Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to our final episode of season three of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Framo. And I'm Emily Tesh. And today we are having a general discussion about the 1990s in Jones's work and we are answering questions from our wonderful audience. Can I say first of all, thank you all for listening.
Speaker: I'm so happy with the number of people who have come with us on this project. It's really lovely and thank you all for all the wonderful emails you sent, the comments that you've made. um We are going to be trying really hard when we go through the questions that we got to only read out the bits that are questions, but just just for time so this episode is not four hours long. um but Believe it what they say, we've read all of the emails. And when you write paragraphs about how much you love Diana Wynne-Jones, we go, yes, absolutely. That's 100% correct. We've said that to ourselves. We're just not going to say it on a mic because then we'd have to say it 20 times.
Speaker: Yeah. So shall we just get started? Let's get started. We have some general, I think we're going to start with some general questions and just jumping off with them. And then we have a bunch of questions by book that we're going to go through. and then we have a couple more just kind of general big theme questions we want to talk about.
Speaker: But I'll start with two that jumped out at me because they seemed similar. One is from Joe. ah how do you feel about all the age gap romances in Diana Wood Jones? Did she just have a thing for older guys?
Speaker: And then we also got a question from Isabella. I read Fire and Hemlock because of you. i kind of felt you sounded traumatized by it. And I was not going to hear that episode unless I had read the book. I don't like comparisons, but I couldn't help thinking how much more meaningful it would have been to read Fire and Hemlock at 15 instead of Twilight. I kind of feel robbed as I really loved it. What a masterpiece.
Speaker: The character of Tom got me thinking about a pattern in some of Diana's male characters. Do you consider exploring the idea that many of them have a kind of man-child quality? It often feels as though the women around them play a role in prompting their growth while also undergoing their own development.
Speaker: Yeah. So this question is technically about Fire and Hemlock, which is from last season. But I think it's good to talk about this season because like the end of the 80s is where she kind of gets interested in romance. And then in the 90s, it blows up.
Speaker: There's a romance in almost every 90s book. It's funny because like Diana Wynne Jones is, I think, in some ways most famous for the ah the age gap romance in Howl's Moving Castle. Yes. Which is, of course, the joke is that the age is the other way around because Sophie believes and and acts like an old woman. Right. But in actual fact, Sophie is 18. And the joke of her turning into an old woman is that it gives her freedom. In some ways, I think the joke of her turning into an old woman is that it gives her freedom to act like
Speaker: like someone in their second childhood as opposed to the parentified middle-aged adult that she's sort of been as an 18 year old well it met lets her act like the person she really is on the inside rather than the person she feels she has to be out of duty and the the romantic part is of course that's the person that Hal falls in love with the real Sophie who is huge and difficult personality but so is Hal so I guess they're a good match beautiful nightmare yeah But it's true that, you know, very specifically, the joke in that dynamic is that he is a 30 year old man child and he's like, look, a mother. Right. He explicitly introduces her to people who know him as his dear old mother. and Okay, so the man-child romance. You're right, it's a thing. And we've talked before about how Jones does the same joke twice or does the same idea twice as as as tragedy and as farce. And I do think Tom and Polly in Fire and Hemlock, which Isabella mentioned, is, again, this man-child romance where we're constantly encouraged to see Tom as a child romance. a child who's been treated cruelly, who's been abused by his adopted mother, a Laurel, ah who becomes his wife. Who is parallel Polly in numerous ways.
Speaker: ah Yes, so Polly is a version of Laurel, while also being a literal child. It's so clear that Diana Wynne-Jones knows this dynamic is weird. Right.
Speaker: And now we get to the 90s, where we have Hexwood, where everybody's ages are constantly being put into question to make everything weirder than it needs to be. the The joke of the age in Hexwood, ah where these characters are introduced as a mad old wizard and a 13-year-old girl, 12-year-old girl, 14-year-old girl, girl,
Speaker: Only for there to be, after many twists and turns, a dramatic reveal that in fact they're 28 and 21, which is pretty normal. But it has to be both the dramatic... First, we have to go through the dramatic sort of Tom Pauly adult child, but the child is in sort of a...
Speaker: parent role to the adult, you know, Anne's role in Hexwood is to go into the woods and yell at Mordian and Hume, who again are both adult men, even though it's not necessarily clear that they're both adult men. Anne is the youngest person here. i thought That's like the the ages of Hexwood are never so vastly distorted that we lose track of like Anne is in fact quite young. 21 is really young.
Speaker: Right. And both Mordian and Hume are like Oh, you come in and you tell us when we're making bad decisions and make sure we have enough to eat and enough clothing and remind us to do the shopping. Thank God you're here, Anne. 12-year-old Anne. Right. but So there's something going on there, right? With the... I don't know, because there's also like...
Speaker: There's a power fantasy to it of Anne is like the girl who is able to point out the obvious, solve their problems. She is able to sort these guys out and they clearly need sorting because they're both so useless. And and that's a similar fantasy, I think, to the part in House Moving Castle where Sophie is like, you your problem is that you need a bath.
Speaker: ah Right. The bath right now, which is absolutely a mother and child behavior. But also it's a it's a it's a power behavior. where It's like I am in charge and I am solving this and then you're going to thank me.
Speaker: And the age gap romance thing. I mean, I do think. So to talk about this a little more broadly in terms of trends, I think this sort of age gap romance was re has been really popular. I was about to say was really popular in the 80s. Has been really popular throughout much of the history of fiction writing. We reread a bunch of Anne McCaffrey recently. and Oh my gosh. I'll tell you one that even in the...
Speaker: in 2000 was reading them I was like hang on uh which is Tamara Pierce um The Immortals where yeah the 13 year old protagonist meets in the first book a teacher in his 30s who is the end game romance option and I used to be like this is weird absolutely connected those books to Fire and Hemlock in my head like they've always just kind of felt of a piece to me in that way and I understand the fantasy, especially in books aimed at teenagers, because when you are a 13 year old girl and you look at a 13 year old boy and you're like, right I don't know about that. And then you look at the 20 year old pop star or 20 year old
Speaker: you know, young teacher at your school and you're like, that seems like someone who has it together. That's not the the horrible child down the road who, you know, pulls my pigtails or whatever. It is part of the fantasy that you, the 13 year old girl, are mature enough to be an equal partner, or perhaps in some of these cases, a more than equal partner for this adult man. And I do think that's part of leaning into writing for adolescents who like Diana Wendell has always been interested in her writing for children about the ways in which children envision themselves as adults, see themselves as self-sufficient and able to sort of enter, make these adult choices. Right. And it's part of what I, I've always admired about that her unpatronizing attitude to children is that she's like, yeah, sometimes children are self-sufficient and making adult choices. That's just a fact that of how some children live or have to live in some circumstances. like she She is very interested in the full personhood of children, which is part of why Fire and Hemlock is so compelling because we are so deeply in Polly's personhood and Polly's full point of view.
Speaker: But that said, I mean, it's interesting to see her, I think, kind of move away from this a little bit over the course of the 90s. We've talked about the weirdness of Hexwood. I think Deep Secret also definitely has some of this age gap mentorship gap with Rupert and Marie. But the thing is when Rupert is going, oh, what if I was the sexy teacher and she was an innocent, beautiful ingenue who learned everything from me? Like the text is very clearly presenting him as a dipshit.
Speaker: Right. Like, no, come on, dude. No! That's silly. You guys are basically, you know, from the point of view of the text, I think, even though Rupert is a couple years older than Marie, I think from the point of view of the text, they're both newish adults who are figuring themselves out. There isn't kind of a ah difference really in in age status between them. We're not looking at one of them as an adult and one of them as a teen.
Speaker: Right. um Even where the woman is younger, which I think is the case for Vieran in Hexwood, for Marie, for Zilla in Sudden Wild Magic. These are relationships between two adults.
Speaker: Yes. Making adult choices about what they want. And it is in both Sudden Wild Magic and Hexwood, actually, it's it's the man in the relationship who is constrained in his choice making by forces beyond his control.
Speaker: Right. The man-child thing, I think, has kind of shifted. It's not like we can't look at Mordian or at, oh my god, why am I blanking on the name of of the most boring man in the world in a sudden wild magic?
Speaker: Mark Harrell. Mark Harrell, thank you. she's but We can't look at either of them and say, like we did with like you do to Howell, looking at Howell, this is a man who is still a child because he wants to be.
Speaker: They are much more in the pattern of Tom. People have been constrained by other powerful figures that have kept them in childlike roles without agency. Yes, who are trapped in a perpetual childhood. Like Mordian is understood by the Rayner as a child, a descendant of Martellion, and as the child he tortured and understands himself as always that tormented child. Right. um And Mark is literally imprisoned by his evil mother who has cut his soul in half for reasons. Right. But in both those cases, too, you know, again, I think we talked a little bit about this at the time, but Diana Wynchones is really interested in these child men, man, children as parents. Right.
Speaker: And looking at them kind of forcing them out of that status of man child by pushing them through the course of the narrative to take up this responsibility towards children in an adult parent role. And that is kind of what makes them worthwhile romantic partners for the women in these books. Which i really, really struck me rereading Hexwood this for this season going, gosh, yeah, it is romantic when a man is a good father figure, not to you, to someone else.
Speaker: we are here In fact, we can even say from Castle in the Air, you know you can sort of see this movement of this because the first big change, many things going on at Castle in the Air. But the first big life change and a thing that she's going to keep leaning into in that universe is that Howl and Sophie are now parents. And that Howl is a pretty for everything else going on in Castle in the He's very responsible.
Speaker: He's in some ways a better dad than Sophie. He's comfortable with Morgan. He knows how to take care of this kid. He's not stressed about it. And this brings us to Dirk and Mara.
Speaker: Yeah. Dirk. I mean, for all the weirdness of Dirk and Mara, I don't think we can say that's not the central romantic partnership in the book.
