Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to our fourth season of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Framo. And I'm Emily Tesh and I would say our final season. Partly because I continue to object to having too many numbers in the introduction. Well we are eventually, as much as we would love to do Diana Wynne-Jones forever, we are about to run out of books.
Speaker: Which is exciting. It has been such a journey, but here we are, we have arrived in the 2000s. And this is weird for me because we are now in the period where I remember buying the Diana Wynne-Jones books myself. with my teenager pocket money. I was going to say my own money, but really it was not. um But i remember going to the shops. I remember buying them.
Speaker: And we're also in an interesting period in writing for young people. The 2000s are like the dawn of modern YA, I think. Yeah, I was, you know, looking at my copy of this book. And I was looking at the the accolades on the back and the people it's blurbed by are people like Megan Whalen Turner, who I think of as very much like contemporary YA authors. we've We've arrived in this moment. Right. And we were also thinking about influences and what is inspiring Diana Wynne-Jones' writing at this time.
Speaker: And you pointed out Mercedes Lackey. Tell us a bit about Mercedes Lackey. Oh, my gosh. I read so much. much Mercedes Lackey when I was a child in the 90s. Mercedes Lackey was an extremely prolific author of, I would say, emotions-based fantasy. You know, we've we've talked a little bit about Anne McCaffrey earlier on this podcast, and I would say in some ways she's kind of an heir to Anne McCaffrey. Many of her books focus on underappreciated young people with great power coming of age and learning that their great power does not, in fact, ah make them
Speaker: a monster or somehow wrong as everyone around them in their life has told them, but in fact makes them the greatest person in the world, possessed of all kinds of good qualities, the only person who can save the situation, etc. If that sounds familiar, it is also a theme we have touched on somewhat in Diana Wynne-Jones.
Speaker: Yes, it is. In fact, it's a it's the Crestomancy theme. Exactly. And it is, I think, a little bit, one of one of many themes, although certainly not exclusively the only theme in Year of the Griffin as well, More to the point, we know that Diana Wynne Jones read some Mercedes Lackey because some of Mercedes Lackey's fantasy world building is, I would say, perhaps typical of its time. And there are some jokes in Tough Guide to Fantasyland that when I read them, I was like,
Speaker: i don't think there were a lot of people doing this, Diana. I think you were just making a joke about Mercedes Lackey specifically. Both of us read the entry for Gay Mage, for example, and we're like, we know who this is. know who this is. He shows up in several Mercedes Lackey books. I don't know that he shows up in a lot of non-Mercedes Lackey books.
Speaker: I'll tell you which which book specifically you pointed me at and went, it's this one. She's been reading this one and that is The Black Griffin, published 1995, which is about...
Speaker: Maybe you're better placed than me to explain what it's about, actually. Yes. ah So The Black Griffin is about a great mage who likes to create non-human creatures for fun, but out of affection. He's, you know, he considers them also sort more or less his children. His favorite creatures that he's created are the griffins. Spelled for P-H.
Speaker: Yes, G-R-Y-P-H-O-N. The first book is called The Black Griffin. And it's about some very sexy griffins who are unfortunately at war and their best friends, some very sexy humans. um And one of the main sort of plot thrusts of the book is this question of whether the mage who created them should continue to hold power over their breeding secrets or whether they should be allowed to reproduce sort of freely as they want.
Speaker: If any of this sounds thematically familiar from Dark Lord of Durkholm, it's because I'm pretty sure that she must have read this book and that it must have been- Possibly immediately before, because Dark Lord of Durkholm is 97, 99?
Speaker: Dark World of Dracoma is 98. There's actually a trilogy of Griffin books, The Black Griffin, The White Griffin, and The Silver Griffin. They're written between 1990, they come out between 1994 and 1996. The reason that I ended up going back to them while reading Year of the Griffin in particular is because getting way ahead of myself we haven't even described the plot of this book yet but there is a weird subplot about all of the griffins from dark lord of durkholm going off to another continent and finding a bunch of other griffins who are all busy having some kind of very dramatic war and having griffin drama and i'm like wait a second
Speaker: I think some of this might have come from the Griffin trilogy. Actually, once you brought it up and I looked at it, I was like, we really should have read these for Dark Lord of Durkholm. But Year of the Griffin is a sequel to Dark Lord and we got there eventually. Exactly. i do think it's an influence and that she was thinking about, you know, sort of, we talked a bit about her weird preoccupation with breeding programs, the breeding programs of the 90s. And I do think that's some of what goes into this. But the other thing that,
Speaker: is important about Year of the Griffin that we sort of started started us off on a chain of looking for influences is the fact that Year of the Griffin is a universe a magic university story, which is a genre that there's a lot of now.
Speaker: And there really wasn't that much of it's in 2000. It's really funny because you read Year of the Griffin, you're like, this is a scathing takedown of the genre of dark academia. didn't exist yet. Which didn't exist yet at all. i was like, wait, so was she reading Lev Grossman? No, he hadn't written his books yet. I was like, Becca, is this a secret history, right? like like like We got six bright-eyed undergrads become disillusioned with academia. That's a secret history, right? And that is early enough that she probably read it. Yes. On the whole, no, I don't think that's key in the like the the influence soup here.
Speaker: It would have been really funny if it was. I don't think it is. It would have been so funny. I mean, Diana, please do the secret history. It would be very amusing for everybody. Carry on. no yeah was So I went back, as I often do, to, well, not as often, as I've done since I read the the fantasy, the encyclopedia of fantasy entry. Now I make a point of going back and looking at the list of books in the encyclopedia of fantasy entry. One of the ones that is mentioned is Carolyn Stevermer's A College of Magics, which did which did come out in 1994. And I think I have never read, despite knowing of it as a major influence in a lot of directions. Tell us about that one.
Speaker: Well, I don't think I mean, I think it is an influence in that it is perhaps the first and I'm sure that our writer listeners will write in with more if you do, please tell me. But one of the first sort of major not boarding school, not children's school stories about magic, but university stories about magic that sort of hit the genre and changed it in a bunch of ways. Only about a third of the book actually takes place at the school. And the school pointedly doesn't actually teach very much magic. The pedagogy style is very different than in Year of the Griffin.
Speaker: But it does sort of lean into what I think is kind of an influence in this book, which is the Buildings Roman... university and politics story where one of the sort of key characteristics of the University of Magic is that the kind of people that you have there include exiled royalty who are there to either avoid some kind of political situation in their hometown or prepare themselves for a political situation that they have to face. So, you know, this sort of intertwining of magic and politics and how you do or don't learn magic in
Speaker: a sort of standardized institution is there. But I actually think that all of this is much less of an influence than, as is often the case, what was actually going on in the real world at the time. Right. of the things about reading this book, and we actually read it with a bunch of friends and with your wife, Becca, who pointed out this book is subtweeting something. And the first time I read it, I did not know what. um It's Year of the Griffin, like Dark Lord of Dirkholm, is satirical.
Speaker: It is bitter and angry and it is engaging with and criticising a contemporary trend. And you do have to know what it's satirising to get the joke. So while you were reading Mercedes Lackey, I was reading Glen O'Hara's February 2026 book, New Labour, New Britain, question mark, ah which is an overview of the domestic policies of Tony Blair's, later Gordon Brown's, but it's mostly of the Blair years. New Labour government that came to power in 1997 after decades of conservative rule in Britain oversaw an economic boom and various horrible foreign policy mistakes and remains such a controversial period in recent British history. It's actually quite hard to find a book that treats the whole thing like soberly. um
Speaker: Everybody has a lot of feelings about New Labour. i can I can summarise briefly. The conservatives hate them because they are Labour. Labour hates them because they are conservatives.
Speaker: Everybody's wrong. They are an unholy marriage European-style social democracy and nineteen ninety s American market capitalist, blue the the Democrats, the Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were friends, it shows.
Speaker: Anyway, I read this book and I was like, here is what Diana is arguing with. She is arguing with new Labour's education policy. The Year of the g Griffin comes out in the year 2000. Thank you for being the British one on our podcast and for knowing things about British politics. I don't is the thing. Like, my honour as the Brit podcaster was at stake. But actually, i i was 11 at the time most of this was happening. So I had i had to go and do research because when I was 11, I was not paying attention. Yes.
Speaker: I know. Well, I think the person who actually, the one of our friends who was reading this, who actually pointed this out as a sort of direction for us was Ev Maxwell, who's going to be a guest on our next episode, I think. So look forward to that. ah ah You know, a teaser trailer of of the insights there. Should I do a potted new Labour's education policy?
Speaker: Yeah, maybe do it in in half a minute because it's so, I mean, it is the theme of the book, I think, in a lot of ways. Right. So education. Tony Blair liked it. He famously made a speech where he went education, education, education.
