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Power of Three
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"'But why should a few people suffer a lot,' he said, 'so that a lot of people shouldn't suffer at all?'"
Thwarted tragedy, the useful myth of Christianity, and sad teen trios that transcend racism.
Transcript available here, and next week we'll be doing Charmed Life!
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Transcript
Introduction to Diana Wynne Jones's 'Power of Three'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones. Today we're going to be talking about Power of Three. Oh, and I'm Rebecca Frema. And I'm Emily Tesh. Welcome back, everyone. I'm quite excited to talk about Power of Three. I have with me today my own copy, which is not my copy. I stole it from the school library in about 2005, and it's still got all the school library stamps, so I apologize.
00:00:26
Speaker
to the librarian who just never got this book back and never will, I'm keeping it. But hopefully that librarian will listen to this and enjoy it and get a a new, ah can understand that the loss of the book from the library contributed overall to something more important. Yeah, this is my first ever book crime, but probably not the last.
Rebecca's Personal Connection to 'Power of Three'
00:00:48
Speaker
um Sometimes you just need to own a book and it doesn't occur to you to go and buy your own copy.
00:00:55
Speaker
Whereas I actually didn't have this one in any of the libraries that I had access to growing up. It's one of the very few Diana Wynne Jones books that was written while I was a child that I didn't actually read while I was a child. ah Which means that I don't have as much of a, when I came back to this one to read it for the podcast, it was very much almost like reading it for the first time because I'd only read it once before as opposed to almost all her others which I had read like so many times before that returning to them was just like oh yeah I know exactly what's happening here. This one surprised me at almost every turn and it is a surprising book in a lot of ways. It is. it To me it feels like two books stuck together, two maybe three books stuck together. um It's
00:01:38
Speaker
I think this one is what I might call a problem book as Diana Wynne Jones's go. Not in the way that Wilkins tooth is a problem book, the Wilkins tooth only the real problem is it's not that good. This is a book that for me bites off more than it can chew, doesn't quite come together. But there are some bits that are really, really good and really satisfying. Yeah.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really interesting structure. I think I want to go through the plot, maybe in a little more detail than we normally do.
Fantasy Elements and World-Building
00:02:06
Speaker
Maybe this is just because, again, as I said, the plot surprised me, but also because of the various sort twists and turns that it takes and the way that the narrative kind of changes and reshapes itself as it goes. Because when this book starts out, it reads much more like a typical fantasy novel than many of Diana wind Jones's other works.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, for the first 90 pages, this is a full secondary world fantasy, vaguely Celtic inspired. Vaguely Tolkien inspired. I read the first chapter of this book and I was like, oh, we're, we're doing Gollum and we're doing the Warring of Power and then we're flipping it around a little bit.
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, and we're doing cast family jewelry, which is very second. Yes. So the book begins with and we're told that this is backstory to the main story. This is a story log, fantasy book, it's got a prologue about a thing that happened in the past that's going to cast a dark shadow over everything to come um in which a child who will eventually grow up to be the mother of our protagonists accompanies her awful brother out on a walk one day. And they come across one of their ancestral enemies, the Doreg, who as we're first introduced to them are sort of weird gray slimy creatures who live in water. Sounds familiar? This weird gray slimy creature that lives in water has a beautiful torque, a collar. i was and think She uses the word color and not torque throughout the book. Yeah, the only people who ever call it a torque are the humans. um And they don't turn up till much, much later. Right.
00:03:35
Speaker
Everyone has torques and the both of the kids and the creature that they meet they all have torques but the creatures is much much nicer and they're as they immediately assume the creature must have soul in it and The creature says no I got it from my father the same as you got yours Which I think is important because this book is significantly about fathers and how the thing you get the things you get from your father's Resonate on down and cause problems um Anyway, the awful brother goaded into aggression and feeling a bit like an idiot, ah says that he wants the torque and the creature says, take you'll take it over my dead body, and then to the horror of the watching little sister, the brother does. ah But not before the Doric has laid an incredibly intense and powerful curse on the collar, a curse that it's going to cause, oh hang on, I actually have the quote, I think, for the words of the court curse,
00:04:32
Speaker
The colour that the words woven in it should figure work against the owner, that power should bring pain, riches, lofts, truth, disaster, and ill-luck of all kinds follow and cloud the mind of the possessor. Then it ran its pale fingers along the intricate twists and pattern of the design, bringing each part it touched to bear on the curse, fish for loss by water, animals for loss by land, flowers for death of hope,
00:04:56
Speaker
knots for death of friendship, fruit for failure and barrenness, and each as they were joined in the workmanship to be joined in the life of the owner. At last, touching the owl's head at either end, it laid on them to be guardians and caused the caller's owner to cling to it and keep it as if it were the most precious thing he knew." And again, I think that we're precious specifically puts us in conversation with Tolkien, I think.
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think this one is both talking to Tolkien and talking to, of course, Tolkien didn't come up with cursed jewelry, right or like curses rebounding on the owners by himself. Like he's drawing on a wide range of medieval so sources. And Diana Wynne Jones is also an Oxford educated medievalist. And in this book, and in Denmark, you occasionally get the impression that she would like you to know it.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yes, she definitely would. ah She's, and as she always does with stories, she's playing with them and eventually she's going to bring them down and up into present day, the present day of our story time. That's a thing that she will always do sort of more or less by the end or the middle of the book. Yeah, we start really firmly in the realm of the epic and the realm of the saga ah and the sort of pre preset tragedy that's going to echo on down the line.
00:06:16
Speaker
ah Right. And there's specifically the power of three in the title. Orban, the awful brother says, well, it's only going to be a weak curse. I'm not scared. um And then he attacks. And this Doric, who he is facing said, well, I will call upon the great powers, the old power, the middle power and the new power to enforce this curse. And that gives it its real strength. And then Orban kills him anyway, and it becomes a dying curse. It becomes a dying curse.
00:06:47
Speaker
And afterwards, his horrified sister, who's now her illusions about her brother are shattered, she's come to see him, and indeed, ah her whole family, as potential murderers rather than heroes. And she's haunted by this, and she goes back and she she swears to her brother never to tell what happened, but she tells her grief to the stones. And while she's telling her grief to the stones,
00:07:09
Speaker
The Dorian's brother pops up and says, ah, I've heard you and now I know what happened. um And then in response to this, both of them go on to swear their own oaths. ah Adara, who is the sister, swears to lift the curse. And the brother says, thanks, you can swear to lift the curse if you want. I swear to revenge my brother by helping the curse in every way I can. I shall spill every drop of Orban's brother's blood ah except yours, and dedicate it to the powers. I call on them not to be placated until none of Orban's people are left alive on the moor. May the hidden stones bear witness and the sun, moon, and earth.
00:07:48
Speaker
Right. So if we're talking Tolkien inspiration, or medieval inspiration, we've now got not just cursed jewelry, but also the family oath to pursue the curse to the ends of the world, um which is straight out of the Silmarillion, except the Silmarillion wasn't published yet.
Cursed Objects and Medieval Influences
00:08:06
Speaker
So actually, I think it's picked from the same sources. Yes. And we're also in the realm of sort of, in addition to all this, I think we're also talking to sort of the classic Welsh fantasy of the 60s and 70s.
00:08:18
Speaker
It's significant that the the collar, the torque, has on the ends of it owls, um and that we're talking about like hereditary curses laid on a valley. I think that harkens a little bit back to Garner's Owl Service, which was published a couple of years before this, um and you know repeated patterns in what you do about them is also a theme that's sort of in the air in children's fantasy at this time.