Speaker: And what Dirk does all book is single parent. Dirk essentially has to prove that he, well, he kind of fails at proving. This maybe breaks my point. I was going to say he has to prove he can parent these children without Mara around to set things right, but he doesn't prove it. He fails miserably at it.
Speaker: I think that's part of like the the resolution of Dirkholm. I mean, I still have like complicated feelings about the resolution of Dirkholm and of Dirk and Mara, but I think part of it is that their shared collaborative effort, not just in producing these magical children, but in raising them and supporting them, is is their marriage. It's what their marriage is. that they yeah They are a team for these children. Yeah.
Speaker: And that's the heart of the romance. And it's why Dirk is so desperate to have another child with Mara. and He's trying to call her back to him by like, look, this is what we do together. Right. We have these incredible kids. Look how great they are. They're all wonderful.
Speaker: Alright, last romantic pairing of... Oh no, two more romantic pairings actually of the 90s that we maybe should talk about. One adult adult, one child child, Mitt and Mae Wen, Migg's mother, and Anthony Green. I would actually add to that a third, ah which is adult child, and that's Mitt and Mae Wen take two. Now she's 12 years old and she's still 13. Right?
Speaker: In my head, my headcanon, to be honest. Speaking of man-child, I think I've always just kind of imagined that Mitt really does kind of freeze at a teenage state. Like, he's a large adult man, but he's also, like, just a teenager still.
Speaker: I don't know. clearly ruled Dale Mark for some time. He did rule Dale Mark for many years. he married. He had children. that yeah In fact, Mae Wynne is descended from his children.
Speaker: Don't think about it too hard. Don't think about it. It's fine. This is what gods do. This is normal god behavior. right And while the Undying are explicitly not gods, they're also explicitly not not gods.
Speaker: Yes. The rules are fuzzy. And it's best not to think about it too hard. But it is, I mean... Again, the sort of question of who's older than who, as in a Hexwood, gets played with and sort of given a lot of narrative attention in Mitt and Maywin's romance. Right, most of it, Mitt is under the impression that she's the glamorous old woman that he's got a hopeless crush on. Exactly. And when it's revealed that she is, in fact, two years younger than him and not the four years older than he thought, he's like, oh, suddenly it's possible now. In a way that wasn't possible when it was the other way around.
Speaker: Which I think is really interesting. Maywin has no such reservations about age gap romances. Maywin has never been bothered by the prospect of an age gap romance in her life. But I do think like on the one hand, this is really her first ever teen teen romance that is you know sort of um about two age appropriate adolescents being like, Oh, he's so dreamy. I want to hold his hand. i fact, it goes further than that. She even does ah an age-appropriate love triangle. We've got moral in the mix as well with his little crush on Mayweather. Love quadrangle. There's also her cousin. Her really embarrassing cousin. Yeah, she's going full teen romance there.
Speaker: And I think it's really interesting that she then has to make it weird in the last five pages of the book. Like she can't quite get out of it without adding a little twist of of something to make it fun for her.
Speaker: So going back to, i think it's Jo's question, did she just have a thing for older guys? Shall we read this biographically? Diana, do you want to explain this in ah psychoanalytical terms?
Speaker: Probably not. I would die if anyone asked me any of my creative work in those terms. So no, i'm I'm not sure we can read directly onto Jones's own interests or preferences. I mean, among other things, at the time she's writing these romances in the 90s, she is herself a woman in her 50s and her 60s. And I think you really see that in Deep Secret in particular, where...
Speaker: Rupert does not read like I mean, he is a romantic interest, but he's not a dream man. He's an annoying 20 year old child. I actually really enjoy the increasing presence of 20 something men in the books in the 90s. And right I think you and I did at one point go, okay, how old are her sons at this point? Right. It's definitely real. It's definitely there. But I do think, hang on, before I go yeah so on, I do think it's so easy to fall back into the biographical readings, even when I just go, you know, we probably shouldn't do that. It's fun. Because an author's life both is and isn't deeply present in their work, right?
Speaker: Yeah. it's it's um It's all material. And Jones wrote herself extensively about how you have to use what's real to make your books real. And she wrote about putting real people into her books. And she talked. we always it always comes back to Carol O'Neill. You've got to go and actually experience some things and then use those.
Speaker: And at the same time, I think we can get bogged down in the in the biographical weeds. Yes. And I think that it's more interesting. it's It's not actually that interesting to talk about the age gap romances in terms of diet did Diana Wynne Jones have a thing for older guys? I think what's more interesting is to ask what she's getting out of this thematically. yes And I do think that thematically there is a very clear interest as she moves into writing female protagonists, because again, this is really not a thing she's doing for the early part of her career where she's not writing romances.
Speaker: With the female protagonists come the romances, come the sort of um Jane Eyre element of meeting a man who has more power than you and ending the book in a position where you are on a status of equals or even the leader in the relationship.
Speaker: And that I think is, you know, kind of a classic thematic element as far as writing about gender, writing about the roles that women play and letting women take active roles in these kinds of stories. And if I, you know, I think that's a big part of what she's doing with these these age gap romances and these man-child romances is that the power imbalance is there so that over the course of the story, the gap can be narrowed. Yes, because she's writing obviously a lot of straight romances, heterosexual romances, but she is...
Speaker: I think consciously avoiding a capital R romance writing. Like romance by this stage is ah a set of tropes and expectations that it exists is well known. She's not doing them. She's not hitting the capital R romance beats.
Speaker: Right. And I think, as always, she's kind of, you know, one thing you could say about Mitten Maywin and that weird twist at the end is that Diana Wynne Jones does always resist writing a conventional story.
Speaker: She always wants to take it and make it her own. And thinking of Jane Eyre, actually, made me think all the way back to Charmed Life, which she conceived of as a gothic in which...
Speaker: the beautiful innocent girl goes to the castle with a mysterious powerful owner and then Gwendolyn does indeed end up more powerful than Crestomancy. Absolutely. matter of I wonder if 20 years later, Charmed Life would have been a romance. That's a weird one. Yeah, i can I can imagine the book that she writes that looks like that.
Speaker: Absolutely. But she doesn't write that book. She does different things with Christopher, which we'll see you next season. yeah Okay, let's have another question from Joe.
Speaker: This one is, ah how does Diana fit within the context of other fantasy, particularly fantasy for children, being published around the same time? And we have a really interesting list of names, which is some, but not all of what might be relevant.
Speaker: Tamara Pierce, Garth Nix, Jane Yollum, Philip Pullman, Susan Cooper, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.K. Rowling, Bruce Covel, Susan Cooper, Terry Pratchett, Nancy Farmer, Neil Gaiman, Lloyd Alexander, Madeline Lengel, David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin. So there's a list of people writing fantasy, ah some of it children's fantasy, in the 1990s.
Speaker: I don't think that's Jones's list. No. No, I don't think so either. i actually don't think that her list for the nineteen ninety s is largely people writing children's fantasy at all.
Speaker: Yeah, in fact, because we do, effectively we do have two reading lists direct from the author. ah One is In Fire and Hemlock. You have to pull it out of a page at a time, but there is in there a detailed reading list for the child who would be a fantasy author. And in her encyclopedia fantasy entry for magic, there is a detailed list of everything you might draw on to discuss the state of magic in fantasy in the 1990s.
Speaker: And that is quite a different list. Yep. And it's wide ranging. It spans a century. It does go back to Nesbitt. It goes back to Chaucer at one point. It goes back to Chaucer at one point.
Speaker: It's also very 90s. She does mention David Edding. She mentions Mercedes Lackey. She mentions others. Well, she's prat got Pratchett in there. She's got Kerr in there. I haven't got the list in front of me, so I can't do the full thing. um But I remember you,
Speaker: pointed out, Becca, that Diana Wynne-Jones is actually spending quite a lot of the 1990s with health problems stuck in bed. She talks about this in her essays and she seems to be spending a lot of that time doing the reading and she's reading adult fantasy.
Speaker: Yes. This is also, we talked about this a little bit when we talked about Deep Secret. i talked about it a lot when we talked about Deep Secret. She's entering into the Ph.D.: Specfic the SFF community in the 90s in a way that's not been true before um she's going to conventions she's listening to her peers talk on panels about what they're writing. Rebecca Ph.D.: And this is largely again adult speculative fiction writers as people who are working in the field rating, not just novels but comics working in television. Everything that's kind of in the milieu of speculative fiction in the UK at that time.
Speaker: And one thing that she's not doing anymore, which I think you pointed out, Em, is she's no longer reading children's books to her kids because those kids are grown up. It's something that she talks about, I think, a lot in her early writings about writing. The stuff that she, the little essays that are in um Reflections are, that mostly come from the 70s and 80s about being inspired to start writing children's books by kind of having an eye for the kind of books that her children wanted to read.
Speaker: Whereas one of the most striking essays of the 1990s in Reflections deals with the rules of adult fiction, which made me go, oh, wait a second, because that's rules as in Tough Guide to Fantasyland. She is thinking about these structures and expectations and generic boundaries and generic limitations of adult fantasy a lot. And she talks about writing for adults and the limits of writing for adults and writing longer books, writing in different style, writing in what she calls the Doctor Who style, where she's ah structuring things like a TV show and moving from point of view to point of view rather than staying in the the person of one child character all the way through. Yeah, it is interesting. I think that she's always...
Speaker: you know yeah that One of the other things this question talks about is kind of groupings. Who is Diana Wynne-Jones like? And I think that's a really difficult question. One of the books that I read in preparing for this podcast was a book called, a book of criticism, great book of criticism called Four British Fantasists that focuses on Diana Wynne-Jones, Susan Cooper, um Penelope Lively,
Speaker: and andnna Anna Garner. And one of the things that I really noticed reading that book, which I got a lot out of and really enjoyed, was how often it would be like, all right, here's something that Alan Garner and Susan Cooper and Penelope Lively are all doing. And here's Diana Wynne Jones doing something slightly different.