Speaker: This was meant to be the core of New Labour's policy for Britain ah was a transformed country where education was central and 50% of young adults went to university and got a degree.
Speaker: But it wasn't about education as perhaps Diana Wynne-Jones liked it. Because this was education as human capital investment, upskilling.
Speaker: ah This was education as the the driving power of a service economy. This was education as ah let's make some more expensive and more valuable cogs for the capitalist machine. And therefore, fundamentally, it was education as training.
Speaker: And that is, I think, what we are seeing in the university in Year of the Griffin is a university, an educational institution that has given itself over to training a particular kind of professional, which is a wizard tour guide, and has no concept of a wider or more complex or less useful, less utilitarian education. No concept of developing an education.
Speaker: And so you end up with a situation where this university, Although its previous teachers were expert, they have trained a generation of wizards who are poor in their minds, who have this this poverty of understanding of what magic is for and why you do it.
Speaker: And then on top of that, it's also underfunded. So the university is ah poor in the mind, but also like actually poor. Everyone's barely getting paid. So you've got underfunded teachers who also don't know what they're talking about, really. They only know the the surface version that will create a wizard guide.
Speaker: And I do think this is all direct satire of new labour. as one junior academic ah taking every single class and he's not very good. no Wizard Myrna is desperate to get out. Corrida has long gone. Corcoran is obsessed with his moonshot and otherwise not bothering. Then there's Wizard Finn, ah who was, I think, moderately likable in the previous book. ah But every time he turned up, was oh, fuck is this guy? Mostly seems to be sleeping with undergrads. The first thing we see about Wizard Finn, I actually, ah i thought this was kind of a fun little riff, gender-swapped riff on one of the dynamics that we saw in Witch Week. The first thing we see of Wizard Finn is trying to be very sympathetic to Myrna without actually doing any of the work that makes her so stressed because he wants to get into her pants. This, of course, is ah exactly the dynamic between Mr. Wentworth and, ah oh, what's her face? The awful Miss Cadwallader in Witch Week. Yes. And you pointed out which week is actually an interesting comparator to Year of the Griffon. In a lot of ways, they are both very much about when school is not school and when college is not college, where it fails and especially where the teachers fail.
Speaker: Yes. I thought, and I'm speaking as an ex-teacher here, I thought reading this, God, this is a number of really sharp satires of bad teaching. I've seen this guy and this one. Oh, shit, I've occasionally been this guy. um There's a sequence where Wizard Wormack, who is the junior academic who teaches...
Speaker: everything and clid doesn't know what he's talking about most of the time refuses to explain why you're not allowed to create mage fire one-handed he says you have to use two hands and phelim one of our six undergrads says is there a reason for that you know asking a genuine question well max says we're doing one-handed mage fire next week and i went oh god yeah Twin temptations of the power trip and sticking to your lesson objectives, which are quite common when you're actually not very confident in what you're teaching and how you're teaching it, when you don't really know your stuff. And this is the behavior of a teacher who doesn't know their stuff.
Speaker: And in fact, what we know about Wizard Wormack, who only graduated two years ago, is that he graduated with top marks by purchasing a set of essays for getting through the university with top marks, because the questions are always the same. And the teachers always have the same policy for giving out grades for these essays. And so if you have the set answers, you will succeed with top marks and be brought up into the faculty to perpetuate the cycle all over again.
Speaker: Do we want to take some time to introduce the actual ostensible protagonists of the book, our set of undergrads? I think we probably should. i think it is more striking all the more striking that it was necessary to talk about Corcoran already. Yes. We haven't managed to actually name the six. Yes. Apart from Elder.
Speaker: All right, that's so we've got Elda, who is Dirk's daughter. She has probably the closest thing to an overall arc in the book, which we'll talk about a bit later. And I do think she is the heart of the book, and the title refers to her as much as it refers to anything. Elda is a griffin. You may remember her as the youngest griffin from Dark Lord of Dirkholm, and she is full of love for life, and she has so much she wants to achieve and so much she wants to learn, and she has a terrible crush on Corcoran.
Speaker: She's honestly very cute. She's she's like ah the picture of a bubbly, happy, cheerful undergrad with lots lots to look forward to and lots of joy in her life. And she is enormous. Giant golden griffin. um I think the reason that... So Elda has a crush on Corcoran, which is easy to remember in the book. And I think it's perhaps the reason that we were like, is this a secret history riff? Are they all obsessed with this ah this bad teacher? Elda's the only one who's obsessed with him. Everyone else thinks he's awful.
Speaker: But Elda thinks that he's a beautiful, lovely lovely like a teddy bear and she wants to pick him up and carry him around. the Then there are our royalty. There is Lucan, who's the son of the king of Lutharia, who which we did meet in the last book, very gloomy king whose wife had left him because of all the tour situations with the children. um And when, you know, during sort of part of the women's conspiracy of leaving. And so this is now Lucan is the eldest son who was part of the women's conspiracy of leaving and then they all returned to his father um and had a series of terrible rows. And now he snuck off to university because his father won't allow him to go and learn to be a wizard.
Speaker: Lukin and Claudia and i arguably Olga all feel like they could be protagonists of their own Diana Wynne-Jones children's book. Yes. And now they've all finished doing that and arrived at the university. But there are these themes of the the broken family, the parent who doesn't understand the injustice, the confusion. In Lukin's case, ah his father still treats him like a small child and doesn't appreciate that he's grown up in the time that he's been away.
Speaker: And this express this psychological torment expresses itself in the fact that Lucan's magic is only good for making big holes. Lucan can make a big hole if you need a big hole and otherwise ah can't do much.
Speaker: But it can make a very big hole. Claudia is the other secret royalty. ah She's the sister of the emperor of... No, she's the other non-secret royalty.
Speaker: She's the sister of the emperor of the empire, which is the pseudo-romantic... You know where that is. It's the pseudo-Roman Empire that is discussed. Go read Tough Guide. It will tell you all you need to know about the pseudo-Roman Empire that somehow exists in every medieval-esque fantasy novel, despite existing, you know, in the real world having existed several centuries apart.
Speaker: Claudia is deemed unsuitable by the Senate because her mother is a Marsh Witch who left the Empire, and the Senate also wants Claudia to renounce her citizenship and never return. But she and her brother love each other very much. So he doesn't want her to renounce her citizenship and never return.
Speaker: And she's also a has a great deal of magic, but is under a terrible jinx, mostly a travel jinx. Which is something that Jones described herself as having, that she was cursed when she started traveling. Claudia is very deeply cursed around traveling and always gets lost or is late or goes a long way out of her way, but ends up where she's meant to be eventually. um This becomes extremely plot relevant in the last section of the book.
Speaker: Yes. But right now where Claudia is meant to be is the university. And but none of the wisdom, she keeps going around trying to tell the teachers that she's under a jinx and therefore can't do magic properly. And none of them believe her. none None of the teachers actually take any time to sort out what's wrong with Claudia or Lucan or do anything except shout at them for sort of not doing magic properly, which is also part of what builds to the book's climax.
Speaker: Our third secret, the actual secret royalty is Phalaeum. who's from the he's it turns out at the end of the book that he's the brother of the emir of the emirates you also know about the emirates go read the tough guide or perhaps go read castle in the air Yeah. So he comes from Fantasy Arabia, where his brother is is in charge, and he snuck away, and his brother is very annoyed, and we'll send assassins after him if he finds out. ah They're called the Emirates of Ampersand, which I do actually think Diana should be in trouble for. Yes.
Speaker: Yeah. Everything about Fairlame's plot sort of feels like a joke that escaped from Castle in the Air and made its way into this book. Yeah, it's it's a real Orientalism drink situation, but I'm nonetheless very fond of Thelim who is quite a lot of fun as a character. Yes, absolutely. And it does sort of feel like with all of these characters who are pulled from sort of the reaches of the world that we didn't get to spend a lot of time in in Dark Lord, that she's sort of seizing her opportunity to fit a whole bunch more jokes. about these places into this book without actually having to go to them very much. We're at the university, but they're they're coming to the university. And so we can we can slide some more of those, just those little pokes in.
Speaker: Don't forget you're in Fantasyland. Yes, exactly. And these are the kind of places that you will meet in Fantasyland. All right, then there's Olga. who is, it turns out, the daughter of a great and terrible pirate who's amassed a great treasure and was terribly abusive to Olga and now wants to marry her off for pirate political power to a second in command. I'm not entirely sure why he needs to marry her off to a second in command. which doesn't seem It was never very clear. yeah But I mean, Olga is suffering from, i think, classic tragic girl protagonist backstory. Yes.