00:08:41
Speaker
yeah But what I think is really interesting about these curses and these oaths is that we're given all of them in the first chapter. It makes it seem like a bunch of really, really awful things are about to happen and resonate down. Right. There's like this huge tragedy being set up. It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. None of these curses are ever fulfilled. I was actually just looking at the wording just now as you were reading it out. And I was like, well, technically.
00:09:08
Speaker
please by the end of this book, none of Orban's people will be left alive on the moor. Except that is completely true. Right. There are various horrible things that happen to the owner of the curse. It just ends up mostly not being Orban. And it happens to a very minor character off screen for most of the book. Right. And it also ends up mostly not being relevant. Like you're given the I spent this whole book, you know, for the first half of it being like, ah, when are they going to have to try and get the collar away from somebody who won't want to give it up? This is going to be major. No, we'll see the collar just get up passed around by people who are like, oh, that's, that's a bad thing. And I don't want my spouse or my father or whatever to have it. So I'm going to move it off somewhere else off page. It turns up in all kinds of places with just sort of the interstitials lightly filled in.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's interesting because actually it is Joan sort of applying her very logical mind to the the the spell casting the magic wording. It says it only says the owner is going to try and cling to it like it is precious. But the owner's wife could be like, that thing is it. I'm getting rid of it. Right. Exactly. Like some kid who walks into the owner's house and finds it in a drawer can be like, well, that looks bad. Right. Let's let's let's pass this. Let's give it back where it came from. till you share this idea that that there are Actually, other people in the story. There are always other people around like the central figures of the story. So this seems like it being set up to be the great tragedy of Auburn and Adara. But in fact, both of them are minor characters in someone else's story. Right.
00:10:43
Speaker
ah And there are lots of other people in this story and when we get that so in fact the book is actually set up the first line in the book is this is the story of the children of Adara of Amy and Carrie who both had gifts and of Gare who thought he was ordinary.
00:10:58
Speaker
Now, I also don't think that's true. I don't think it is the story of the Children of Adara. I think it's the story of Ger, and Ger has some siblings, and they're relevant in the story. But really, it's the story of another set of three. It's Ger and the other kids from other cultures that he meets on the moor. But we just spend several chapters like it's going to be the story of Ger and of the Children of Adara. We're introduced to these three kids. ah The oldest sister, Anna, who has the power of foresight one when she's asked questions, um she has she will answer them correctly. As long as she's asked the right questions, this gives her, you know, you can find out the future from her. Right, there's a whole lot in this book about finding out the future, about destiny. So the curse is the destiny of Orban's family, or whoever holds the cursed collar. um And then there's Anna's gift of the sight asked, where if you ask her what's going to happen, that is what's going to happen.
00:11:55
Speaker
And eventually it will transpire that Gare, who thought he was ordinary, also has a gift of prophecy. It's the gift of sight unasked, where he knows what's going to happen without knowing how he
Prophecy and Tension
00:12:05
Speaker
knows. Which mostly just manifests itself as bad feelings, bad vibes.
00:12:10
Speaker
tremendously bad vibes. What all these things do, of course, is they set up a tension that runs through the book of what's going to happen? ah How is this curse going to play out? ah Have we asked any of the right questions? What does get gets bad feeling? Right. And then there's another plot point that sent to play early on with the youngest sibling, Carrie, who has two gifts. One, he has a fairly ordinary gift, which is he can find lost objects. If you ask him where anything is, he knows where it is.
00:12:38
Speaker
um And the second is that he has the much more vague and ambiguous power of thought. He can change the properties of things with his mind. And quite early on we're told that he's not really old enough or responsible enough to have this particular power, and he's very afraid of what's going to happen with it and what he might do with it.
00:12:57
Speaker
again none of that it really happens he's pretty much fine with the power yeah this is okay so we were talking about let's explain the plot of this book and we kind of immediately started diving into like the first 90 pages of this book is a different book yes and a really interesting one and a really awful one i think it's a full tragic adult fantasy in which a lot of bad things happen right but at about this 90 page mark ah we get a flip of point of view, a flip of the whole concept of the book, which makes you go, oh, nothing here is what I thought it was.
Revelation of Elves and Story Shifts
00:13:32
Speaker
And this makes brings me to something I think Diana Wenn-Jones is brilliant at, something that is like, if you like, one of her real strengths as a writer is her control of points of view. She is very much a character first writer, and that's become increasingly clear, just like as we go through the 70s, and she digs more and more into point of view characters.
00:13:52
Speaker
She's interested in what any given person knows and how that controls their understanding of the world. And of course, when you're reading a book, you, the reader, only know what the book tells you. right ah And the point of view character in a Diana Min Jones book will only tell you what they know. And in Power of Three, we do skip out sometimes into other points of view, but we are mostly in Gare's head and we know what Gare knows. And Gare does not know a lot of things. Yes, and one of the things that Gare does not know
00:14:25
Speaker
is that the third species that lives on the moor, so we've got people, they're only ever called people when we're in Gehr's point of view, which is we are for much of the book. And we've got Doregg, who, as far as we know, are weird and silvery and maybe cold blooded and live in water. And then we've got giants who are very large and thunder around dangerous and thunder around somewhere just out of frame. Right. And Gehr understands that the other two species have weird magical powers.
00:14:52
Speaker
So the Dori can shapeshift ah and the giants have powerful magical artefacts that work by themselves. yes And sometimes the giants go to war with each other and you can hear the strange rumblings and groanings of the earth as they as they wreck terrible destruction. And you're like, yeah, that sounds like giants. Eventually.
00:15:13
Speaker
ah at this sort of 90 page mark, maybe a third of the way into the book, Gare decides um after a fight with his father, who he has a complicated relationship with, to go and find a giant. And he does. And he goes and finds a giant. He finds a giant, the giant he finds two giants, the giant's names are Gerald and Bredla and they're having a fight over a boombox. Right, so Gare is like standing behind a tree watching and he's like, this giantess has a magic box that's But it doesn't sing very well. Or rather, it doesn't seem to understand what's going on because it's singing about love, but they're having a great big fun. And immediately it recontextualizes the whole book and you understand that our POV characters are have been living alongside human beings and are hidden from human beings and are perhaps
00:16:04
Speaker
what we might call elves. or and when When Gerald act and Brenda actually meet them first properly, they're like, oh, you're fairies. And our kids are very offended. They're like, we're absolutely not fairies. Fairies are stupid little things with wings. We are people. I don't know what you are. You're giants. They also say like, fairies aren't true. Right.
00:16:20
Speaker
and And then Gerald and Brenda are saying, well, the giants aren't true. We're people, you're fairies. And there's an ongoing argument about who gets to be people or who thinks they're people and what you other people are if you're not people. Right. And there's also something really interesting about perspective specifically as it allows the kids to relate to each other. So when we first are introduced to the concept of giants, it's Gare seeing a giant's foot and it seems to him huge, unfathomably enormous.
00:16:48
Speaker
And when he actually sees Gerald and Brenda interacting with each other the same way that he and his siblings might interact. Gerald and Brenda are not siblings, they're neighbor kids who hate each other, but they have a very sibling-ish vibe. um Except when they start getting into fights about, you know, who's been in the Valley longer and who's lording it over whom.
00:17:05
Speaker
But ah when he starts actually looking at them as people, he realizes that they are approximately his own height. They're not actually that much taller. They're larger and stockier, and they sort of move on the earth differently. They shake the ground. The the environment reacts to them in ways that it doesn't react to people, ah the children of the sun. um But they are like in terms of actual like physical height, they're not that distinct.
