we do find out they're all reporting back to Aunt Mariah. Yeah. And the first, you know, I've had a completely different idea of the pacing of this book, actually. in my In my memory of this book, everything that I remember vividly as happening happens, it turns out, in the last, like, four chapters.
00:11:27
Speaker
Standard Diana Wynne-Jones, I think. Standard Diana Wynne-Jones. The first approximately 100 pages are just this kind of sense of slow, creeping dread of very normal events.
00:11:43
Speaker
It's Nothing really supernatural. It's just the way that once you get into Aunt Mariah's house, you are dancing to Aunt Mariah's tune.
00:11:55
Speaker
The way that she sort of expects you to act a particular way, dress a particular way. perform a particular role in her life and you find yourself doing it.
00:12:08
Speaker
So Aunt Mariah is, she's not even the the chief of the gender police, she's the dictator of gender health. She has a chief of police who is explicitly described this way by Meek several times. I think Mariah is explicitly called a dictator. Yes. um And what she insists on is a very strict set of gender roles, which Mig in particular is forced to conform to. Her mother less so, although she's also required to do many things. Her mother, the moment they arrive, begins to be treated like a servant. Aunt Mariah says Lavinia, who seems to be her usual servant, has gone on holiday.
00:12:53
Speaker
It quickly becomes clear that wherever Lavinia has gone, she left in a hurry and she won't be back. This is one of the sources of early creeping tension. So MIG's mother, Betty, who is saintly, yeah non-derogatory. Yes. part time Our very first example. of saintly non-derogatory. We've had a couple instances of saintly women before, or women who look saintly, and it's Phyllis in Time of the Ghost who looks like a harried saint but has no time for her children, puts all her and you know does not ah pay attention to any of the terrible things that are happening to them, puts all of her energy into the boys she's teaching for school voluntarily.
00:13:30
Speaker
And then we have the Duchess in Magistice of Caprona, who puts on a saintly affect to cover the ah evil that she evil plans, that she's evil devilish plans that she's running underneath.
00:13:45
Speaker
But I think someone else we should have in mind for Betty is actually Kathleen in Dog's Body. Yeah. Who is this girl who cares. who cares for all living things. And Betty's great ah weakness is that she sees Aunt Mariah, a poor little old lady, all alone in the world, not very healthy, desperately worried about everything, and wants to care for her. right ah They actually... So this is... Betty is, I think, the most...
00:14:14
Speaker
human and visible and connected to the narrative mother that we've had. And one of the things that i think happens when they enter Aunt Maria's house is Betty gets sort of put into this position of being, she's no longer the head of the household, right? Aunt Maria is the head of the household.
00:14:29
Speaker
She and Meg are sharing a room. They have these long talks late at night about what's happening. And they talk really honestly to each other. um And there's this this one bit early on in the book where Meg is kind of talking about how she wishes that she was charitable like her mother because she's having all these wicked thoughts about this poor little old lady. And Betty says, charitable be damned. I want to slay auntie half the time and I could strangle Elaine all the time. At first I was as muddled as you are because auntie is very old and she can be very sweet.
00:14:59
Speaker
and I only got by because I do rather like nursing people. Then Chris did me a favor behaving like that. He was admitting something I was pretending wasn't there. People do have savage feelings, Meg.
00:15:10
Speaker
But it's not right to have savage feelings, I gulped. No, but everyone does, says Mom, lighting a second cigarette off the end of the first. Auntie does. That's what's upsetting us all. She's utterly selfish and a complete expert in making other people do what she wants. She uses people's guilt about their savage feelings.
00:15:26
Speaker
Which is all spot on the money. Like, Betty is 100% correct. Right, but the whole book is in fact a record of Mig's hidden savage feelings because it's framed, or we first encounter the narrative, as Mig's journal that she's writing in secretly and locking so no one can read it. yeah And this is how she really feels. This is all her savage feelings buried deep down and then physically hidden behind a lock. Right.
00:15:51
Speaker
And there's a real contrast to between Mig and Chris, which I'm trying to find the quote where she, so Chris, from the minute they gets there, Chris is raging against the way that Aunt Mariah treats him.
00:16:06
Speaker
Because ah Mig gets there and Mig is dear little Naomi. Mig's name is Naomi. Specifically my new dear little Naomi. Yes. Mig's full name is Naomi Margaret Laker.
00:16:19
Speaker
She's, I think we learned pretty early on that she was named after a daughter of Aunt Mariah's who unfortunately isn't around anymore. So Meg is my dear little new Naomi. She gets, you know, most of what she's asked to do is just sit with Aunt Mariah.
00:16:32
Speaker
Betty is asked to do the chores. And Chris, Chris is not really supposed to do much of anything. Right. Now, this is what i found really striking. Aunt Mariah in her initial gender dictates. says that Mig has to sit, she has to wear a skirt, she has to listen to what Aunt Mariah has to say. And what Aunt Mariah has to say is intensely boring on purpose. This is part of her magical power that she bores you into stupidity and obedience.
00:17:02
Speaker
But Chris, in the early book, is constantly trying to be helpful. He wants to help his mother with the chores. He offers to pour a cup of tea. la don't trust him with the china. Boys can't pick colours. Boys can't do this. Boys can't do that. And he'd left with a What can he do?
00:17:18
Speaker
Nothing in Aunt Mariah's world, because Aunt Mariah's world is... a woman's world by her standards in which men have no place or no right to exist whatsoever. and One of my favorite moments early on is where ah Aunt Mariah is ordering Mig and Betty into skirts and Chris asks sweetly and loudly, and shall I wear a skirt too?
00:17:43
Speaker
And no one pays any attention. They just pretend they don't hear because that's one of Aunt Mariah's greatest tricks is pretend if you try and say something to challenge her, just pretend she doesn't hear. It doesn't, whatever you said, whatever thought you provided that challenges the world that she created, it doesn't exist. You didn't say it and it doesn't matter.
00:18:00
Speaker
Or she heard something very different. She's a sweet little old lady. She mishears things all the time. Don't worry about it. I'm trying to find, there's this quote that i cannot find. about Mig watching Chris increasingly express his feelings, lashing out, say louder and louder the secret thoughts in his head.
00:18:18
Speaker
And Mig says, I wish I could. I'm not brave enough. All I can do is write in this book. Right. It's... This one... This book feels like it is reassessing and reconsidering the role of the storyteller heroine in that...
00:18:36
Speaker
Quite a lot of what Mig is doing in frantically writing down her feelings ah is putting them away safely so she won't actually do anything with them.
00:18:47
Speaker
Right. And it's i mean one of the things that I find really interesting about Mig's writing in this book is that it's even though it's an act of rebellion, it is an approved activity. um You know, one of the the times that Mig feels worst about her secret evil thoughts towards Aunt Mariah in the beginning of the book is, you know, Aunt Mariah says, oh, let Naomi finish that story she's writing so busily first. It's all right not to turn off the light.
00:19:12
Speaker
It's fine to write if you're a woman in Aunt Mariah's world. You just have to be writing the right sort of things. Right. The book actually begins with Mig's father going off a cliff and Mig's initial...
00:19:27
Speaker
sort of numb reaction that he had hidden in a hiding place in his car, a story she was writing that she hadn't finished. And she spends like the book begins with a story going missing.
00:19:39
Speaker
yeah One of Mig's stories. And the question of what's happened to that story and should Mig finish it somehow kind of runs through the book.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Conformity and Identity Struggles
00:19:52
Speaker
One of the things that I think is really striking actually about, and you know again, I think this has to be a little bit of a response to the Stabford Wives. We start to meet not just Aunt Mariah, but Aunt Mariah's little sort of coven of women who hover around. A little group of friends who coincidentally adds up to 13. Right.
00:20:10
Speaker
They call them the Mrs. Errs because you know the way Aunt Mariah talks about them, they're all sort of interchangeable. It's, oh, dear Zoe Green and dear Hester Bailey and dear X and dear Y and so on. um But they are, when they start to meet them,
00:20:22
Speaker
They hate them all. They're all terrible. But they are all individuals. Meg actually has a really nice conversation with Hester Bailey, who's an artist, about painting and how difficult it is to paint the sea and so forth before she starts to sort of twig on that she's really more or less just another Mrs. Ur.
00:20:39
Speaker
But women in women's world are allowed individuality, are allowed creativity in Cranberry on Sea under Aunt Mariah. Whereas the men, who they never really get a chance to talk to, are pretty silent in women's presence, but they see them going to and from work. And they look at them and they're like, these are zombies. These are just zombies.
00:20:59
Speaker
Actually, what what Meg and Chris say to each other, they're watching them coming and going from the train to the car park. And Mig says, they're zombies, zombies tired after work. And Chris says, all the husbands of the Mrs. Errs.
00:21:12
Speaker
The Mrs. Errs take their souls away, and then send them out as zombies to earn money. But the Mr. Errs don't realize, I said, they've all been zombies for years without anyone knowing. This is a ah literal and accurate description of what has happened in the book, yes.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yes. don't know it. They think that they're being fanciful. The same as when, you know, they find an orphanage full of children. And all the children just kind of look and act sort of alike. Like they look different.
00:21:36
Speaker
But they have the same expressions on their faces. They move the same way. And they're like, these kids are clones. And then it's explained to them that they're just the orphans from the orphanage. and i like ah But they're clones.
00:21:48
Speaker
Right. So the book opens with this long... yeah I mean, I find it incredibly painful to read this very frustrating sequence of Mig...