Speaker: ah in that she was raised by her father who is a psychopath ah but he liked her when she was a child because she was disguised as a boy and he could treat her like a boy but once it became clear that she was really a girl he became angrier and angrier and he was deeply abusive and beat her so she couldn't do her her magic with the wind anymore with her air elementals and then he beat her because she couldn't do that anymore and then she took her share of the treasure and left and she's going to get her own and back and and and come into her own and you're like hell yes Olga I've read this book Right, exactly. And all of this is dispatched in like three pages of this book. Because again, Diana Jones knows that you've read this book, she doesn't need to spend a lot of time on it.
Speaker: Olga arrives at university, falls in love, is able to start speaking to era elementals again. Wonderful. Last, we have my favorite of the students, who is Ruskin the Dwarf.
Speaker: Ruskin is the product of a proto-Dwarf communist revolution. Right. So Dwarf society, we are told, is very, very ah deeply stratified by caste. but And the Forgemasters, who are the most powerful caste, control all the others as their legal slaves. Ruskin has taken the magic of his people and been sent away by the bottom three castes. to become an all-powerful wizard and help overthrow the Forgemasters.
Speaker: Right. This is a last person you should send a begging letter back to the dwarfs about. Right. And they will turn up. Now, I do think, and we'll we'll get into the sort of weird politics of this book, it's, you know, me being the person I am I get very excited to see a communist revolution plot show up in the first chapter.
Speaker: But one of the things that I think is is funny about this book is that all of these protagonists have been sent to do something about the politics or, you know, with a sort of ah a plot attached about the problems associated with where they come from. And most of them don't actually do very much about it.
Speaker: The problems get resolved, but they're sort of resolved by happenstance or as a result of some of the ripple effects. Ruskin never goes back to the dwarfs to lead the communist revolution. The communist revolution does happen in like a two pager at the end, but it happens completely without him while he's already gotten a new job offer doing something else.
Speaker: Similarly, you know, ah Claudia's brother Titus leads a sort of imperial... consolidation of power and overthrows the Senate while she's gone. But she has nothing to do with it. It's, the you know, the fact that they are at the university sets a plot in place in which somebody from that country or that that sort of section of the world has to come to the university and make a big fuss. And then something happens while they're at the university as a result of what they're at the university. But none of the actual protagonists are protagonisting to make that happen.
Speaker: Oh yeah, they don't do anything. This is part of why I i feel like Corcoran is the real protagonist. Because the undergrads... I'll tell you what it actually makes me think of. It's all the way back to Howl's Moving Castle, which is is a sequence of comedy set pieces that rather than a plot as such there's ah which is great to be clear it's great in HAL and it's great here as well it's really really fun but it's following the um the logic of comedy yes rather than like like as in stage comedy rather than the novel this would be a great TV show I would love this TV show absolutely
Speaker: I was, you know, there's a point in the middle of the book and I sort of sat down and totted up the incidents that had occurred over the course of one day in that book. In the course of one day towards the middle of the book, Lucan's sister shows up to get sort of a fake version of him to to disguise from their father. A bunch of senators show up to try and insist that the university put Claudia to death. A bunch of dwarves show up to insist that they get ah Ruskin back so that he can't come back and leave the communist revolution. Lucan buys Ruskin, the dwarf, as a slave in order to make the dwarves go away. Then a bunch of mouse pirates who were already there earlier to try and get Olga back and got turned into mice attack all the pigeons so the university can't get any messages out and destroy the moonshot project.
Speaker: Then Olga reaches the climax of her arc and starts being able to talk to air spirits again. Then Olga and Lucan, who have been flirting for the most of the book, confess their love. Then Colette the Griffin, Elda's sister, shows up, followed by a bunch of rapist Griffins from the other continent. Then Kit and Blade show up. and make the rapist griffins go away and break the main statue, triggering the end plot of the book. That's all one day. That all happens over the course of breakfast to night.
Speaker: It seems like a busy day. But yeah, but that's part of the comedy feeling, right? It's it's um and and and then another thing and another thing and another thing. Right. And it's charming. Really charming.
Speaker: It is. We talked about in Durkholm the sort of why are there so many griffins ah in this household? Why are there so many kids in this house? And it's so that you always have the feeling of something exciting is happening and it's happening to one or two people. And then there are a couple of other people on the edges who are sort of having a comedy bit alongside. And that's always what's happening in this book sort of writ large is something exciting is always happening to one or two of the undergrad protagonists. And then there's a couple of other undergrad protagonists having doing a bit. And then there's a couple of other undergrad protagonists running for help. And then there's some other characters in the background doing something else. like It's so that there's always this sense of like too much. there's there's There's always a joke happening in the background, which I think is really what distinguishes this book from Witch Week, which does, you know, a lot of the sort of problems in this book are recurred from Witch Week as far as how teachers fail their students.
Speaker: But This book is a comedy at all times. It's always lighthearted. There's always a joke. ah There's always some kind of fun chaos happening in the background. Like tonally, it's it's deeply shifted. What was I going to say?
Speaker: Tonally, it's more like Magicians of Capron. I think there's a lot of ways that this feels like some of the lighter crustomancy books. And structurally, I think it is a Crestomancy in that when Kit and Blade show up at the end ah to be like, but the power to do the things you want to do was within you all along. If you understand your true power and your true selves, then your magic is very strong.
Speaker: that that's just crestomancy they they have like jointly become crestomancy right it was like it is quite funny coming off dirkhorn where blade was a 14 year old boy and kit was getting was very ashamed of himself for becoming the dark lord you're like here's kit and blade the coolest two wizards on the continent have you heard about these guys they're very famous they're so powerful Right, everyone from all of lyn love Elda's family members do show up at one point, just to kind of make it clear that they've got their happy ending and things are fine for them.
Speaker: And they're not who we should be focusing on right now. We need to be focusing on the university and its problems, which Elda's family will eventually turn up to solve. I mean, I do think that there's sort of one of the main thrusts of this book is about being yourself as big as you can be.
Speaker: bigness bigness uh which is a very crestomancy theme but it's you know there's much made always of the fact that elder is so big compared to the other students what is where where have we got the quote where corcoran sees her for the first time uh yes i think so No, I guess I don't have her, what we'd seeing here for the first time. I have him looking at her and being frightened because that's one of the the first things that one of the the the first reasons were given to sort of understand that Corcoran is not going to be a good teacher for Elda, right?
Speaker: is that he looks at her and he's immediately scared. The thought of doing anything to a g griffin who could push a mountain out of shape turned corker and cold and clammy. This bird, lion, female, thing made him feel weak.
Speaker: Yeah. But Elder in her hugeness is elsewhere constantly described as beautiful. Like when the soldiers of the Empire show up, they all immediately kneel to her because the griffin is the symbol of the Empire. um She's large and she's splendid and she has big feelings and she has a big crush on Corcoran and she feels really wonderful and happy about being at university and learning things.
Speaker: And this largeness is attractive and admirable in her. And it's something also that we get for Olga, who in her very first introduction, there's who is girl protagonist with a capital G and a capital P. ah running away from tragedies, an evil father, an enforced marriage, and stunningly beautiful. But also the first thing i hear about that is she she is large.
Speaker: She's a big girl, takes up lots of space, and that largeness is part of her beauty. The description that we get of Olga is he pointed to the large young woman sitting behind the dwarf. So that's the first adjective. And then she was very elegantly dressed in dark suede, The elegance extended to her long, fine, fair hair, which was drawn stylishly back inside an expensive looking scarf to set off her decidedly beautiful hawk-like face.
Speaker: So she's big and she's strong looking. And what we later learn is that she looks like her father, the big, so strong, scary pirate Olaf of the high seas.
Speaker: There's actually a really sort of lovely little bit where she's like, you know, after her father shows up and gets turned into mice, she says, I wish I didn't look like him. And there's sort of, you know, a lovely little bit about how people can have the same features and have it look very different because of how different they are inside.
Speaker: Ruskin has a briefly mentioned comedy girlfriend who's a large healer. But Ruskin himself, even though he is a dwarf, is actually constantly described with a large voice. This big, great ti booming, large, like powerful voice that comes out of his small body and makes the walls buzz with its force. Wormacht calls him you with the voice because his voice is so big.
Speaker: And later on, so eventually Elda does get a love interest, everyone gets love interest, everyone gets paired off. This is the sort of book where everybody's in a little duo by the end. And it's very heterosexual.
Speaker: it's So heterosexual. Ad infinitum. But ah Elda's love interest is a sort of meek griffin who's shown up from the other continent along with, you know, there's a bunch of, Colette shows up with a bunch of evil griffins from the other continent chasing her because one of them is obsessed with her. And Fleury, who's Elda's eventual love interest is with them because he's sort of trying to keep an eye on them and get them to a place where they can be neutralized. And then he just kind of hangs around.