Speaker: Tonally, even though she was very much kind of time-wise in her children's books, her more numinous children's books of the 70s and 80s, part of that set of writers, her sense of humor, ah her particular kind of way of looking at the world and sort of pulling out the rug under assumptions of ah kind of more serious assumptions made her stand out consistently.
Speaker: And I do think that as she's going through and as she's moving into this more adult space, something that she is consistently still interested in doing is looking at the assumptions of how you write this kind of book and then saying, okay, what if we either take this assumption so seriously that we now have to look at it more closely or remove this assumption altogether? Right. I keep coming back to Farrah Mendelsohn's idea of Diana Wynne Jones as critic writer. Yes. A lot of what she's doing in, I think, especially the 90s books reads to me as critical work, um as work that is assessing um and analyzing and in some cases judging pretty harshly the state of the field as others are doing it. And that makes it quite hard to put her in a community with anyone except someone we have mentioned a few times, which is Terry Pratchett. Exactly what I was going to say. It also...
Speaker: that as humorist as satirist is ah essentially satire is a form of writing critical fiction right of analytical fiction like hang on have a look at this have a think about this um and I do think there is a meaningful overlap between Pratchett and Jones in terms of outlook of humor and of not just resistance to the tropes and assumptions of the fantasy fantasy but an active anger with some of the tropes and assumptions of fantasy Yeah, and I'm an anger born of love in both cases. Like it's a deep love for the genre, which means that when you say this is shit, you really mean it.
Speaker: And I think the other thing that aligns them together is the seriousness with which they take their satire. I think like there are other humorous works of fantasy and science fiction being written about this time. I think the thing that both makes, but makes both Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones stand apart is that the humor does not come at the expense of like rich characterization and real thematic interest in these character arcs and sort of demanding that you use the satire to take the world and the people in it seriously and to treat them as real people.
Speaker: Yep. I think another a fantasist of the 90s we probably do have to place Jones in direct conversation with is Neil Gaiman, given that it's like a connection that both of them acknowledged and talked about. Gaiman in particular has talked extensively about Jones's inspiration. um for his particular interests in sort of contemporary urban grounded in the modern world fantasy. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't think he's as good at it, but we're not a game and podcast, so we don't have to talk about that. Right. One, I guess thing I'll mention though, in terms of the kind of books that she's writing, I think it's interesting to go back to Hexwood, which feels like a picking, speaking of urban fantasy, A picking up of the kinds of ways that you could write science fiction and fantasy in the 90s and ah putting them together in different ways to kind of look at the connections between them.
Speaker: We've got the the space opera, we've got the high castle fantasy, and we've got the kind of thing that she's, you know, that she's done often and she's most interested in, which is the way that fantasy kind of creeps into the everyday world and changes ordinary people's lives. And I think it's really interesting to place that book against her list from Encyclopedia of Fantasy. which I will at some point after all this is done, put the names of all the people that she mentions. I see how she's playing with it. At some point, maybe end of the podcast, we will just make you guys a reading list. Yes. like Here you go Anybody wishing to put together a Diana Wynne Jones syllabus? Here's what we've got.
Speaker: All right, speaking of syllabus, I'm going to move on to the next. This one is less a question than a comment, but Emily writes in to point out that on r slash fantasy, a Reddit SFF book community, they have a yearly bingo with different categories for books. And you try to get a blackout by reading a different book for every category. Technically, each book should have a different author, but this year I tried a Diana Wynne Jones bingo card, which I think is great. Emily, we will link the write-up in the comments to this episode so other people can go and have a look at it. ah But I think it kind of speaks to what we were talking about, about the vast range of what she's interested in, that you can complete an entire bingo cart out of her works, no problem.
Speaker: Yeah. And this one, again, where somebody has just said something really good, we're not going to pretend that we have anything special to We'll be like, here's a really clever thing our listener said. You now get to hear it too. So this is from Ilsa, who's talking about evil women in Diana Wynne-Jones.
Speaker: So you can see hints of the evil hyper feminine in Hal's moving castle and straight through to the Pinho Egg. Sometimes she is a granny or older woman as in Black Maria and apparently in a sudden wild magic, but also in the Merlin conspiracy in the Pinho Egg. Sometimes she is slightly younger. Think Janine in Deep Secret or Ageless. Don't forget that Rainer 3 is a woman.
Speaker: What they share is their assistance on hearing to strict gender norms or gendered norms, sometimes implicitly as encapsulated in focus on appearance and power through motherhood and sometimes explicitly.
Speaker: It wouldn't surprise me if Jones herself had suffered or thought fought three these restrictions. Often as not, it is other women who police gender for girls. And I'm sure she was punished or ostracized for her infractions of the rules. She seems angry at the rules given to women and sometimes translated the anger into the anger at the women who maintain the rules.
Speaker: ah From bits and pieces I gather about her life, from past reading from your podcast, she might also have often felt she did not live up to the feminine ideal and resented the people who wanted her to match it. I think these are good points.
Speaker: but Yes. We'll just say that. These are good points. This ah consistent anger with the evil hyper feminine in a way that she's not actually angry with her male villains. Reyna Warr is great fun. Yeah. Awful, but great fun.
Speaker: Though I suppose someone like Dillion is quite clearly great fun as well. Yeah. Right, and she puts the fun that she has writing him into Quentin's mouth. This is my favorite kind of villain who is evil, hyper feminine, big gun, big hair, you know, polished in every way. Ilsa has more to say about feminine ah roles and reconciliation and or understanding ah in some of Jones's 2000s books, but I don't want to spoil the 2000s books until we get there.
Speaker: So we'll come we'll come back to this point. And it's something that we'll be talking, I think, keeping an eye out and talking about because it's quite, and i think it's quite tempting in the 90s to see an arc towards greater acceptance of an interest in the feminine, in particular, the older feminine, the move from Aunt Mariah to ah older Tanakwe in ah Crown of Dalmark to Kerida.
Speaker: Gladys in Sudden Wild Magic really echoes the descriptions of Biddy all the way back in Wilkins' Tooth. This very weird old woman who turns out to be extremely educated and lives in a house full of junk with cats. And you're like, she's back, but she's not a total monster this to, oh, she kind of is, but- But we're supposed to like her for it. Yes.
Speaker: And same with Carida, who is a total monster and whom we're supposed to like and be interested in for. it And I do. I am i do like it. I'm interested in Carida. And she is a monster. Yes. So there's more ah space for the ruthlessness and the selfishness of older women.
Speaker: More space for Sophies, I guess, for women who are fully themselves in old age and having a great time doing it. More space, I think, for... The idea of the hyper feminine as play, as something you can play with without having it be a full set of rules that you sort of get yourself trapped into. I'm thinking actually of Mara here. who doesn't have a great arc in Durkholm, but when she goes to be the evil sorceress, is clearly having the old fits yes she's having such a wonderful time being the evil sorceress.
Speaker: like One of the best moments for my money is when Blade turns up and and ah I think it's his sister who goes, oh, she put on the one with a top for you. Right. It's so funny. And also, I think maybe more pointedly, not just Mara, but when ah Elda goes to hang out with her, she's also having a great time hanging out in Mara's evil hyper feminine fortress.
Speaker: Yeah, you know what? The sparkles are fun. Exactly. we like wearing the outfits. And in Deep Secret, we get Zinka. who's also just having a wonderful time being playing up the sexy witch who, you know, goes to the orgies at the con.
Speaker: I wonder as well if that is part of the repeated descriptions of the three beautiful people with the baby who were always described as very strikingly gorgeous in their family. yeahy Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: It feels like it's something, you know, this kind of like, you know, we've had, beautiful people previous to this but there's always kind of a worry about the beautiful people and I think really in these later 90s books is when it starts to be like oh this is something that you can put on and put off you can you can you can play at being a woman without having to be the kind of woman that aunt mariah wants you to be yeah And that is a kind of empowering. And so it's very easy, again, to read the 90s as this like straightforwardly positive arc in Diana Wynne Jones's attitude towards femininity, towards her you know towards towards the concept of femininity in literature. And yet, I mean, the the misogyny is still there, especially if the woman happens to be fat. yeah um
Speaker: There are still like this far and no furthers around... But around Jones's concept of womanhood as well. Like she's both very, very angry at certain kinds of strict, dry rules of femininity. The Thorn Lady, the Aunt Maria.
Speaker: Janine. Janine. Yes, absolutely. But at the same time, the like her female protagonists don't go hugely outside a particular range of womanhood.
Speaker: I don't want to express it better than that. Maybe you can. No, I think that's true. And the like ah the particular range of womanhood that they're kind of allowed to inhabit is starts from like exactly the start of womanhood and goes maybe a third of the way um like from kind of so you know early on, her child her her female child protagonist up through the end of the eighty s um I think ending with Polly, always kind of have a gender ambiguity. Part of their journey is figuring out where the borders are, how far they can go towards her, towards the can they find a way towards girl hero from boy hero? Is that an option open to them?
Speaker: I think in the 90s, she said, okay, woman hero, we can do that. We don't need to kind of push down into boy hero anymore. i Adult woman hero is a thing that I can do, but this is what adult woman hero looks like, and it doesn't look like Janine.
Speaker: It doesn't even look like Zinka. It looks like the kind of frustrated, angry, inquisitive, not particularly feminine,
Speaker: young woman. Well, I guess that's not true a little bit because there's Zilla, who is a total knockout and is her first kind of stab at adult woman hero.
Speaker: Zilla feels like an experiment in so many ways. i think one the thing one of the things is her sort of status as a total knockout, as a beauty, as someone who is constantly negotiating other people's attraction to her. Right. Like,
Speaker: like I think Joan sort of looks at the problem is like, what if I took it, took it head on? Yeah. What if I, all right, my woman hero, my female hero does have to deal with this. What does that mean for her?
