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S2 Bonus Episode 1 - With Farah Mendlesohn
657 Plays10 days ago
The thing we must notice is frequently identified by what is not described or told or explained.
In our first Season Two bonus episode, Farah Mendlesohn -- who literally wrote the book on Diana Wynne Jones -- joins us to bring a critic and historian's eye to the first two decades of DWJ's career.
Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pUoTY4vf69pSgYCj-nTVKA7DCE_gePEF/view
In our next bonus episode, we'll be covering the short stories of the seventies and eighties as collected in Unexpected Magic and Mixed Magics, including:
Unexpected Magic: "Carruthers" (1972), "Auntie Bea's Day Out" (1978), "The Fluffy Pink Toadstool" (1979), "Dragon Reserve, Home Eight" (1984), "No One" (1984), "The Plague of Peacocks" (1984), "Enna Hittims" (1987), "The Fat Wizard" (1987), "The Green Stone," (1988), and "The Master" (1989)
Mixed Magics: "The Sage of Theare" (1982), "Warlock at the Wheel," (1984), and "Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream" (1986)
And on September 17th we record our Q&A episode for the eighties, so please send us any thoughts before then!
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Transcript
Celebrating Success and Introducing Farah Mendelsohn
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everybody, and welcome to our first bonus episode for our second season of Eight Days of Diana Wood Jones. We're actually going to have
00:00:21
Speaker
to our bonus episode for our second season of eight days of diana woodjos we're actually gonna have a couple of them this year, we're feeling a bit justified in being very self-intelligent this season.
00:00:36
Speaker
As we are recording this, we've just won a Hugo Award. Thank you to everyone who voted for us. What a strange and wonderful thing to have happened. Yeah, thank you very, very much, everybody.
00:00:48
Speaker
And may I direct your attention as well to, there were so many ah excellent nominees for the fancast this year. And if listening to a fancast is a thing you enjoy,
00:00:59
Speaker
you should check out the Coot Street podcast, Hugo Girl, Hugo's There, a Meal of Thorns, and Worldbuilding for Masochists. The final vote was very, very close and justifiably so. There is so much good work being done by enthusiastic fans, and we just feel so lucky and so grateful to have been received so kindly by our listeners this year.
00:01:19
Speaker
i will also say that because there is so much wonderful fan cast work out there, we are officially recusing eight days of Diana Wynne-Jones from future Hugo nominations.
00:01:29
Speaker
We got one. We don't need any more. And we want to celebrate and for everyone to celebrate all the wonderful work that's being done. So thank you very much. We're so happy. We're so grateful. Never again.
00:01:40
Speaker
Yes. Thank you so much. I will also add what I forgot to say in the speech, which is that we won on Diana Wyn Jones' actual birthday. So that seems to be the, you know, that's done. That's that's enough. Thank you so much again.
00:01:54
Speaker
um And today, now we're back here recording and I want to welcome our wonderful guest for our bonus episode. Farah, you want to introduce yourself?
00:02:05
Speaker
Hi, I'm Farah Mendelsohn and I wrote a monograph on Diana Wynne-Jones back in 2005. Yeah, and it's wonderful. Becca and I have been, what we usually do, of course, is pre-read and chat chat in Discord and ah copy paste things at each other.
00:02:23
Speaker
And we have been reading Farrah's monograph the last couple of weeks and we have been having a really, really good time and we are going to make you talk about a lot of things. Yes. it It kicked off a lot of ideas for us, I have to say. like We kept quoting things to each other and then being like, and this makes so much sense and this resonates with this other stuff that we've been talking about.
00:02:40
Speaker
So we're really excited to talk about it this week. um But should we start with 2005? That was actually quite a long time ago now. How has like... What was being a Diana Wynne-Jones scholar like in 2005 and how has it changed?
The Rise of Diana Wynne-Jones' Academic Fanbase
00:02:56
Speaker
So back in 2005, it was just starting to become clear that there was a small but quite committed cohort of academic Diana Wynne-Jones fans.
00:03:08
Speaker
and And I do talk a little about this at the end of the book because I'm a historian. And I think the those are people who are listening to this who don't know my work do need to understand I'm a historian. And I always think historically.
00:03:21
Speaker
And the thing I pointed out is that 25 years had gone by since Diana Wynne-Jones had been really writing at that point. And effectively, if you looked at how old we all were,
00:03:35
Speaker
We had all started reading Diana, not necessarily as she started writing, but within that first five years that she started writing. So we had quite literally grown up with her work.
00:03:49
Speaker
We had been reading since we were eight, nine, ten. And if you look at comments on Diana Wynne-Jones by a previous generation of academics and literary critics, John Roe Townsend is quite a good one.
00:04:03
Speaker
They're really dismissive of her. A very quick way to get incandescent. um aman jones They see her as a minor writer. They don't think fantasy is relevant because this is the height of social realism in British children's literature, ah which is part of why she wrote Wilkins Tooth, to get into print.
00:04:23
Speaker
um Two of her books had already been turned down. And here it came, this new generation that didn't have those prejudices, that had come in through fantasy anyway, that had often had what I, in another book I talked about, the science fiction ready child's reading list.
00:04:44
Speaker
um Because when I was at school, we did so much on Egyptians. We did so much on Greek myth. Although I missed almost all the things that you spotted in Fire and Hemlock. I was daunted by that episode.
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah. We had almost exactly the kind of education that she was writing with, because we were all part of that big post-1950s transformation of British education, which doesn't get talked about much.
00:05:14
Speaker
But although there's a modernisation again in the 1970s and 80s, if you grew up any time between about the 1950s and I'd say about when the national curriculum comes in in the 1990s, there's this kind of shared body of what you should know about Britain, what you should know about the world, the myths and legends you should know, the Bible you should know.
00:05:39
Speaker
All of this stuff was part of a commonality of education. I'm not quite sure it is anymore. So in 2005, there was me, there was Taya Rosenberg,
00:05:52
Speaker
hello There was Martha Hickson, Kathy Butler, who became a very good friend. um I didn't know Kathy. Somebody said to me, did you know somebody else is writing a book?
00:06:03
Speaker
like go But in fact, hers was a comparative. But we got into it and we became, ah if you've read the book, you'll notice that once or twice we reference each other. it It saved each of us a chapter neither of us wanted to watch to write.
00:06:17
Speaker
I didn't want to write the one on archaeology and landscape, which she wasn't keen on. But it made me just cross-reference. um And a couple of other people in Australia...
The Isolation of Early Fandom
00:06:28
Speaker
But there wasn't that kind of mad, enthusiastic fandom. We didn't have any mailing lists.
00:06:34
Speaker
We didn't have Facebook. We didn't have any of that. Stumbling across another Diana Wynne-Jones fan was kind of a real meeting of minds moment. So yeah, definitely a lot lonelier.
00:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, i I have read Kathy Butler's book and it is also fantastic. It gave me a reading list as long as my arm of other things that I've not read because it is a comparative This is the side effect of... Go on.
00:06:58
Speaker
I was just saying, Cathy has the classic English literature training that I don't have. So they're very, very different books. The side effect, I think, of reading Jones and then reading around Jones is you end up with reading lists.
00:07:12
Speaker
ah There is just so much more you can always read for her. I did actually read every single book mentioned in Fire and Hemlock. Oh, Lord, even The Golden Bough? I made a list and I went through every single one because I wanted that sense of what Polly read.
00:07:30
Speaker
There's one author I want to mention that Diana Wynne-Jones doesn't put in that book and it does surprise me. And she's kind of disappeared from the record and I think it's shocking. There is a fairy tale reteller called Ruth Manning Sanders.
00:07:44
Speaker
hu
Influences on Diana Wynne-Jones
00:07:46
Speaker
Books are beautifully illustrated by Brian Jakes. They're just gorgeous. And the reason they're so important is that every time somebody says, oh, and in fairy tales, girls never did anything.
00:07:58
Speaker
I want to shake these books because those books are full books. smart maids, brilliant apprentices, canny young girls who save their sisters.
00:08:12
Speaker
And I do wonder if Diana read them because I see some of the tropes in Diana's books in the Ruth Manning Sanders fairy tales. If you've not come across them, ah they're called things like a book of giants, a book of princess princesses, a book of kings, a book of queens.
00:08:30
Speaker
The dates are right for her to be reading them to her own children. And they were all in the library. and They were all hardbacks in the library. And it was one of those things where if you were in a strange town and you went into the library, because what else would you do?
00:08:42
Speaker
um They were one of the things I would make a beeline for every time. um And they're retellings. And they're clearly linked to the Andrew Lang books, but they're quite different.
00:08:55
Speaker
And they're very, very... Not exactly feminist, but full of strong young girls and strong women. Well, concerned with the problem of the female hero, right? Which is so much one of the foundational questions of her work, or at least her work as we've been reading it so far.
00:09:13
Speaker
yes ah You talk a lot in ah in your book, Farah, about Diana Wynne-Jones as critic and the work of her writing as critical work.
Analyzing Diana Wynne-Jones' Writing
00:09:25
Speaker
And I found that absolutely fascinating as sort of a lens to see the work through, because once I read it, was like, yeah that's right.