Speaker: And one of the things that's notable about Flurry is that he can make himself bigger or smaller. So he can make himself almost entirely unnoticed. He can make himself look smaller than Elda. He can make himself look bigger than Elda. And Elda is deeply annoyed by him at all times. and Except when he's making himself...
Speaker: big so when he's making himself humble she's like why are you here you know you're you're you're sort of doing this false impression of a just a little guy and then when she sees him make himself big she says flurry was not looking humble at all she thought it suited him much better to be about kit size with his crest up and his eyes keenly open this was much more how she had all along supposed without knowing she supposed it that flurry should really look she's so much approved of him this way that she added happily. I'm so glad to be back. I love the whole world. So the way to get love, to make the people around you big in their turn, and is to take up physical space.
Speaker: I just did, i did a search on the word size in my notes in order to find that quote about Flurry. And I found another quote ah where someone's looking at Elda flying and says, Elda looks twice the size when she's flying.
Speaker: And it's, Luke and thought, admiringly. It's when she's doing what she ought to be doing, what she's good at doing, that she looks big and takes up the room that she's supposed to take. Yeah. there's Honestly, I feel like we've come a really long way from, say, Power of Three um and Brenda.
Speaker: It is Brenda, isn't it? It is Brenda. It is such a a source of cruelty in that book. Yeah. But even it feels like we've come a long way from Deep Secret. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, there is ah this is, this is a book where bigness is celebrated. um and anytime one of Elda's siblings arrives, everyone looks at them and goes, whoa, they're even bigger than Elda. Look how self-actualized they are.
Speaker: Speaking of she's come a long way, a character, a minor character who really entertained me, really amused me was Melissa. So we first meet Melissa as Phelan's girlfriend very early on. And Phelan's friends all say the thing is that she's too stupid. So he dumps her.
Speaker: Melissa is very, very beautiful and very stupid. And this is consistent throughout the book. Everyone is pretty clear that they they meet her and go, o she's she's very thick. And she is the person who ends up buying the set of perfect essays that will get you the marks that you're meant to get. right um Had the school not been disrupted, i think we would have had teacher Melissa in two years having an even worse time of it than Warmhawked. I think you're probably right. Melissa also is the undergrad who ends up sleeping with Wizard Finn, which I think actually says more about Wizard Finn than Melissa, but the narrative kind of treats them as equally silly for it.
Speaker: But I thought really striking at the climax of Olga's plot. So the the point where the evil pirates start to be like, Olga, you're coming with me and marrying this horrible man and never getting an education and you're serving your father forever as you should. It's not Olga who stands up and gives the feminist fuck you rant, which is what you'd expect from the girl protagonist. It's Melissa who stands up and goes, excuse you,
Speaker: Just because someone's a girl and pretty and stupid. yeah i I don't know if she actually says it so clearly at that point, but it's clear that Melissa knows she's not very bright. That means she shouldn't get an education. Yeah, there's actually a point later on where Melissa is running screaming from one of the many other horrors that attack the university over the course of the book. And one of the boys says that girl is such a wimp. And Olga says, no, she's not.
Speaker: Just stupid. And it's not her fault she was born that way. She knows she was and she's trying to do something about it. I respect that. Those other girls helping her respect her for it too. So Melissa, who's sort of introduced as this figure of fun, really gets the and everybody clapped moment in the middle of the book. It does feel like a she's come a long way in terms of Jones's like internalized misogyny. Right. Here's this rather dim,
Speaker: very feminine character well she she deserves to be treated properly as well and and she and she gets to and she gets the respect of other women for it oh yes oh i think i have some feelings about melissa yeah it's quite lovely wizard finn yes i do think by the way jumping back to the size thing So the two sort of first runs of problems that hit are the assassins that go after Phelim and the pirates that go after Olga. And in both cases, the solutions, which then turns out to be a later problem, but they make them all very small. so
Speaker: So when the assassins come, Corcoran just kind of goes around collecting up assassins and shrinking them and putting them into a little bag. And then he kind of puts them in a cage for later. And then he forgets about them because he's an absent-minded professor, which I'll rather he's quite a sharp satire on the absent-minded professor. Forgetting about literal people that you've made tiny and imprisoned is a bad idea.
Speaker: Yes. And the pirates, Elda turns them all into mice, which you would think makes them harmless, but doesn't. They run, you know, ah a horde of angry mice can actually cause quite a lot of problems in university. It does does feel like a Disney joke.
Speaker: Yes. it is, you know, the the sort of horror of being small and the shame of being small. um There's actually sort of, i think, something sort of interesting in the different treatment of the tiny assassins and the tiny mice. The tiny pirate mice...
Speaker: all get eaten by cats in sort of a don't think about it too hard horrors of death. Which must tell you what that it feels like. Roald Dahl, the witchers. Yes, absolutely. But the assassins are sort of treated with a certain degree of respect. So Wizard Finn, when Corcoran sort of has his little bundle of assassins um and he's like, well, what am I going to do with these? i guess I'm going to send them to the moon and see if they die. They'll be useful research subject. And Finn feels sick, Wizard Finn, in one of his sort of few moments of actually being more of a moral center of the book, so to speak.
Speaker: Says the assassins might be professional murderers, but he was sure they did not deserve this. He knew assassins were dedicated men who trained for years and had the same kinds of professional standards that wizards did. In their way, were wonderful people.
Speaker: So there's kind of a double-edged joke here, I think. like we are meant to be horrified that corcoran is like i'm just gonna send these assassins to the moon where they might explode but also finn looking at the assassins and going they're just like me for real uh doing that job just doing their job harks back to the joke in tough guide about assassins as sort of you know this rule-bound order when when you the protagonist defeat the assassin by doing something unexpected. They will die exclaiming that you broke, it's not fair, because you broke some rule or other.
Speaker: Which is, the whole book is interested in this idea of rules as a trap. Yes. and Rules that you have to follow, rules rules that you don't really don't have to follow, but everyone insists that you do anyway. So this sort of wizard Finn sort of looking at the assassins going, they're just like me, is perhaps part of his hidebound...
Speaker: Tors generation wizard thinking he can't imagine ways things to be different actually Corcoran deciding to do research experiments to them and send them to the moon is more intellectually sincere yes ah there's a quote from you know the the encyclopedia fantasy entry I do think some of this book as with Durkholm was inspired by the tough guy at Encyclopedia of Fantasy double experience, because there's this, the Encyclopedia of Fantasy entry that she wrote is about magic it's about systems of magic how you do magic there's a line early on where she says attempts to write to a system or define the rules can produce sal shallow and simplistic fantasy rationalized fantasy and that seems to be what she's sort of arguing against here in the descriptions of magic so much of the real heart of the book
Speaker: is about these students looking at the rules and then taking them apart and yeah thinking of new ways and new ideas um and sort of being inspired by them.
Speaker: For my money, the two best and most compelling sequences in the book are both the student undergrads attempt to solve a magic problem. The first one is when they realize assassins are coming for Phelim. And they think we must put protections around him. We haven't done protections in class yet. We'll go to the library, we'll get a load of books, and we'll do everything we can from the books. But at the same time, they've just had Wizard Dirk's little lecture on, you should read off on theory. So they get some theory books out as well. And the theory books inform what they're doing in terms of protections.
Speaker: So things like there's one protection, you're meant to draw a circle in chalk, but they don't have any chalk. And Ruskin, who is reading out theory books and his low rumbling voice reads, think, oh, wizard, do not do a thing only for the reason that it was always done before.
Speaker: And Elder goes, finally, some good advice. And makes the circle out of books. And in the moment, its just a funny and charming little scene. And then it pays off when the assassins turn up and immediately Phelan is hidden in a protective beehive made out of books. Yes. And it works great. nothing Nothing can get through it. The assassins keep turning up and trying to stab through the leather beehive. And Phelan is just sailing placidly around.
Speaker: Right. It's great. And it's extremely funny. But the whole sequence of we're going to try this, we're going to try that, we're going to do this with orange peel. And then bit by bit in the sort of sequence of assassins turning up in the following chapters, you see how each of these little problems they solved turns into something surprising, something different, something new. And you're like, it it kind of, it's the argument demonstrated. If you do...
Speaker: your magic, your creative work in an interesting and thoughtful way, you get interesting and thoughtful results. Which is also sort of the culmination of like these scenes reminded me of the scenes in Crestomancy when the kids are trying to, and in Caprona where the kids are trying to do the magic washing up. The scene in Christopher Chant where they're, you know, they're getting the boot boy to come up with clever booby traps for the attack on the, on the castle. which are sort of these fun, you know, little joke scenes in the moment. But here it is the, you know, the thrust of the book, really the main, the main point of the book is these clever, creative, ingenious things you can do with magic if your brain is sort of allowed the joy of expansion and experimentation. Yes.