00:17:34
Speaker
And similarly, later in the book, Gerald and Brenda go looking for Gare's home. you they They're trying to pass a message to Adara, to their mother. um And at first when they see it, it looks to them like a rabbit warren. It's small. It's not a place that people could live. And then when they say the right words and look at it properly, they're like, oh, this is a huge house. There's a door. I can walk through it. It's like, it's never sort of explained why this happens, why there are these ships shifts of perspective literally in the book in terms of what size they are and how they relate to each other. But it does seem to be that when they start interacting with and thinking of each other as people, they literally become, they're able to see each other at their right height and not at these huge distinct
00:18:16
Speaker
very distanced. It's almost as if ah there's a distortion in each like people's minds about what the others are like, which is preventing them actually seeing what they are. And it's revealed sort of quite late in the story, the Dory, two Dory teenagers come out of the water to negotiate with ah gere and the others, and with Gerald and Brenda, and they take off their wetsuits. And they take off their wetsuits and they're just people. And you're like, oh, so the whole horrible gray slimy, yeah, if you live underwater, you need a wetsuit. And it's also like, it's significant for them for the DORIG.
00:18:54
Speaker
that unhooding and showing your actual face, your more or less human face to a stranger, is significant. It shows a sign of trust. It shows that you can interact with that person. like they Again, we're not explained to this. We just get this because Gare doesn't know it. ah We just get this through bits and pieces of overhearing the door and talking about who's unhooding to whom and saying, well, I didn't unhood to them.
00:19:17
Speaker
ah So it's either you know, I didn't unhood to this person and therefore we don't have a relationship We don't know each other anything or I did unhood to this person and therefore I do owe them something I owe them good treatment. I owe them the ability to negotiate Yeah, that's not the only sort of ritual or friendship exists in the book, because the other one is about exchange of colors, we're back to the colors again. um So there's a whole sequence of exchanges, not just at the cast color, but of the children's own personal colors, they swap around with each other, they give to each other, or in the previous generation, guest father has actually done a fairly complex color swapping situation, which puts it in
00:19:53
Speaker
guest friendship, collar friendship relationships with people of both both the Giants and the Dory. And we also have, I think, there's a whole sequence where Gar and Kerry and Aina go to visit the Giants' house, and they are taken inside and given tea and biscuits and bacon. yes And there's quite a funny place of them being amazed and astonished by the marvellous magical miracle the Giants have in their kitchens, such as the box that makes warm but no fire.
00:20:23
Speaker
But there's also like our hospitality ritual happening
Character Connections and Themes
00:20:27
Speaker
here, right? The Giants don't explicitly acknowledge it as such, but the children seem to understand it that way that look, we've eaten together, we've spoken together.
00:20:36
Speaker
ah we have a bond now, and then Gare responds by giving Gerald his colour. Right. And I would argue that I think the thing that really kicks off the book, and the actual power of three in the title, I mean, the power of three can refer to many people over and over and over again, that is ah the usefulness of this rather vague title. But the first thing that ah really it really changes the direction of this book is when Gare looks at Gerald,
00:21:03
Speaker
and has a flash of recognition. There's something about Gerald that Gare connects with. When they, you know, at first, when they come out, they see Gare and Gerald get in a raging fight, and Aina, or sorry, Gerald and Brenda get in a raging fight, a raging fight, and Aina immediately is on the side of Brenda. She's like, oh, Gerald, this other giant is clearly horrible. He's just like our bully cousin.
00:21:27
Speaker
And meanwhile, Kerry, the youngest son, says, no, actually, I think he's a bit like Gare. And Gare's at first really troubled by this. He's like, why is this angry giant like me? And then he looks longer at this giant. um And he's like, oh, he is like me. So the first thing he says is he saw a fierce, moody nature, unhappy deep down and unhappy too on the surface. And then he goes back alone to creepily watch Gerald again.
00:21:54
Speaker
There is a whole lot actually of boys creepily watching each other and thinking about how similar they are and how much they would understand each other if they talked to each other. Right. ah Gerald strode about crushing gap grass and shaking the earth. His dark face set in a lonely private look which Gare found very familiar. It was not the bully's look. Gare knew it was his own. The giant did not look happy.
00:22:17
Speaker
Gare wondered why he wondered too if he looked that unhappy himself and obviously he does because his siblings look directly at Gare and at Gerald are like oh you guys are basically the same. Right and then there's actually a third part of this like creepy staring trio which is the whole time Gare is hanging out in the woods staring at Gerald he also going like what is that bird doing there? And the bird is a shape-shifting Dory um Haffney who is the son of the brother who swore this great oath to destroy all all those people And he is watching Gare while Gare watches Gerald. They have this sort of three-way connection of we are in some way similar. Gerald's the only one who doesn't know that anything's going on. Right. But Gerald also, I think, you know, we're in Gerald's head much less than we're in Gare's.
00:23:04
Speaker
But the moments that were in Gerald's head are always when it's after the color exchange. Gar gives Gerald his color. And first it's just as a a sign. He says, I'm going to give you my color so you can go talk to my mother and she'll know that you're not attacking, that I've given this to you in friendship. And then he says, actually, you know, I want to do this meaningful color exchange. I'm giving it to you properly. I'm saying the words of friendship. And whenever we're in Gerald's head, it's because he's thinking about how much this color exchange means to him, how he's never been so touched and honored by a gift.
00:23:32
Speaker
in his whole life that it means something, this this point of connection, that he's not had. And later on towards the end, when Gar and Gerald go on a small quest with the Doreg, who's the one who's been watching them, Gar almost drowns, and Gar thought that it was just his luck that the only two people who had ever as far as he knew spontaneously liked him should be a giant and a Doreg. They've got a sad teen boy collection that transcends racism.
00:24:09
Speaker
And that actually that brings me to I think one of the points of Baythea of this book. This book is encouraging you I think to read it metaphorically, allegorically. This is a book about three different peoples who see each other as totally alien until their children are able to find these points of connection and say actually we're not so different are we we're all just people really why don't we all get along uh-huh literally she says have you noticed that we're all people really says gare and everyone's like oh wow that's true that's um i mean of course they are different species they seem to be different species um but
00:24:48
Speaker
similar connected species but right it's it's a very obvious very naked metaphor for race relations for ah may ah specifically I think for a post-colonial race relations yeah arguments about it is who has the right to live here on the moor. And guess, it's me, it's us, this is my moor, this is where I live. um And then you have a later argument with the Dory who say, sorry, I, I've been pronouncing it Dory because I think that's probably. I think you're probably right, you, you are the person. But I'm not too wrong, it's just that the but character Brenda, whenever she says it, gets it
00:25:28
Speaker
slightly wrong and is spelled wrong, I think it's a hint. Yes, that's, you're probably right. I trust your pronunciations of all of these names much more than I trust me. I have a complete nerd. Anyway, they talk to the story about it and they say, we were here first, you chased us out, we used to live on land until you chased us into the water. And then the guy says no, we were here first, and the Giants made us go and live in the hills. And then at this point, the Giants turn on each other. And Brenda says,
00:25:57
Speaker
We were here first, Gerald Masterfield, that's the surname, because he's a fucking Norman landowner, or descendant of one. His family has been in the region for 900 years, owning the land. He's like, this is my wood. And he does clearly have a sense of strong personal possession and connection to this wood in the same way that earlier in the story, Gare has a particular windowsill where he goes to sit and think and it's his windowsill. Gerald feels that way about the wood.