00:09:32
Speaker
That's exactly what she's doing. ah So could you like tell us and our listeners a little bit more about Jones's critic and what you mean by that? Before I do, I just want to explain that about that time I got moved into a creative writing department.
00:09:45
Speaker
It's a long story I don't need to summarize here, but they discovered that I knew all these people and publishing and they basically went, we'll have you. What? yeah One of the things i was teaching was a course on critical writing for creative writers, ah because the critical writing that our students turned in was often very bad. LAUGHTER and They tended to do it right at the end and just rush.
00:10:13
Speaker
And the foundation had been running for a decade or more under my partner, Edward James, something called um Professions of Science Fiction. And in fact, Diana had done one in which we asked writers to talk about their writing.
00:10:28
Speaker
And the standards of those were very, very high. And I sort of came into it that way. And also of a book that I recommend to creative writers and particularly PhD d students by Francine Prose called Reading as a Writer, or Reading Like a Writer, which really focuses on the word, the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter.
00:10:50
Speaker
It's a marvellous book. So all of this was swimming around. And the more... Okay, so I read or read enormously widely.
00:11:01
Speaker
I was pretty sick as a teenager and I spent a lot of time at home in bed. And if it was a book, I read it. ah I mean, if you hit the entire fire and hemlock reading list, that's already a year's worth of reading for anybody else.
00:11:14
Speaker
It's one of the distinguishing things about the kind of thing I write. I've just but produced a book that I've literally just delivered on Joanna Ross as a female man. That is so unusual for me because any book by Farah normally covers like a hundred books.
00:11:28
Speaker
ah hu Okay. So when I was reading Diana, I was recognizing all these tropes and all these critiques and and the way she was offering creative writing lessons.
00:11:41
Speaker
And there were one or two real moments. I mean, you're not going to come to it till much later. But in Year of the Griffin, there's a scene where the students are writing their essays. And her depiction of each of those essays is just stunning.
00:11:57
Speaker
I got permission from her to type it up and put it on my my um WordPress account when I still had a ah a blog there. that she was always very engaged. She wrote a brilliant essay about Tolkien and compared Tolkien's movements to opera.
00:12:14
Speaker
And by pure coincidence, I was reading that and Radio 3 were doing three days of the Ring Cycle. ah hear And I ended up reading one book of The Lord of the Rings on each of those days.
00:12:27
Speaker
And blow me, it fits. It fits. If you're a reasonably fast reader, it fits. Oh, my God. And she had picked up that the movements in the books match the Wagnerian movements and tropes and crucially rhythms. Oh, that's what she's doing in Fire and Hemlock, though.
00:12:52
Speaker
ah's And the other thing, I mean, I'm no poet. and But about this time, I was also writing Rhetorics of Fantasy. Now, what was supposed to happen is that Rhetorics of Fantasy was supposed to come out first, followed by the Diana Wynne-Jones book as my, and here is the practical application.
00:13:12
Speaker
But I got chicken pox. And with the chicken pox, I got um fatigue chronic fatigue syndrome. And Wesleyan would give me an extension on the Rhetorics book.
00:13:24
Speaker
And Routledge would give me an extension on the Diana Wynne Jones book. But came out though in the wrong order. um But if you look at them, you can see how just how much the writing the Diana in Jones book influences rhetoric. It's a mutual. I was literally doing a chapter of rhetoric, three chapters of Diana.
00:13:46
Speaker
OK, all the way through. And it that really started to draw my attention to Diana's skill as a poet. And one of my friends who Meredith, Meredith McArdle, who was in charge Diana Wynne Jones official website, had put up an experiment that Diana did in which she wrote a sonnet and then she wrote it as a villanelle ah to vel so and then as something else.
00:14:15
Speaker
And that led me to Stephen Fry's book, The Ode Less Traveled, but that's a different story. So just becoming aware, and I think this is all part of my own shift as a critic, The importance for Diana, not just of the content, but of the way in which she wrote that content.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yeah. One of the pieces I thought was just a so a stunning piece of writing is the opening of The Magicians of Caprono, which I think is right at the 80s, but you're doing in the next season.
00:14:45
Speaker
Is that right? No, we did Magicians of Caprono. It started in the That's right, it started in the 80s. The opening moves us 30 years in time in four paragraphs.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yes. It's astonishing. The structural analysis in your book of the opening of Magicians of Caprona, just what she's doing, the the temporal work that she's doing on a sentence level.
00:15:08
Speaker
the the move from the general to specific paragraph after paragraph. That was just just such ah such a smart piece of analysis. What's striking, though, is that it's really easy to read. She's doing really complex stuff right in a way that it is effortless for a reasonably intelligent 10-year-old to understand. It's beautifully done.
00:15:26
Speaker
and And I think that is part of her gift. I mean, she isn't an entry-level reader. Sorry, I'll say that again. She isn't an entry-level writer. But she writes, I mean, she talks about it herself. She writes with that principle that if the kid doesn't notice it the first time, they'll notice it the second or the third or the fourth. i mean And I do wonder if Asterix was an influence on her on that one.
00:15:52
Speaker
I don't know if kids still read Asterix. Did you read Asterix? Yes. Because I started reading Asterix at my godmother's house when I was five and I was still reading it at her house when I was 16. Oh, wow.
00:16:05
Speaker
And they unpack and they unpack and they unpack. And i I think that set a principle for her that I don't think there are many of her contemporaries or predecessors that do.
00:16:18
Speaker
Right. It does feel like she's an author who writes in a real way to be reread. You know, the the book teaches you as you read it. The book teaches you how to read it, and then she expects you to go back and read it again. And the book teaches you how to read her other books.
00:16:34
Speaker
And then, you know, she expects you to sort of expect you to go on and read more. There's this sense that, you know, every every book is sort of unlocking something. She's not just a critic of other works of other fantastic tropes, but but a self-critic and a self-commentator.
00:16:48
Speaker
I think back in the first episode, I talked about Diana Wynne-Jones as a writer's writer. And I think it is true that I've come across a lot of writers, particularly who have great admiration for her because she trains the kind of reader who goes, oh I could do this myself.
00:17:02
Speaker
and I can do it in layers I don't have to write my novel in one go it's in layers but I do want to mention something and and um you asked me if there things that you didn't talk about or missed in the series I only really have one criticism and it's really a criticism and it was I became very aware of the difference between mine and Diana's generation's experiences with books and libraries and yours as a much younger set of people.
00:17:35
Speaker
And I don't think either of you quite register how hard it was to get books. Yeah. Okay. So Diana expects children to reread because we didn't have enough books.
00:17:48
Speaker
Right. Talking to my friend Caroline Mullen and and my other friend Alison Scott, both big name science fiction fans, the thing they most notice about their their daughters is that their daughters never had to reread because there was always something new to read.
00:18:05
Speaker
there was always something new coming out. Or you mentioned something about, well, would a child be able to get X in the library? The libraries didn't start purging stock until the end of the 1980s. And it was essentially because they were broke and they were selling books to try and make some money.
00:18:20
Speaker
And then it just became part of this where we can't keep expanding, so we sell books off. But when I was a kid, the library was out, the children's section was full of ancient 19th century books.
00:18:33
Speaker
that had been there since the library opened in the big expansion of the 1890s. So that whole reading experience was just very, very different.
00:18:45
Speaker
And but I don't know if you've read Joe Walton's Among Others. Yes. Okay. I predicted it would win the Hugo. And I predicted it would win the Hugo on the basis of demographics.
00:18:56
Speaker
ah hu Because at that point, the Hugo voters were still a majority my age and older. And we had the same reading experience as her. Yep. well Everybody I spoke to just five years younger than me.
00:19:11
Speaker
So not much. So I'm 57 now. So we'll be talking 53. Had not had the experience of everybody reading the same books because it was the only stuff you could get. Yeah, that's fascinating. I remember reading Among Others and it has this glorious specificity. It spoke to such a very clear, precise experience that was not my experience. no like I could see that this was a very, a very true book. And I always enjoy that in a book, a sense of deep truth. It's one of the things I enjoy most about Joseph's work.
00:19:42
Speaker
and Actually, it is a book I would compare to Fire and Hemlock for that sense of reading as discovery of self-discovery. But I will say that although it's true that, you know, a shortage of books was never a danger when I was growing up.
00:19:58
Speaker
But I do think in terms of Joan's writing to be reread, I do think that that is still true of children. And that specifically true of children and not adults. And perhaps a gift that you have as a children's writer is that when a child finds something that they like, they will reread it yeah over and over and over again, regardless of how many other things they have on tap. So I read, you know, I've,
00:20:19
Speaker
I've said before, and it's true, I can't remember the first time I read Jones, because what I remember is just the experience of rereading her over and over again, because she was the author I liked best to read. And there were several times reading your book, Farrah, where I um was really struck by the experience of having been someone who I i do think, and I think perhaps reading your book ah really drove this home for me, was taught to read by Jones, because you'd mentioned something that was sort of an accepted piece of wisdom that Jones is subverting. And I'd be like, well, i've I've never believed that in my heart. I think there was there was something where you commented about, you know, if we have a first person narrator, we expect that first person narrator to be reliable.