Speaker: and then the other yeah but Essays? Yes. Okay, the other sequence, which to me is, i reread this for this podcast and I was like, oh, this was so much more influential on me than I remembered. The sequence where Wizard Corcoran has set his first essay for his six students and he takes them in and he marks them. And you're like, a scene of a guy marking essays should be terrible. Yeah.
Speaker: because actually, having done it a lot, marking essays is terrible. It's just one of the sufferings one must go through as a teacher, and it is not great. But it is a delightful sequence of, it gives you the personalities of the six, ah a all of them The question of the essay is, what is wizard's magic? All of them have variants on the same answer, I think, which is that wizard's magic is diverse and complex and hard to pin down. They all approach that their answer in different ways and prove it in different ways.
Speaker: And wizard Corcoran, as the person marking the essays, is unable to find fault with them except that he resents them. He resents them for being right.
Speaker: He resents them for being better than him. He resents them for making him work and making him actually think about what they're saying. He resents them for being bossy. And we can't read out the whole sequence, but it is brilliant. it Honestly, this informed my own practice as a teacher, just thinking back to this sequence of how can an adult...
Speaker: expert quotation marks respond to what young people actually think and what they say there's all of the essays are it's four pages we can't read it all there it's riveting it's and not just because of what it's saying but because of how it's saying it in a way like this is what gives you the most sense of individuality I think in the whole book of these specific protagonists is how they write their essays. um I'm picking one. I'm going to read the passage about Ruskin's. Tell me if there's a So at this point, Corcoran's already read like four or five essays.
Speaker: He was determined to skim Ruskin's essay, but it was impossible. Ruskin was a dwarf used to working with intricate things, and his argument was like chain mail forged link by link. He put out a suggestion.
Speaker: He followed that with obvious things as that led from it, things you were forced to agree to. And then he went one stage further and wham, you were agreeing to something that was quite unheard of. Then Ruskin took the unheard of idea and did the same to that.
Speaker: Wham, a new mad idea. Around and around the links Corcoran went, up through, and wham through the first 20 pages. By this time he found he was humbly agreeing to a complete reorganization of the university syllabus, with theory and practical being taught together to give more space for hugely advanced theory, and the first year course beginning where the third years left off, and agreeing then that magic as used today was being handled entirely wrongly and should be rethought from the bottom upward.
Speaker: Corcoran left off reading and gave Ruskin a C. Then after some thought, he made that a C- minus for bossiness. It was as if the wretched dwarf was teaching him instead of the other way around. Right, and this is part of Corcoran's tragedy that he does in fact have an opportunity to learn something here and doesn't and won't. Yeah, and we also get this really stri- after he's read this sort of series of essays, we get this really striking description of Corcoran himself.
Speaker: It was sad, really, Corcoran thought, as he stacked the steep stack of papers together. Young people came to the university full of such bright hopes, feeling the whole world was open before them. And by the end of three years, Most of them were simply competent magic users, scraping around to find employment that made them some money.
Speaker: He remembered being like this himself, even. Right at the start of his first year, he had thought that magic offered great things, though he could not now remember what things. And by the end, he had felt he was lucky to get a job on Mr. Chesney's tours.
Speaker: He had come on a lot in those three years, he knew. He was sorry for his six students, but they would learn just as he had. Right, and this is... The core of Corcoran's tragedy, of course, is that any reader reading that is like, he's got it exactly back to front. He's the one we should be sorry for. He's the one who hasn't learned and ought to and can't.
Speaker: But it's also, this is part the core of the satire, right, is that university turns young people with great ideas about their education into cogs of capital. Yes.
Speaker: It's what we know about Corcoran other than this is that his entire home was burned by the Tors. He had nowhere to go. He walked to the university when he was 15, full of these bright hopes and ideas.
Speaker: And when all of this is done, when he is left as head of the university, all that's left is this idea of the moonshot. And the moonshot is an exciting idea. It is the only thing that sort of, ah you know, that that sparks excitement in his students of everything that they're getting in their course of study over the course of this year. He's given them back their essays and they're all...
Speaker: depressed and sad about getting C's. And then he starts talking about the moonshot and suddenly everything's exciting and they have a really great conversation and and he's like actually connecting with them for the first time.
Speaker: Right. And they have ideas and he listens to their ideas. like That's a really good idea. And he's impressed by their ideas and he wants to use them. And in fact, this is part of Corcoran has been Chesney-fied, right? He has become Mr. Chesney and that's Dark Lord of Dirkholm's thesis was that a person like Mr. Chesney turns the world into copies of himself. So when Corcoran has these wonderful moments of connection and excitement and you know actual teaching where he's using what really inspires him to inspire his students in turn,
Speaker: What it comes down to is that he then starts thinking, but i then I can use these these students. I can use them. I need them. They're going to get me to the moon. And his understanding of the moonshot has become really something quite hollow and sad. He doesn't want to go to the moon because there's anything interesting there that he wants to learn about or know about or do. He just wants to be the first man.
Speaker: to This is in fact how Finn convinces him not to send the assassins to the moon. right Because he says, even though you've made them small, they're still men. And if they get to the moon first, you won't be first. Right. But it's it's the tragedy of Corcoran, right? Is that he's been intellectually hollowed out so that he can no longer remember.
Speaker: He no longer remembers the wonderful things. He can't remember what would be special or important about doing this amazing thing he wants to do. He doesn't understand why he's going to the moon. Yeah.
Speaker: And he, the, the way that he connects with these students for the first time is because he's asking them questions or, you know, they're, they're asking each other questions. They're all asking, how does one best get to the moon? And I do think that one of Diana Wendou's thesis is that, you know, the Socratic method is sort of the best way of teaching. You want questions to, you need questions to be asked, sometimes not even the right questions in order to open your mind. Right.
Speaker: The philosophy of magic. Yes. So the key book that Dirk recommends to the undergrads is Wizard Policant, who is the founder of the university, wrote a book called The Philosophy of Magic. And we see a description of Elder reading it, which I found incredibly charming. Like Elder reading Philosophy of Magic is me reading Foucault for the first time. It was so cute. And um she comes out, she's she's been reading all night. Next morning, she sort of floats out of her bedroom, which is the concert hall because she's enormous, like floating on air because her mind's been blown open by this amazing book. But the description of the book is that it's asking questions.
Speaker: And it's actually quite annoying because it asks the wrong questions. The more you read it, the more annoyed you get until you realize it's doing that on purpose. And then you're hooked as you find the great as your own mind goes. But then what are the right questions and how do I ask them?
Speaker: have you got the right? Yes, Policant had a way of putting together two ideas that ought not to have had anything to do with one another, and then giving them a slight twist so that they did, after all, go together, rather as Dirk himself had done to Eagle and Lion to make Griffin, Elda thought. To her mind, the way Policant did it was a bit forced, but Policant kept asking questions.
Speaker: They were all questions that made Elda say to herself, I wouldn't ask this like that, or that's not the quite right question, he should be asking this. Before long, she was wondering if Pollicant might not be asking the wrong questions on purpose to make you notice the right ones. After that, she was hooked.
Speaker: It dawned on her that she had chosen the most exciting subject in the world to study, and she read and read and read. In the end, she was almost late for breakfast because she just had to finish section five. She floated into the refectory, feeling utterly absent-minded but terribly alert somewhere, as if her brain had been opened up like an umbrella, or rather a whole stack of umbrellas, some of them inside out.
Speaker: And then her friends look her. I love the stack of umbrellas image. It's so... Yeah, that's what it's like read a really good book. Yeah! And it is, like, I really resonated with this. I resonated with this sometimes in the way it feels like to read Diana Wynne Jones herself.
Speaker: When you're reading a book and you're like, there's something... You push you put these two ideas together. And it shouldn't work, but it does. And I'm not sure the question you asked is the right one, but you're making me think about it.
Speaker: I think actually when a book makes you go, I would do this differently. And then you want to go and do it differently. That book is making a demand of you, but also ah giving you an invitation. And that is a wonderful feeling.
Speaker: And mean, Way, way back at the start of this podcast, I said Diana Wynne-Jones is a writer's writer. And it's because one of the things you feel reading Diana Wynne-Jones' book is something I want to write something.
Speaker: I want to write something that's kind of like this, but also not like this because I disagree with this. But it it gets your brain not just moving, but wanting to do it yourself. Yeah. I often describe a book I respect as a book I want to fight with. Yes.
Speaker: This is what this description made me feel like. And there are many ways in which I want to fight with Year of the Griffin, and we'll get to some of them. But I do think this kind of beautiful description of the intellectual opening, the reading of the books, the essays, the unlocking of possibility that a good education can bring you is the heart of it and is what makes what pulls the book together is is why she wanted to write it.