00:26:27
Speaker
Right, Gerald's much bigger. Gary understands this perfectly. He's like, Gerald's much bigger, so if he needs a whole lot. If I was the size of a giant, I probably would need a whole lot too. And this is, you know, these kids who are tempted to negotiate like a fair settlement between them all, but this is the point where Gerald completely loses time. We're like, if 900 years isn't enough, what is? Right. And I think that, like, you know, I do think that it's it's As metaphor, it's bad and doesn't really work. So one of the things that I think that ah she is quite smart to do, at least, is that it's it's always set in context of these same fights about who's here first, ah who has the right to live here, whose space are we on, whose place is this, are always echoed among the different sort of groups as well as in between them. So I think actually the first moment that we really get this is when some one of the sort of inciting incidents of this book
00:27:19
Speaker
is when the Gare's awful uncle and his awful cousin, the evil uncle, the murdering uncle, ah and his entire family, they have ah ah they get kicked, basically they have a battle with the Doric. They're kicked out of their mound, their hill where they live, and they come and knock on their family's door, on Gare's door, and says, ah you know, we need a place to live. Can you let us in?
00:27:46
Speaker
And of course the Gare's father, the hero, and his mother, um you know the the notorious wise woman say, of course you can come and stay here, what else can we say? And then immediately there starts to be tension because it's the house is too small, the the the hall is too small, and there's not enough space for these two groups. And everyone immediately starts feeling crowded and like the other people are doing things exactly in a way such as that's designed to inconvenience the others. You know, you're building your house and setting up your looms exactly where they're going to get the light in the way of my light and so on. And it's, you know, this, you know, it's a refugee situation, but it's also setting up attention about who has the right to live in this space and who has the right to the resources of this space internally, before we even get to, oh, now we're having arguments with the Giants and the Doric.
00:28:36
Speaker
about the rights and resources. And it turns out that there's a similar sort of refugee situation among the Duri in that there is another set of halls elsewhere that have been flooded out and there are thousands of Duri living in this very overcrowded underwater hall, ah desperate for more space. We have Brenda and Gerald's argument, but actually the giant argument about who has the right to use this space ah takes it right out of this context of the more and into like contemporary Britain. And we discover that the war is actually under threat from an external force, ah which is the Civil Service Water Division. Because the plan is to flood it and turn it into a reservoir ah to secure drinking water for the city of London. And if the war is flooded,
00:29:26
Speaker
everyone is screwed at this point. Even the Dori will not be able to stay because there is magic in Geir's family mound on their wells which makes the water unsafe for Dori and if those wells overflow and mix with all the water in the reservoir, Dori can't stay. Which is part of why they declare war against Geir's people.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yes. If the hills are underwater, then the people in the hills can't stay. I guess people can't stay. And of course, if the hole, more is flooded than the humans living there can't stay. right and There's a whole conversation that they have with this because one of the things that one of the ways they try and resolve this at the midpoint of the book is Gerald's father has invited an old friend turned enemy of his, who is now the person who has made the decision to flood the moor, to come have dinner and stay with them and see if they can rekindle their friendship and talk him out of flooding the moor, ah which at first it seems impossible because it turns out that the way they fell out years ago was about the cursed collar.
00:30:26
Speaker
Yes. Um, so it the backstory is revealed that these two men the night before Gerald's father married Gerald's mother found themselves mixed up ah in a hero story with a weird little guy who they call titch and who get instantly recognises as his own father. Yeah, it's so again, this is probably I think the closest that she gets in this book to her norm, like to the way that she often does this move of story time to putting to present daytime to, you know, how the heroes move among us.
Heroism and Cultural Allegory
00:30:59
Speaker
So we've got, ah we've got to talk about the father issues in this book. good toac ah Because it underlies the whole thing. But early on, we are told that Gare's father guest is a great hero. He won his mother Adara.
00:31:12
Speaker
ah By performing three heroic tasks for her, he answered a bunch of riddles, which is weird because we know Guest is doesn't know anything about riddles, he's bad at them. um He got a beautiful collar from Adorig, and he moved an enormous stone that's too big for anybody to move. and The way he did these these tasks is a great mystery, but he came everyone now acknowledges him as a hero.
00:31:36
Speaker
And then we hear it from the other side, uh, from the bachelor night adventure of, you know, it was the night before Gerald's father's wedding and they stole a tractor and went on kind of a drunken rampage around the moor because a weird little guy was like, Hey, wouldn't it be fun to move that stone?
00:31:52
Speaker
Right, ah so there is, like, Geth's hero tale. Geth, throughout the story, feels like a letdown to his father, because he feels like he's ordinary next to his father, the hero. And then he finds out that what his father actually did was he got his future wife to tell him the answer to the riddles, to get the collar of a Dari, which had seemed like this huge, like, difficult and impossible task. All he did was go and, like, make friends with one. Yep. and They swapped.
00:32:20
Speaker
um Did you ever really get why the Dora did this, agreed to do this? It seems that he just sort of thought it was funny, even though he's sworn, this is the same one who's sworn to, you know, rid the moor of these terrible Lymen. I think it's implied that it's because Guest wants to marry Adara, and Adara is like the one good one.
00:32:40
Speaker
right He's like, well, I guess you have good taste and you seem not terrible, so sure. But specifically, we're told that even though Gare says the words over his collar and sort of swears guest friendship to him, the Doric doesn't do so in response. He didn't say words over my collar and I didn't unhood to him, but I did give him the collar. Yeah, exactly.
00:32:58
Speaker
um and then like guests to finish. It's really confusing that all the names begin with G. I know. Guests to finish is like Hero Convention does in fact just go on this Bachelor Night rampage with the tractor. Right. And the hero story is reframed as like a comedy anecdote from our youth.
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah. It's actually, there's kind of a fun line here where, you know, they, at first, they're, Jerry and George are are fully ready to go on the bachelor name rampage, and then they get a little more sober. and They're like, we're gonna get in so much trouble if we do this. And Titch says, but ah he looks in this, you know, Titch has said, oh, I'll give you something, a nice gold collar if you'll do this for me. And he actually, he puts his hands to his neck, and then realizes he's already given his collar to someone else. He's like, I'll go and get you one.
00:33:46
Speaker
right um and jerry and george are like well let's see this color then if we're gonna do this thing i bet you're just having a song uh and it says titch seemed both dismayed and exasperated but he seemed fatally amused too as if jerry and george were behaving according to some absurd pattern which is I think even though every time Gare is accused of being a fairy or an elf he's like no absolutely not that's absurd. I think is one of the clearest clues that we have that Gare's people are in fact what we would think of as elves in sort of British mythology.
00:34:19
Speaker
Right. um And what ends up happening is guest goes back to Adara to get the collar he just got from the Dory. ah But in the dark, a different woman, Castor, who we haven't mentioned until till now, but she is the wife of the awful brother Orban. She- She's the awful aunt, you're there's gonna be, you know, one of Diana Winjose's classic awful aunts. Right? Yeah, you can't have Diana Winjose, but a horrible older woman. Well, she passes the cursed collar to guest instead to give the Giants.