Speaker: Right. And then after that, we get Maywin, we get Marie, we get all the, well, we don't really have a female hero in Dark Lord per And we get Anne,
Speaker: who are all kind of every girls, I guess is the way to put it. there you know they're They're normal, slightly tomboyish, heroic women who fall within a range of not overly beautiful, not overly feminine.
Speaker: Although Anne, interestingly, does have this this this very glamorous and feminine cousin, who's clearly heroic and who Anne is very fond of, but that's not ah that's not protagonist material.
Speaker: Right, I think that's kind of what I'm saying about Ciri and Zinka and ah even Mara, is that we can have these beautiful feminine women, but they are not in the protagonist role, and they never quite get a chance to be in the protagonist role.
Speaker: And then at the other end of the scale, you have women like Wendy the Willow, who exists to be a punchline. Yes. um So this is what I mean about sort of that. There's a range with limits at either end.
Speaker: Oh, and all of them are white. All of them are white. The only non-white heroines that we've had in the night. Well, there's Flower in the Night, who, again, is a sort of beautiful reward.
Speaker: She exists. She's walked out of the Arabian Nights ah to be an ideal love interest. In a different book, she could have been a female hero, but we just don't spend enough time with her. we're having very interesting character growth arc. We're just not there. Right, exactly. We're hanging Adela and his three male friends.
Speaker: And we have the one character in Sudden Wild Magic, who again is part of a set of seven who are all having interesting character arcs that we get three paragraphs of each.
Speaker: Alright, speaking of women, ah this is a poll from last season. This is from April. i says back in twenty twenty four i independently came up with justice for fifi to the extent that i had It It's a good idea waiting to be had.
Speaker: In my case, one of my first conversations with my partner was when I discovered we were both DWJ fans and we were both angry about what happens to Fifi. She's a teenager with a crush, he roared. I printed them up on a cheap surface and gave him one for a laugh. Now i put this on here because i I really just wanted to acknowledge I'm so happy that these buttons exist and that they're out there. Thank you, April.
Speaker: But actually, coming in context, ah it is kind of interesting to look at Fifi with her crush on an evil older man and put her in context of both the the age gap stuff that we've been talking about and the possibilities for a female hero.
Speaker: Fifi actually looks quite a lot like some of the protagonists of the ninety s Right, except she sort of gets written out of the book. ah Basically, the minute she falls in love with Archer, Awful, who is always right about everything in Archer's Goon, is like, Fifi's boring now.
Speaker: Right. um ah And that's the end of her, because there is no greater crime, no greater sin than to be boring. Right. But it's from a child's point of view. You know, that is, I think, in some ways, kind of the difference between the seventy s and early 80s and the late and the 90s.
Speaker: and the late eighty s and the ninety s From a child's point of view, from from the kind of child's point of view that Diana Wyn Jones is writing in the 80s, romance is boring. It's not in those books.
Speaker: She's not going to put it in there. The kids don't care. Diana Wyn Jones cares. She actually finds Fifi's romance with art i think she finds ah phofi's romance with Archer quite interesting. And if it had been in the 90s book, there would have been a lot about it.
Speaker: I think she finds it funny. i I can't imagine what Archer's Goon in the 90s would have felt like. Maybe, in fact, it would be a book a bit like Hex would. which Yeah. Which also a book about weird immortal powers going off to space. Exactly. Children who are adults who are children. Yes.
Speaker: We've got a couple a question about the theme song from Hannah. ah your I love your theme song. Who made it? And is there more of it? Becca, this one's on you. I know nothing about this. Yes.
Speaker: So there's another, a second podcast theme music question as well that I'm going to lump together with this one and just talk about them both at once. which is from Gabrielle. ah Your choice of podcast theme music has fascinated me from the beginning.
Speaker: Were you aware of the Orientalism present in this piece of music when you chose it? And did you intend any resonance with the way Orientalism comes up in DWJ's works? And then she hopefully answers the first question for me. The san Sans Sans Bacchanal, which is in fact what our theme music is. So thank you both for asking about this. It indeed the bacchanal from Sansaens.
Speaker: the orientalism however is built into the very first notes the obo oh look orientalized wind instrument plays for the introduction so thank you both for asking about this it is indeed the baccane from sanans The way that the theme music kind of came about is, ah so we sort of had a plan for theme music that fell through. And I went then like two weeks before we were going to launch season two, went on a desperate quest for open source music that we could potentially use for the theme. I also actually reached out. I was like, there's a really beautiful cover, cello cover of Tam Lin on YouTube. and I actually reached out to the person who made it like, could we maybe license this? from you and she wrote back a year later by which point we already had our theme music very kindly saying yes we could but it's too late but i'll link it in the comments because it's gorgeous anyway so then i went frantically looking through wikimedia comments for anything that sounded plausible and i am not a musicologist uh or a musician i found among other things the bacchanal from sansons And I was like, the name of this piece is fun for reasons of involving later Dan and Jones books.
Speaker: Let's see if it sounds kind of right. And so I sent you um a bunch of samples for like, here's a couple of things that I think might be plausible. And both of us agree that this is the one that sounded the most like the kind of stuff that we're talking about. It kind of has that mix of lightness and complexity and interest ah to kind of lead into the kind of discussions we thought we were going to be having.
Speaker: And so not not being musicologist, I did not immediately think oboe, orientalized wind instrument. Fascinated to know that now. But I did, after we'd selected on it, and I'd kind of done the samples and put it together, go look up more about the piece. And I sort of read the sampson into the description of the Samson and Delilah opera, and I was like, ah, there's a lot going on here.
Speaker: But I still think this is the right piece of music. And I do think that that has something to do with the fact that, yeah, the Orientalism is baked into it, is kind of baked into the assumptions that went into building this up.
Speaker: And that is baked into some of Diana Wynne Jones's kind of pre-existing assumptions as well. All the history of literature that goes into hers includes a large part of the history of Orientalism, both in the way we've talked about with the Arabian Nights and in the way we've talked about with, you know, kind of the idea of Babylon. It's all in there and it's kind of disingenuous not to acknowledge it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: What she said. Anyway, I'll also link the again, the version that we're using is open source. I'll link that in the comments too. You can listen to the whole thing because I've taken like... You've given yourself so many comment linking jobs. I know. I'm going to have to remote like take notes for myself when I'm gladly saying it every other minute. I should mention, you guys, you all need to know i do nothing. I turn up and talk about a book. Becca does all the work of this podcast.
Speaker: ah That is not true. ah you do all the transcripts, which is vitally important. And you did all of the bolding and selection for what we should talk about in this very Q&A. Yeah, okay, I did that.
Speaker: But mostly I do nothing. Not true in any way. Don't listen to her. Something else, jumping back to Hana and her question about the theme song. Hana also had a question about going back to the 80s. One major theme in the book is that hope is what stops you from doing something about your situation, that it locks you in because you believe things will eventually work out and therefore don't revolt. The symbol for the them is the anchor, which I suppose Diana Wynne-Jones took from Paul's faith, hope, and love, usually symbolized by the cross, the anchor, and the heart.
Speaker: But do you think she started with the thought that hope is a bad thing in a bad situation? Or did she start with the anchor, thought it was a strange symbol because it keeps you in your place or maybe even drags you down to the bottom for a good thing like hope, and then decided to write a book where hope is a bad thing?
Speaker: ah This is tricky because it's actually quite hard for us to know what was going on in Diana Wynne Jones's head. i will say that like from my own experience of writing books, that's not often how it works. like Like it's rare you start with like a single image and go, yeah, weird.
Speaker: And work out from there, or at least not quite so like logically, because that is a very logical analysis, right? Like hope anchor weird. What if we reversed it? Interesting.
Speaker: I don't, Certainly if I'd written the book, that would it wouldn't be intelligent as that. I would come up with that later and claim that was what I'd done. Right. Which reminds me of the Diana Wynne Jones essay where she writes a really beautiful, detailed explanation of what she was thinking in Fire and Hemlock. And then the next essay in Reflection is like, I gave the last one to my editor and says, you're lying.
Speaker: was right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So that was the last question about last season. And now I think we're going to move on to some of the direct questions about specific books from this season, starting with Lives of Christopher Chant.
Speaker: Right. This is from Sasha talking about Lives of Christopher Chant. says It's impossible for me to read the name Mordecai Roberts as a British man with curly dark hair and not 100% think Jewish. It's a very Jewish British name.
Speaker: This is a long question. or rather is a long, detailed, knowledgeable comment and we we're short on time. Let me do what I can. In Victorian Britain, for much of British history, we were considered swarthy, darker, thicker, curly haired people of possibly Middle Eastern in origin who were slightly strange and usually tolerated, but suspicious. And there's like a thousand years of British anti-Jewish tropes she's drawing on here, way older even than Victorian imperialism.
Speaker: One of the most legendary European anti-Jewish tropes is the one of dual loyalty. The idea idea that our primary loyalty is to our clan, basically what the Dreit is doing by sending his double agents out. For a long while, Jews lived in their own neighborhoods and spoke their own language. And the story of the rebel Jew trying to break out of what is seen as their clannish cult and blend in with Christian secular society because of its superior attributes, music, cricket, would pop up periodically in fiction.
Speaker: In much of Christian European history, we're specifically known as silver-tongued liars and mercenary dealmakers, merchants without morals. close enough in appearance to Europeans to blend in, but just far enough to be suspicious. We have a second secret foreign name used only within our community.
Speaker: Mordecai reads as Jewish in ways that are very British. I'm not super sure Diana Wynne-Jones was aware of what she's doing here, but she is definitely doing it. Yeah, this is actually something that came up in our conversation around the book beforehand, and then we didn't actually manage to pull it through because there was just so much to talk about in that book.