00:21:59
Speaker
and her family settling into Cranberry. Chris is the only one who can bring himself to rebel out loud against Aunt Mariah and her enormous boredom and her endless rules. And the rules are enforced ah by the next door neighbour, Elaine, who if anybody even thinks of doing something that is not Aunt Mariah approved, Elaine marches around and starts giving orders.
00:22:23
Speaker
And it starts to become increasingly like Aunt Mariah just kind of assumes that they've come to stay. And at first the Lakers are all in agreement. They have not come to stay. They're going back. Mom has a job.
00:22:35
Speaker
Mig and Chris have to get back to school. But the way that she, that Aunt Mariah just kind of assumes that their whole world is going to be cranberry. ah There's this quote, you end up feeling that you're in a sort of bubble filled with that getting a cold smell. And inside that bubble is cranberry and Aunt Mariah. And that is the entire world. It is hard to remember there is any land outside Cranberry.
00:22:56
Speaker
This Easter holiday time that's meant to be a very specific time starts kind of shifting and becoming sort of feeling endless. And Betty, who's their mother, who, again, really reasonable, really, you know, clearly a very good mother, has these conversations with Meg at the beginning of the book about how frustrated she is. Her relationship plan, her tack is, what if I can fix Aunt Mariah? What if I can convince her that she doesn't need us so much?
00:23:22
Speaker
And then she'll be better. And what happens instead is that Betty starts getting worse. Betty's mistake is that she thinks Aunt Mariah is reasonable and isn't doing it on purpose. Like, Betty is playing by the rules of the system, right?
00:23:39
Speaker
that she's been given, assuming there are no bad actors. But in fact, I think what the book is largely about is if you have a social system with rules, there will be people who abuse and exploit those rules for their own benefit.
00:23:52
Speaker
Right. Betty is civilized. That's a term that's used for her. We learn. So one of the things that sort of starts to come out over the course of the first half of this book is also what Greg, their father, was like.
00:24:05
Speaker
And we learn, for example, that he used to sometimes try and hit the kids and Betty would get in the way. ah Mig says she's she's very courageous. She's just too civilized to hit any of the Mrs. Errs or Aunt Mariah. Which is great because eventually she does.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's so good. But Mig says is what puts mom at a disadvantage. Aunt Mariah and Elaine and some of the Mrs. Errs can rely on mom being too civilized to fight back.
00:24:32
Speaker
What's the good of being civilized? That's what I want to know. It just means other people can break the rules and you can't. um Which is a preoccupation of Diana Wynne-Jones' who gets to break the rules, who makes the rules and who gets to break them. And especially it's a preoccupation of this book.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yes. Aunt Mariah makes the rules and nobody gets to break them. Until Chris does break them. Chris goes a little bit too far. But I guess first, before Chris going too far, we should talk about the Phelpses and the Ghosts. Yes. So we have in the early part of the book, the only supernatural thing we encounter is that Chris claims there is a ghost in his bedroom and the ghost brings bad dreams and the ghost needs something. And the the two children, Mig and Chris, are then investigating together and trying to find out what it is this ghost needs and what's going on with it.
00:25:24
Speaker
And in the course of this, they go to Aunt Mariah's one stated enemy in town. And she is not much of an enemy, but is, did you hear what dear Miss Phelps said about me? Now I said to Amaryllis and Amaryllis said to Phyllis, you know. Right. And the way that she's expressed her enmity to Miss Phelps is, you know, it used to be that as, you know sort of head of the town. and so Miss Phelps has, she calls it the plunge. She just falls over all the time. She clearly there's there's you know, it's she uses a wheelchair or it's it's easier for her to get around with a wheelchair.
00:25:58
Speaker
There are things that would make it easier to get around town and do what she needs to do that Aunt Mariah used to provide for her and doesn't anymore. Now, Miss Phelps doesn't deserve a wheelchair.
00:26:08
Speaker
doesn't deserve help getting to church or any of those things. In fact, whenever Aunt Mariah goes out, she goes out in a wheelchair, which is eventually revealed to be Miss Phelps' his wheelchair. And we know perfectly well that Aunt Mariah doesn't need it. And Migs describes it as a kind of throne.
00:26:23
Speaker
Right. it's It's an office of state. So Miss Phelps stays home in her house ah with her brother, Mr. Phelps, and who is the first, I think, the first adult man that we actually speak to in Cranberry.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yes. And we actually meet him before we meet her because he's a weirdo walking along the seafront who shouts good morning at them. Right. um And when they actually get inside the house, Mr. Phelps is doing weird sword exercises in the living room.
00:26:52
Speaker
ah Right. Mr. Phelps, just as much as Aunt Mariah and her coven, Mr. Phelps is a believer in strict systems of rules, ah one of which it means that ah as as a man, he must be doing sword play.
00:27:07
Speaker
Right. The art of swordsmanship properly practiced entails my standing here for another minute, by which time any self-respecting enemy will have stabbed you in the stomach, Miss Phelps observed lying on the floor. The sibling relationship between Mr. and Miss Phelps, I think, is really important because it is the first parallel to Chris and Meg that we see in the book of what an adult sibling relationship looks like.
00:27:31
Speaker
And I don't think it's a great model. I found it quite touching in a way. It's clear that Mr. Phelps is in fact, Miss Phelps' main carer. Like she's quite seriously disabled. There's very little she can do. She's made herself an outcast from the world of Aunt Mariah, which is the world of all the women in town.
00:27:50
Speaker
She's very alone. And Mr. Phelps does all the cooking, looks after her. So he's doing, in fact, women's work. Yes, but he hates doing it because Mr. Phelps's mind is as divided as Aunt Mariah's by gender. Miss Phelps, Miss Phelps's isn't. So when we first meet Miss Phelps, it's clearly the book, well, Mig likes miwelps Miss Phelps, Miss Phelps, it's clearly the book likes Miss Phelps. The description of her, she's brisk and direct. And the best way to put it is that she's interested in things and people for their own sake. She does not want to make anyone do anything.
00:28:24
Speaker
You can't imagine how restful that is after Aunt Mariah. She sees people as people. But Mr. Phelps, very strictly, is like, there are things we do not talk about in front of women and children. because there is a war going on between men and women and there is no crossing up the sides. Right. Mr. Phelps rejects Mig to begin with quite strongly, but seeks to recruit Chris.
00:28:46
Speaker
Right. And for a while, this puts a little bit of a divide between Mig and Chris, who up until this point have been, they're they're they're very close in age. As you said, they're Christopher and Millie. They're opposite sides of the same coin. They're in cahoots. They're one year apart from each other. um And they're telling each other everything and, you know, using each other as their sort of vent outlet about the things that they feel about Aunt Mariah. um And then there's like a couple chapters where Chris is plotting with Mr. Phelps and Meg is cut out because Meg is a girl. And so they cannot plot together anymore.
00:29:20
Speaker
What Chris says is, I knew you wouldn't understand being female puts you automatically on the other side. And Meg says, no, it doesn't. I'm neutral like Miss Phelps. But that's not a position that exists in the minds of aunt Mariah or Mr. Phelps.
00:29:33
Speaker
Right. And in fact, I do wonder if that um that division between Chris and Mig where ah he insists on Mig's inability to understand is in fact one of the things that leaves Chris so dangerously isolated yeah in the following sequence. So the the first truly her ah horrifying supernatural instance happens about a third of the way into the book and Chris goes too far But it is, I think, true to say he is pushed too far. He has been told he can't do anything useful. He's not allowed to do any of the things Aunt Mariah approves of. Just by existing in her orbit as a teenage boy, he is not good enough. And still worse, he is a teenage boy with feelings such as...
00:30:20
Speaker
my father drove off a cliff, I feel some kind of way about that, which he announces loudly at a tea party to general silence and everyone pretending they didn't hear. Right, and he does feel some kind of way, a complicated way, because it's really made really clear that, as is often the case the Diana Wynne Jones book, Mig has forgiven her father for the various crimes that he did, which were numerous.
00:30:43
Speaker
Migg understands that, her you know, knows sort of in the back of her head that her father was not a good father and not a good man, but doesn't want to think about it, gets along with him pretty well. Chris doesn't. Chris has not forgiven their father for any of the things that he did, including trying to hit them or running off with Verena Bland.
00:30:58
Speaker
Or indeed falling off a cliff and dying. Or indeed falling off a cliff and dying. Right. So Chris is a teenage boy who, through Aunt Mariah's cruelty to him, is left with pretty much no way to behave except the nastiest way possible. like She won't let him do anything else. And then...
00:31:21
Speaker
when he has behaved badly enough, she rather gleefully punishes him. And her punishment is, she says, take the form that suits your true nature. Yep.
00:31:34
Speaker
And Chris is transformed into a wolf. Yeah. And this really struck me because this this is the werewolf transformation, right? And Mig, although Aunt Mariah doesn't know,
00:31:45
Speaker
ah Mig is secretly watching this happen and we have the the the boy becoming a wolf and the hair growing everywhere and the terrifying light eyes in the middle of it and I'm like this is werewolf stuff and of course the um the werewolf metaphor is a natural and often used teenage boy metaphor um he grows hair everywhere and suddenly becomes very violent and dangerous yeah yep It's also like this is a fairy tale sequence, right? It's the sister watching her brother get transformed. It's the seven swans. um
00:32:21
Speaker
Although actually, and I think that we'll kind of see this shift later, the the seven swans, the the sister has to keep endlessly crafting to make a shirt to turn her brother back. And the person who's endlessly crafting in this book is Betty.