00:34:48
Speaker
And actually, if I were her, I would have done the same because it's clear that at this point in her life, the cursed collar is like has caused quite a lot of of shame and horror for her. It's made given her an unhappy marriage and multiple miscarriages. like All this stuff is sort of mentioned in passing off screen. It's not important to the children. ah So the the workings of the curse don't have the full tragic horror that we might have expected from the prologue. Right. I want to get back to... I'm putting a pin in this because I do want to get back to how Castor figures out completely off screen that the colour is cursed. This is never a plot point, it's never relevant. There's a lot of stuff about women doing things in this book just off screen or figuring things out or having connections that's really irrelevant to Gare and he doesn't think about it at all, but it's all in the interstitials. Lae Ann Jones- Point of view control. That's Lae Ann Jones' thing. We are stuck with the point of view of these children and especially of Gare, and we know what they know and they are not thinking about the grown ups as people most of the time. right? In fact, it's that reframing of his father for get from guest the hero who I can't live up to, to guess the guy manipulating two drunk idiots on a night out. It's like, it's heartbreaking for him. It undoes makes him furious and angry and bitter. And it actually ah leads to him making some very bad choices to decide to go on this final quest, which he realizes later is actually the curse taking hold of him, right?
00:36:12
Speaker
And this is also the connection that he has, the instant connection, the instant recognition that he has to Gerald. We're not told really anything about Gerald's relationship to his father, but we accept through what Gare recognizes and a point you know towards the end of the book when they're in prison together and Gare is thinking miserably about how he's led Gerald to his death.
00:36:33
Speaker
And Gerald, meanwhile, carefully puts Gare's collar to his neck and says, I say, do you find you get on with your father? Like he has recognized this point as well as the thing that brings them together is then, and we know that the collar has ruined Gerald's life, again, from these things that we learned in passing. His mother is dead, his sister is dead, and he doesn't get on. His house is about to be flooded. Yes. His house is about to be flooded.
00:36:59
Speaker
And whatever his relationship with his father is has clearly been really strongly warped by the influence of the collar. And that brings Gare and Gerald and eventually Hackney all together as their fathers are sort of under the influence of powers that caught that make their sons misunderstand them, that make them misunderstand their sons.
00:37:20
Speaker
um I think Gare even says at one point, you know, he's thinking about this connection that he has to Gerald and he's like the only other, like there's, ah he's the only person I felt like I've connected this with this in this way because everybody else gets along with their fathers. There's another kid in the mound who I really like and could have been friends with, but I didn't understand how he seemed to get on so well with his father and so we could not connect. Right. um And part of like the the heroic resolution of the story is Gess declaring his pride in Gare.
00:37:51
Speaker
um and guest finally announcing to the world at large, although not to Gare personally, loves that he loves Gare and admires him and respects him, ah is sort of presented as part of a happy ending. Should we talk about the ending? I feel like every episode of this we get to a point where we're like, we got to do the ending. And we're Jones Climax, so it's weird. Right, we've got to do the ending. But I want to I want to roll back a little bit first.
00:38:15
Speaker
So the reason that I started talking about this scene with Gerald and George, the bachelor party night is all, is I wanted to jump back to a conversation that they have with, I forget which father, whether it's his father, that's Jerry, and the other one is George. No, the father is Jerry because the father is Gerald Seniors. Gerald Seniors, Gerald Seniors. He's supposed to confuse me as well. Like, why are all the giants just names? Right! Everybody! Everybody!
00:38:44
Speaker
um But they have an argument ah about why they're like, well, you can't flood them more. You're bound to move people away. And Mr. Sorry, it's George Clayberry. Right. The civil servant is called George Clayberry. And he's mostly known as Mr. Clayberry through the book.
00:39:00
Speaker
And Gare wants to, first he wants to explain about his people and how they're going to be flooded out, but in order to do that he'd have to explain about the evil color, and that would mean explaining also that his father had, perhaps knowingly, given an extremely evil thing to two harmless giants, and in the face of all those other giants and their huge thirst, he just could not bring himself to do it. So instead what he says is, but why should a few people suffer a lot, he said, so that a lot of people shouldn't suffer at all?
00:39:27
Speaker
Couldn't they all use less water, Anna suggested? Mr. Clayberry smiled and shook his head. Only as a last resort. This is a very old argument. The greatest happiness of the greatest number. If you think about it, you'll find it always works out that a few suffer for the good of the rest.
00:39:43
Speaker
In stories, Gare agreed hopelessly, brave men die defending the rest, but this isn't like that. So they're having this argument about who needs to sacrifice for whom, and whose good counts, and you know what what do we count as the good of the many?
00:39:58
Speaker
And of course, I mean, put this a little bit in context, there are several drowned villages under reservoirs around the UK, some of them very ancient. um There's a couple under the Lady Bower reservoir in Yorkshire. ah But I think the one that Jones must have had in mind, leading up to writing this book ah was it's the one that's let drown quite late in the 1960s. Capitol Kellen which was a Welsh village, a village in North Wales ah in a valley, quite a small village. I think there were 12 houses, not many people. One of the last fully Welsh speaking settlements ah in the country. And the story of the the near death and resurrection of the Welsh language with aggressive lack of help and in some type of aggressive hostility from the English government um is a story that
00:40:52
Speaker
I think matters hugely.
Welsh Influences and Historical Context
00:40:54
Speaker
Yeah. That's one of the other reasons that I want to put this, that I think it's worth putting this into context with the Welsh fantasy of the 60s and 70s, because I do think that there's something here. Diana Wynne Jones, I think, as we said on earlier episodes, comes from a Welsh family. Her grandfather is a Welsh preacher who preaches in Welsh very sort of, you know, she writes about how sitting in church and listening to him preach sort of rollingly and intimidatingly.
00:41:20
Speaker
Right. um And she has this sort of memory of as a child, like visiting her Welsh family in the in the in a village and not being able to play with the other children because she didn't speak their language. So yeah, English girl in the Welsh village, and we talked about that a bit in the context of Denmark and divide that entity. Yeah, and I do think that there's an element of wish fulfillment here almost in the fact that all of these three people speak the same language. So when they're trying to talk things out is the power of words and the power of speech that I think we're going to have to come back to and talk a little bit about that. That's really significant to the magic of this book. But it's all mutually intelligible. There's no language barrier once they actually start talking to each other. Yes. But to bring it back to the the the fate of Capo Kellin, so this Welsh village, they found out in the 1950s that this valley had been selected for flooding. It was agreed by an Act of Parliament, which meant that there was no opportunity to protest.
00:42:14
Speaker
um there It took 10 years during which the inhabitants of the village sort of begged anywhere and everywhere they could. The purpose of the reservoir was to provide drinking water for the city of Liverpool. It failed, short answer. Cabo Kellum was drowned in I think 1966, 67, and remains underwater to this day, and the village was scattered, the community was broken. um So this is a story of injustice, right? Yes, absolutely.
00:42:45
Speaker
at the Times book was written in the 70s, a very contemporary injustice. A native people, an earlier people, are people speaking their own language with their own culture, ah being flooded out of their homes for the benefit of the greater number. Yes, and she's removed it. Like this book does not, to be clear, this does not explicitly, it's not said in Wales, the book for British fantasists by Charles Butler identifies The more that this is based on is Opmore. Yeah, that's gotta be right, because Opmore is in Oxfordshire, and dan which has a very close connection to Oxfordshire and talks very movingly about land the landscape of Oxford oxford and the surrounding environments in her essays. ah Opmore is also a wetland.
00:43:27
Speaker
which is important for this, like, three people, some of them living underwater, and Ottmoor has been since the 1920s the home of a bombing range, firing range for the military, and there's this whole, like, throwaway sequence early on where they're like, the giants have gone to war, we could hear the thundering of their weapons, you go, what? Yeah, because my hair in the British house, ah, it's a bombing range, the giants are in fact practicing going to war.