00:20:56
Speaker
Well, I've never thought that. And I was like, but of course, my first first person narrations were in Jones's work. So of course, you know, she taught me to expect that there would always be something under there that we're, you know, that the first person narration is limited and unreliable.
Children's Literature and Identity in Jones' Work
00:21:10
Speaker
There's things you don't know. So I do think that there's, you know, and she's she's very smart to write for children as the writer that she is in a way, as as she said in a couple of her essays, you can be more complicated when you're writing for children because children will go back and catch it and will understand the second time if they like it.
00:21:27
Speaker
And you talked in your book, Farrah, about the child reader as kind of a construction that exists in the mind of adults and how Jones seems to have a different idea of the child reader to met to many others.
00:21:40
Speaker
That's actually part of a very long rant on my part that got longer and angrier as years went on. Let's hear it. I love a rant. Give us the rant. Well, nobody talks about the adult reader.
00:21:53
Speaker
Nobody talks about the gatekeeping that goes on for adult readers. Nobody talks about the difference between the adult writer and the adult reader. I'm afraid, to put it really, really bluntly, I think Jacqueline Rose is talking bullshit.
00:22:09
Speaker
For those who don't know it, Jacqueline Rose is a theorist who argues that the child is a construction in the mind of adults and that there can be no such thing as a true children's book because children don't write children's books.
00:22:21
Speaker
okay And I kind of know where she's coming from, but I know where she's coming from because I'm an adult who doesn't remember much of my childhood. And I have a strong suspicion that Jacqueline Rose is an adult who doesn't remember much of her childhood.
00:22:36
Speaker
But most children's writers do. They are people who remember their childhood. It's one of the things they have in common. And even those of us who don't remember our childhood are still that person for all that we change.
00:22:52
Speaker
So that this is just purely personal. I was very sick from the age of 12 to the age of 30 when they finally figured out I had celiac. People who knew me as a child recognized me.
00:23:05
Speaker
People who knew me as a teenager don't. oh And I find it fascinating. They say I'm just like I was as a child. I don't remember that. Okay. I am still fundamentally little Farah. You are still fundamentally little Rebecca, little Emily. And I just find this entire concept, because obviously children shift according to cultures, you know, that we have different expectations, but that's not the same as saying there's no such thing as the child.
00:23:36
Speaker
And, What Jones did or dot does in her work, however we want to see it, and what really good writers do, is that they understand that there is no such thing as the child. There are children.
00:23:48
Speaker
And children are different from each other. Yep. They bond differently. And they act differently. And they are not some kind of homogenous block. Right. I mean, even in terms of a cultural response to something, two children can respond completely differently because they have different personalities.
00:24:09
Speaker
And frankly, most parents know this. Anybody who's ever owned a dog or a cat knows this. yeah ah To deviate slightly, I had dreams of taking my puppy with me across Britain on a road trip.
00:24:22
Speaker
My puppy takes one look at the car and says, Mama, you are killing me.
00:24:28
Speaker
I named her after a a famous fast driver, Miss Friny Fisher. We hit 60, the dog starts whining. So this idea that there is just the child and Jones is one of the writers who have clearly has no truck with it.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yes. And I do think that that's one of the things that we've been kind of identifying in her books. Emma, I remember your your point on and Homeward Bounders, which I think about constantly.
00:24:57
Speaker
um about how much Jones is constantly, like clearly she remembers being a child. She is constantly identifying with the child. Her childhood comes through in every book. And the contrast between, or that that the sort of,
00:25:13
Speaker
I hate to say use the word liminal space, but the shifting borderlands between childhood and adulthood, between seeing yourself as child and seeing yourself as adult, and the weirdness of stepping over into those spaces feels like a concern, especially in the 80s, that is coming up over and over again. Right.
00:25:32
Speaker
It's a thing about, say, both Jamie in The Homeward Bounders and Howard in Archer's Goon, that they are simultaneously the child and the adult. They are both this this ancient figure and this this young person who doesn't know what's going on or what to do about it.
00:25:47
Speaker
and You never lose the child you were. You keep being that person. And yet, yes, I mean, I think I talked about this in the chapter on on a a Yes.
00:26:00
Speaker
Because Jones doesn't write about puberty and yet she is always writing about puberty. Yes. These are kids who are discovering they have new talents.
00:26:14
Speaker
They don't feel comfortable in their bodies anymore, which we get to see very vividly in Archer's Goon, which is... but My favourites change, but I'd say Archer's Goon is a pretty consistent favourite. So good. Yes.
00:26:26
Speaker
Such a good one. And that way that Howard grows out of his body ah could, um and Fine does that very well as well. She's one of the few non-fantasy writers I read a lot of.
00:26:39
Speaker
Yeah. And that sense also, well, in the sense I just talked about it for myself, my experience was more dramatic than most, that you go through this phase in which you don't know who you are, who you are seems to be changing rapidly. But when you get to the other side of it, which we do see in Howl's Moving Castle, you discover you are still that person.
00:27:04
Speaker
But you are a more specific version of that person. I think that there's something about, I was really struck by a point you made, speaking of Archer's goon, about the siblings and Hathaway. And Hathaway as kind of limiting himself by having made adult choices. He's he's restricted himself from the freedom that his other siblings experienced.
00:27:25
Speaker
in running around and causing problems and being powerful and playing God in this town by moving to the past, by starting a family, by living as an adult, which clearly makes him a more trustworthy and admirable person, but also is a real limitation. And one of the things that I think, you know, I was looking at that, thinking about that in looking at Jones's protagonist as they make adult choices, which I think is, you know, is a point that you make out that something they're often called upon to do.
00:27:52
Speaker
And those adult those choices, the adult choices are often limiting ones, they cut off a path of potential in order to, you know, in order to to make a choice that seems correct or correct for them.
00:28:06
Speaker
and that will lead them towards the kind of adult that they want to become. But that necessarily cuts off certain paths of the adults that they might be. So a small correction. Athway doesn't choose to live in the past.
00:28:18
Speaker
He gets trapped there. hu And I think that's significant because he's forced to live with what he's chosen, what's happened, and therefore starts to grow up.
00:28:32
Speaker
And I think it's more... that Jones is very much about consequences. Once you turn this corner, you have to work with where you're at. You can't turn back.
00:28:46
Speaker
Well, you can sometimes. oh I mean, if you think about Polly, she's made a wrong choice.
Themes of Trauma and Memory
00:28:54
Speaker
We're told very firmly in um Time of the Ghost, you can't travel to the past. You cannot change the past. You can only change how you remember it.
00:29:03
Speaker
Exactly. You can change how you remember it. And this, of course, is all about trauma as well. You can change how you respond to it. You can choose to go beyond the trauma. You can choose to face the trauma. You can choose to tackle the trauma.
00:29:18
Speaker
And those are choices you retain, but you can't do the childish thing. And here we go to Tale of Time City, which you've just done, which is to go back and change the past.
00:29:30
Speaker
Right. And I think that's a pretty constant thing. And it does sometimes make me wonder what it was Jones would have liked to have changed. Yeah. ah Because it is a a fairly strong trope.
00:29:43
Speaker
You can't change the past. Well, only people who would have liked to change the past would harp on that particular trope. I do think it's, it is so hard to resist the biographical when you're reading Jones.
00:29:56
Speaker
It is so hard not to go, Diana, tell me all your secrets. I'm suspecting the shapes of many of your secrets. And I can see you do not like your mother. Yeah.
00:30:09
Speaker
I don't know if that's true. Yeah, she's ah complicated. i find tight um Time of the Ghost very hard because I had a very difficult relationship with my mother.
00:30:23
Speaker
ah But it's my husband who pointed out to me, yes, but it was still a very close one. And I think Diana's issues with her mother might have been from what what I've heard Isabel say.
00:30:36
Speaker
might have been in that same framework where, you have a very difficult relationship with a parent. You don't like the way they behave, but there are really strong links about passions, things you care about, the way you express yourself, the full knowledge that you are just like her in key ways.
00:31:01
Speaker
You know? And I think it's with, with Jones, the reason it's so complex is because she's constantly reacting to her mother in a way that somebody who was simply distant from her mother would not. Yes, it does. It absolutely does. And I do think that to go back to the child and the adult, um you know, one of the things that is striking to me about Diana Wynne-Jones books is if you look at her adults, especially her unsympathetic adults,
00:31:29
Speaker
there's always an echo of the child protagonist in them. They're always someone that the child grew up to be. And you can always see, in almost all cases, you can see a trapped child in the unpleasant adult. oh Yes. The one I keep thinking about is Lenina in Cart and Quidder, which is fairly early. Yeah.
00:31:45
Speaker
um But both ah the way that she is obviously a very, very unhappy woman, but the enormous sympathy for her unhappiness is never outright stated, I think, more implied and morals similarity to her, her coolness and her dishonesty.
00:32:03
Speaker
Jones would have known quite a lot of Leninas. I don't know if you've read Virginia Nicholson's book Singled Out on the surplus women after the First World War. ah One quite common pattern was marrying down socially.