00:32:33
Speaker
um She's making an eternal eight-legged sweater and Meg watches her knit another arm on the sweater knit another arm on the sweater and goes, i wish she wouldn't do that. But Mig lets, so going back to the idea of the wolf as teenage boy metaphor, I think it's actually pretty striking that, so later Mig lets Chris secretly back into the house to feed him. And the first thing that Chris conveys to her in wolf form is that a kind of shame. He knows he is a wolf and he hates it.
00:33:03
Speaker
He hates the strong way he smells when he is wet. I could tell that because he kept breaking off whining all the time I was lighting the lamp to give himself disgusted little licks. He hates having a tail. He turned around and bit his tail when I got the lamp going to show me. There is something about, you know, we've seen this kind of body dysmorphia in Diana Wynne Jones before the feeling of being in the wrong body, a body that is wrong for the situation that you're in. And I think that the way that Chris feels when he's a wolf of hating this strong smelling, uncomfortable dangling appendages body that he's got is something that reflects how he's felt in Cranberry, or at least the way that Aunt Mariah has made him feel in Cranberry about being a teenage boy in these spaces that are profoundly unwelcoming.
00:33:51
Speaker
Right. Aunt Mariah's construction, understanding of what a teenage boy is, of what masculinity is, if you like, is so narrow, so cruel and so limiting that ultimately it reduces Chris to an animal.
00:34:07
Speaker
that he I think you could basically I would read a fanfic in which Chris was a trans woman and I would believe it I i don't think that's how Jones intends it but I think it is ah it's a interesting reading of the text and I do think you know the other thing about Meg and Chris is that it is together that they form the protagonist of the sco story and it is Together that they form the echo of the other wolf in the book. Because the first thing Elaine says when she comes in the front door and sees Wolf Crisp
00:34:40
Speaker
is, oh my god, you haven't done it again. Right, which is brilliant because it's a double-edged hint. um and Because we have had, lurking around the house, a large fluffy cat ah yes who ah Betty has repeatedly pointed out looks a bit like Lavinia, the servant who's supposedly gone on holiday in an awful hurry and won't be back.
00:35:03
Speaker
Betty thinks, oh it was Lavinia's cat because animals grow to look like their owners. and So this one like this is one layer of our hint. You've done it again. And the reader goes, oh, Lavinia is Lavinia, if they hadn't done that already. But in fact, that's not the only thing that Elaine is referring to. ah Animals are a habit of Aunt Mariah's.
00:35:24
Speaker
Yep. And we will get to the other wolf in this book in a little bit. But we're not there yet because first there is the sort of escalating horror of not just
Narrative Control and Reality
00:35:35
Speaker
Chris being a wolf. I think that's half the horror. It is horrible.
00:35:38
Speaker
But the other half the horror that is really horrible is how Betty reacts to Chris's parents. Because up until this point, unlike in most Diana Wynne Jones books, again, Meg has been able to rely on her mother to listen to her and to understand. Right. And this is a ah thing that does happen in Diana Wynne Jones' books is that the parents are not magically immune to what's going on the children's world. Children do tell parents things or do tell adults things or expect them to notice things. ah Most especially, I think, Crestomancy.
00:36:13
Speaker
But what's striking here is that Betty behaves the way grown-ups in children's books usually behave, which is as if magic doesn't exist. And for her doing so is horrifying because it means she doesn't notice that Chris is missing.
00:36:30
Speaker
Yeah. what one of the you know There's many, many instances of Mig attempting to tell her mother Chris is a wolf. Chris has been turned into a wolf. This horrible thing has happened. And her mishearing or saying, oh, no, he's just gone out. No, I think I just heard him go out. No, he got up early and ate breakfast. The one that's most most striking to me is when she says, mom, Chris is a wolf and I don't know what to do. And Betty says, end the story some other way.
00:36:54
Speaker
because she knows that Mig is a writer, that she's writing books, and that she lives in a world of imagination. And so it's easy for her to put this all down to a world of imagination where Mig has control over the ending.
00:37:09
Speaker
Mig loves happy endings. This is a point made various times throughout the book. But Mig doesn't have any narrative control in this situation. And Cranberry, unlike the other girl writers in Diana Wynne Jones' oeuvre, What Mig writes doesn't come true. She's recording events. She's not altering them by her words. Right, because the person who has narrative control and who all alters events by her words is Aunt Mariah.
00:37:32
Speaker
Right. When she wants to cast one her magical spell, she speaks aloud. But also when she's altering the minds of other people, she does it by talking to them in this immensely boring way.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to jump ahead to the quote where she actually explains how she's doing it. She's talking and talking and talking to Meg and Meg is horrified but bored and horrified but bored. And then Aunt Mariah ends by saying, so this is really your first lesson, dear. Do you understand how it's done?
00:38:01
Speaker
The main spell is just talk and that's quite easy. But of course you are working away under the talk, putting all sorts of things into people's mind and tying their thoughts into the right shape. This is something you'll learn in time. It takes time. I wish you could have been there when I had my long talk with poor Zoe Green. That was me at my best.
00:38:18
Speaker
Now, poor Zoe Green, we will say, is a woman whose son, Aunt Mariah, has buried alive and who remains, nevertheless, one of Aunt Mariah's coven, obediently part of everything she's doing in Cranberry. And Mig, every time she encounters Zoe Green, is like...
00:38:36
Speaker
she's quite mad. right And it's slowly and horribly revealed over the course of the book how and why Zoe Green is mad as she is being forced to believe two totally contradictory things simultaneously and she can't, her her mind can't hold it.
00:38:51
Speaker
Right. Right. And Aunt Mariah just has this power to make her world keep on going the way she wants it to go, no matter what terrible thing has happened within it.
00:39:04
Speaker
Betty, at this point, this is also when Betty starts to say, maybe we should stay and take care of Aunt Mariah. Maybe I should give up my job. ah She says it very cheerfully, which horrifies Meg more than anything else that she's heard because her mother would never want to do that.
00:39:18
Speaker
Right. I think it it's pretty clear that off screen, Betty has had one of these conversations with Aunt Mariah. And that just becomes more and more clear through the book until the spell is finally broken. Not quite in the way Mig expects. Nothing Mig says about Chris ever gets through to Chris's mother.
00:39:38
Speaker
No. Their mother. So she eventually starts, Mig, after trying and trying to basically work word magic on Betty to try and tell her, explain to her what the truth of what's happening. Her word magic just isn't strong enough. And Mig eventually comes to the conclusion she can't, she has to actually do something. Right. She can't just write and talk.
00:39:59
Speaker
So she starts to make plans. One of the things that she does is she actually finds her father. They've been sort of seeing a car that looks like their car a around Cranberry. um That's actually where they found. So what Mr. Phelps is looking for is this thing called the green box. They don't know what it is yet. It's something to do with men's power in Cranberry to contract contrast against women's power. They find it in the car that looks like their father's car.
00:40:24
Speaker
So Mig goes and waits for her father to see if he's going to be any help or if he's going to have any explanations. He's no help. and he doesn't. But he isn't even really surprised.
00:40:35
Speaker
And she doesn't like, it's not a happy moment discover her father is alive after all. And, and, either never went off the cliff or somehow magically survived. And it's there's always sort of a durable reality running over the question of Greg Laker going off the cliff. He both did and did not in some way drown.
00:40:57
Speaker
Right. And Meg, you mig Meg, Meg, early in the book, you know, writes, About what if he didn't really drown? What if this happened? What if that happened? And Chris makes fun of her for her happy endings. That's the same thing her father says when he sees her having come to find him.
00:41:12
Speaker
Is that why you're here? Soul searching, happy ending seeking Mig. um Like it's a flaw in her to want a reality where her father isn't drowned. But it's a moment of mockery, which for seeing your daughter the first time again after so long is, I think, Greg's final failure. And it's clear that he's been mind whammied by Cranberry as well and by Aunt Maria. He's a zombie. it's you know they He's acting like all the other zombies in Cranberry.
00:41:37
Speaker
But he's still himself. Right. He's never not been like this. And I think it's worth comparing to Betty's description of their relationship when they were together. And Betty describes how when she was pregnant with Mig, she fell down the stairs. Now Greg came and looked at her and said, what a stupid thing to do and walked off.
00:41:55
Speaker
Yeah. And Betty says, I should have left him then, but I hoped he'd learn. Right. Which is the same thing she's doing with Aunt Mariah. Yeah. She should have left. she should have taken the kids and gotten out early in the book.
00:42:08
Speaker
But she hoped that she would learn. And Greg has his own his own view on the the gender rules like governing relationships between men and women. have Have you got the quote anywhere? Yes, I do So they're talking and she's trying to get information out of him. And he says, that's enough, Mig. One way of managing people is to tell them you're being quite honest.
00:42:28
Speaker
I know, I said, why do people always have to manage one another? Can't they just be people? Doesn't seem to be possible where men and women are concerned, Dad said, more sarcastic than ever. You'll learn that, Mig. No, I won't, I said. Dad just went on as if he hadn't heard me. That's the real trouble with your mother, Mig.