00:43:51
Speaker
Uh-huh. And the there's the the syllable ott shows up multiple times. The G names, that the yeah horrible uncles family is, ah there's a lot of ott and O names sort of scattered. And they live in a place that they call Ott Mound. So Ott Mound, which they say is the oldest of the like the mounds on the moor. So Ott Mound, the capital of Ottmoor. So yeah, so i I think that identification is correct. And it's imagining what if this Oxfordshire Valley was given the the the treatment of But it's not just Kapila Khelan, because there are other drowned villages. I think it's all thought under Lady Bowery's reservoir, the clock tower was standing until the 1940s. And then they decided it was a hazard and ah blew it up. But until then, you can see the tower of the old church like poking up above the water. Yeah, very, very haunted.
00:44:42
Speaker
But yeah, so they have this argument about the greater good and whether they really need to flood people out of this reservoir. And ah George, I keep forgetting his last name, the civil server makes the argument about sacrifice and about the need for sacrifice and the sacrifice of the few to save the many. And then we get to the ending.
00:45:03
Speaker
Right, which is all about sacrifices.
Complexity of Heroism and Destiny
00:45:06
Speaker
So, after all this fuss, Gare decides the only thing to do is to somehow try and undo the curse on the collar.
00:45:14
Speaker
And his idea is that he and Gerald, as like representatives of the other two peoples, will go to the king of the Doric, who is, his name is Hathill, this is the younger brother who swore vengeance for for the murder at the very start of the book, he is now the king, he is the father of Hafni, who is this Doric prince who has also tried to join this like connection of the children or negotiating with each other, these groups of three.
00:45:38
Speaker
So Haffney will take them down to visit his father as messengers to bring back the cursed talk and see if they can all agree something. It's a terrible plan! Yes. The one Penadettes doing is handing uh himself and Gerald over into the hands of a hostile power who has sworn destruction on them all. Uh-huh. It doesn't work.
00:46:01
Speaker
a the the king of the Doria comedian is like great what would you do to take the curse off everything anything wonderful you're willing sacrifices and we're going to sacrifice you to the old powers and that will get rid of the curse and fix everything for everybody uh and then the three powers that like guarantee the curse and i think it is clear that there are three magical powers at work behind everything that's happening behind all these trios that is like a ah myth behind the myth So they have different names for in the different cultures, the old, the middle and the new power. And then they're the power of the moon, the power of the sun, the power of the earth. Right. And the do we are told the giant names for them. But I'm going to talk about that because I think yeah we can actually work out what the Giants would say.
00:46:45
Speaker
yeah But it the idea is that the powers need appeasing, and the only way to appease them is human sacrifice. And they already did it once. there's They're like, we've already appeased one of the powers, which was just by moving the big rock, which is on top of an old, the drunken bachelor party exchange.
00:47:05
Speaker
ah which is on top of a burial mound and they freed the trapped spirit, so we don't know anything about the trapped spirit, this is a throwaway multiple times, like, you know, it gets casually referenced to until we get the end, they're like, oh yeah, that appeased one of the powers because we freed a bunch of trapped ghosts. I honestly think even Jones feels as a bit of a cheat, because actually there's a secondary level of appeasement for the old power, where Haffney, realising that what he's done is take Gerald and Gare to their deaths at his father's hands, goes and hands himself over to Gare's people,
00:47:34
Speaker
expecting to be killed in return. So a kind of like, eye for an eye, a mutual vengeance, and that willing self sacrifice, that's an actual willing sacrifice, yes, happening, expecting to die, and doing it anyway, that pleases one of the three powers, the old power, the power of the moon, which is associated with the Dori, and it's suggested that like the Dori have a particular personal understanding of this power of how it works. And that half the has instinctively intuitively done exactly the right thing.
00:48:03
Speaker
But there were still two powers left in the curse. Right. And so the Doria are like, right, we're going to sacrifice Garen Gerald and that's going to do it. And then the whole I do want to come back and talk about some of the ways in which the the plot comes about because it involves a teen girl trio that we haven't talked about yet. yeah um But to get to sort of the the mythic ending.
00:48:23
Speaker
uh so jerry and george and guest and adara and all of the kids turn up to renegotiate and try and free gare and gerald and they make all of these arguments uh and the king of the dory says well i see the force of your argument and i'm really sorry because i didn't know this kid was guest kid and this is awfully rude of me oh And I have swore to preserve Adara's bloodline and whatever, but we've already dedicated them to undo this like as as sacrifices. We really can't undo that. There's nothing to be done about it. And then Mr. Claybury goes for a rules lawyer. Right. So think there's a whole
00:48:57
Speaker
It almost feels like the actual book is happening between these three men who have this shared backstory of the weird night before guests got married when he did all his hero tasks. So Haffel, the Dory King, Guest, and ah Jerry as of Masterfield Senior, the chief farmer on them all, the human king, the local squire.
00:49:20
Speaker
right they call him a chief among the humans which i think is they call both him and claybury chiefs among the humans which again i think is really a stretch but intentionally so right uh but it turns out that like all of this isn't just negotiating among these guys um and they're best friends so each of them has got a mate like a chief bard in the case of guest and hathil and his mate the civil servant in the case of mr masterfield And it's these guys who are doing the negotiating and the arguing, and what becomes increasingly clear to Gare as he watches this plot that he is not really part of, is that the others are angling to make Hathill volunteer to take the curse upon himself. yeah And of course, this is what curses do, right? This is
00:50:04
Speaker
absolutely true to the sources you swear an awful curse that will destroy everything and everyone then eventually it will rebound on the caster that the curse which Hathill's brother swore as he died will eventually come back to haunt Hathill and because Hathill is king it will destroy his whole people and this is the ultimate culmination of tragedy and you can see that tragedy coming and Gare is watching Hathill and he has this sympathy for him. And actually I found myself thinking of Dog's Body, where Sirius in the final hunt is chasing this prey which is the dark power under the earth, the power of the moon maybe. Yeah.
00:50:44
Speaker
this dark power of death and he is chasing this prey and he is desperate to catch it and destroy it and the same time desperately hoping it will get away and when he finally catches it he is both the happiest he has ever been and the most like heartbroken he's ever been. yeah And this idea of sympathy for the hunted comes back here in Gare and is revealed to be a heroic trait in him because he sees what's being done to Hathill and he stands up and said listen if somebody needs to die to appease the curse take me and that's another actually willing sacrifice and that appeases another power it appeases the new power the power of the sun no sorry
00:51:26
Speaker
ah know, the middle power, the power of the sun. um And again, it's suggested that because Ger is of his people, he has this kind of intuitive, instinctive understanding, this emotional connection to what really needs to be done. So just happening handed himself over to die. ah Then it's Ger who hands himself over to die. And what Adara says about this, when they're again, sort of negotiating what sacrifices are needed, ah the middle power lies behind the sun. And so it is the power I understand best,
00:51:54
Speaker
It is a fierce power of light and life and the present time, and that is the power which asks most for blood, as all living things need to feed, but it is not unappeasable. It is life, and I do not think it asks for death." Right, and it actually just scares volunteering of his life. It's enough. He doesn't actually have to die. Yes. Yes, I think Haffney did have to risk certain death and came very close to it at one point. Orban, Orban's son, I think, really stabs him. Yeah.
00:52:21
Speaker
um And says, I can't believe we haven't quoted this, by the way, the sort of the key line of Orban and his family is, the only good Dory is a dead Dory, which is echoing ah the famous line from, who was it? Who said it? It's an American one. You don't know American things, right? Oh, some American things. And Diana Wynne Jones did also know some American things because she evokes, I mean, the term that she uses is Red Indian, where this book is written in the 70s.