Speaker: It is that We actually have a couple questions about Diana Wynne-Jones and Judaism. We also have Nathan, in a later question, points out that Adon simply means Lord in Hebrew, as in the hymn Adon Alam, Lord of the Earth. ah We did talk about it a little bit in Deep Secret, as far as Jewish Hebrew origins of the Magids, and a little bit about kind of what that influence was on her. I do think that in Christopher Chant,
Speaker: Yes, it's a very Jewish-British name. Yes, I think that Mordecai is... Mordecai Roberts is pulling on this for the purposes of that book.
Speaker: Jewish racialization is the same kind as other kinds of racialization tropes that are happening, exoticization tropes that are happening in that book in talking about series 11.
Speaker: The thing about... Jewishness in Britain as ah Sasha points out Jewishness is a ah state of conditional whiteness and I think for Christopher Chant that conditionality is has you know Jewishness in that book moves outside of conditional whiteness into exoticization I don't think that this is something that she was doing deliberately but yeah I absolutely think that it's something that you that is underlying that text in many of the ways that all kinds of
Speaker: exoticization for things that are outside of Christopher's little Victorian white boy experience are underlying that text. Right. I think it's striking that Christopher repeatedly sort of looks at Mordecai Roberts and thinks, oh, he's like me. He has curly hair like me. He loves cricket like me. And at the same time, the reader is very strongly encouraged to see that Mordecai is quite fundamentally different to question Christopher in a way that's not explained until the series 11 reveal at the end.
Speaker: which, as you say, Becca, is a reveal which has so much so much of like the the the the British canon of racist tropes lying underneath it.
Speaker: And something that I think is in that book and... Also in, ah you know, the one that Nathan calls out is also kind of dealing with some of these tropes is power three. And in deep secret is the exoticism, the Orientalism of the Near East of, you know, Arabian Nights of Babylon, of this kind of group of stories with which Judaism is really associated as well. It's sort of part of that mix.
Speaker: Going all the way back Said Orientalism, which I remember when I read it, one one of the things he points out is that anti-Semitism so is so cool because it's aimed at the Semitic peoples by the Victorians. It becomes more specifically an anti-Jewish um position in sort of 20th century, 21st century usage. yeahp But it's originally anti-Jews and anti-Muslims, both Christians. Middle Eastern foreigners, exotic, don't look like us, curly black hair, big noses. remember we talked about the um the caricatures in the illustrated edition of Castle in the Air where we were like, wow. yeah
Speaker: And I do think that that's something that really comes more out of her reading and the sort of grounding elements of her, you know, these tropes that have been bubbling up through all these various texts more than out of Diana Wynne Jones's everyday life. Like I can look at the list of people that she's talking about the,
Speaker: encyclopedia fantasy and be like there were jewish authors on there there were you know people that she was mingling with at cons uh and i'm sure you were jewish whom for sure she didn't think you know think twice about give a second thought to it but it's part of this older canon of british literature that is informing all of these books in which you have this very orientalized stereotype of the jewish person walking amongst you that is that is working its way into these texts I mean, this is sort of what it means to write in a canon, to write in a tradition, whether you like it or not, you are going to be constantly finding yourself in conversation with, in use of knowingly or not, all sorts of stuff that maybe you would never consciously go, wait, what? Right.
Speaker: And yet it's there. It's always there. ah Books are not product solely of their author. Books are product of their author's context and of how thoughtfully or how thoughtlessly the author is using that context. I think one reason that you and I, Becca, have often like been really sharp on the the thoughtless racism in Diana Wynne-Jones' books is that we so much admire her thoughtfulness elsewhere that it seems a more shocking...
Speaker: Right. Notice. Yeah. Or failure to care. And I think one of the reasons that honestly, I personally have often been less sharp on the Judaism stuff. I think something else that we didn't really talk much about at all at the time is the wandering Jew and Homeward Bounders. Yeah. That's kind of a glaring one that jumps out is...
Speaker: In some ways, for me, I'm like, I read all these books as a kid. And so I've internalized them. They are part of me. And so when I read The Wandering Jew in Homeward Bounders, and I'm like, ah, this is what she's doing with that trope. She's, you know, taking this very anti-Semitic story and she's making it, ah incorporating it into her cosmology. And making this sort of ah certainly a weird and othered but sympathetic figure who gets, you know, this great speech against the them. And I'm like, okay, great. I understand what's going on here.
Speaker: I've internalized, you know, I've come to terms with this for me. So I don't need to spend a lot of time talking about it. And that leads to gaps on the podcast. Yeah. ah co yeah so Wait, sorry, no, we skipped one Christopher Chant one.
Speaker: oh yeah. Oh, just a defensive Christopher Chant. I think you do Christopher Chant a disservice when you speculate that everyone gives him things in the Anywhere's because he's using magic. I was as a small child, very good looking and charming and people really did just randomly give me things. It didn't occur to me that this was not normal when I read the book as a child. It's also another way Christopher is like Gwendolyn when everyone on Coven Street adores Gwendolyn and gives her presents.
Speaker: Well, I am delighted and amazed to find out that this is a thing that happens in real life. Congratulations on your childhood. It was really lovely time. But you're right about the Christopher Gwendolyn link. Everybody adores this perfect looking little child and gives them stuff.
Speaker: Yeah. And that's not going to be a problem for their later development at all. now castle in the air now castle in the air Farrah says did you not recognize the tale of the twelve dancing princesses it's the soldier's tale he's wandering when he comes across a castle where everyone wants to know why the princesses are asleep all day he offers to try to find out using a cloak of invisibility he follows them across a lake to a castle it ends with him being given the pick of the princesses and choosing the eldest as is so often the case yeah we miss stuff Yep. We absolutely missed stuff. We are not claiming to be the final word on Diana Wynne-Jones' work. Can you imagine? In no way. Impossible.
Speaker: Remember when we did a whole episode on Tale of Time City and didn't talk about The Wizard of Oz? Yeah, I do remember that. And we're about to come up on against another one as, you know, ah the number of people who wrote up about, wrote to us about Deep Secret and the Like Wake Dirge. We'll get there.
Speaker: Yep. I'd also like to notice that one issue for Jones's generation that one often met one's partner when one was quite young, then went into uni and work, etc. My partner was 17 when he met his first wife. Off he went to university. They married when he was 21. So Flower in the Night has been off doing her thing and Abdullah is left to deal with and accept the results. It's probably quite realistic for Jones's generation. Although I do think it's striking the way the way that it's gendered. Flower in the Night has been off to genie fighting you university. and a Right.
Speaker: You are very scary now. But I'm into it. Deeply into it. But I do think, again, ah you know, this is the kind of book that she's writing at the beginning of the 90s.
Speaker: At the end of the 90s, perhaps she'd be writing Flower in the Night Story and Abdullah would be, ah would we'd have Abdullah off to the side and we'd get him at the end accepting the results. All right, Black Mariah.
Speaker: This is gender again. Samantha writes in um about our Black Mariah episode, says there's one intertextual connection that I don't think you mentioned, which is Arthur Ransom, author of The Swallows and Amazons books. um We know that she read The Swallows and Amazons books.
Speaker: The great aunt appears in two books, but her second appearance in The Picts and the Martyrs presents a much more rounded and human character. In her first appearance in Swallowdale, however, she's malevolent, a Gorgon. You don't meet her, you don't hear her speak, but her presence is the heart of the plot.
Speaker: Not as the driving force, but as the immovable, malign, selfish obstacle who gets in the way of everything, especially of children having fun. There's quite a lot more ah beautiful writing about the Swallows and Amazons. I'm sorry we don't have time to read it all.
Speaker: Skipping down. aunt mariah the woman who brought up the kids puts a stop to all their fun in spite of the fact that they hated their upgrading neither if adults able to stand against the great aunt she bullies everyone and she is boring timthee calls her a gorgon turning everyone to stone while appealing the character is all wrong medusa is a victim not a queen bee i think that illusion would have annoyed the more classlyminded diana enough to reinvent her Her Aunt Mariah, still always prim in her black, very old-fashioned clothes weighted on hand and foot, is rooted in different mythology, but they're both a dead lead weight on anything approaching fun."
Speaker: True. Yep. Good spot. We missed that one. ahha Although part of Jones's personal mythology is her encounter with Arthur Ransom as a child, isn't it? Yes.
Speaker: Up in the Lake District when she was an evacuee, got shouted out away because he didn't actually like children, according to her. ah Much like Aunt Mariah. Yes. Also, Black Mirror.
Speaker: This is from Sarah. Mig mentioned she was going to use her notebook with a lock on it for her league table of King Arthur's knights and pop groups. Is this some kind of Arthurian pop slash fantasy football she's made up?
Speaker: Is this a known pursuit in England? Please, I must know. Yes, every girl in the 1990s had their little notebook full of King kenar pop slash. I have several still stored in the book. No, no, this is a big thing. Or rather, this appears to be a Diana thing, because this is the plot of Hexwood. Yes, it happened several times. She seems to think it's a normal child pursuit. Have your little league table where you mix up a heroic figure and... It is part of her known preoccupation with the idea that sports figures are the same equivalent as classical heroes. It's the Andre Agassi cricketer thing.
Speaker: it's she's She's looking at sports and she's being like, what's the appeal of this? well It's like King Arthur, really. What if you were Gawain?
Speaker: What if you were Gawain? That would be sexy. She's right. Um... And then also I'm like, Maria, one more. You missed this. Naomi Lebeke on Tumblr.
Speaker: ah It occurs to me that Cranberry must be named after Elizabeth Gaskell's classic little old ladyocracy, Cranford. I'm pretty confident one of the things that Diana Winchester responding to. Yep.