00:42:43
Speaker
She seemed to think it was possible, too. She was always assuming we thought the same way, and we didn't. You never knew where to have her. She was so reasonable. None of the traditional facts seemed to mean anything to her, and she went and taught the same outlook to you and Chris.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's it, I think. That's the core of, yeah like the story behind this story is the story of Betty and Greg's divorce, which is divorce because you have Greg who is a man who believes in and values a traditional framework of heterosexual marriage. And Betty who's like, oh, we could actually talk to each other like human beings. right And Greg not only rejects this, but he's angry that Betty's taught it to their children.
00:43:26
Speaker
Right. because he understands a world where everyone plays by the rules. He's in fact more happy that way than he is in a world where he has to treat everybody as a human being.
00:43:37
Speaker
he's out there's ah so So Greg is now longer with Verena Bland. He's now with a woman called Zenobia Bailey who lives in Cranberry. And when Mig leaves, she says, now dad's been zombie. I think he's as nervous of me as he is of Zenobia Bailey, because it's more important that Mig is woman.
00:43:54
Speaker
then she's that she's his daughter right and it reveals the sort of essential shallowness and hollowness of the father-daughter relationship which Mig cared about yeah which her father clearly did not even to the end of the book Mig still kind of cherishes a hope that there's going to be a happy ending where her parents get back together which it's so obvious would not be any kind of happy ending No, you're like, Betty, dump that guy, divorce him harder. Yeah, I think that there's, you know, the another book that this echoes a little bit is Ogre Downstairs. Yes. This is,
00:44:29
Speaker
I think the thing about Betty is that Betty feels like justice for Sally. yes Sally and the ogre downstairs is not involved in any of the action of the book.
00:44:40
Speaker
And at the end, she comes in and says, I wish you'd told me. right And it's so clear that she would have done a much better job of the magic chemistry sets than her awful husband. Right. And I do think it's important to say, because I think I skipped over it in the setup at the beginning, even though Greg greg runs off with Verena Bland, but then he comes back and then...
00:44:59
Speaker
Betty kicks him out. And that's one of the things that makes sense is I can't get over mum being the one to ask for a divorce. Right. Betty's the one who finally had enough of this man.
00:45:10
Speaker
Right. And then he goes to Cranberry and falls into the sea or doesn't. But there's I mean, I think that the that what Meg really spends the next third of the book doing is trying really hard every way she can to get her mother back into the story until eventually she succeeds.
Mig's Rebellion and Courage
00:45:29
Speaker
ah She has to ask for help to do it. She has to get other ideas for how to do it. There's a murder in between. But she does eventually bring Betty back into the narrative. She doesn't let maria Mariah take her away.
00:45:41
Speaker
Let's talk about the wolf hunt. yeah Because I think this is like the core horror moment of the the central turning point in the book. And it happens before Betty wakes up. yeah In fact, part of the horror of it is that Meg's mum sends her out to take part in the wolf hunt. Right. Meg's mum, who is kind to all creatures, who's been, who helped actually when the wolf came charging in.
00:46:06
Speaker
ah So at one point, Chris, as just as a wolf he did as a teenage boy, as a wolf can no longer restrain his feelings and charges in and causes chaos at one of Aunt Mariah's tea parties, steals her her giant pair of flapping underwear, runs around with the underwear on his head as a wolf, which is very funny.
00:46:24
Speaker
but also provides an excuse for the town to get up in arms about wolves, about how dangerous they are. Yes. So Aunt Mariah, in her newest ah version of her talking spell, starts talking about the awful wolf escaping from a zoo. And what if it savaged one of the poor little orphans? And then, oh gosh, the wolf has savaged one of the poor little orphans. It shall have to be killed. Right. And Aunt Mariah, and it very clearly comes from her, even though she never actually explicitly gives the order,
00:46:54
Speaker
Aunt Mariah arranges for a wolf hunt in which the men of the town are finally given something to do because this at last in Mariah's world is men's work is shooting guns. Right. women The women and children of the town are there as well, but they're beaters. They're not given guns. That's not their task.
00:47:12
Speaker
But they're all there. They're all participating in this. It's ah a town ritual, a town sacrifice, if you will. hmm. So Mig is forced to join in and be one of the beaters working through the woods and the wood is called the loop wood. So the wolf wood.
00:47:28
Speaker
And she is completely horrified at first and then she is numb as it becomes increasingly clear to her that there is no way for a large animal to escape what's happening.
00:47:40
Speaker
Yeah. Meg had been kind of expecting that she was going to be the way, that he would come to her and she'd let him through. But she's surrounded by townsfolk. There is no way for him to get to her without seeing. Right. There's a man with a gun standing behind her and it's clear that this is intentional. In fact, I think Aunt Mariah is expecting Chris to go to MIG yeah and is expecting to catch him that way.
00:48:01
Speaker
yeah But she doesn't see Chris at all. They get to the other side of the wood and they get out into the open and then she does finally see a wolf running desperately for his life. And Elaine's husband, Larry, side note, we think this is probably an Elaine and Lancelot Oh my god, I laughed so hard when you pointed this out.
00:48:20
Speaker
Right, Elaine's husband, Larry, not Lancelot, shoots the wolf and he says immediately, i got her. Yeah. And then Mig looks at the wolf and it's very obviously a female wolf. We've seen before, by the way, Diana Wynne-Jones kind of do this parody of gender through animals.
00:48:40
Speaker
It's something that she likes to go to a lot. ah This wolf is much bigger than Wolf Chris and has two little rows of nipples on its chest. It's much older as well.
00:48:51
Speaker
and If you remember, Elaine said you've done it again. yep This is the original animal transformation of Cranberry. This one was done 20 years ago. and We will have a little time travel moment when we get to see what happens.
00:49:05
Speaker
but ah They bring the wolf's corpse to Aunt Mariah who gave the command. and Aunt Mariah breaks down screaming. And it's interesting how the town reacts. Firstly, all the men are clearly quite smug about it. They did this on purpose. But also quite a lot of the Mrs. Ur's. Right. In this moment, when Aunt Mariah discovers that it is her daughter Naomi, whom she turned into a wolf decades ago, who has been shot, but this is a moment of possibly genuine grief. Right.
00:49:39
Speaker
yeah And all her supposed friends are standing around, sneering a bit, smirking a bit. And Elaine is the only one brave enough to say to her, well, you told them to shoot a wolf.
00:49:49
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Elaine, clearly quite smug about the wolf. The central female friendships between the Mrs. Errs, which seems so important. None of them even like each other. no They're all horrible all the time to everyone. But nobody actually likes Aunt Mariah. She's just in charge.
00:50:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And Zoe Green says, oh, poor dear. Now you know how I feel. Yeah. And Aunt Mariah grabs at Mig and says, dear little Naomi, you make it up to me, don't you, dear?
00:50:23
Speaker
Yeah. And I think this is, to me, I think on Uriwi, this is the point where it became totally clear that Naomi is a replacement for Naomi, who's dead in every possible way, which also, of course, is a threat. Here's what happened to the last daughter, heir, successor whom I chose.
00:50:43
Speaker
This is what I could do to you if you don't do what I want. Right. And this really is where, like, again, Migg and Chris together make up Naomi, the last Naomi, the rebellious Naomi, who outwardly challenged, who who was the heir to Aunt Mariah's power. And who challenged her for it and failed.
00:51:05
Speaker
And was turned into a wolf because of it. The punishment goes to Chris and the sort of heir apparent role goes to Migg. Yes.
00:51:16
Speaker
But then, of course, the performance of Rebellion also went to Chris. He gets the parts of Naomi that she was punished for and then he gets her punishment. Yeah. Anyway, this is really what... this This incident is horrifying enough to finally get Meg to take some drastic action. She actually does involve Betty. She brings her mother down to the seaside because she's being watched She actually has an interesting conversation with Elaine before this. It turns out that Elaine is the one who let Chris slip out of the way and got... Which actually, was killed and Elaine, from first encountering Chris, repeatedly warned him, tried to restrain him. And when he's turned into a wolf, Elaine is seen to be nearly crying
00:51:58
Speaker
Elaine's awful. Mig and Betty can't stand her. she's she I mean, Mig essentially describes her as like the the the the chief of police to Aunt Mariah's dictator. She is she is she is the gender police. yeah And you pointed out she's Dillion again, right? Barbie cop.
00:52:15
Speaker
Barbie cop. She's beautiful, she's described as thin and beautiful and with these little whirring laughs and plastic smiles. They catalogue her smiles by how many precise little creases they make in her face. A one line, a two line or a three line smile.
00:52:28
Speaker
Yeah. But Elaine genuinely likes men. In fact, boy does she like men. And it is implied that she is ah cheating generously on her husband, Larry. But also she is from the first kind to Chris, helpful fall to Chris, yeah ah trying to flirt with Chris.
00:52:50
Speaker
And it's in fact her sympathy for Chris that saves his life. So redeeming quality hits on teenage boys. Right. Question mark.
00:53:02
Speaker
Question mark. Lots of question marks about Elaine. Although I do think this is one of the models of heterosexuality that exists in a book which has several because it's a book that's about relationships between men and women. and this is the ah Elaine is a heterosexual woman who experiences desire actively, goes looking for it,
00:53:22
Speaker
isn't kind to the men she uses or feels attracted to, certainly isn't kind to her husband, um behaves inappropriately, is also nice to men.