00:32:18
Speaker
h So the there was a general man shortage, but in particular, the lieutenant problem. Yes.
00:32:28
Speaker
like I actually know about this from a different angle from being obsessed with Tolkien, where the vast majority of his social group had that level of society got wiped out. because they lot of leave from the front So a lot of Jones's peers have older single women in them. Joan Aitken has a lot of older single women. yeah You find see a lot of them in Agatha Christie.
00:32:49
Speaker
These are all the women who never married, whether they wanted to or not. But the other thing that Virginia Nicholson noted was quite a lot of of middle class women marrying social inferiors.
00:33:02
Speaker
And I suspect Jones knew these women. I mean, my grandmother didn't quite do that because she was a working class woman. But she married an intellectual inferior for a completely different reason, which was that the guy she fell in love with wasn't Jewish.
00:33:15
Speaker
Wasn't going to happen. And she I picked up from my dad, who was quite close to in age, that she was kind of manoeuvred into marriage. And when I think back, I realize it was a similar kind of marriage where you have two parties, one of whom is much more in love than the other.
00:33:35
Speaker
And the other is desperately trying to do her duty. Uh-huh. Yeah. In ways are kind of poisonous, even as they they're absolutely doing their duty and doing their best.
Generational Norms and History
00:33:48
Speaker
Yep. And it's a period where most women needed to marry. i mean... jo i have no I know nothing about Jones's marriage, but she too belonged to a generation in which you got married, you had kids.
00:34:02
Speaker
The women who didn't do that were either making a very strong conscious choice and one they would have had to have more or less fought for. Or they didn't get married and everybody felt sorry for them.
00:34:13
Speaker
And the two weren't necessarily unrelated, you know. And again, I think this is a generational difference because my mother's generation was still part of that. I mean, my mom should never have had a kid ever.
00:34:26
Speaker
But what you did was you got married and you had kids. Yeah. Yeah. yeah Although and i I think there are places where that shows up which week, you know, the stepmother doesn't really want to be a stepmother to young girls, you know, but you have to get married.
00:34:43
Speaker
And the hats are all telling people who they're going to marry, what they're going to do. There were no other options. The one that always gets to me is Astrid in Eight Days of Luke. Yes.
00:34:54
Speaker
who has Oh, Astrid is a brilliant depiction. what and yeah what and what What an extraordinary character from such an early book as well. she is yeah um So Astrid's story of marrying someone who is clearly a nothing, a worthless man.
00:35:09
Speaker
but The pattern of the worthless men who are going to appear in Diana Wynne Jones all throughout the next few decades. I was saying it's sort of in this pattern of complicated married women in Jones, ah she stands out as like an early figure of great sympathy, sorrow. Is it worth it to be happy just for a little while? Mm-hmm.
00:35:30
Speaker
which But it's not just about that, is it? It's economic dependence. Yes. And that book in some ways is actually Jones's most feminist because it's a book that says what Astrid needs is a job.
00:35:44
Speaker
What Astrid needs is her own bank account. When that book was written, women could only had only just started to be able to get their own independent bank accounts.
00:35:54
Speaker
My mother had to get her dad to sign the mortgage papers. Right. Yeah. And this is, I think, some of the stuff you we're starting to lose as the books are getting... older in that things that I recognize are not necessarily familiar to you yeah and they become part of that historical background to the books but the fact that we need to do that gives an idea of the depth in the books we yeah we oh yeah um Maren I'm going to get her name wrong Marnanel Thurman is actually writing a glossary for the Diana Wynne Jones books
00:36:29
Speaker
Oh my gosh. She's been doing it on one of the Facebooks and she sends it around and asks those of us who are older to comment because the stuff she's missing is exactly this kind of thing. Right. yeah Or in um Homeward Bounders, it was far more obvious to me where Jamie was at the beginning than it would have been to you because that Britain was still all around me.
00:36:54
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Although... Speaking of Lenina and Astrid, I am very excited to get to the 80s for a number of reasons, but the figure that always, as far as thwarted childhood, constrained adulthood, that always really stands out to me, and perhaps the first time that she's doing this from, it's not a trapped woman trapped into marriage, but a man trapped into a profession, ah is Gabriel DeWitt, the yeah Christopher's crustomancy, which...
00:37:23
Speaker
I think it's such a clear portrait of how this kind of entrapment sneaks on you for the expectations that settle on you and the duty that settles on you and that you can't i amm trying so hard not to just start talking about lives of Christopher Chan because I will not shut up.
00:37:40
Speaker
But again, you see, so It's only really in the 1950s that people stopped doing what their dads did. one You know, a working class kid, your dad had a job in the factory, your mum had a job in the factory, you went into the same factory.
00:37:56
Speaker
If your dad was a doctor, the chances were you'd become a doctor. um Immigrant families are slightly different, but I kind of broke the mould by not being a doctor, dentist or lawyer. Well, and Jamie's, you know, the the start of Homeward Bounders is Jamie pushing back against being expected to do what his father does. But the 1950s and the grammar school system, for all my criticisms of it, broke all that.
00:38:23
Speaker
You got a scholarship to the grammar school. You were being told your future would be different. So all around Diana are all these people who did jobs because that's what they did in your your family.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it's such a different world that we live in. I mean, some professions are still quite hereditary. Being a doctor still is, which slightly surprised me.
00:38:49
Speaker
But mostly at all levels of society, there is no idea that you will do this thing. So Gabriel might seem an anomaly when actually he was kind of the norm.
00:39:02
Speaker
ah um which may actually be why hobbies were so very important to those generations. You know that space to do the thing you really loved because there was no chance of doing it as your day job.
00:39:13
Speaker
Not at all. And I do think that so many of her children are resisting being crammed into a shape that doesn't fit. You know, this is really striking in Time of the Ghost when...
00:39:26
Speaker
there' all of the All of the girls are constantly being told, this is who you will grow up to be. yeah And this is this is the space in which you will fit. and I think you did mention this, but of course you have to remember that kids left school earlier.
00:39:39
Speaker
Yes. yeah I mean, even middle class kids would have been out of school between 16 and 18. And many working class kids would, I mean, in my year, we had a girl leave from the top set the day she turned 16.
00:39:53
Speaker
Yeah. And Sophie Hatter in Howl's Moving Castle at 16 or 17 is an adult. You know, that that is a children's book about adults. Yes. My dad left at 15, but he reminded me that he went to night school and that wasn't that unusual for for kids after they left school.
00:40:11
Speaker
That, yes, you got a job, but you didn't stop your education. A lot of community education has vanished over the last few decades. A lot of stuff that's not the formal ah secondary school, university.
00:40:22
Speaker
The other options that have been rejected. That's because Blair brought in the rule of of progression? Yeah. If you didn't progress, you couldn't be kept on.
00:40:33
Speaker
And the problem was that night schools couldn't manage large enough classes. So my dad lost his Spanish class because they couldn't get enough students for the intermediate level.
00:40:45
Speaker
and he and he wasn't allowed to keep going with beginners. So there's all sorts of things like that. Yeah. But let's get back to Jones. Well, I was going to say that actually gets back a bit, I think, to the idea of you know, that this this tension of whether adulthood is a fixed space, whether you can go back and and from from a position of adulthood, from a position of the future, say, go back and reimagine the past, re-envision the past and become someone different through it. I think that, you know, one of the things that really struck me combining your analysis of the way time travel works in Jones's work with having just read Time City is that I think that there's this idea
00:41:22
Speaker
of the past as a re-imaginable space, a space that's not entirely fixed. You can't change the past, but you can change how you remember it and changing how you remember it changes it. um how there's There's a quote of yours that really struck me that I'm going to go look for about... Ah, right, okay. um So you say, jod constructs her legends in the spaces between historical time, which is not unlike the idea of stable and unstable eras in a tale of time city, in which the unstable eras are defined by the stable ones around them.
00:41:53
Speaker
As already seen, the structure is repeated like a Russian doll down to the ground level of Jones's work. The things we must notice is frequently identified by what is not described or told or explained.
00:42:04
Speaker
So there's this idea of, of the, you know, the, the past or the the interstitials, the spaces in between is almost a colonisable space. you can You can go back and it's it's malleable. You can make it fit to what you want it to be.
00:42:18
Speaker
Gosh, I was feeling clever the day I wrote that. Yes, but I'm just trying to think, looking at the list of 1980s books, I think the book it's most interesting about is Homeward Banders, ah where we see glimpses of time periods that we, but Jamie doesn't, we recognize, but Jamie doesn't.
00:42:48
Speaker
h So at one point he's very clearly in the middle of the first world war. Yeah. Yeah. but but The mud war sequence is actually, I think one of the most effective in the book. And he therefore constructs a history that is a,
00:43:08
Speaker
It's a chronology, it's not a history. Yeah. And I think you can compare what he constructs to what Time City constructs. Yes. And Time City thinks it's a history.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah. And it's not, it's a chronology. And this is where we get into the real nuances of being a historian, where the past is not history. When people say, yes, but what really happened?