00:52:49
Speaker
Um, but she's talking, you know, what she has Gerald thinking about how people are going to come in and take over the, if they, if they reveal Gare and guests in the existence of these people to giants, humans at large, they're immediately going to come in and, you know, people are going to come in, take over them more and turn them into a spectacle. Um, and that's the, the example that he goes to is the treatment of native Americans in the United States. And meanwhile, the, the blind men, the Gares people,
00:53:19
Speaker
are using the only the only good Doric as a dead Doric, ah which is again a direct reference to the treatment of the Native Americans in the United States. So it's refracted on itself. It's clearly something that she is thinking about. Right. As I said, there's clearly like a strand of postcolonial race race relations in this book of the treatment of indigenous peoples of who was here first.
00:53:42
Speaker
right in a very 70s way of hopefully we'll see each other as people we can all learn to get along. She's not thinking about a children's book way. Right. And she's not thinking about justice. I mean, well, maybe she is thinking about justice, but she's thinking about justice as revenge is the problem of revenge. She's not thinking about restorative justice or anything like that, that we might that that one might maybe wish her to take a step further and think about. Yeah, it's one of the ways in which I think the book bites off more than it can chew thematically. But to come back to this final sequence, right, we've appease two powers ah through half-knees and Gare
Ordinary Heroism and Its Implications
00:54:16
Speaker
sacrifices. And you'd be reading this and you think, well, right, we've got a trio of three boys, two of them have taken the final step and broken the curse. So you're up, Gerald. That is not what happens. Yeah, Gerald has nothing to do with any of this.
00:54:31
Speaker
So the final power that needs to be appeased is the new power, the power of Earth, the power associated with the Giants. And this, I read this and I went to you and I was like, so I think this is Diana Minjones' most explicitly Christian book.
00:54:46
Speaker
and I haven't read it yet so I was like what is this an absolute reaction was very funny uh so let me explain what I mean so this is the point where they're trying to decide what the new power means and the Dory said listen somebody has got to be human sacrificed today there is something here that needs life ah And the person who steps up to explain what the new power really wants is Mr. Clayberry, the civil servant. the civil servant like I think possibly the least likely ah final heroic figure. So let me see.
00:55:25
Speaker
now As to the new power, Mrs. Adara speaking, the new power which lies behind the earth, that is the most mysterious. I know it is the power of birth, growth, and future time, and I think the nature of the sacrifice it asks might be different from the others. New things spring from the decay of life, the chief daring songman said. It asks life. Allow me, dear lady, said Mr. Clevery, putting his glasses on again, seeming rather happier, as a representative of the the people of Earth, and you could hear him want to save the government. there Oh, absolutely. I understand this so called new power a little. Believe me, your majesty, it may be a very vigorous power, but it is also a gentler one that you might think it could well ask for life renewed as it were. And you can see Mr. Clayberry sort of hinting and hinting at at this point, Apple exasperated just losing and this is stupid. I am not human sacrificing anyone. Right.
00:56:21
Speaker
And in that moment, when he rejects the curse, when he rejects death, when he says, I personally am stepping back from this ah situation, from this requirement of destiny, from this prophecy, I personally am rejecting the power of death and choosing life today. And through that, everyone can be saved.
00:56:46
Speaker
Yeah, and I went, wait a minute, I know this story. yeah
00:56:52
Speaker
Yeah, I hadn't read it yet at the time, so I was like, what is this, like, an Aslan on the stone table thing? Like, are we harkening back to dirty? No, that's not what we're doing. No, but I do think that the the myth that Diana Wynne Jones is drawing on here, this, like, thing she does in every book, I think, that at the end of the story, someone says, I know this story, and I know how to solve this problem.
00:57:13
Speaker
Yes, you know, the myth, you can solve the problem. But the myth that we're drawing on here, the myth that the giants understand, instinctively, intuitively, while the other peoples do not, ah the myth which breaks the whole thing open and reveals that everything is fine in the end, I think it's Christianity. I think that's how we're meant to read that. Yeah. ah kind the other way I think you're 100% right. And You know, we had this sort of conversation about whether she's doing this because she really believes in the supremacy of Christianity, which I don't think is true. I don't think she's trying to use this story to explain something about Christianity. i think she's I've just been rereading C.S. Lewis, I've been rereading Narnia, and when you read Lewis, you know that he is a Christian and he thinks you should be too. Right. This is not preachy, this is using the myth.
00:57:59
Speaker
right this is a story like all the other stories that she uses and we're not meant to come out of this thinking the giants you know the giants are right or that you're supposed to go around to their way of thinking there's actually a really interesting beat very early on when garris talking to jess about the giants and garris or jess says uh don't let the giants find you if they find a child they will take that child away because they seem to think that they can bring them up better which is a fear and a horror. But there's actually this idea of changelings, right? But turn backwards. So it's the fairies will steal your children away, it's the humans will steal your children away and send them to school. Right, which is also a concern if we're talking about Indigenous peoples and we're talking about colonisation.
00:58:42
Speaker
right, but it's never dug into, never gone into anything. So we're not, you know, it's not expected that everyone in this book is going to go around suddenly starting, you know, thinking about the new power all the time. um But it is a, it's a way out in a very, i think you know, in a way that's, I think, kind of a cheat, not fully satisfying, because it happens so quickly.
00:59:03
Speaker
And it's also just like this random civil servant who does it. It doesn't have the quite, it doesn't have the mythic weight that you want it to have. Right. And you want it to have because again, we're set up, at the beginning of the book, we have Adara, Adara swears to undo the curse. And I am going to backtrack a little bit, I think, and use this as a way to talk about one of the things I've wanted to talk about, which is the women in this story, because there are quite a lot of them. There's Adara, who is a fairly atypical mother for a Diana Jones book. She's a good mother. A And she's wise, she's notoriously wise. um And she is set up as the person who's going to undo the curse. ah She doesn't, she gets down there and she explains some things and then Mr. c Claybury comes in and and figures out the end.
00:59:46
Speaker
cuts Which is, or Hathill undoes the curse on the Mr. Clabory's advice. Right. And we also have, there's a a trio of girls, there's Anna, who is constantly worried about, you know, predicting or un-predicting the right thing. That again, doesn't really happen. People, though we're not relying on Anna's predictions in the end of the book. or i know I mean, it does sort of govern the midpoint. There is a point at which the Dory invade Garhol, Gares Mound. And it turns out that nobody asked Anna the right questions, and she's heartbroken about this. But that's it. We don't know, we've got no further development of that. And there's Brenda, who is Gerald's, you know, friend, friend of me from down the road, who is one of the most glaring examples of Diana with Jones fat phobia, the descriptions of her are really awful. Um, even though she's a heroic character, and
01:00:31
Speaker
But one of the other things that sort of brings around the end of the book is there's also Halla, who's Haphne's sister, who is beautiful and stupid. It's very, very funny. I've got to say, the sequence where Brenda sees Halla for the first time. Oh my god, every time Brenda sees a girl of one of the other species, the first thing she says is, Like, you're gorgeous, you're so beautiful! And I think it's probably meant to be Randa's envy, but to me it's very gay. It's incredibly gay. It's so funny, Hala unhoods and is revealed as beautiful, you know, the first time they're seeing an unhooded Doric. And it's Aina and Brenda who are like, oh my god, she's so hot! And Gara's like, I noticed Aina and Brenda thinking that she's odd to me.