00:53:34
Speaker
Yes. And has, you know, I think that one of the things that I think is interesting about this book, I'm really glad we read the shorts, because I do think that throughout this book, and we'll talk more about this, I think when we hit the end, Diana Wynne Jones is wrestling with her tendency to sort of write a cruel, unkind parody of somebody that she doesn't like. And I do think that she's putting in an effort to make sure that all of these horrifying women in this book are not just cruel parodies. They have some element of human feeling to them. Aunt Mariah does have her genuine grief about Naomi. Elaine saves Chris's life.
00:54:09
Speaker
it's It's always a little bit more complicated than that. Yeah, I think to me, I think this book is in fact a reflection on a wrestling with portraiture of truth telling in fiction. The fact that it's framed as Meg's autobiographical um record of what's happening, written as it's happening. And we discover at the end that that's not true.
00:54:33
Speaker
This is an edited account. Mig's actually gone back and expanded in several places. Chris points out you didn't have time to write all that. ah But the question of how and why you edit your true experience into a fictionalized account and for what purpose and...
00:54:58
Speaker
especially given the centrality of these i think largely are they are quite cruel portraits yeah um we know from our good friend colin uh jones's son colin burrow wrote uh in his description in his response to her work old women and failed mothers do not fare well in her stories the central character of black mariah is an elderly suburban lady of high respectability She turns out to be a witch who uses magic to control a whole town full of zombie-like conformist men. This particular witch is clearly based on my grandmother's.
00:55:33
Speaker
They are represented so cruelly that one of Diana Wynne-Jones' own characters might well cry out, it's not fair, if they read about them. And I do think that question of cruel, vengeful representation and then what it's for and why you do it yeah is important in this book.
00:55:52
Speaker
Yeah. And I do think also, again, so one of my theories about this book is that even though Meg is the girl writer protagonist, so to speak, a lot of the actual protagonist work towards the end of the book is done by Betty.
00:56:06
Speaker
And I do think this is kind of a slippage we've seen in the early nineties and we'll see as we go on through the nineties, not looking ahead, but you know, through the short stories, she's getting increasingly interested in writing about adult women.
00:56:21
Speaker
um A lot of the bad mother portraits early in the books or the complicated mother portraits early in the books are about a child's relationship to her mother. and In this case, it's about a child and her mother's relationship to an older woman.
00:56:34
Speaker
Right. The question now is one of the mother-in-law. Right. Aunt Mariah, sorry, is an aunt by marriage. The exact relationship is never explained, but I think think there is an element of mother-in-law to her and Betty. Very, very clearly.
00:56:51
Speaker
So, wolf hunt over. Meg starts working on the problem of freeing her mother. She gets her mother to come to the beach and says, Mom, can you humor me? I want you to talk to this rock and pretend it's me.
00:57:01
Speaker
And she puts a little anorak over the rock and she sneaks off to see the Phelps because she knows now that she's being under watch. And although Mr. Phelps is not inclined to help Meg's mother, a woman, Ms. Phelps has to say, think of it as an intellectual problem to get him to assist at all.
00:57:16
Speaker
He does suggest that perhaps... Mig should bring her mother to see the ghost that's been showing up in Chris's room. Right. Because what's really needed, well, what Mig really needed is for her mother to understand how much trouble they're all in that something's happened to Chris. But that's what she won't listen to So instead, the idea is to get Betty to recognize the presence of the supernatural another way.
00:57:41
Speaker
And we do know at this point in the book who the ghost is. We know that the ghost is Anthony Green, who was Zoe Green's son. We know that For 20 years ago, before he disappeared, he was somehow in charge of the men in Cranberry or held the power of the men in Cranberry in the same way Aunt Mariah. Yes, Aunt Mariah's male equivalent.
00:58:01
Speaker
Right. um what We know that Greg, Meg's father, was jealous of him, wanted what he had. But we also know from Elaine, when asked about Anthony Green, Elaine says, the silly innocent refused to believe other people were different from himself.
00:58:18
Speaker
And Meg says, what's wrong with that? And Elaine says, nothing provided you're the same as other people. I've no wish to be treated in the same way as Larry. And the way that the just ghost himself is described... um Well, I think he's pretty clearly a Diana Wynne Jones sexy man.
00:58:35
Speaker
Meg describes him as odd looking. He has a small, peaky face with a lot of swept back hair and very thick, dark eyebrows that bent in two upside down Vs like a clown's eyebrows. His whole face was kind of quirked and crooked and surprise looking. This is a direct parallel to many other sexy men we've seen, but most notably um some of the ghosts or the projections of Faber-John in Tale of Time City. And in fact, when Chris and Mig are first talking about the ghost, Mig mishears some of the things that Chris says. They're walking along the beach they're hearing the sea. And she's like, oh, it's his name, Neighbor John. That is just Faber John again.
00:59:13
Speaker
But Megha's actually quite surprised to hear that the ghost only disappeared 20 years ago, because when she looks at him, there's something antique about him. What she says is there's a feeling of king as well as the scarecrow and jester he gave you. Someone important dead hundreds of years ago and half crumbled away.
00:59:31
Speaker
Right. I mean, I think we do at this point know what happened to Anthony Green. He has been buried alive and Mig has been sleeping in Chris's room where the ghost appears and has been having the dreams of the ghost, which are dreams of being buried.
00:59:45
Speaker
Right. But Mig can't understand the ghost, which I think is important. Mig actually compares this directly to the experience of not being able to understand Chris as a wolf. These trapped men can't speak to her. They don't have word magic.
00:59:59
Speaker
And something else, actually, that's happened before this is Meg has found her missing story. It's on a shelf in the garage, proving that her father got here before falling off a cliff, quote unquote. And she looks through the whole book. She's left every other page in this story blank for herself to make edits later. And she looks through every other page, looking to see if her father might have left some kind of message for her, some kind of word.
01:00:23
Speaker
Nothing. Silence. Silence. But the ghost, it turns out, can speak to her mother. Right. And this is a great moment. So Betty, indulging Mig, comes with her to sleep in Chris's room, is woken with her by the ghost and understands him instantly in a way Mig does not. And I think implied, Betty instantly like, that is the sexiest ghost I have ever seen. The first thing that she says when she sees him is, oh What a smile.
01:00:54
Speaker
But also, you know, Betty and Anthony are about the same age. They are both people who are trying to live outside this system of gender rules.
01:01:07
Speaker
um And they they do seem to have this instant affinity because Betty instantly is able to communicate with him. Right. Which Mig couldn't do. I think the thing about Betty and Antony Green, I think, is that they are both frequently described using these classical heroic archetypes. Antony Green is the buried king under the hill. He's the idealist, the Arthur, who tried to make a different world and failed. Betty is the saint, the one who sees suffering and immediately has, unlike Meg. Oh, my God. oh i know I had a thought. I had a thought. Betty is Penelope, right? She is constantly knitting and unknitting the same sweater Chris, who isn't there.
01:01:47
Speaker
you're absolutely right. Betty is Penelope. um But she, as soon unlike Meg, Meg has been in the room being visited by this ghost over and over again. and like, I can't understand you. I don't know what to do.
01:02:00
Speaker
Migg or Betty immediately is like, oh my God, this man is buried alive. We have to do something about this immediately. But also Betty points out that you can't ask someone who is buried alive to solve your problems for you. just Something that hadn't occurred to Migg that in fact the the unselfishness of Betty's caring for other people is what's needed here. You've got to do something to rescue Anthony before Anthony can rescue Chris. Yeah. Exactly. The other thing that Betty points out is she looks at this this sexy man ghost who looks like someone from hundreds of years ago and says, I think you've got yourself wrong.
01:02:35
Speaker
Nobody looks quite this odd, but you're putting out your own idea of yourself, aren't you? I suppose it's quite a privilege to see it. So the way that Anthony Green looks to himself is this kind of old, failed, strange-looking, heroic figure. He sees himself as ah as an antique hero.
01:02:52
Speaker
Right. Interestingly, Betty sees his true self before she sees any other other version of him. yeah um Honestly, I do think it's quite romantic. I'm quite fond of Betty and Anthony. This is also what I mean about justice for Sally, right? that this is This is the mother figure who, not widowed this time, but divorced. Get rid of that guy.
01:03:15
Speaker
Upgrade. She did. She really did upgrade. Yeah. And now all the really magical stuff in the book starts happening very quickly because Betty, have the worm having turned, is not going to be having with any of this sneaking around and trying to get under Aunt Mariah's nose that Meg has been doing. She's like, I'm walking across the street. I'm ringing the Phelps' doorbell. I'm asking them how we get that man out of the hill right now.
01:03:42
Speaker
And their first attempt is time travel. They're like, what if we went back to books published in 1990, so it's 1970. We went back to 1970 and somehow prevented him from going in in the first place. ah But time travel is apparently quite difficult and disorienting as a human. So first we must all turn into cats. and Yeah. And we all love being cats. I think this is actually really ah really fun contrast, how much fun Meg has being a cat with how much Chris doesn't like being a wolf. there's a kind of like physicality euphoria that Meg experiences being a little creature. Like what if you didn't have to be a girl? What if you could just be a little creature?
01:04:21
Speaker
And she got, but also the experience of Meg as kitten is one of movement and delight in movement. She goes jumping about, she goes wiggling her hindquarters, climbing up things and and hanging off the backs of things and scrabbling up and down the sofa. ah But it's a delight in the movement that I think will come back yeah multiple times later. But first,
01:04:45
Speaker
Betty, Mig, and as their guide, Mr. Phelps, are sent back in the past 20 years. The first thing that happens in the past is Mr. Phelps, as a large, rather rather swaggering tomcat, looks at Betty and goes, hmm, makes a cat approach, to which Betty instantly claws him across the face.