00:43:35
Speaker
Historians will often flounder because apart from like, well, X got assassinated.
00:43:41
Speaker
a lot of the past isn't made up of things that really happened in in quite the way that non-historians Right. Think of it.
00:43:53
Speaker
It's made up of perspectives that people have on what they think happened. It's made up of individuals with points of view. Oh, and I can actually give you a classic one.
00:44:04
Speaker
The number of people who tell me that clause 28 closed down conversation about homosexuality. And as anybody who actually lived through that period will tell you, what conversation about homosexuality?
00:44:18
Speaker
We barely had sex education. You know, the nearest we had to that was giggling about the gym teachers. And yet there is this narrative. OK, and that narrative is not wholly wrong, because ironically, the Clause 28 marches opened up the very conversation that Mrs. Thatcher was trying to shut down that didn't exist before she tried to shut it down.
00:44:42
Speaker
So. I think that that's quite a good one. And I think that comes over very well in A Tale of Time City. Before we carry on with that, though, I want to come from back briefly to the issue of adulthood.
00:44:55
Speaker
I've totally forgotten his name, but the Sempiton. we see him resisting adulthood. And I don't think this is something you mentioned in your episode, which was quite brilliant, by the way. But we see him, he's got to be somewhere on time. And and we start by thinking he's just very careless and disorganized.
00:45:14
Speaker
And we start to realize that as with Gabriel, actually, he doesn't really like his role. But unlike Gabriel, he has found a way to project beyond it, to to turn it into a performance that he can live with.
00:45:28
Speaker
yeah um And it's amazingly funny. It is amazingly funny. It is that moment of connection between him and Vivian as the adult and child. She is the only one who sees that he's funny. He's right good on purpose hes being childish and it's brilliant.
00:45:46
Speaker
It is, of course, the Emperor's New Clothes seed, isn't it? Mm-hmm. but that Vivian all the way through the book, because she is the the naive child, in fact, the whole book is the Emperor's New Clothes, she sees through all of these things that she is told she should admire, be respectful of, etc., etc., etc. I mean, in that way, ru Jones is a terribly subversive writer.
00:46:12
Speaker
She tells children, look again. yes Do not believe what you are told necessarily. Question everything. Look behind the curtain um to go forward to Christopher.
00:46:24
Speaker
Pinch the the window, see what opens up. which Which brings me actually to something you said in your book about guides. I got to the chapter you wrote on what you call portal quest fantasy, which I love as a framing, really love as a framing. I'm going to summarize for our listeners.
00:46:42
Speaker
um Portal fantasy, of course, has been a standard of children's literature for a really long time. ah It is child A goes through portal to fantasy land B and explores it.
00:46:54
Speaker
So things like Alice in Wonderland or Narnia are portal fantasies. The quest fantasy is a standard of adult fantasy in which... a young person from nowhere in particular discovers they have to go on a quest and goes on a sort of extended travelogue of fantasy land. I think the point you made is that these are the same.
00:47:13
Speaker
The only difference is that in one you're explicitly jumping from one world to another and the other it's implied. But you talk about the guide as a portal quest figure. Tell us about the the guides and Jonesian guides.
00:47:27
Speaker
Well, the guide is the person who claims they know all about the world and is going to take you through it.
Portal Quest Fantasy and Unreliable Narrators
00:47:32
Speaker
But what they show you is only what they want you to see. And they're going to tell you what's right and wrong.
00:47:38
Speaker
And they may be unreliable. They may be lying. They may have an agenda all of their own. um Homeward Bounders is interesting in these terms because Jamie actually becomes the guide for other people.
00:47:52
Speaker
Yeah. And he doesn't understand what he's doing. He's picked up all this knowledge and he's got knowledge from other people, but he's making half of it up as he goes along. And sometimes he's wrong.
00:48:04
Speaker
He wants to look impressive, but also he doesn't know what he doesn't know. Yes. yeah And that turns out to be absolutely crucial at the end that he doesn't know things, as we discussed. ah I'm just looking through the 80s ones.
00:48:18
Speaker
How's Moving Castle? I'm not sure. You asked me to talk about this, but actually they don't appear. There are no guides in the 1980s books as such. That's why I find it interesting that she shes she resists the the the guide as a figure. I mean, we have a brief one in Howl's Moving Castle where we have that classic portal where Howl takes Sophie into his world.
00:48:40
Speaker
But he doesn't really tell her anything and he kind of leaves her to figure it out by herself, which she does, but she totally misprisions it. She gets it completely wrong in ways that are very, very funny.
00:48:52
Speaker
and very creative and and very challenging. Polly has no guide, except that Tom is feeding her narratives to function a Is Tom not her guide?
00:49:03
Speaker
No, no. Tom is not the guide because Tom is not allowed to. Tom is not allowed to tell her stuff. So Tom, in some ways, is the mute guide, the the guide who who cannot take her through fairyland.
00:49:16
Speaker
In fact, the nearest guide figure is Granny. Tom is just throwing books at her head. yeah yeah one Take a look at this.
00:49:28
Speaker
um And that may actually be quite important because the one of say if i just finished up because I'm thinking aloud here. One of the things we learn is that the answer is not the same each time.
00:49:41
Speaker
So that if Tom had guided Polly, it wouldn't have worked. right And that might be a factor there. I think if we go all the way back to Wilkins tooth,
00:49:55
Speaker
the guide in that is the Caribbean boy, Wilkins. He goes and asks his mum, what do we do? And his mum provides guidance and he's much the smartest of the kids.
00:50:09
Speaker
But again, he and and the female Frankie are all having... to piece bits together. So if anything, we're kind of making our own guidebook as we go.
00:50:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's the thing that's really striking about how Jones does the Portal Quest fantasy, right? Is that the answers are never just from one place and never fully trustworthy. You know, even as Tom is chucking books at Polly saying, you'll find the answers here.
00:50:39
Speaker
What Polly is finding is that the answers that she finds are incomplete and sometimes wrong. And the thing that she learns from one book can't be taken from another book or the the thing that she's told is the answer is an incomplete answer.
00:50:50
Speaker
that won't save her yeah or won't save Tom in the way that Tom expects it to. you know Tom expects Tam Lin, hold on as long as you can, to be the answer to solve that problem. And it's not. It's wrong. It's incomplete.
00:51:02
Speaker
And I think increasingly, you know one of the things that we've we've been talking about through the 70s and 80s is the sort of shift from the story that unlocks the plot to the story that forms part of the plot but can't be relied on is missing a piece is misunderstood um i think often the books that have gone before are guides but you know in what you've been talking about the diana wendellans's critic they're guides that you have to question they're guides that you have to put in context with each other and learn when the lessons that they are giving you are the wrong lessons um are you know if howl is
00:51:37
Speaker
Sophie's guide he is the worst guide imaginable. doesn't tell her anything. I think that most encodes that is the time of the ghost because the girls are constantly learning the wrong lessons, partially because they've never been fed enough information.
00:51:51
Speaker
They don't really have enough information for anything. And they're getting caught up in that awful thing adults do where they think they've told you enough and But they haven't because you're a kid and you don't have the background for the thing they started telling you.
00:52:10
Speaker
Or they equate being smart with knowing things and they're not the same thing. I mean, I think if we're looking at a portrayal of the disaster of adolescence, Time of the Ghost is probably top of my list. yeah And the everybody in that book is making a disaster of their own adolescence, including, I so including i suspect, the parents.
00:52:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You know? And these are people who clearly didn't want children and wouldn't have had children if they could possibly have helped it, you know. so yeah, I think all of that is part of that.
00:52:42
Speaker
There aren't any actual guides in these books, but there are ways to construct guides. The closest they come in Time of the Ghost to having a good idea is when Cart decides we need to communicate with the ghost immediately.
00:52:58
Speaker
It's in one of these books. Haven't we got classical education here somewhere? We need a pool of blood. I know that bit, but that that's the closest you get to an actual, the answer is here. It's definitely in a book I've read somewhere. I remember one bit of it.
00:53:13
Speaker
And even then. yeah no go for it. No, no, you first. I was going to say that the the only reason that works is that the ghost, Sally, is combining the knowledge from the book, the blood, which at first doesn't seem like it's going to work. It seems like a bad idea, like the kind of thing that Monaghan wants her to do.
00:53:30
Speaker
And then she has to combine it with her own reiterated, reframed experience as an adult of the blood donation in order for it to become a positive thing. Right, because you reframe the past not by changing it, but by changing your interpretation with your but your knowledge that you have gained.
00:53:49
Speaker
It has to be your interpretation. The thing that you bring with you from your own experiences. I think that was the other thing that really struck me about the Portal Quest fantasy is I think that, you know, in your ah very very good critique of the standard shape of this sort of book as a travelogue, which is deeply concerned with describing the two in ways that are just purely descriptive. Here's the the pleasure of looking around and seeing a new place, but not really interpretive.
00:54:15
Speaker
ah not really distinct or specific to the vision of the person experiencing it. And I think the thing that Danowyn Jones does is she's always very deeply concerned with the from, with the specifics of what the person who is portal questing is bringing to that experience and how their specific framing alters it.