01:01:15
Speaker
know Because care is interested in dark, gloomy boys. who Exactly. But so it's Halla who brings Haffney to Brenda and Brenda brings him to Adara. And this sort of exchange of, you know, moving Haffney around and and figuring out what's going on and passing the sacrifice along ah is what enables the finale. And the other thing that enables the finale again, in this sort of weak racism way is it's ah It's Gare looking at the trio of Aina and Brenda and Halla all talking to each other and arguing with each other, but also thinking the other is hot. And it's like, oh, you're all three alike. You're all three people. I recognize what a bossy older sister or younger sister or bossy sister is like, and you're the same. So there's this really interesting connection, mirrored connection between these three girls who are also clearly you know in the background, but i having these moments of looking at each other and feeling connection the same way that Gare and Gerald look at each other and feel connection.
01:02:11
Speaker
ah that's never dug into because we're never in any of their heads. We're breathing in because they can they can't be protagonists because it's 1970s Diana Wynne Jones and she doesn't write female protagonists.
Social Commentary and Character Dynamics
01:02:21
Speaker
but I do actually want to pick up like one thing I really noticed reading that horrible description of Brenda when she first appears as the giantess and what Gare focuses on is she's so fat and so disgusting and that I've discussed some of the fact that so closely connected it's really nasty stuff.
01:02:37
Speaker
This is also more or less how Jones writes about her own body as a teenager. In her essays yeah about being too big, too large, ah taking up too much space being too loud. um And it also sort of ties into how she writes about how she couldn't write female protagonists to begin with. She says the identification was too close. I kept getting caught up in the tactile sensations of being a girl.
01:03:01
Speaker
which meant you towered over boys of the same age, were forced to wear your hair so they got in the way, and your chest flopped embarrassingly. I knew that in order to see my girl as a real person, I had to be slightly more distant than that. And I think, actually, it's the first time I felt any sympathy for the way she writes about teenage girls in these early books. I was like, oh, you're not having a good time, are you? No. but In fact, so much of this early like these these early works are about longing to belong in masculinity or at least to get the hell out of femininity. Yeah, even in Dog's Body, I think, you know, Dog's Body is about being in the wrong body. It's about the limitations of your body and how it prevents you from the heroic action you want to take.
01:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't think I would find myself arguing Diana Lynn Jones, subtextual trans themes. But a little bit of that there, at least the discomfort with the body she's in. I think it's really palpable. And she's sort of you know she's projecting that onto largeness and the happy ending for Brenda is Brenda asks, you know, will I be thin someday? And Anna says yes.
01:04:01
Speaker
and Brenda's overjoyed and congratulations Brenda's got her her happy ending because we're not digging into and really digging into the the consciousness of any of these women yet but it is i think the first time that she's writing women interacting with each other meaningfully and we're gonna get that a little more and more i think as you know from this point on like i think this does mark a little bit of a turning point in that she's starting to think about it even though she can't write about it directly yeah i think you're absolutely right um The other thing I wanted to pick up actually, just before we finish, ah going back to Christianity as a useful
Christian Themes and Heroism
01:04:37
Speaker
myth. Yeah. And this again is from Reflections. Jones was sort of thinking about how Christianity affects this idea of having a hero and a myth hero. And she argues that a mythical hero, um a fantastic hero, as one of their qualities has a special connection with God or with the gods.
01:04:55
Speaker
they're chosen by the gods guided by the gods. And you know, I think she's got a point. um And she says, a medievalist I consulted about this applying that Christianity had substantially affected the heroic ideal, especially where women were concerned by introducing ideas of patience and endurance and the solitary personal struggle against one's own fleshly instincts. Yeah, forward and then rejects it straight away. So listen, Penelope predates that as in the Odyssey, Penelope is patient endurance struggles,
01:05:22
Speaker
Endurance? That's a word, I made the word. um But then she puts forth her own argument. I began to see just what Christianity had really added to the hero tradition. It had reinforced the high ideal for God is love, but heroes have always had that, even if they do not know it when they begin. But more importantly, Christianity had modified the tradition that a hero is guided by a God or gods, for God watches over everyone. I now knew that every ordinary man or woman could be a hero.
01:05:52
Speaker
Yeah. And one thing that's hit thematically in this book over and over again is Gares terror of being ordinary. Yes, he can't be a hero. And he's first believing that his father is a hero and then discovering that his father is ordinary to he cheated and being betrayed by it. This idea of the connection between being an ordinary person and being a hero, going back over and over again in this book where the solving myth is Christianity, ah like there is a crunch here that Jones is thinking about the possibility of an ordinary hero and how that connects to a mythic world, a divine world. Right, I think so. So it's the the recognition, so at first it's a betrayal, the recognition that his father is ordinary, and then at the end, it's the thing that connects them.
01:06:36
Speaker
is that, you know, it is heroic to go and make connections with these other three species. so they' In the most ordinary way possible, to get drunk and laugh together. That is right a heroic connection. And in fact, that's even hinted at when um George is first telling the story of that drunken bachelor night, the curse stops working for a little bit. Yeah, they're able to reconnect. They can feel the evil kind of backing off from this memory of drunken laughter together, because in fact,
01:07:04
Speaker
masculine bonding and belonging and masculinity of evil.
01:07:11
Speaker
It's so funny. I've been meaning to say that when I read Eight Days of Luke, I was like, oh, this book is singular in the way it describes masculine friendship. It's not. this Power of Free is doing exactly the same thing. um But what it's backed away from is Eight Days of Luke is haunted by this idea that those who the gods love die young.
01:07:33
Speaker
And here she's, you know, she's been dog body, I think is haunted by it too. ah But this book, she's able to, you know, nobody died, nobody's dying young, there's no hint that anybody's gonna die young, there's no hint that anybody's particularly beloved by the gods. We've moved away from this idea of the hero who is loved by the gods for probably for a tragic ends, towards this idea that, you know, the everyday hero, the ordinary person,
01:07:57
Speaker
that the gods will recognize that divinity Christianity will recognize for their ordinary actions. Right. ah So she can see her sort of working through flipping around the different ideas she's had about the connections between myth time and story time. i And in here, I mean, because of course, Gare is a fairy, an elf, his world is myth time to us, the humans, but the humans are myth time back to him. And that sort of ah forced perspective, that point of view control,
01:08:27
Speaker
uh organizes the whole book and it is i think one of the reasons is one of the things that makes the book really interesting and also why it does feels like it doesn't work because you have this whole force of myth time of gayers myth time that's building up for those first 90 pages as we've said And then the human alter myth time ultra myth time comes in and just changes the way the entire story works, which is cool. I think it's a cool structural conceit, but it also feels like there's the whole book is full of potential energy that doesn't really have anywhere to go and gets like dissolved into things that feel a little bit like platitudes. We're all people really.
01:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, there's a very packed resolution. And meanwhile, like the greater mighty curses you get in the first chapter kind of work off screen or in a sort of half-assed way. So you never feel the real force of them. And at the end, there are none of Orban's people left alive on the moor because they leave. Right, they moved away. Thank God, we're never gonna have to talk to our awful aunt again. Yeah, that's it. That's it.
01:09:29
Speaker
um I think possibly we should call it there because we are running over. Yes. ah Thank you guys again for listening to another episode. Next week we'll be talking about Charmed Life, which I think picks up again on some of these themes in really interesting ways. Our first Crestomancy. And this was my first Diana Wynne Jones. I am really looking forward to talking about it. I'm really excited for it. um So you can again, thanks for listening. You can find us anywhere you find podcasts. And if you have questions or things you want us to talk about, you can email us at eight days of Diana at gmail dot.com.
01:10:00
Speaker
Thanks and see you next time! See you next time! Bye! Bye!