Past Betrayals and Power Struggles
01:05:05
Speaker
Right. No hard feelings. That's just how cats are. Again, gender gender is fine if you're a cat. We've seen this many times.
01:05:12
Speaker
But then they go and as cats witness the burial of Anthony Green, and they fail. let like Let's say that out front. They do not succeed in preventing him getting buried in the first place.
01:05:23
Speaker
Right. But they do they do have a like quite cute moment with him. He is the kind of man who stops to pat a kitten. But they also meet Naomi. And Naomi haunts the narrative of Black Mariah in many, many ways. But we don't actually meet her until this late stage. And she is. Migg describes her.
01:05:43
Speaker
And I think actually you can kind of see Jones working against the limits of her point of view. Well, like, Dinowin Jones has a very clear vision of a 1970s fashion model. yeah And she knows that Migg would not find it impressive. Right. to But Naomi clearly is quite glamorous.
01:06:03
Speaker
quite unusual, very striking, very beautiful. And she and Anthony clearly have this complicated relationship and they are teasing and flirting, but Naomi is pushing him to prove that it's possible to go into the earth and come out again. and You'll become the more powerful wizard that way. And this of course is Nimue and Merlin.
01:06:20
Speaker
Right, exactly. And the subtext, or I guess just the text of this conversation is not just, can you go into the earth, but do you trust me to take you out of it again? Yeah. You love me enough to put that trust in me. Yeah.
01:06:34
Speaker
And clearly, Antony Green... doesn't, but he wants to. And so against his better instincts, against, you know, he stalls and he delays and he pets the cats, but against his better instincts, he says, yes, I do love you and I do trust you and I will go into the earth.
01:06:51
Speaker
And there is a sense that like Anthony Green very clearly never liked the system in Cranberry, had big ideas for change and that his relationship when Naomi Laker was part of that. She's the daughter, the heir successor of Aunt Mariah.
01:07:07
Speaker
And presumably together in Anthony's hope, if she's trustworthy, if she loves him like he loves her, ah together they could change things in Cranberry. That's not what happens because she instantly betrays him. Yep. And then she runs. I think like it's so clear that she's quite young in this scene because she puts him and and then she runs off and says, oh, whoopee, I've done it.
01:07:29
Speaker
Like, she she runs gleefully and childlike off to tell her mother what she's done. Right, and her mother is right there waiting, and it's clear that Aunt Mariah maria Laker orchestrated this whole scene. And then Naomi, ah not one to rest on her laurels, instantly betrays her mother as well.
01:07:48
Speaker
Right. And it's like, now I've done this, I have the power, it's time for you to retire and me to take over. Right. um So it's not that Naomi betrayed Anthony to serve Mariah.
01:07:59
Speaker
She did it to serve herself. But she underestimated her mother. And they have a flaming row. It's brilliant. And what love about the flaming row is how much Naomi says everything that makes me in thinking. Because they are the same person, right? Yeah. And Naomi says, you're a lazy old bag. And I do everything around here. Uh-huh.
01:08:21
Speaker
And... hypocritical hag which she is yes and what aunt mariah shouts is things like scarlet woman which who doesn't know what they mean and we're like yeah okay very clearly naomi is sexy and up for it um but in fact what aunt mariah's final word on what naomi is is bitch And this is also, of course, the transformation, the she-wolf, the wolf bitch. It's what Naomi becomes in this scene as she fails to take power from her mother and is banished to Loop Wood to live as a wolf for the rest of her life. And Aunt Mariah says, may it be your death if you ever leave, which of course it was. It absolutely was. And Meg watches her looking to see for any sign of the sadness that will come later and doesn't see it. At that point, she thinks that she's perfectly in the right.
01:09:16
Speaker
and so time travel time travel episode one they go back and Betty is very confused and one of the running jokes in this section in the time travel section of the book is that Betty keeps checking her watch and Mig keeps patiently explaining that it's not going to help yep yep But it's fine. Benny has a mission. She's going to get that man, that sexy man, out of that hill. Right. So they figured out exactly where Anthony went into the earth. And so they run off to the mound in the present day to go and get him out.
01:09:49
Speaker
Only to find the mound is in the process of being bulldozed at that very moment. The whole town is watching. Aunt Mariah out in front in on her throne, on her wheelchair. um So, in fact, this has been sort of set up very subtly in preceding sections where Ammarai's like, we should build an extension for the orphanage. Those poor little deers need a playroom. But of course, it's clearly always been about destroying the mound where the king is buried and so preventing him ever returning.
01:10:19
Speaker
Right. And she can't just I mean, this is what's so interesting about Aunt Mariah's power, right? It's been 20 years. She can't just kill him from within the mound. She has to take 20 years to like bureaucratically work up the plans for what if we built a built an orphanage? Then what if we built an extension to the orphanage? And then what if we bulldoze the mound? And what if everything happened very appropriately and with every box checked? And we all talked about it in the town meetings endlessly for a while.
01:10:46
Speaker
i do doing it Yeah, I do find it striking that that it happens at this moment. I wonder if Aunt Mariah does feel threatened in some way, or if the the death of Naomi as the wolf ah has her going back to tie up loose ends. Yeah, because of course what Naomi said when she put him under was he'd stay there until I, Naomi Laker, take him out again.
01:11:11
Speaker
And now Naomi Loiker is no longer existent, so nobody can take him out again, right? Right. ah Except, of course, that Mig and Chris together form Naomi Loiker.
01:11:22
Speaker
Right. So for a moment, they're all downcast. They think, oh, no, the man's being bulldozed. It's too late. And they're like, wait, we just had time travel. Let's go to time travel some more. Yeah. So there is really an absolutely delightful, like the the um the mechanics, the sort of plot work of it is very neatly done. There's a point at which I think three separate versions of Mig and Betty are running around the Phelps' house at different times, which are all the same time.
01:11:51
Speaker
Betty constantly checking her watch in the hopes that it will help. It does not. Right. But they go back to that morning. And they get him out of the mound. Before the bulldozer arrives. And Mig, whose real name, remember, is Naomi, my new dear little Naomi, takes her place. and My name is Naomi Laker. And in so doing, takes up the mantle of dead Naomi.
01:12:14
Speaker
Yes. ah Takes up, in fact, the position of the successor of Aunt Mariah and calls Anthony Green out of the mound. And this is really the biggest thing that Meg does in the book is she gets Anthony Green out of the mound. And then they get Anthony Green back to the Phelpses and the Fetty you know, helps clean him off, get takes the first chance she can get to go help him in the bath. that for there um Betty likes looking after people. We know this. She got gives him a haircut, helps him shave, gets a chance to see him naked. Just saying. ah
01:12:49
Speaker
At one point, ah Meg sort of resentfully says, have we just traded looking after aunt Mariah for looking after Anthony Green? But before that, though, before they get at the Phelps, something important happens first.
01:13:01
Speaker
because the minute he comes out of the mound... Right. He does a little dance. No, a big dance. He does big dance. Not a little dance in any way. Right. He seems to them to be completely crazy, completely out of his mind. And he goes dancing all around Cranberry. And it's only towards the end of chasing him all around the town in this mad dance that Meg realizes this is magic. He is doing ritual, a beating of the bounds. He is taking his place as, if you like, priest king of Cranberry.
01:13:30
Speaker
It's a really striking image. He's dancing around, his clothes are changing colour as he goes, and he's doing these big leaps and bounds and incredible dance. Just like freedom, freedom after 20 years. Right, and then he goes and has a bath and gets a haircut. And then he goes and has a bath and gets a haircut, and then he and Betty go off to rescue Chris. But Mig isn't part of that, because Mig is like, oh no, I've left my story in Aunt Mariah's house, so I'm just going to pop across and get it There is something I think really interesting about, again, the way time and writing work in this section, because we don't learn until this point in the narrative that, in fact, the entire previous section, which, you know, Mig starts the section about the wolf hunt by saying it's Saturday and so much has happened. I've got to get this all down. and she writes about the wolf hunt, and she writes about getting Anthony Green out of the mound. And here we learn, as she starts to write in a new book, that she's written all of that sitting in Aunt Mariah's house. She went across to get her story and was like, oh, I've got to catch up. And instead of getting out of that house, was like, I have to write.
01:14:36
Speaker
I have to explain this all in my notebook and just sits there for hours writing A sitting duck for, and and you know, sort of imply that this is part of Aunt Mariah's magic, is to get her to sit down and write this all instead of leaving and going to join in helping get Chris back.
01:14:52
Speaker
Right. This is what I mean about like, this book complicates, I think, the figure of the writer girl heroine. Mig's writing is not a source of power for her at this point. It's a source of terrible vulnerability because it makes her passive. It makes her captureable It is in fact what captures her and it is also selfish and silly.
01:15:17
Speaker
All she's doing is sitting down frantically writing at the most dangerous possible moment. And in fact, of course, Aunt Mariah then returns and captures her as she was planning to do because it becomes clear Aunt Mariah knew that Mig had become the heiress, the Naomi.
01:15:36
Speaker
She felt it because the power that is Naomi's power is also Mariah's power. Aunt Mariah gives her back the book of the twin princesses, which is the story that she was writing that she found was in her father's car and says, you know, I've seen from the last few pages of your other writing that Elaine is right. I bet she writes this on the front page of the twin princesses. I have been much too trusting. I give you this story instead and suggest you finish it while you meditate on how deeply you have hurt me.