00:54:37
Speaker
I was halton inside out and just thinking, the obvious guide is Jonathan in Tale of Time City. And ah first of all, he doesn't know the things he thinks he knows.
00:54:55
Speaker
That's to start with. the the time tale The time city he knows is is quite shallow. It's a child's view of the city. But in addition, Vivian is busy refusing to be the guided.
00:55:07
Speaker
yeah She won't be. She won't allow us. We're all giggling because my cat has decided he wants to be picked up and played with. He has opinions. yeah He has very definite opinions as well. um and And this is perfectly okay because Diana loved cats and cats are... Right, I was going to say there are a lot of cats in Diana Wynne Jones that he could provide an opinion on. Absolutely. um But I think, yes, Vivian in a sense is refusing to be guided.
00:55:37
Speaker
And that's something that Jonathan does not know how to handle. And of course, if we're actually going to see that book, I hadn't really thought about this until he was we started talking. A Tale of Time City has all the people you would have on a quest fantasy because it has the wizard sitting in his tower.
00:55:55
Speaker
ah hu It has Jonathan, who is the native. It has Sam, who is the thief. It's Elio who is our elf. Oh my God.
00:56:06
Speaker
Oh my God, you're right. And now I have paid you back for that bit at the end where I'm going, what do you mean they're the same people as the time lady and the time lord? but How did I write an entire chapter on Time Games and miss that, of course, ah sir they're Vivian and Jonathan?
00:56:28
Speaker
I'm not the only one. i i didn't actually put a giveaway. I said, you have to listen to the end of this. And my entire feed is going, oh, my God, they're right. They're right. How did we miss that? Oh, my God. How did we miss it?
00:56:40
Speaker
To go back your point about child readers and there are My reactions were 50% split between people who, like me, were like, oh my god,
Re-reading Jones' Rich Narratives
00:56:51
Speaker
obviously.
00:56:51
Speaker
And people who, mostly younger people than me, who read Time City even younger than I did, who were like, is that not just textural? I just, I've always assumed that was the book. yeah
00:57:03
Speaker
Totally missed it. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. One of the reasons why Jones is so good to reread is that she just keeps working for you. There's always more. You can come back and go, what?
00:57:16
Speaker
It is a testimony, both I will say, and I want to say this formally, to the brilliance of the podcast. Oh, but also to the brilliance of Diana. um i i once read an article comparing Diana's work and and the work of ah somebody who we will no longer name. And my main reaction was, what's the point?
00:57:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. because yeah You've got one writer who tells a story, and I'm not going to deny that that person is a rattling good storyteller, but that is all there is to it.
00:57:47
Speaker
And then you have this author who, let's be honest, we could have spent this entire hour talking about three paragraphs. yeah Yeah, so easily. And we would have brought three completely different things to it.
00:58:01
Speaker
And we would have missed the fourth thing that Kathy or Deborah or Martha Hicks said or one of the, or Gilly or one of the other rabid fans, because we are pretty rabid about this. Oh, yeah. um would ah Would have spotted.
00:58:12
Speaker
One of my favorite things about doing this podcast has been after every episode, some will go, well, didn't you notice this? And I'll go, oh, my God. Oh my God. i ah like i got I re-listened to the Time City episode and went, we didn't talk about movies at all. In a book where the main character is named Vivian Smith and there's a Vivian Lee, we just did not talk about Vivian Lee.
00:58:37
Speaker
And speaking of Portal Fantasy, the Wizard of Oz references are all through that book. All over it. And I've just realised there is a classic Portal Fantasy and it's not one you covered. It's Warlock at the Wheel. oh It's a longest short story, for those people listening, set in the Crestomancy universe, in which a slightly seedy warlock escapes the ending of Charmed Life by buying a ticket to another world.
00:59:02
Speaker
But in a trope that Pratchett actually uses in Jingo, he goes cheap. And because he goes goes cheap, he finds himself stealing this motor car, which has this little girl in the back. And the warlock has been told that in this world, somebody would be bullied and somebody will be the bully.
00:59:23
Speaker
And he assumes that he... will be the bully. And he is a oh ah so wrong. ah But it is ah proper portal fantasy in which he's desperately trying to figure out what the hell is going on and mostly failing.
00:59:40
Speaker
It's very, very funny. So this is maybe a good time to mention that our next bonus episode that we're planning to do is we are going to do some of the short stories so thank you for the incredible segue um i think that our plan I've got the list up if you want me to just give us the list so I basically went through all Diana Wynne Jones stories we could get our hands on ah which is if you want the collections you want unexpected magic and mixed magics and we are going to read through the ones from the 70s and 80s which is not counting the ones for younger readers so we're we're skipping who got rid of Angus Flint for now
01:00:17
Speaker
Oh, don't, don't, don't, don't. It's fantastic. we I know it is. I have read it to my children. But it's not one we're doing yet. Right. Okay. So we're going to do Carruthers, Auntie B's Day Out, The Fluffy Pink Toadstool, um The Sage of Thear, Dragon Reserve Home 8, No One, The Plague of Peacocks, Warlock at the Wheel, Carol O'Neill's Hundredth Dream, which to me is like thee the Diana Wynne-Jones short story.
01:00:42
Speaker
ah Enna Hittims, The Fat Wizard, The Green Stone, think we couldn't get hold of Mila Worms ah but The Master as well and that brings us up to 1989 so that is two decades of short stories most of them from the 80s which really does seem to be just like a period of intense productivity she wrote so much And we will be reading all of them and talking about probably not all of them, depending how long we have to record, talking about the ones we have the most to say about ah for next time.
01:01:13
Speaker
One of the ones that we're not doing for this one, but I think that we will be doing for the 90s, because even though it was written in the 60s, it was published, I believe, in the 90s, is the one that you talk about quite extensively in your book, The True State of Affairs, which I'm very excited to get to, speaking of portable fantasy.
01:01:29
Speaker
Yeah, I got to that chapter when there's more Delmark. Yeah, I'm actually had to skip a lot of the Delvark stuff because you're trying really hard to be unspoiled for Crown.
01:01:41
Speaker
I don't know why I have a blank spot in my memory where Crown should be, but you guys are all going to get the benefit of it when I re-experience Crown as if for the first time. And of course, Crown is a portal fantasy.
01:01:51
Speaker
Crown is ah exactly a classic portal fantasy. um And it's... We won't talk about here because you want to hold on to it, but it's... it For an author who has such a range, It and Dragon Reserve Home 8 are the two pieces that feel least Diana Wynne-Jones to me.
01:02:14
Speaker
It doesn't mean they're good, but they both feel hop out of kid I love Dragon Reserve Home Age, but I think I told you on Twitter for years I thought it was a Jane Yolen story.
01:02:29
Speaker
For some reason, doesn't feel like a Diana story to me, even though I absolutely love it. And Crown of Dalemark, same thing. Well, I do think the thing that I think is going be really interesting about Crown and about the 90s in general, which I guess brings us a little bit to looking forward, a thing that we don't do on the normal episodes, but I think we're allowed to do a bit here.
01:02:50
Speaker
is that, again, returning to this idea of Diana Wynne Jones' critic, in the 90s is when she's built up enough of sort of an oeuvre of her work that she can start to look critically at her own past work.
01:03:04
Speaker
I think that's one of the themes of the the back half of her career, say the 90s and thousands, is she's doing a lot. I mean, we've we've seen it even in the 80s, right? There are books that we've hit that feel like like another run at a book. I think even earlier, I think Spellcoats does feel like a rerun of Power of Three.
01:03:21
Speaker
um She's always been metafictional, critical, but it does go onto the next level in the 90s. Like both Christopher Chant and Crown of Dalemark feel like books that could not have been written without the desire to really think back and synthesize and pull together the things learned by writing earlier books.
01:03:41
Speaker
I think that's true. This is not an, I mean, it's why we're here. This is not an author who ever stands still. I mean, I don't like some of the latest books very much right at the very end. I i think they they start, problems start to emerge, but those books of the nineties are really rethinking some of her her ideas. And,
01:04:01
Speaker
And also starting to be aware that, yes, she's still writing for kids, but that she now has this audience that has grown up and still want to read her.
01:04:13
Speaker
And I'm very carefully saying she's not writing for adults. She only wrote one book, A Sudden Wild Magic, specifically for an adult market. And she seems to be decided afterwards, just not worth the candle. love the book.
01:04:24
Speaker
not worth the energy of dealing with those editors, but she's very clearly increasingly aware that her readers are older, yeah but they, but they've stuck with her and that they both want what she produced, but can also take a different set of heroes and heroines who are older, who have different concerns.
01:04:46
Speaker
And it's, it's an interesting thing to do. um one of the shifts that took place in the children's market is that we, In the nineteen <unk> there are a lot more adults in children's fiction.
01:04:59
Speaker
And as we move into the 50s, 60s, 70s, we get that trope of leaving the children behind more and more and more. But it really descends from the Second World War when the adults were away, they they were missing.