Speaker: Yeah, I think, according to Year of the Griffin, the benefits of university are one, there is a library there with good books in it. And yeah two, you may meet other other people your age who will be charming and interesting and possibly secret royalty. Right, you make friends. The disadvantage of the university is that there are teachers there.
Speaker: Yes. There is, you know, I thought i thought thought it was really striking that like Dirk shows up in chapter two or three and Elder runs up to him and goes, Dad, I've got friends. Come and meet my friends. There's no, and never, I think, before in Diana Wynne-Jones have we had this kind of easy friendship happen so quickly.
Speaker: and forge the characters together into a collective that holds strong throughout the whole book. There's no interpersonal... And this is the reason that, you know, eventually i thought about secret history and I was like, it's probably not actually a secret history riff because so much of the, you know, what becomes dark academia is about this sort of sense that you can't trust your teachers, but neither can you trust your fellow students. There's something sinister there. And there's this instant trust between the six students in...
Speaker: in this book that there's almost never any interpersonal tension amongst any of them throughout the whole course of the plot. They are all standing together against external threats. The two exceptions to this are one, Ruskin is annoying in the way your friends are annoying and I love him for it. but He will not stop reading bits out of books. Two, Olga and Lucan have a little bit of a tiff when they're in love and don't realize they're in love and then they resolve it within the space of two pages and they're in love again and it's fine. This is just your friends who are undergrads breaking up and getting back together and you're like, we all knew you would do that, but well done. Yes, exactly. This is a thing you do when you're 19.
Speaker: But they are otherwise, from beginning to end, a unit, which is part of why i think it's easy to think of them as a collective protagonist. They don't rub against each other. they They work with each other and they have sort of little interpersonal problems along the way that get resolved. But none of them are as significant as this big sort of collective movement towards we're all reading these books we're all writing these essays we're all working on these problems together and solving them together which is why in the end it is the six students and not corcoran who do yes not
Speaker: Yes, but before we get to the moonshot, I do want to talk a little bit about Elda's solo arc. She does sort of have a solo arc. I don't know that I like it, but I think that there is a running thread. I think I will make an argument that I do like it, but you go first.
Speaker: All right. So I do think that there is sort of a thread in this book, in addition to the intellectual maturity that all of these students are coming into through their access to the library and their sort of investigations into magic of Elda.
Speaker: coming into sexual maturity. They're sort of, you know, by the end of the book, she has this love interest, but it's not just that. ah So she starts out with this kind of immature crush on Corcoran, which gets sort of exploded midway through the book when there's a scene where where she has to carry Corcoran to the top of a tower to deal with some of the tiny, i forget if it's the tiny mice or the tiny assassins, I don't know, tiny problems. Explicitly her crush on Corcoran is childish affection. Like she imagines him like her childhood teddy bear. which was soft and cuddly and nice to carry around. And that's what she wants. She wants to pick him up and carry him around. Right.
Speaker: And then there's this scene where she has to carry, she has to live out her dream of carrying him to the top of the tower. And it's physically unpleasant. She's tired. He smells sweaty. He's scared of her. She's scared of him. It's physically exhausting. And at the end of it, it's, you know, they've done this heroic feat together.
Speaker: And he goes down and sort of gets taken to the pub with everybody and starts getting toasted about it. While Elda is lying there, spent and exhausted from having carried him to the top of the tower. And the quote that really struck me is, he might have said, thank you, she kept thinking, heavy with cramps and with memories of that nasty smell of sweat. She did not feel in the least triumphant.
Speaker: It was more like being wracked with bouts of shame. She felt a complete useless fool. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't actually clock this. And then you said, is it a sex scene? And was like, oh, fuck, it's a sex scene. Yeah.
Speaker: you you you You do with it. You get what you thought you wanted. It's sweaty. It kind of hurts. It's not fun. His friends all clap him on the back and toast him. You're left there feeling stupid.
Speaker: Yeah. And it is the loss of innocence because from this point on, you know, she's idolized Corcoran. And from this point on, she feels embarrassed about it. She feels stupid about it She knows that this illusion she had about this guy is is gone forever.
Speaker: So this happens. And then we get a couple of beats later on where when the dwarves show up, she hides Ruskin under her arm. And suddenly she feels a maternal instinct. And she's like, oh, this is how I, an adult griffin, would protect a child.
Speaker: Is this dwarf that I've got under my wing that I'm protecting from the world. And it's on the course of the same day, on which everything happens, that some big scary griffins turn up. And the big scary griffins look at Elda with Ruskin protectively under her wing and say, well, she is ready to be a mother.
Speaker: And Elda looks at them and at these big scary hot griffins. They're hot griffins, but they're awful griffins. We read this and was like, this is the second coming of Julian Adaman.
Speaker: Yes. It's lust frightening, lust scary. And the word lust is used in the text. Elda says she understands exactly why Colette had said this griffin made her soft and squeamish inside. The smell of him, the way he glared, and the great eagle lion shape of him were making strong, primitive demands that Elda had never met before.
Speaker: He made her like a cat or a bird or even like a lioness want to lie down and give in. Her insides crawled with what seemed to be lust. But griffins were a higher order of being than cats or eagles, and the way Jessica was deliberately making her feel was beginning to enrage her.
Speaker: I find this really actually striking. I like Elder's sexual maturity arc. I think it is something to deal with. in In a university story, it would be weird not to talk about sex. Yes. And Jones, as usual, finds it easier to discuss sex in animal rather than in human terms. Yes. Thinking back to Dog's Body, where there was actually loads of sex going on, but it was all the dogs. so Elder's sexual maturity arc is about learning that a crush is not necessarily...
Speaker: the same as or a good reason for this an intimate physical relationship with someone. Right. um It is learning that you can be horrifyingly attracted to someone who you know intellectually is a complete piece of shit and the intellectual side of you is right.
Speaker: Yes. And it will eventually be about meeting her love interest and having her own demands and expectations of him. Like, right when Elder encounters Fleury, she knows enough about herself to say, I don't like it when you do that.
Speaker: I want you to be more like this. Right. I don't want you to act like you're less than me. Let's be equals. Now, they're not actually equals because Flory eventually will become her magical teacher. but We can't not have a teacher-student romance. Yeah. But she is, you know, she's making this challenge, this demand of what I want is a partnership where we are both being excitingly our best selves.
Speaker: Yes. And I actually think it's an interesting and well-executed... sexual coming of age arc yeah you're right i don't think it's bad just didn't i didn't like realizing that the corcoran flight was a symbolic sex scene once you see that reading of the corcoran scene you're like oh this is really awful Yeah, you just I felt sad. Elder is the heart of the book. I think this is i think without Elder in the book, this would me it be a much angrier and much sadder book. Elder's light, her joy, her happiness in I have friends, I'm learning so much, but gives the book its lift, its delight, its sparkle, even more so than any of the scenes of the undergrads doing magic or solving problems. It's Elder right who brings it all together.
Speaker: And it is her sympathy for Corcoran that sets up the end of the book, although she's not actually the driver of it. So what happens is the tiny mice and the tiny pirates and the tiny assassins all go in together to destroy Corcoran's moonship that he's been working on. And he's so depressed that Elda feels a bit sorry for him. And everyone who knows that Elda has a crush on Corcoran, all of her friends are like,
Speaker: We should help him fix his moon ship. We should get him to the moon. Well, it isn't just for Elder, though. that That might be the initial thing. But also this moment of Corcoran's desire to go to the moon is the one bit of real teaching he's actually managed to do. And it's worked past his wild wildest dreams. His students are now genuinely invested in this project. They want to make it happen. They want to prove they can make it happen.
Speaker: Right. And in fact, when Elda eventually is like, guys, you don't have to you don't have to go help out Corcoran just for me. I'm not really that into him any anymore. Her friends say no.
Speaker: A, it's an intellectual problem. B, it's just, I think it's Ruskin, no, it's it's Lucan who says, it's to show Corcoran that our adaptation of spells really does work.
Speaker: Phelan simply couldn't believe it when Corcoran gave him such a low mark for his essay. He said he filled it with the best stuff he knew and Corcoran simply stat spat in his face. He says it's his honor at stake. So this is solving the moonshot problem is their way to prove to Corcoran that everything that they said in their essays was right. And that the way that they're thinking about magic as a space of infinite possibility is right. So they set out to solve the moonshot problem with magic. And what I find interesting is that Corcoran has been building a ship, right? a spaceship, which actually is not the way to go to the moon if you live in fantasy land. And the students point this out say, well, we have magical transportation spells. Why are you...