01:16:02
Speaker
Your loving Aunt Mariah. here's an appropriate little thing for you to write.
Transformation and Resistance
01:16:06
Speaker
do find very striking that we do have a title for this other story and it is the twin princesses. So this is a story with ah no male characters. Yeah. um And it is a fairy tale and that will be tied into some fairy skipping dancing we're about to have. um All of this is suitable for little girls.
01:16:27
Speaker
yeah And in Aunt Mariah doesn't just want to crush MIG into woman shape, she wants to crush her into little girl shape. right So every possible version of ah adulthood and agency is taken from her. like Compare Betty, who the minute she's back in the game says, right, I am crossing the street and ringing the doorbell. I am not sneaking around. Betty has this power of adulthood, at least, to fall back on. MIG is losing even that.
01:16:56
Speaker
And she gets crushed even more into little girlhood. So the next thing that happens is after Aunt Mariah gives her this long, long droning little chat that's just normal. and then at the end, she gives the quote we've already read out about how the kind of magic that this is. And then Mig wakes up in the orphanage.
01:17:17
Speaker
She's been put in the orphanage, which is explicitly a training ground for future citizens of Cranberry. Future appropriately gendered citizens of Cranberry. Right. One thing that's really clear is Mig is too big to be there.
01:17:30
Speaker
Yeah. Like, Mig is, I mean, as usual in a Jones book, we're not given exact ages, but Mig and Chris are something like 13 and 14, 14 and 15. Mig is not little is... migg is not a little girl she is a a near adult with her own strong feelings and beliefs but in that ah space she is compelled into little girl behavior and we get outright again the the magic of the Mrs. Ur's as Mig's real feelings are she describes it as being put in a plastic bag bulging out. Yeah have the quote
01:18:02
Speaker
Side note.
01:18:16
Speaker
side note this book taught like after reading this book i was like i can never eat muesli never ever
01:18:23
Speaker
yeah i think there's something about that sort of plastic bag around your feelings which are still there but which you're not doing anything with and can't do anything with there's a i think there's a line to be drawn between that image and mig's writing mig's journal in this book which is essentially a plastic bag where she puts her feelings so that she but she she willingly doing that because it's more civilized than doing what Chris has been doing and breaking out and rebelling and shouting and saying inappropriate things. Right. Which will have feelings in a little bag and a little locked book and she's done nothing with them. And that the ultimate outcome of doing that is you end up in this position in this orphanage where these powerful women will control you into eating stuff you hate and doing stuff you hate and treating you like a child when you're not
01:19:15
Speaker
And like, this is a power of art book as well. Yeah. But it's also a limits of art book. Yes. And to be clear, but Mig wants to rage and shout like Krish. He says that multiple times. But she can't. I mean, I think that the way in which socialization has worked on Mig already, in spite of the way that Betty has been trying to raise her children equally, is really clear throughout the book. There are a number of times when Chris rages and Betty go has to go run an errand or do something necessary to make the family function. And Mig...
01:19:47
Speaker
ends up doing, because someone has to do it, what would be called the emotional labor. She deals with Aunt Mariah. She does the work. She ah she ends up sitting you know staying behind in order to make things function smoothly. And this is a pattern that's been in place since the first pages. makes Like someone's got to talk to Aunt Mariah on the phone. Can't be mom.
01:20:05
Speaker
Can't be Chris. Gotta to be me. Because if anyone else does it, something bad will happen. And as she contains her feelings in the little bag of this book, it's like, I want to rage like Chris. I can't bring myself to do it. I have to keep things functioning. I have to keep things civilized. But of course, things staying functioning and civilized is how Aunt Mariah stays in charge. Yeah.
01:20:28
Speaker
And Meg's sort of big creative act of rebellion in this book is not writing at all. It's during the sequence in the orphanage when, as you point out, she has to do this little fairy dance with the other little orphan girls.
01:20:39
Speaker
And she's like, all right, I'll dance. I know how to dance. I've just seen Antony Green, the green man of this village, doing his big dance of power all around the bounds.
01:20:51
Speaker
So I'll do that. Yeah. And it's this is where I think the the the the kitten euphoria comes back. It's joy in physicality. It's yeah having a big... like To begin with in the scene, Mig is embarrassed of the hugeness of her body compared to the other little girls. And then she dances and the bigness of her body and the way she's taking up space shocks and horrifies the Mrs. Ur in charge who punishes her for it.
01:21:17
Speaker
yeah But it is the most the most powerful act of rebellion she can do in that moment. Yeah, and the most powerful act of artistic rebellion, I think, in the book. But it doesn't actually get her out of the orphanage. Her mom has to come rescue her.
01:21:30
Speaker
Yes, which is a great sequence when it's pretty clear like Mig is locked in a room so she doesn't see everything that happens but she hears the boom which is the doors getting blown off the hinges and she sees her mum storming in and hears her ah shouting furiously at the Mrs. Ur in charge and calls her, what is it? You cruel wicked woman and bangs her head on the doorpost and this is Betty finally getting to do the act of violence that's been brewing inside her all through the book and it's Mama bear, mama wolf, maybe.
01:22:02
Speaker
right this This is the savagery of the very angry mother who has come to rescue both her children. She's rescued Chris. Chris is there in human form again with them. And now he is she's here to rescue Mig, who has no business being in an orphanage. Here's her mother. Right, exactly.
01:22:22
Speaker
And from there, events progress very quickly. They defeat they go and confront Aunt Mariah. Antony Green tries to sort of confront Aunt Mariah and the Mrs. Errs with their various crimes. it Doesn't work at all. Can't make them feel guilty a bit.
01:22:35
Speaker
They have no conviction or no no comprehension of the idea that anything of what they've done is wrong. to there To Aunt Mariah's mind, she is making the world function the way it ought to.
01:22:48
Speaker
And there's nothing wrong about that. Right, and there's a quite striking moment where Anthony Green, and clearly it hurts him very much, shows her the death of Naomi the wolf and then the death of Naomi the woman.
01:23:00
Speaker
And like this was his girlfriend. he He liked her. And he's clearly very upset, but Aunt Mariah isn't moved. And we heard those shrieks of grief when Naomi died, but it becomes clear, I think, that they might be shrieks of anger at having given the wrong order.
01:23:18
Speaker
not having successfully killed Chris rather than true grief for Naomi. Or they might even be grief but not repentance, right? Like what she says in response to this is, upon reflection, I have nothing in my life to reproach myself with, young man. You can be sad about something that you don't think was wrong.
01:23:38
Speaker
Yeah. She sincerely believes that she's done everything that's right and proper. Yeah. So... Then there's a really interesting sort of final judgment sequence where Anthony Green says to the town, what should I do with this woman?
01:23:57
Speaker
And some people shout, lock her up, bury her, kill her. And some other people shout, which I think is really funny. No, no, she's such a character. i really want to know who's shouting. No, she's just a character.
01:24:08
Speaker
Miss Phelps, possibly. Possibly. ps And what Anthony Green says is, as far as this lady herself is concerned, she was in the right all along all her life.
01:24:18
Speaker
Nothing is going to make her see she was wrong. And the only point of punishment is to make someone see the error of their ways. If they don't see it, then what you are doing to them is vengeance, not punishment.
01:24:28
Speaker
Right? I dare say a lot of you do want vengeance. But if you do take vengeance, that makes you as bad as this Mrs. Laker herself. I want to stop for the wrong in Cranberry, so I'm not going to take revenge.
01:24:40
Speaker
I'm simply going to put her away quietly. She probably won't even realize I have. Is that understood? And then he shrinks Aunt Mariah into a little tiny figure, frozen, and opens up the green box that holds all the power of the men in town. Let's ah let's it all go.
Vengeance vs. Justice
01:24:59
Speaker
puts Aunt Mariah in the box and sails her away on the ocean. Right, they sail quite a long way out to sea with Anthony's mate George, ah who is one of the ah strikingly real character for a guy who only turns up on two pages. um They sail out to sea with Anthony's mate George and then he floats the little box on the water and it floats away. And actually, I do wonder, we've had Anthony's had his death by earth. is Is Aunt Mariah getting the death by water proper to a witch?
01:25:28
Speaker
Could be. Or is she just, you know, sailing into the West, quite Tolkien? Right, because it's not a death. They make it really clear that it's not a death because Mig raises the problem.
01:25:40
Speaker
She, you know, he asks what's going on and Anne-State says she thinks she's in Cranberry going on just as usual. And Mig says, couldn't Cranberry start up again then, sort of in her mind? So we'd all have to be figments of her imagination there and have to do what she wanted.
01:25:53
Speaker
And there's not really an answer to that. No, no, Antony says, yeah, probably. Yeah. You can't control her. You can't change her. You can't make her different to what she is.
01:26:03
Speaker
You shouldn't destroy her cruelly for your own satisfaction because it makes you as bad as she is. You just put her in a box and float her away. She doesn't have to live rent free in your head.
Exploration of Gender Dynamics
01:26:15
Speaker
Exactly. have Your mother-in-law does not have to live rent free in your head. Exactly.
01:26:21
Speaker
Actually, like this, this grappling with what is just punishment versus what is vengeance, what is ah a just punishment versus what is just vengeance is so interesting in light of what Colin Burrows says about this book as a cruel tearing down of Diana Wynne Jones's mother-in-law.