01:05:12
Speaker
but The Evacuee book has is sort of a fundamental thing. Absolutely. But Jones is one of the people to start to realise, although this hasn't been taken up so much by newer writers, that actually you can have adult characters that children are interested in, that it's not impossible.
01:05:28
Speaker
Children's fiction does not need to be to only have children in it. Yeah. Yeah. and Black Maria is a really interesting book for that. Yes. Oh, that's a fascinating book. But it doesn't belong to this period, did you ask me? It doesn't. No, we're going to get there. oh Well, she wrote it in the 80s and didn't publish it till later. it's what It's one of the ones that is published very out of order. There are a few like that.
01:05:55
Speaker
It's one of the cleverest with language. it like It's a astonishingly good with language. It's one of the ones that's most concerned with this figure that we see again and again in Jones, ah which is the girl writer.
01:06:10
Speaker
What does it look like to be the girl writer? What do you learn from the things you're taking around you? How do you take that forward into the act of creativity? But also what it's like being the girl who hears the nuances other people don't.
01:06:24
Speaker
i mean, I talk about this in the book, but that lovely scene where the conversation she's having with her mother and her mother responds to the last part of each sentence. Yeah. But doesn't track the conversation, which is part of the spell.
01:06:39
Speaker
But many of us have had those conversations where you realize that you're not actually having a conversation. You are exchanging words, ah but you aren't actually having a conversation. not being heard. And that it's the experience of not being heard, especially by someone who ought to be hearing you and ought to be helping you, is I think one that that strikes strikes home. It feels very true. Yeah.
01:07:02
Speaker
And maybe that's that goes back to sort of the absence of guides as well, right? You can't. yeah trust a guide because you can't trust a guide to listen to you. You can't trust a guide to hear you when you say, you know, what you but this is what I need to be guided on.
01:07:17
Speaker
They won't give you the right answers because they won't hear you There's a fair number of feckless husbands in Jones. I mean, she uses the phrase slither out of a hole, but it describes a sempan turn. It describes the main character's father.
01:07:34
Speaker
It describes Polly's dad's. And as with the you know as with the strict mothers, there's sort of a range of sympathy. you know there's they they they They're all on a spectrum from charming to despicable.
01:07:49
Speaker
um yes much Much as the mothers are sort of on a spectrum from ah sympathetic to despicable. So have you read Saffy's Angel by Hilary McKay?
01:08:01
Speaker
No. No. Oh, so I am raising it for reason because Diana did not like these books. Oh. And she did not like these books because it was too close to her in the same way that I could never watch Absolutely Fabulous.
01:08:17
Speaker
Where what you are watching made humour just wasn't funny to be in. I strongly recommend Hilary McKay's series. It starts with Safi's Angel. Don't bother with the prequel.
01:08:28
Speaker
But it's set in a family where mum is an artist and works from home and is a bit chaotic. It's a lot chaotic. Dad thinks he's far superior artist and lives in London in his studio and visits at weekends. And there's a whole ritual of saying goodbye to daddy in which the taxi driver thinks how lovely this is.
01:08:49
Speaker
And the kids are actually just relieved he's gone. And they love their daddy. Right. He comes in and he disrupts everything. And it's the same model of man where daddy is incredibly attractive and throws money around. There's a bit of a cad.
01:09:04
Speaker
ah You'd love these books, I think. Hilary McKay and Anne Fine are the two non-fantasy writers most like Diana Wynchon's. The one that I remember that I read, i believe this is Hilary McKay as well. If it's not and I'm mixing up a different writer, I'm sorry, but there's a series called The Exiles, which is about the experience of being bookless.
01:09:27
Speaker
um It's children go and get exiled to an island. uh by their parents who think that they're too obsessed with reading and so they're sent to an island where there are no books and have to spend the whole summer desperately figuring out what to do with themselves when there's nothing to read.
01:09:41
Speaker
Noelle Stretfield does that in the growing summer where they all get sent off to Ant Dymphna in Ireland. Yeah um and again no books no books oh my god I think that speaks to what he brought up really early on which is the And I did find this relatable, even though I, for me, the experience of being for a day without a book was a horror I couldn't imagine. So I found that even though it was not like true to my life necessarily, I was never sent to a place where I had no books. I lived in terror of this happening to me. So this is a horror story. Because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it's not scary. but There's another generational thing that I've just remembered.
01:10:18
Speaker
You grew up in a period where everybody is exhorting children to read novels. we yeah We didn't. my grandmother My grandmother, who was a reader, used to take my book off me.
01:10:33
Speaker
eight Reading was considered antisocial by many people. Reading novels, my lovely, ah adored great uncle Phil thought reading novels was a complete waste of time.
01:10:47
Speaker
I mean, we got on because I read history. So it I think it's hard to get into that mentality where that activity that you have grown up with social approval for, me Diana grew up with absolute negativity And my novel reading was policed. Certain kinds of things were okay.
01:11:09
Speaker
I talk about this in the intergalactic playground. You ended up reading a novel for the teacher, a novel for your mother. and somehow um because There was much, much more policing of fiction than there is now when they're just grateful if kids read. Yeah.
01:11:23
Speaker
it's ah It's a very different world. So when Diana talks, ah and her sister doesn't remember this, but I suspect it is true, about having books rationed, it would have been meanness and part of it would have been an argument that reading all the time wasn't good for you.
01:11:37
Speaker
Right. Well, I did get, you know, even though my parents obviously encouraged me to read. But there does come a point if you're a child who reads a lot during other activities, that they do start to take the books away and say, perhaps you should go do something else.
01:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, I got that. No, i got I got older relatives telling me I was rude. And to be fair, I was and I didn't want to talk to them. um Yes. ah Because I wanted to read my book.
01:12:02
Speaker
But that's exactly what I'm talking about, Emily. Sitting on a sofa politely, quietly, that was socialising, even if you said nothing. Sitting in in a corner quietly with your book was being rude.
01:12:14
Speaker
Yeah. I was kind of lucky because my mother had been the same kind of kid. And frankly, as far as she was concerned, the sooner I learned to read, the sooner she could go back to her own book.
01:12:26
Speaker
There is, think, you've put your finger on the book hunger that runs through all of Diana Wynne Jones' work. And subsequent to that, this is something thing that M.U. and I were just talking about, the disappointment that goes along with it when the book has the gall not to be doing something interesting. This rare and precious resource that you've got your hands on and now you've got it and it's just not worth it and now you have to fight it. It's not even good.
01:12:58
Speaker
Outrageous for a book not to be good. A bit of Jones's ah writing I really enjoy is actually when she writes, I think it's about judging the Whitbread.
01:13:09
Speaker
It's about judging one of the British children's fiction prizes. And she writes about first reading all these books very generously, thinking, well, you know, all these authors tried so hard. There's something good in every single one.
01:13:20
Speaker
And then going, wait a second. This is terrible. This is bad. And this is bad. And there is something there is something very, i suppose, satisfying about ah Jones's critical judgment. I really enjoy her...
01:13:37
Speaker
har ah so she's she merciless with it she does it to herself as well as to to fantasy tropes in general to children's books in general Sexy backs Yes! um is is this so ah Is Diana's awareness the the that you can look at a book and say well that's not good enough yet do it better Yes I mean I sympathise I tend to get very testy and I've read for lots of awards over the years I'm so sorry.
01:14:06
Speaker
yeah no, I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it because you get some real gems. Actually, I get more annoyed when I'm reading award nomination lists.
01:14:17
Speaker
And a few years back for something I was doing, I looked at all the children's book awards I could find because I didn't want to pre-select my text. So I thought, great, I look at all these children's book awards and some of the stuff that not only had it been published, but it had been nominated for awards.
01:14:34
Speaker
was really quite distressing ah and just and it's I don't know there are books for different people and I'm very conscious that what I like other people don't like and I try to avoid words like bad and sick too not for me That's so heroic of you. yeah i just see it's bad. When I wrote the Intergalactic Playground on children's science fiction, there is a note in there that basically says, I read a lot of these books, see, you don't have to.
01:15:06
Speaker
yeah have a friend who has just finished a project, a years, decades long project, of reading every single Newbery Book Award winner since the onset of the award at the turn of the century.
01:15:20
Speaker
and which is so valiant. And you, you hit books where you just find yourself going, what ah why somebody think this was the ever nomination?
01:15:33
Speaker
And it's, it's yeah. I mean, I know Diana Wynne-Jones stood down as a judge for the world fantasy award, but I honestly have no idea why she fell out with the judges in some way, but no, I'm talking. Oh,
01:15:46
Speaker
ah But I suspect it was that you have to read an awful lot of stuff. And not everybody has the temperament for for being a judge. I've been ah ah an administrator over the years and more than once I've actually had to say to somebody, please stand down.
01:16:04
Speaker
And that means you're not reading enough. I am, by the way, as the the the comment you just dropped, I'm really resisting the urge because I know that you've spent a lot more time and had a lot more access to Diana Wendtose's personal archives than we have.
01:16:17
Speaker
So I'm really resisting the urge to ask you for more biographical tidbits because I do think that we perhaps lean heavily on... No, I'm not the right person. Exactly. I'm actually not the right person. Talk to Kathy. Talk to Kathy Butler for that.