Speaker: Yeah, we missed that one. I haven't read it. You guys know so much stuff, so we don't have to. Truly, thank you for sending all this in. It increases my reading list for the offseason. There's so much stuff that I meant to read before this episode. It didn't get around to, but I valiantly do plan to attempt it before we start season four, and we'll see.
Speaker: All right, moving up to A Sudden Wild Magic. The first one is from Catherine. Catherine, you had a lot of thoughts and questions, so I'm breaking them up by book. I'm just going to start with a Sudden Wild Magic one. So first, spotted from the fandom wiki, two of the notable casualties of the Strikeforce are called Tam and Lynn.
Speaker: She can't help herself. She can't help herself. It's in almost every book. Like, look hard enough in almost every Diana Wynne-Jones book and you'll find Tam Lynn a little bit in there, even if it's just Tam Lynn is dead.
Speaker: Next, another pulling back into old women. Gladys reminds me of Carida from Darkload of Durkholm. They feel of a peace as well as both reminding me strongly of Granny Weatherwax, strong crone, the other one vibes.
Speaker: And of course, Gladys explicitly is a crone and that is like her magical role. yeah And of course, there's the the practice of the the triple goddess is a practice in like...
Speaker: contemporary magical practice contemporary alternative practice religious practice and we know that jones is mingling at cons and in her science fiction community with people who are practicing wizards practicing yeah practitioners of contemporary magic so i think it both jones and pratchett when they're they're doing their crone thing must partly be drawing on that as well the the crone the witch yeah And I do think I come back often to that one little moment in Deep Secret of Marie being at the con and looking at a very quiet older woman across the room and thinking there's a lot going on with you. I'd like to know you.
Speaker: I feel like maybe in that moment encapsulates a lot of what's going on with these older women in the back as we suddenly start to see these interesting older women in the back half of the 90s moving away from the Aunt Mariah.
Speaker: And then moving on to Hexwood, it occurred to me that somebody thinking what a shame it is that Orm corrupted the banner so I could cheat is like the end of Castle in the Air and how Dalzol corrupted Hasrael.
Speaker: You're absolutely right. Absolutely. I think she does tend to reuse pieces, ideas, and I think Castle in the Air, it's odd because I remember reading Castle Air as a child and really enjoying it, although being baffled by these Howl and Sophie people, who even are they? Because I'm older. I'm older.
Speaker: But rereading it for this season, i was really struck by what an airless feel it has and how how little space many of its ideas have to breathe. I'm not surprised she comes back to it and reuses it. This idea of of enjoying wickedness, yes enjoying being bigger and more complicated and more dangerous, enjoying wildness, perhaps, yes brings us into figures like Zilla.
Speaker: as well as these powerful, dangerous, ruthless older women like Kerida, as well as, yes, the Banas itself. As well as Sophie, who the entirety of Hal's moving castle is Sophie enjoying getting corrupted by Hal.
Speaker: Yes, she's having such a nice time. A little bit of corruption, I think, is maybe no bad thing. But when it comes to something like the Banis, where a lot depends on it being fair. There's two kinds of corruption. At the same time, though, the whole point of the Banis is fairness is what was used against it. When you were stuck too firmly to the rules, the rules are a trap.
Speaker: The ability to be a little bit corrupt, a little bit of cheat, a little bit of... wickedness is necessary in a world where rules are so easily turned into a cruel trap that turns Sophie into an old woman as a girl that then in her old womanhood is the first time she actually gets to have her her full personality or turn the banners as a tool of like fairness and justice into a tool of thousand-year domination of the bad guys yeah I'm trying to put together a thought about the kind of cheating that
Speaker: Aunt Mariah does all along or that the them do all along. ah But it's not quite coalescing. So let's move on. I was surprised to hear you call Martellian over sex at the end of Hexwood. This is still from Catherine. He spent most of the book as a child. It's true. And yet like you get three pages of him as an adult. And I'm like, this guy is a dog. um I think my idea of his breeding programs is much more technological than him necessarily just having a lot of sex. It strikes me a bit too haphazard and random in outcome, as well as rather horrifying in its implications. I do think Hexwood is committed to horrifying implications. Absolutely.
Speaker: Two of the eventual hand of Rayna's being Martellian's nephews, who are results of organized breeding, doesn't suggest any kind of good things for his siblings. Though I appreciate it's likely not necessarily that specific relationship. Of course, the word nepotism comes direct directly from nephew.
Speaker: That is very funny. And I think likely an intentional joke that ah two nephews end up in this hand. Speaking of Mordian and Martellian, this one comes from Nathan, who also had a lot of book by book thoughts that I've sort of broken up here.
Speaker: Dinah and Jones spoke in Reflections about the healing power of children's make-believe play and experiencing being someone else in roleplay. You didn't mention in your Hexwood episode, but it's an important theme. We see both Mordian and Martellian explicitly heal and grow from it.
Speaker: Dinah and Jones also spoke in her writings about how she blames her parents' generation's lack of play and focus on the sensible for many of the ills of their time. The ending of Hexwood is literally, now that you've learned and grown, come out of your fantasy game and get to work changing the world.
Speaker: We've seen a parent or ancestor with a mission that they disastrously hand off to their kids before Martellian in Clennon to his children and Milda to Mitt. Adara and her children are a contrasting example. Given Fytila's presence, I expect a WJ was snarking about how unethical Valhalla is where Woden prepares younger men to fight and die for him. Hugh Goddner, Guarantee, and Hearn are both reasonable and don't believe in the fantastical stuff the younger family member sees and both respond with mockery that may be the same Carol O'Neill archetype.
Speaker: Not believing and being oblivious to the fantasy things going on are all around them is a note she plucks repeatedly in both Hexwood and Deep Secret. And then one last little tidbit. Mordian, like Mitt, is a murder-related young man of low social status despite prestigious distant ancestry, selected as the next ruler by higher powers, leapfrogging an aristocracy. Yeah, I think Mordian and Mitt are same. And he's face. And he's got a weird face. I think they're the same guy.
Speaker: i suspect them of being the same guy. But going back to play, I think this actually ties really well to the conversation that we were having earlier about corruption. Oh.
Speaker: Because... I think you could you could say that one of the things that Sophie does perhaps in Howl's Moving Castle is learn to play. She's playing the role of old woman of Howl's old mother. Yes go.
Speaker: Thought of a thing. yes Play is not just ah let's play a game. Children's play make believe is let's make up the rules of a game and play the game. Let's yeah experiment with rules. Let's try different things and see what works. And that is perhaps the kind of play which is an antidote to the the corrupting power of stultified, unchanging rules. yeah Children's play where you experiment with rules, where you change the rules, which brings me back to the novella I've forgotten the title of, the Crestomancy one.
Speaker: Oh my God, this is going to be embarrassing in a minute. Sage of Yes! Sage and of fear um She yelled into the microphone. No, it's important, right? Because that one is all about the Sage of Fear going, if rules are a structure for the mind to play in, why not just climb right out of it? um This idea of playing with rules, ah imagining how rules could be different.
Speaker: is the sort of necessity necessary antidote to a stultified and increasingly changeless world. Yeah. And... this I think this is a really interesting point about kind of the power of make-believe, of pretending to be somebody else, of sidestepping the rules of who you are that you've been given by moving into this other role and being like, I'm committing really hard to what I think this other role is like.
Speaker: Sophie does it. As Nathan says, Morty and Martellian both explicitly do it. That's how they move around from the... ah the sort of prescriptions that have been based on them, Tom and Polly do it. This is how Tom and Polly get out from under the rules and the laws that have been placed on them is by pretending to be heroes and and acting by the rules of the heroes that they pretend to be rather than the people that they actually are.
Speaker: And I think that that's a really powerful point that if who you are, if the person that you're stuck being does not allow you to be everything that you want to be, you can just be somebody else. You can just play pretend and make your own rules up.
Speaker: And the Banis does this too. The Banis is pretending to be the Holy Grail. And the play is the truth. I think that is important that that ultimately Polly is a hero who saves Tom. like Like she was playing this and it was the truth. These are not mutually exclusive. Your you pretend is not fake.
Speaker: Does that make sense? Yeah, it absolutely does make sense. It's a way to, and I think this actually ties back to some of the stuff that she said about how she writes and taking these characters and taking different aspects of these characters and putting them into different books by looking at real people who have many different aspects to them and being, all right, this is the bit of you that I would like to play with for this story.
Speaker: This is the bit of you that I would like to play with for that story. And perhaps as well ties into what you were saying earlier about the increasing willingness to um show characters who are playing with and performing femininity yeah as not necessarily simple evil incarnate, but but people playing.
Speaker: Yeah. And thinking about corruption, like, I think there is a point where that goes too far, where that gets dangerous. um And I think we see it at the end of this decade in Dark Lord, when Kit starts playing at being the Dark Lord. Yeah!
Speaker: Yes, he plays the Dark Lord and he is missing which parts are not a game. And that's explicitly what the gods say to him at the end. You have to learn that war is not a game. Like there are limits to what you can play and what you can pretend and what is justifiable as pretend.
Speaker: And I think that's where we come back to the Banas. It's a pity the Banas got so corrupted. Because you can, so you know, there that what you said is true. When you start playing something enough, you do become that person. It becomes a part of you.
Speaker: Polly plays at being a hero and becomes a hero. Kip plays at being Dark Lord. Polly plays at being a witch and becomes a witch as well. Yeah. And so you do have to learn by seeing the consequences of playing these new rules, playing this new version of you, which one has consequences that are not the consequences that you want to see.
Speaker: It's a game, but games are real. Yes. She's so interested in games. My God, all the way through. tell you, I'm really excited to get to next season and do the game. I'm so excited to get to the game, which as far as I'm concerned is like the closest she ever gets to a thesis statement about what writing a book is for. Yeah.
Speaker: We'll get there. We'll get there. there's There's some really interesting stuff coming up in the two thousand s And some less good stuff. Yes. It's going to be an interesting ride. Okay.