01:26:42
Speaker
ah Maybe she was nicer to her mother-in-law after this? No, actually, I tell you, she was probably perfectly nice to her mother-in-law to her face all her life and hated every second of it. She was totally really civilized about it. And then she went home and wrote it all down in a book.
01:26:55
Speaker
Like Meg. Like Meg. So I think this is a weird book and I'm really glad we're talking about it because every time I read it, I'm like, there is, i just gotta unpack this. There's so much to unpack about what it's trying to say about gender.
01:27:11
Speaker
and about society. I think we need to talk about the green box to fully yeah unpack it. To unpack the green box. Okay, so the the system we are eventually told, and it is quite late that we're told, the system of Cranberry is that there are two kinds of power men's power and women's power the women's power is vested in the queens so Aunt Mariah is the latest of the queens of the town ah so in these witches in these ah living women the men's power is stored in a little box and then the box is given to a keeper who can use it or not as he chooses and Anthony Anthony Green rejects the construction he says first of all what I've got in here is not really men's power everyone's got it It's the power of ideas, the power of imagination. And in fact, one of the things Mig does early on, which ah Nathaniel Phelps and Chris are both furious with her for, and they call her you little female, you stupid little girl. Well, you release el calls this is actually when ah Chris says maybe they're both as bad as the other, because Mr. Phelps comes out and is furious at her and tries to hit her. And Chris gets in the way and then says, I thought Mr. Phelps was right and that when he was the goody and the women were the baddies. But now I don't know. Maybe they're both just as bad.
01:28:26
Speaker
Right. And I think it's an important, a striking moment that Mr. Phelps is just as bad that when... Mig releases this power of ideas and imagination and she and Chris get a lot of the power through them. And the mound that Anthony Green is in, by coincidence, that's where they're standing, gets a lot of the power, which is very lucky for later. It was in fact the right thing to do. And the orphans from the orphanage, the children, get a lot of the power. And the power of imagination belongs to everyone, but perhaps especially to children.
01:28:57
Speaker
Yes. But Mr. Phelps' view of the world... It needs to be kept contained. It needs to be kept private and private to men. There's something. So Mr. Phelps and Elaine are actually paralleled because they're both described with the same kind of fanaticism in their eyes about the system that exists here in Cranberry. It's not just Aunt Mariah's system. It is a long system that has a long history.
01:29:24
Speaker
And there are these hints throughout the book. What we see is an evil matriarchy. But there are these hints throughout the book that there have in past times been an equally evil or worse patriarchy. When they're talking about the orphanage, so turns the orphans are actually just all the children of Cranberry have been rounded up and put into this orphanage. So Aunt Mariah can have a next generation that's trained up properly.
01:29:44
Speaker
um But what Miss Phelps says is that some of the previous holders of the green box tried to breed a whole race of obedient folk. There's this just sort of casual dropped mention of things that have happened before in Cranberry. And I do think you have to read this book with its vision of the evil matriarchy as a response and you know an entry in a conversation of a long, you know, the Stepford Wives and a lot of similar books about an evil patriarchy, about what happens in a town where the men hold all the power and are able to make the women perform exactly as they like. Because I don't think that she's ignoring that. I don't think she's saying, no, that doesn't happen.
01:30:25
Speaker
I think she's saying, we all know that happens. And now here's the other side of it. Yes, it's, how to put this, the problem is gender.
01:30:36
Speaker
And what Black Mariah is arguing is the solution is not more gender, but the other way around. Right. Yeah. you can't You can't fix a patriarchy with a matriarchy. Yeah, which is why I do feel it's talking to a certain strand of 80s, 90s feminist Arthuriana.
01:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think it is an entry in a long science fiction fantasy conversation that's been happening at this point. So it can't really be read. You know, if you read it on its own, I think it is very easy to read this as a very misogynist book or at least a very...
01:31:10
Speaker
a book that reflects a lot of internalized misogyny. Yeah, this is a book that has a lot of women you're meant to hate in it. Yes. and i And I think it's more complicated than that. But that that is in there. I mean, I think as much as this is an entry into conversation, it is also a very personal book about what it means to hate your mother-in-law, what it means to hate the role of women that you're expected to play.
01:31:32
Speaker
One the things that i've I've ended up saying to you as I was reading is that this is giving me real Joanna Russ vibes and it's that moment, ah ah go which Russ book is it? worship that They got to my mother and they made her a woman but they won't get me. and That I think is is quite a lot of what's going on with Mig and Betty in the first half. Mig is watching Betty be saintly and self-sacrificing And I think, you know, bloody hell. Right. Is that who I have to be?
01:31:59
Speaker
no no You could also be Aunt Mariah. Are those the options? Right. that what you're stuck with? Right. And then she goes home and she takes everything that she's written and she edits
Reflection on Endings and Expression
01:32:13
Speaker
it. Yes.
01:32:13
Speaker
Yes. And it's not, sorry, one more thing. It's not the story that she wanted to write. I think that's really important that even at the very end, you know, i mentioned this before, but she sees her mother, so that they're having sort of an orphan auction.
01:32:27
Speaker
Quick side note, problems with the orphan auction. But there's a, you know, I think Diana and Jo's really wanted to make this book diverse. So there are black orphans as well as white orphans, but it's very clear that in Cranberry, that's not important. And they,
01:32:43
Speaker
send all the orphans that have parents home to their parents and then they auction off the rest of the orphans, which of course includes all the black orphans. and Diana, think. No, as usual, Diana did not think very hard about the race.
01:32:57
Speaker
Right. And Larry and Elaine take one of those orphans, which I don't think they should have one of those orphans. Poor kid. I think of all the people to be transracially adopted by, Larry and Elaine have to be like the bottom of the bottom of the worst list in the world. Elaine, who is?
01:33:14
Speaker
hates women and and who hates children and who hates children who specifically to you know mig's last thought on elaine is i guess she's not so bad if you're a boy this orphan they adopt it's not um anyway in the middle of the orphan auction betty sees greg alive it's the first time that she's learned that greg is alive really and she goes over and she meg is like maybe and then she comes back she's like great he's agreed to decide the divorce papers thank god what and you're like good for you Betty get your new and a better matt better man but you can see why Mig still wanted the happy ending which would be the pat ending the easy ending where mum and dad get back together and everything is fine but part of having a
01:33:57
Speaker
a model of relationships between men and women in which everyone is treated as people is that you got to have people who don't get on people who were never meant to be together relationships that don't work out Betty is a person she's not just your mum who ought to get back together with your dad she's a real human being with her own needs and desires like a guy who's less shit than that right the happy ending that you think is the happy ending that you want to write and this I think is one of the ways in which you know Diana Wynne-Jones protagonist always reflects the villain early in the book. We see Mig watching the way Aunt Mariah sort of passive aggressively gets her own way and tries it out on Chris and it works. um And then they laugh about it. It's a joke.
01:34:41
Speaker
But one of the ways in which I think we see that Mig does reflect Aunt Mariah could step into that power is this way that she wants, she always wants to write a happy ending according to her idea of what a happy ending ought to be.
01:34:53
Speaker
And in this book, thankfully, she never comes into that power and she doesn't get it. Sometimes you shouldn't have the power of writing to change the world around you. Right. Because the world has other people in it and they have their own ideas.
01:35:07
Speaker
Yeah. And I do think you're right that this book is wrestling with that as much as with anything else. What does it mean to write about the people in your life? yes What do you do when you do it?
01:35:20
Speaker
And what does it achieve? Oh, I wanted to say one last thing, which is about the editing. Mig's choice to go back to her story and edit it is, I think, a choice about private versus published art. What you write for yourself what versus what you write to be read.
01:35:38
Speaker
And I think one of the things the book is saying is that actually the the published art is necessary. If you are keeping your secret savage feelings to yourself forever, you are complying with Aunt Mariah and her view of the world.
01:35:52
Speaker
It is sometimes necessary to publish the unspeakable that you were never supposed to think. And in so doing, there's a very striking scene where Mig... grieves regrets that she feels that she's not a genius.
01:36:07
Speaker
She's not a special. And it's because she's talking to Anthony Green and they're discussing the contents of the green box, the little box. But Anthony Green points out to her that being that her perspective still matters that the fact that she was deceived by aunt mariah doesn't mean that she's an idiot forever it means that she's someone who perhaps won't be fooled again and who can talk to others about what it is like to be deceived and how to become undeceived And that is also, I think, from Mig's point of view, what the book is in the end.
01:36:40
Speaker
Mig's story is the story of how you get out from under the thumb of an Aunt Mariah, from under this system of of of the gender police. And it's also, I think, really important that it is edited. It's not in Médie S. Rés, as she presents it originally. It's not all true. Like, as with Spellcoats, the ending beat is an acknowledgement that what we have is a text that is a text that is filtered through personalities, through editing, through transitions.
01:37:08
Speaker
It's not meant to be read as word for word. a hundred It's not trustworthy, but it is true. Yes. And that distinction between trustworthy and true is the human in fiction writing. Yeah.
01:37:23
Speaker
Alright, shall we call it there? Let's call it there. Next week we're going to be talking, or two weeks from now, we'll be talking about gender some more with a sudden wild magic, which I'm very excited about. I can't wait for you to read a sudden wild magic. about it So that's going to be a good time.
01:37:41
Speaker
Alright, see you then. See you then.
01:37:53
Speaker
you