01:16:30
Speaker
Or to Meredith McArdle. In fact, having both on together would work. But... I'm not really a biographer type person. I did it for my book on Heinlein because I felt I had to, but I did it by taking the two volume version and writing a cheat sheet.
01:16:46
Speaker
Biography is not my thing. But I do want to ask you if there's, as we're looking, yeah know, you've mentioned a couple of things that we missed looking back at the 80s. But as we're looking back and as we're looking forward to the 90s, are there other things that we wouldn't know that we should be thinking about as we're we're we're moving ahead in her work?
01:17:05
Speaker
So I honestly think the big thing to be aware of is just that the market changes. So when when she's writing in the 80s, there's not a lot of fantasy for kids around.
01:17:17
Speaker
There's not that much stuff coming out. There's science fiction, but we are very much in that social realist period. As we move into the 90s and then the publication of the book We Shall Not Name,
01:17:29
Speaker
the market explodes. her And several people are very happy about that because it brought Diana Wynne Jones front and centre. I think it must have been such a weird time to be a legend in British children's fantasy fiction.
01:17:45
Speaker
But of course, at that point, she wasn't. At that point, Diana Wynne-Jones was a cult, which is not quite the same thing. i mean, before before Amazon, I used to trade Diana Wynne-Jones books for American books I wanted because you couldn't just walk into a shop and get an American book.
01:18:02
Speaker
You had to find a way to get it. You know, Amazon. ah So there's also a big shift. at The other big shift is publishing. Now, this doesn't benefit Diana, but again, it changes the the market.
01:18:13
Speaker
Up until the mid-1990s, The US s market overlaps with Canada, but there is also the Empire and Commonwealth market and they barely overlap. So you can have a conversation with somebody from Hong Kong and they will have read the same books as I did.
01:18:29
Speaker
But if I have a conversation with somebody from America, apart from the really big classics, they haven't. So Americans in particular, it's a tiny number of people who've read that. in the 90s she starts to become a feature on the convention circuit those of us who adore her start talking about her we start to get writers talking about how she influenced her work so she is writing in a different context and if there's one thing i think we start to see is as well as being self-referential that second set of books is much more referential to modern fantasy fiction
01:19:06
Speaker
Yes. And when you eventually get to it, to modern fandom, Brits spend a lot of time talking about... so Not the Merlin Conspiracy, the one before it. Deep Secret.
01:19:17
Speaker
I love Deep deep Secret. big Of course we love Deep Secret. Deep Secret was a present to British fandom. yeah what you It's a beautiful in-joke. I went to EasterCon ah this year and went, ah, I am experiencing Deep Secret in real time. Someone at Worldcon asked me what the next Diana Wynne-Jones book they should read was.
01:19:39
Speaker
And I was like, well, we're at Worldcon, so I can't tell you anything other than Deep Secret. No, but you need to take a trip to the Hinkley Hotel and you need to take a trip to the Radisson at Heathrow because the two of them together are that hotel.
01:19:52
Speaker
No, it was so funny. I found myself in a conversation with some sort of long-term conrunners and I was describing the setting of Deep Secret and they went, oh, the Radisson. Absolutely.
01:20:03
Speaker
um But the mirrors are from Hinkley. um ah In Hinkley, you had to be slightly careful what you wore in the lobby because people looking up looked straight down your cleavage. And you can't exactly call that harassment because it's not their fault.
01:20:19
Speaker
But but ah but they Even the people in it. So there's some argument over whether Zinka is Gita or whether she's Judith Klute.
Jones' Legacy in Fantasy Literature
01:20:31
Speaker
She might even be su Sue Jones or she might be a combination of all three. But she's recognisably a type of person we knew. and mean these people stand out.
01:20:45
Speaker
So I think it's that, that that growing sense of her being embedded in the fantasy world. And then, of course, ah they the the the guide to fantasy land right tough guide and then dark lord of dark home yeah it's it's just yeah and he's so engaged there are so talking to the 90s doorstoppers which are the fantasy i grew up on like the first adult fantasy books i read were my uncle's collection of uh sort shanara wheel of time uh david eddings all that stuff and then i remember coming across the tough guide and going oh
01:21:23
Speaker
Oh, I see. And of course, that book enters into our parlance. We then joke about stew. We joke about taking a bicycle somewhere where we need a horse.
01:21:34
Speaker
It's all become part of the tradition. So... I think it's in the 90s that she moves from being a cult to becoming one of the grand dames of the field, becoming one of the key tap roots, as Clute would have it, of our genre, where you can often tell when somebody's read ah red Jones.
01:21:58
Speaker
And and oh who to recommend if somebody likes Jones they will like. And you end up with a quite particular list of authors. I think she still stands out.
01:22:10
Speaker
Her work is not predictable. we've We've spent that 90 minutes talking. We haven't touched on a single thing you touched at the podcast. There's so much more we could talk about. going I mean, I hope we'll do another big ah conference in about three, four years.
01:22:28
Speaker
We've managed one every five years. ah That seems about right. Because today we're talking about Diana. It's just fantastic. It really is. Just talk about all those things we spot this time round when we read them.
01:22:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think. So that feels to me like ah we could go on forever. But that feels to me like a really good place to end. But I do want to ask you guys if there's anything that,
01:22:54
Speaker
You want to make sure that we hit on that we haven't hit on before we we we come to a close today. Inevitably, I'll remember in about half an hour. yeah We always do. but Every time.
01:23:06
Speaker
but It's just, i mean, I deliberately just put the 1980s books in front of me. I'm just having a quick look.
01:23:18
Speaker
Oh, I will say... The absence of happy endings. I'm not sure I totally agree with that, but I do think we often get slingshot endings in which we're thrown into a new future that is neither happy nor sad, but is different.
01:23:36
Speaker
Yes. that's That's actually one way to talk about certainly the ending of Time City, which is weird and strangely pat, but does have that slingshot feel of...
01:23:50
Speaker
everything has now changed. Yes. And has to be re understood from this, this new standpoint.
Complex Endings and Historical Parallels
01:23:57
Speaker
Yeah. And that is actually one thing that I wanted to jump back quickly to the portal quest fantasy that sort of clicked into place for me when thinking about the portal quest fantasy and time city and context, personal individual context is the, the way the ending of time city works is that ah in,
01:24:13
Speaker
In order to really synthesize who she is and where she's come where she's come from, where she's come to, she has to bring her entire context with her. She you know she ends that book by bringing 100 refugees and her parents to Time City so that she can be you know everything that she is in the context of the place that she's going to.
01:24:34
Speaker
And of course, that's the kindertransport. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It's not straightforward. That is the train which left with a hundred or so kids from Germany from you save what you can from the catastrophe.
01:24:51
Speaker
Yeah. asked And it's never straightforward in Diana Wynne-Jones. There's always another layer. Because don't forget, they're going to go back for Vivian's parents.
01:25:01
Speaker
But did they say they're going to go back for the children's parents? They're not. hoping They certainly did not. No, they're farming them out. and And sorry, this is a total segue, but my original PhD work is on Quaker relief work in Spain.
01:25:18
Speaker
And I came to curse the name of Eglantine Jeb of Save for the Children. Because Eglantine Jeb who sets up this weird thing where you save the children but not the parents and she was working in the 19th century context in which she was trying to get sympathy i mean the unions did it to get the hours changed you know that there's this whole 19th century thing of you can arouse sympathy for children but not for adults but that is actually poisonous and it is still with us it is still with us um
01:25:58
Speaker
And we see that where even Diana rescues Vivian's parents, but the the children are going to be farmed out. Yeah. Odd moment. I really need to go.
01:26:09
Speaker
Yes. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been so much fun. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'm honoured. I've been honoured to be
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:26:18
Speaker
here. It is a wonderful podcast. We're honoured to have you. I do totally deserve that, Hugo.
01:26:23
Speaker
yeah I'm very excited to go down and pull out all the books that you've mentioned and make the reading list for this episode based on just what talked about here today. Do not forget Ruth Manning Sanders because I really want to get more people reading her. I've got the article open.
01:26:35
Speaker
Ruth Manning Sanders is on my computer. I will find her. um No, thank you so, so much, Farrah, for joining us. it has been wonderful. And we've really enjoyed the conversation and we hope to have another one in future. Absolutely.
01:26:48
Speaker
In the meantime, as we've said, this is our first bonus episode for season eight. ah Season eight? Season eight. Season two. Oh my God. Season two, the eighties. um It's seven. and No, it's eight in the morning. I should be awake by now.
01:27:02
Speaker
But probably in about two weeks we'll be doing our short story episode and then after that we will be doing our Q&A episode for the season. So please... We are being so self-indulgent. I am loving this so much. We are going to have so much fun in kind of this intermission and then straight into season three in the 90s which is a lot of my personal favorite books.
01:27:23
Speaker
Absolutely. So if you have thoughts or questions, don't see we've already received some great questions for for our finale episode, so don't hesitate to send them to us at 8daysofdiana at gmail.com.
01:27:35
Speaker
And we'll see you. We'll talk to you all soon. And thank you again, Farrah.