Speaker: What else have we got? From Kaz says, audiobooks are my saving grace, especially when coupled with fascinating commentary. I'm sad that Hexwood never had an audio edition, though there's an abomination of an AI-generated version on YouTube.
Speaker: Don't look at that. ah If you could pick an all-star narrator for Hexwood, who would be your choice? This is the worst possible question to ask me, a person who cannot deal with audio to the extent that I was like, I will only podcast if you let me transcript the whole thing so that people like me can experience it. I don't. yet It's so important.
Speaker: I have an answer for this. It's my same answer for who 20 years ago I wanted to play Morty and if there'd been a movie 20 years ago, Christopher Eccleston, let him do it. God, you're right. God, you're right.
Speaker: I don't know. Would we want to multi-narrator? Do we need ah an Anne to play opposite Chris Eccleston as Mordian? That's the question. I don't have an immediate answer for an Anne, but I think it would be fun to alternate for them. But then as soon as you start going multi-narrator, then you also need to have one for Raider 1 and Raider 3 and Bors. Sir Bors needs his own narrator.
Speaker: We're getting complicated now. Sir Bors needs his own narrator. I bet it wouldn't be hard to find this or force. But in the interest of saving budget for our imaginary audiobook for Hexwood, maybe we just pick one all-star celebrity narrator.
Speaker: Farah points out... Oh wait, no, it's your turn to read a question. Right. Farah points out, halfway through the Hexwood podcast, you said something in a very specific way that set off a ping in my head. Anne is Vieran. Anne's middle name is Veronica. So she is Anne Veronica, Wells' rebellious new woman. Did you make the connection with the Wells novel? and never even occurred to me. Didn't occur to me either. Adding one to the reading list.
Speaker: Put it on the list. Put it on the list. Sam says, I was struck by your Silverchair comparison in Hexwood, which never occurred to me. Perhaps given Diana's awareness of Doctor hugh Who and the fact that Tom Baker had just played Puddle Glam in the 1990 BBC adaptation of Silverchair, could he be the prototypical Diana Wynne Jones sexy man?
Speaker: I could certainly see Tom Baker as the long pale guardian of the iron casket in a squashed and floppy hat. Absolutely. He could play all these men. Make him the celebrity narrator of X-Men.
Speaker: Actually, i mean, I basically just did. I said Christopher Eccleston, who's another Doctor Who. So I think basically what I just said is just let a doctor narrate X-Men and you'll do all right. yeah From Harris, I was listening to the short story episode and cracked open my copy of Minor Arcana, which includes both the master and an an introduction from Diana Wynne-Jones.
Speaker: I thought you might be interested to see her comment. The master was another dream or maybe a nightmare, which I dreamed more than once and had again to exercise by writing it down. I know it is really part of the complex of ideas out of which Fire and Hemlock got written, but I couldn't explain how.
Speaker: I'm not sure I could explain it either, but there it is. I also found her comment about Dragon Reserve Home 8 interesting. While I was thinking about the multiplicity of alternate worlds that occur in the lives of Christopher Chant, I wrote Dragon Reserve Home 8 almost by way of clarifying things. At that time, though, I was thinking of the worlds as rather like a wad of different colored paper handkerchiefs. If you were to take that wad and crumple it in one hand, each color would be separate but wrapped in with the others.
Speaker: And I was also thinking of an enchanter's gifts rather more as inborn psychic talents. As so often happens, when I came to write the actual book a good four years later, everything turned out differently, and probably no one would realize this story had anything to do with it unless I told them.
Speaker: Thinking about it, the Crestomancy world classification into series, etc. does feel connected with the structure in Dragon Reserve. I expect it originated as a sort of world-building exercise, as what makes it feel like it could be part of a completed longer story, and why Jones didn't end up building on it.
Speaker: Maybe it had served its purpose creatively and didn't need developing further. I think I meant to put this in the Crestomancy section and accidentally put it in the wrong space, but we can talk about it now because I think it's really interesting. I think, i think world building exercise is a really interesting way to think about it because yeah, it's very compelling opening to a world, Dragon Reserve.
Speaker: Yeah. And I do think it ties back into both this comments on the Master and Dragon Reserve Home 8, even though Hexwood is not necessarily mentioned specifically in these comments. It does feel again, when she's thinking about the complex of ideas out of which a certain book gets written, You can see bits of these complex ideas of ideas making their way into the full length novels.
Speaker: And I think that is a really fruitful way to think about the short stories. Agreed. Okay, Crown of Delmarc. Wow, you guys sent us so many questions. Becca, we might have to record a second. We might have to do a part two.
Speaker: Okay, ah Crown Delmarc. This is from Nathan. Recovery of the sword is another sly joke where no matter how difficult the conditions of recovering the MacGuffin are, plot armour ensures they couldn't fail if they tried and they try. And in fact, you do have Tenequois standing there giggling the whole time while they're desperately trying to fail at the plot and can't. So funny reading the reading Crown of Jail Mark after reading Tough Guide or in the context of Tough Guide, I think makes it a much funnier book, even though it is quite a serious book, as we said, she's doing it seriously. But there's so many sly little jokes in there about like, I guess you want this is what a quest fantasy looks like.
Speaker: This is what we're writing these days. Here you go. Enjoy. Which is not the last time she did that. um we like I'm looking forward to the 2000s in many ways.
Speaker: But this is what we're writing these days. It gets us to Diana Wynne-Jones does 2000s YA. Right. Oh, my God. Yeah, we're going to get there. From Holly.
Speaker: I wrote to Diana Wynne-Jones when I was a teenager. I was obsessed with the Delmarc books the time. I don't have a copy of my letter, but I seem to have asked a bunch of questions and she wrote back. letter is typed. The letter headed to her address in Clifton. It's signed and the envelope written by hand. In it, she writes, Gull goes off and has adventures in another part of the country where he gets known as Gunn.
Speaker: At some point, I hope to write the book about that. Diana! Diana! I do feel sometimes sort of tormented, taunted by how much more Delmarc there could be and isn't.
Speaker: Every single character in Delmark could be the protagonist of a different spinoff book so easily, but I would love the gold book. I would love it desperately. Another sort of prehistoric novel from her, I think would be really, really fun. I loved Spellcoats so much. I think possibly of everything we've read for this project, reading Spellcoats with you was just exquisite. Just my favorite. So good.
Speaker: Yeah. i' I'm glad that we waited until... two seasons later to read crown but what also the experience of like just reading them all in a rush would have been a delight all right deep secret From Spotify, a comment from Spotify.
Speaker: This was so much fun. There's only so much time in the world, time in an episode, of course, but I was hoping there was room for discussion of whether Diana Wynne Jones is intentionally having a bit of fun at neuromancer's expense. About the ghost in the radio, the traumatized hero villain guy, Maurice Claus, and Case were a part of a bit. I'm sure there was other stuff I'm forgetting. Okay, I think you're always safe to assume Diana is having fun at someone's expense. Yeah. it's Just safely, is the joke on purpose?
Speaker: Yes. Probably. This reminds me of when I went back to Chronicles of Amber and I was like, Becca, I think possibly every book in the first half of the 80s is a joke about Chronicles of Amber.
Speaker: And you're 100% right. And we know this because then she goes on and puts Amber in her encyclopedia fantasy entry so it's officially on the reading list. Yeah. This is from Catherine.
Speaker: community of these spaces very well portrayed in the book i've also had the experience of watching a panel where two people are visibly getting pissed off at each other about it later Babylon is a word used in all sorts of ways that don't relate to the historical or archaeological city of empires from the ancient Near East.
Speaker: It occurred to me that Babylon is another older empire that existed but fell into ruins or maybe drifted out of the infinity sign of worlds and became something else. Yeah. The way that Babylon... we could There could be essays written on the way that Babylon is used in Deep Secret, I think.
Speaker: And sort of the messy knot of signifiers that it stands in for. Yeah. One of which we'll come to in a second. question from Laurie who said I just reread Deep Secret I wanted to even notice the subtle but important references to the like wake dirge first of all we hadn't second this is I think so key to understanding Deep Secret that we actually do have to reread it out to you now yes also Ariana is the other person who said like wake dirge go listen to it right now And she's right. We should have. there's
Speaker: This is another thing I've been finding in the 90s. I am losing track of or less able to keep up with everything Jones is putting in. Like back in the 70s books, I was able to read quite a lot of the background reading for Diana Wynne Jones because by sheer coincidence or not coincidence, but a lot of her reading list for children's fantasy books was my children's fantasy reading.
Speaker: But by the ninety s she is is pulling in so much from so many directions. I'm like, I cannot keep up with you. Yeah, it's just completely all encompassing. Yeah.
Speaker: If I had a lifetime, maybe I could track down all her references. I mean, this is her lifetime, isn't it? This this is yeah what she's doing with her life, isn't reading extraordinary amount and synthesizing it into extraordinary books. Anyway. Likely Durge, go for it.
Speaker: I am not going to sing it. Yeah. But you can look up sung versions on YouTube. This a night, this a night, every night and all, fire and fleeting candlelight and Christ receive thy soul.
Speaker: ah When thou from hence away art past, to Winnie Moor thou com'st at last. If ever thou gav'st Hosen and Shun, sit thee down and put them on. If Hosen and Shun thou ne'er gaes nain, the Winnie shall prick thee to the bare bane. From Winnie Moor, where thou may'st pass, to Brigadred thou com'st at last. From Brigadred, when thou may'st pass, to Purgatory fire thou com'st at last. If ever thou gav'st meat or drink, the fire shall never make thee shrink.
Speaker: If meat or drink thou ne'er gaes nain, the fire will burn thee to the bare bane. This a night, this a night, every night and all, fire and fleet and candlelight, and Christ receive thy soul.