Speaker: Why build a ship? Why not build a transportation bubble? Do it with a spell. This idea of using magic in a more interesting and more creative way. I think a little bit of Jones speaking outwards to the reader as well. Like just because rocket ships are the way to go to the moon in our world doesn't mean that rocket ships are the way to do it in fantasy land. Right. Yeah.
Speaker: So they decide to build a bubble of air a bubble of air with compressed air and transported magically to the moon working together. Yes. Does this work?
Speaker: Well, they get somewhere. Kit and Blade are here by now as well, by the way. I think it's actually very funny. Kit and Blade have shown up because they want to solve Claudia's jinx problem.
Speaker: And in the meantime, Flurry has shown up and solved Claudia's jinx problem. So kit and Blade are sort of like, well, all right, we were here to solve a problem. I guess we'll solve the moon problem while we're here. what This is part of the end game of the book where everybody starts heterosexually pairing up, though. So right like what's really motivating Blade is that he's terribly interested in Claudia and therefore wishes to do helpful things for her. And if she's going to the moon, then...
Speaker: However, you may remember, everybody, that Claudia has a travel jinx. Yep. And therefore, perhaps putting her in the moon bubble in the in the air bubble to go to the moon was not a good idea.
Speaker: no Claudia has a travel jinx and Lucan can only make big holes. So instead of ending up on the moon, on the surface of the moon, they end up in a big hole on Mars. Yeah.
Speaker: Which actually, i do, some of this, I was thinking of, I think another influence here that I do know that she read because it shows up in the ah encyclopedia of magic entry is the young wizard's books, where there's also ah some significant moon travel and using magic to solve space problems and how do you get enough air and things like that.
Speaker: Anyway, they all end up on Mars, trapped in a bubble of air that is rapidly... ah sort of sluicing away being used up amongst six students and Corcoran and Kit and Blade Corcoran is screaming because on coming to Mars he discovered that he hates this actually space travel is terrible what was he thinking eventually they knock him out because they can't deal with the screaming right so he didn't appreciate that at all Which, to be fair to Corcoran, I also, upon reading, you know, I also dreamed about space travel when I was a child and that I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars and I was like, that's actually something I would never like to do. That seems miserable. And also, you know, they have not accounted for heat. They have not accounted for gravity. They've made many very serious mistakes.
Speaker: Right. But they've got, you know, they've got nothing to do. They're all in imminent peril of death. And the only way to resolve it is for Kit and Blade to play Crestomancy and immediately resolve everybody's magic travel jinxes and sort them out psychologically so that they can all magic themselves home.
Speaker: Right. Which they do. It turns out that Lucan and Claudia both have family problems. Yep. You know, Blade says... Oh, hang on. there's a there's There's a quote that just again kind of sums up everything that Christomancy does.
Speaker: Right. Blade says, you've realized, have you? It's your feelings that are deforming your magic. Now, we did have a moment with Claudia earlier where Wehrmacht tried to do the same thing and was like, yes, it's your feelings that have caused this jinx.
Speaker: She spent much of the book attached to a cloak rack because Wehrmacht got his magic wrong in trying to undo her jinx. And Wormacht goes, you're attached to this cloak rack because you want to be attached to this cloak rack. Psychologically, you need this cloak rack. Which I think is a very funny joke on Howl's Moving Castle.
Speaker: And so when Blade turns up and says, ah it is all your feelings, Claudia's like, I refuse to believe that it was all my feelings and that Wormacht was right. But then it is indeed all their feelings. They talk through it.
Speaker: The Jinx goes away. Everybody feels the Jinx release. This again happens in the course of two pages because we haven't had time for the long in-depth, you're working through all of your emotions arc that we would get in, say, Howl's Moving Castle, where when Sophie releases the spell at the end, you're like, ah, yes. Sophie has been working through these issues throughout the whole book.
Speaker: Presumably Lucan and olga have all are luin and Claudia have also been working through these issues throughout the whole book. Right, because they're one sixth of the protagonist in a frenetic comedy, comedy ah constant everything happening at once. You seem to be like, yeah, okay, I guess you've been thinking about that. You've solved it. Well done. yes Well done. They solve it.
Speaker: They get back. They get back just in time to find that all the other plots have converged on the university to cause problems while everyone was away. I do think that something about how Lucan solves his issues is relevant to the resolution of the various political plots that have converged on the university.
Speaker: Because Lucan says, I know all about my psychological problems. I make these pits because when I don't want to be a king, when I think about ruling, I just want to dig myself in a deep pit and stay in it. There it is. My pits. My holes. um And Ruskin, who's the dwarf, who who at this point has, again, been in order to protect him from the Forgemasters who came to take him back in the middle of the book. Lucan has legally bought Ruskin as a slave and everyone everyone's like, what a clever solution to this problem. Now you're a citizen of Lucan's country and that's fine.
Speaker: Ruskin says, I don't understand. You met the forge masters. They love their power. They'd kill to keep it. Why don't you want to be a powerful king? And the resolution of that plot is actually Lucan would, would in fact quite like to be a powerful king. It's not that he doesn't want to be a powerful king or that a powerful king someone who would kill to keep his power, is a bad thing to be. It's just that their country is quite poor, and so it's likely to be very depressing to be king of it. And also that his father still treats him like a child. What we need is capital investment. What we need is capital investment. Luckily, Lucan's been networking at university, and his future Beyoncé is heir to the pirate treasure, and his new dwarf slave is an expert on gold deposits that happen to be under the country. So that's Fine. We'll do an infrastructure project. We'll get capital invested up front in the form of August pirate treasure. Lutaria is going to be rich. You can thrust the neoliberal market capitalism out the door of your thought. but In it comes through the windows. Crying. It's the economy, stupid. It's really quite funny to just do a quick roundup of all the students' individual plots.
Speaker: Real quick. So we have our three royalty. Lucan, has secured capital for his country, so the country is going to be fine. Claudia, through no particular action of her own, has inspired her brother Titus to throw all of the senators in prison and become the absolute tyrant that they were afraid he was going to become. um Everyone says, hurrah, we've been wanting you to do this for years. Titus exposes military law on the empire and General Agricola is like, fantastic, I've been waiting for you to do this for years. And I read it like, within the decade, General Agricola is going to be the new emperor.
Speaker: Yes. Sorry, Titus. Titus is not going to survive this one. right I know my Roman history. Thank you very much. I do think it's really funny. This is just a side note. But Titus is like, oh, the senators are afraid that I'm going by sending Claudia to university. She's going to come back and I'm going to make myself a tyrant. That's not, right you're already the emperor. the We're afraid you're going to make yourself a tyrant is what set up the empire. That's the plot of Julius Caesar and he wasn't emperor yet. um
Speaker: But nonetheless, within the context of the book, Titus has made himself big. He's exerted his power. Huzzah. have ray ah That democracy was was bad and morally corrupt.
Speaker: The... Falim's brother, the emir, who's been sending all the assassins, shows up and says, I'm going to assassinate everyone at this university. And Falim says... No, you're not. Don't silly. I'm going come and see the doctor for your heart problems that I've been very worried about. with oh that's all right then, is it? Right. I'm going to help you choose the next emir who will also have a hordes of assassins at his disposal. One of my nephews, all of my nephews have problems, but they all have something to recommend them. Together, we will find a good next emir to be the absolute head of the emirate. We're not going to resolve any of the issues in the emirate. That's not the point. The point is that the family is sorted out.
Speaker: So that's our three royals. They have consolidated their power. Wonderful for them. Our two lower class students, Ruskin and Olga, both get sort of just absorbed into Lucan's plot to make his kingdom more prosperous. Again, we get a one page saying that the dwarf revolution has happened elsewhere, but Ruskin is no longer interested in it and no longer involved in it. Ruskin had nothing to do with that.
Speaker: The pirates have all gotten eaten by cats. We're not really going to resolve that either. Olga is going to live happily ever after as queen of this monarchy. Great. That's fine. They're going to be very rich.
Speaker: And Elda... Has her teacher-student love story future. Has her teacher-student love. And what about the actual university? The actual problems at the university. So again, Kerida, thinking about the university, says, my mistake was leaving the university in the hands of a sort of board of directors. What the university needs is a strong leader, perhaps an emperor of some sort or a king of some sort. If only there were a destined figure of myth and legend who had promised to return to us at a time when things seem most terrible, a kind of King Arthur. but for university chancellors wonderfully fortunately there's been a statue at the university the entire time of great wizard pollicant who wrote the book that unlocked everybody's brains also incidentally wrote the uh the laws of the caste system of the dwarves that enslave us people yes it is specifically pollicant's fault because he said yeah sure that sounds like a fine system
Speaker: We won't be returning to that. Don't worry about it. Wizard Policant wakes up again. In the last like three pages of the book, to be clear, I want to emphasize how out of nowhere this arrives. It's pure deus ex machina, and I don't say that as a criticism. A deus ex machina is a perfectly respectable way to end a comedy plot.
Speaker: Polokant says, the enchantment was tied to the wards of the university. When the wards go down, I return to take up my postage head here. This is a prophecy made that this was only to happen in the year of the griffin. Unkind persons held that this meant never. Griffins in my time being thought to be mythological creatures. But I see the prophecy was quite correct.
Speaker: So it's the that only when things are worst and when the institution is in danger or has failed utterly, at this point of failure then king arthur can return right take when the institution falls apart that's when you need a charismatic leader to re-found it this is also ah the thesis of the aeneid yes well it's it's it's it's also plot of julius caesar it's also the plot of deep secret it's also yes the plot of at least half the diana when jones books that we read in the 90s kind of
Speaker: Having recently read A History of New Labour, it was like, ah, the sudden arrival of a charismatic leader whose instincts are largely authoritarian populism, let's do things that everybody likes and punish criminals about it, ahha is kind of a thing that's going on.
Speaker: Maybe she's right. What the university really needs is Tony Blair. my God. With a wizard hand. Oh, my God. But no, what the university really needs is still capital investment. Luckily, Wizard Pollock's statue was standing on a plinth made of solid gold. And Fantasyland is still on the gold standard, so that's fine.
Speaker: Not only that, but in addition to this sort of deus ex machina, ah the the king has returned and everything's sorted out, we are marrying everybody off. Olga and Lucan are are getting married.
Speaker: Flurry and Elda are eventually going to be in love. Claudia and Blade are eventually going to be in love. Sorry, real quick side note about Kit and Blade. There's something really weird going on. Again, I have to go back to this must be a joke on the Griffin books or something. Because whenever they turn up, they're like, there's been a terrible war over on the other continent. Everyone's been dealing with this terrible war. ah When they knock Corcoran out in the bubble, Blade just kind of knocks him out. and then it's like, I'm so sorry. I've been in this terrible war and now I'm very ruthless. And I'm like, wait, wasn't that the plot of the last book was about being in a war and being very ruthless and how maybe that wasn't such a great idea. Don't worry about it.
Speaker: The other continent, every griffin has been in a war. Every griffin has been either getting paired off or getting chased by hordes of griffins of the opposite sex in hopes of getting paired off. We get one scene of Colette beating her true love who came from the other continent, whom we meet for no apparent reason at all, except to assure us that Colette's going to get paired off with someone who appreciates her.
Speaker: Why is this happening? Turner unlocked Griffin's sexuality plot and then couldn't turn it off again? Yeah, I think so. um But there's one last romance that happens in the last three pages of this book, which I think it felt so Shakespearean to me, honestly. Like, this is the final resolution. It's just we're also going to pair these people off and stop the war thereby. There's a minor, minor, minor de-plot of the fact that the Empire, which is Claudia's country and Lucan's country, have been at war ever since the Tours. But fortunately, as soon as Claudia's brother Titus sets eyes on Lucan's sister, Isabel, they fall madly in love with each other and negotiate a marriage agreement on the spot. Wizard Policant marries them with the power vested in him as king of the universe.
Speaker: This is what I mean. This is a comedy. This is stage comedy. You're right. This is this is the end of a Shakespeare plot. Yes. These people are going to get married. The war is going to end. It's the end of As You Like It. Yes. ah Hyman has descended from his university plinth and he's going to marry everybody off and stop all the wars.
Speaker: o Well, that's good. Well, that's good. But I do think, you know, so the end of the book is really interesting as an ending for this book because it's Blade, and again, who's barely been in this book except to show up and occasionally solve problems. And Fleury, who's barely been in this book except to be Elda's love interest.
Speaker: A scene from their point of view, looking at the six students, the collective protagonist, all on the golden plinth of the statue, hanging out together, singing badly, having a wonderful time.
Speaker: And looking specifically at two young women who I think of the six might be the closest to Diana Wynne Jones herself, Claudia, who is the one with the travel jinx,
Speaker: And then Elder, who is this heart of intellectual discovery and delight. And it is Blade and Fleury looking at them and thinking about how attractive they find them and how much they're looking forward to eventually being their love interests and admiring like these young women growing into themselves and becoming themselves.
Speaker: Yeah, there's kind of a note, actually, that Blade... looks at Claudia and Carida has shown up as part of the resolution of this plot. Carida, who is sort of the epitome of the scary old woman from the last book and from this book, and who, again, you mentioned this offhand, but what she's been doing throughout this book is she's been sitting on the edge of the waste, cleaning up the waste with her cats, As a solo, like she had like I think it is a deliberate witch of the waste joke. We're doing this again.
Speaker: But this time, instead of being the antagonist, it's, you know, this frightening old woman. It's great to be a weird old woman doing your own thing. Right. And Blade looks at Claudia and thinks about how much she looks like Carida and her very strong magical talent that's like Carida's. And this sort of implication that Claudia is going to grow up to be Carina, that this beautiful, she's not even beautiful. i think there's a point made about Claudia that she's not beautiful. She's nice. Everyone looks at her and is like, oh, this is a trustworthy person.
Speaker: But this compelling sort of travel jinxed, troubled young woman who is, has become sort of the focus of the interest of last book's protagonist is going to grow up to be this scary, powerful old woman.
Speaker: And that's a great thing. It's a wonderful thing. It's a triumph to become Kerida, who is totally ruthless, totally amoral, responsible for most of the murders in this book. Right. um Turns various evil griffins to stone and breaks them apart, brings her mouse-killing cats and has sets them to hunting and killing pirates.
Speaker: Kerida just doesn't hesitate. Yes. And that's wonderful. Yes. So we're looking at these students and specifically these two young women as a space of possibility and excitement and sort of the power, you know, the imaginative power of the future.
Speaker: Yeah. What a book. yeah And what a beginning to the 2000s. I'm so excited to see where we go from here.
Speaker: Next week, we will, as I mentioned, we will have a guest, Evrena Maxwell, to talk about the sequel to Deep Secret. The Merlin Conspiracy, Diana Wynne-Jones does self-conscious 2000s YA. I'm very excited for this. We have Year of the Griffin is sort of the last book of Diana Wynne-Jones' that is part of the set that I consider my childhood that I don't remember the first time I read them. From here on out, we're on books that generally speaking, I've only read once and I remember when they came out. And I'm really excited to revisit them and see how I think of them and how they fit sort of the long arc of her career.
Speaker: I do also think Year of the g Griffin is the last one that was sold, positioned as adult fantasy. She is back into children's books now. And I do think that's interesting for what what what it means for her work this decade.
Speaker: One last question before we wrap on Year of the Griffin. Do you think this book is adult fantasy?
Speaker: Well, I think it is possible to argue that the the the magical university story, the the campus story, is and is not an adult story. In the...
Speaker: Right. Children's books are often targeted to readers a year or two younger than the protagonists, right? So if our protagonists of Year of the Griffin are the sixth students, um those 18, 19 year olds, then we can imagine their intended audience older teens looking forward to university, imagining what university might mean for them or what pitfalls they might face at university. In which case I'd say, this is a YA book.
Speaker: But I do think there is a case that the protagonist is Corcoran. Right. In which case, this is a very deceptively bleak book. Because among the ending, I don't think we we've talked about where Corcoran actually ends up.
Speaker: Yeah. Corcoran gets in some ways a kinder ending than he deserves in that he lives. He gets back to Earth from Mars, which he hated. His whole dream is in ruins. ah He was the first he walked on Mars, didn't even want to, never did actually go to the moon, but has now discovered that he hates space travel. Yep.
Speaker: ah shattered he is a ruin and he's been very very bad at his job so much so that like the king has returned the university has collapsed to the point where king arthur came back that seems like a bad look for the person who was supposed to be in charge Right. But he doesn't get summarily fired because Corrida, who was nominally in charge as the actual chancellor, is like, kind of looks bad for me if I admit that I made a mistake appointing this guy. And she's like, Corcoran, you look terrible. You should take a really long holiday.
Speaker: They have great wine in Chell. Yes. Corcoran's future is that of the failure and alcoholic. Yes. Without a dream.
Speaker: Which was the only thing that was his saving and grace to begin with. Yeah. And that, I think, is an adult book and a pretty sad, as well, a bleak one, I think is the right word. It's a bleak satire on the failures of an underfunded and unconsidered higher education system. And I do think that there that there's a case that that's the book and that be the six students, delightful and distracting as they are, are not the point.
Speaker: Well, you know what they say about literary fiction. It's all about the failures of middle-aged academics. So she's done it. She's finally written a literary fiction novel.
Speaker: but Alright, shall we call it there? Let's call it there. See you next time. See you next time.............