Speaker: So that is a description of a journey. First you come to Winnie Moor. Winnie is a dialect word, thorns, the thorny moor.
Speaker: If you ever gave hosen and shoon, hosen shoes, you get to put them on. If not, you're going to get pricked to the bone by the thorns. Then from there you come to the brigadred, the bridge of dread.
Speaker: And there may be a couple of missing verses there. ah Wikipedia page is quite good on this one. Wikipedia is actually generally surprisingly good on folk songs. And then from the Bridge of Dread, when you get past, you come to purgatory fire. And if you ever again gave generously of meat or drink, then you can get through the fire. Otherwise, you're going to get burned to the bone. So it's a description of a journey into death and you end up explicitly in purgatory, which is part of like the...
Speaker: Catholic afterlife underworld journey. So this poem, speaking to some of the other stuff we've talked about on this episode, was first recorded in 1686 or 87, though it's clearly much older than that, in a book by John Aubrey titled Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme.
Speaker: And although it is from the Christian era, says Wikipedia, and features references to Christianity, much of the symbolism is thought to be of pre-Christian origin. This ties, I think, a bit back into this idea of Babylon, of the Near East, of old occult symbolism, of Magids as a term from the Hebrew, in deep secret, in the way that all of these kind of like, well, it's if it's older than Christianity, then this must be what the kind of thing that we're looking at. Which is not true, by the way. the Many things are older than Christianity that aren't either Judaism or
Speaker: anything that else that comes out of that that era, but I feel like that's all tied together in the way the symbolism appears as part of the Babylon journey. Right. I think the Babylon journey is a journey into death.
Speaker: Like it's a journey out of life and into an afterlife, another life where there will be some kind of judgment. And it's drawing on definitely drawing on the lightquake dirge for its images of what that's going to be like. But it's not only drawing on that. It's drawing on Babylon imagery.
Speaker: It's drawing on, i mean, it's drawing on like the classical... catabasis narratives as well like there's a it's got that Virgil feeling that the you go down to the underworld it's all gray and dark yeah such a sequence it's such a sequence it's stuck with me as nothing else has like it's so beautiful and it is numinous in the way that very little else in the 90s is numinous
Speaker: It feels in a way like, you know, this kind of catabasis, this kind of interaction with the underworld feels like dog's body or... Yeah, that's a good, good, good one. Good comparison. um it's It's a moment of mystery.
Speaker: And she has been interested in the mystery of magic elsewhere. But Deep Secret, even though it's explicitly about we are working on the mystery of magic for the benefit of all, we, Rupert and the Magids, are the keepers of these mysteries, ah slowly preparing the world to receive them. But there's actually very little mystery everywhere else in the book. It's like love it's like comedy. It's contemporary. it's Very little of it has that numinous feeling. And yeah, very little of what's in the 90s has that numinous feeling, although it does come up in places. I'm thinking of Hexwood.
Speaker: You get these we these moments of the forest yeah as a separate kind of magic to what the Banas is doing. And I was actually thinking about the moment in Crown of Dalemark where they descend and talk to to old Hearn, to dead Hearn. Yeah, there are these flashes, these moments that kind of dip beneath the surface and touch at something very deep and very old and this and and near to death that get, you know, these that are in the middle of these books that are otherwise very concerned with the present, with the future, ah with the way people live in the nineteen ninety s with teens working out their romance.
Speaker: And then you just get these kind of sideways flashes of something really profound. Yeah. Anyway, Babylon. I feel this is another where I feel like I could read endlessly about Babylon and still not understand Babylon.
Speaker: i Something else I want to mention real quick From that same Bit of stuff from Catherine though ah Is the fat phobia of the 90s again oh Just pointing out that this is something that all Something else actually That Diana mc Jones has in common with Terry Pratchett In that you have these sort of Characters who are charmingly fat Relatedly fat, allowed fat And then you are Characters that are too fat Where it just Forms the central point of their personality Catherine points out sort of Nanny Og and Sergeant Colon versus Agnes Knitt and Ald Olson, who are so big you really just got to go on along about it.
Speaker: And how that sort of, you know, part of the social social messaging around fatness yeah um really comes through. We are 90 minutes in. And we have several more deep secret questions and then our kind of closing questions. do you want to go on or do you want to call out and continue next week? Shall we call it and continue next week so that I can be more intelligent and not talking quite so fast? I think we have quite a lot to say about the rest of Deep Secret, about coming questions. And then we wanted as well to sort of talk about the whole arc of her career in the 90s, where I think there's a lot that's interesting to say. Yeah, let's try let's not try and squash that all into the next 30 minutes. Let's give ourselves time and come back to it next week. Lucky you guys if you get a surprise three-hour episode. Em and Becker are at it again.
Speaker: and no this one's not our fault. It's your fault for sending in so many questions. And thank you for doing it. We really appreciate it We do really appreciate All right, we'll see each other next week and you in five minutes. Exactly.
Speaker: And we're back. Hello. It has been five minutes for you and a week for us. Any incoherence in what you're about to hear is caused by that gap. Yes. A week plus, I think a week and a day. and I'm back with, and another thing about the Like Wake Dirge because- Becca, tell us another thing about the Like Wake Dirge. I'm going to tell you two more things that I found out about the Like Wake Dirge over the course of the intervening week. The first is that according, and I don't know why it didn't occur to me, it's right in the name, it's a wake.
Speaker: But according to the poet, Carol Rubens, who did not say the source for this, but she says that originally it was sung by a woman during the traditional watch at the side of the corpse. So it's not just like a general kind of poem that you say for a wake. It's that you're literally sitting next to the dead person overnight singing the like wake dirge.
Speaker: Carol Rubens also wrote... Is the corpse saying Rob or is it Marie or is it both? I was thinking it was Marie. that Because Marie is already mostly dead, right?
Speaker: Yeah, but probably the one who's bleeding out on the bed. That's true. They're both sort of mostly dead. I mean, there's no reason that you can't two for the price of one. They could both be corpses. Everybody going on the catabasis is clearly like dead in some way. Right. The other thing that Cal Ruman says in this Guardian article that I found, which I find really funny, um is that so because there's so much in the poem about...
Speaker: you know, have you been charitable? Have you given things away in your life? Have you, you know, have you lived a life that is worthy of receiving some balm in the afterlife? Carol suggested that if the dead person had been notably uncharitable to those present, the reception could well have been more gloating than devout when they saved these lives.
Speaker: Which I think is really funny. Everyone's sitting around like, we know you never gave any clothing away, John. ah Rob, in this case. So we do have sort of a, you know, a little bit of a morality tale here with the the the people who, well, it's not as simple as a morality tale because, of course, Rob has never had the chance to give anything away. That is sort of part of the point of Rob's journey and of the book is that the the closeness, the smallness of the, yeah, cult that he has lived in has has blocked him off from the opportunity to live
Speaker: a broad, open, charitable life. Which I actually was thinking about that over the course of the five minutes that was eight days. Ah, it was eight days! Eight! And I was thinking it comes back to another theme that Diana Wynne-Jones leans on a bit in the 90s, which is the...
Speaker: poverty I guess or the anti-poverty it's the Dale Mark thing it's it's yeah May when looking at the miners and thinking these people aren't free because they have nothing because they are so fucking poor right um and Rob has lived this life of yeah yeah emotional poverty and smallness but also you know physical poverty and meanness a life without splendor there's that word splendor as in the true state of affairs a life without greatness in it a life where he has nothing to give away and it has reduced him
Speaker: to this ungenerous, selfish, nasty person who, when faced with the challenge or or the test of the the deep secret cataposus, has nothing to help him.
Speaker: Yes, who has been taught to think only of, you know, it's it's ah there's there' there's a certain people in Rob's life that he's been taught to think of as real people and important.
Speaker: And everybody else is unimportant and doesn't count. And that's kind of a scene theme that we've seen a couple times through Diana Wynne-Jones. You know, the the the way of thinking that limits your perspective only to the real people who do count.
Speaker: That goes back even to Witch Week. You know, there's there's real boys and real girls and everyone else is just a shade or a shadow. And to Rob, everybody else is a shade or a shadow, including his own siblings that he doesn't know are his siblings, but has been raised as his siblings, nonetheless.
Speaker: Until he kind of goes on this death journey where he's the one who's a shade. a And sort of Gesundheit has to experience that. Sorry about that. ah ah Christ receive thy soul.
Speaker: oh yeah like The other thing I want to point out about the like wake dirge before we move on that I discovered over the past week. is that if you like the idea of a journey of Katabasis over 40 miles or so while the candle lights burn, you can join the new Like Wake Club and perform the Like Wake Walk, which is a complete crossing of the North York Moors along their main east-west watershed in journey of approximately 40 miles in a period of 24 hours. There's no membership fee for this elusive and exclusive achievement, but All you have to do is complete your catabasis journey in 40 hours and you are entitled to the title of Witch if you're a female member or Dirger if you're a male member.
Speaker: You can be further rewarded for completing crossings ah with the titles Master Mistress of Misery, Doctor of Dolefulness, etc. There are people have completed a hundred catabasis walks, which I think is really incredible.
Speaker: But i also think that this this has been going for decades. I wouldn't be surprised if Diana Wynne-Jones knew about it because there had certainly been multiple crossings in the 80s and 90s by the time this book was written.
Speaker: And I do think that, you know, despite, it kind of goes back again to the ambiguousness of this dirge just kind of as a religious element, despite the fact that there are numerous references to Christ, to purgatory in the poem. There is this sense that it's speaking to something not quite Christianity older than Christianity um it's not the canonical theology there's really not the Thorn Moors I'm like I don't I don't remember this from anywhere it's not even Dante and the fact that you know you cross doing this crossing gets you the title of witch and dirger kind of speaks to I think the what people are seeing in this poem as a kind of a kind of like it's it's been seen since well before this book as a kind of magical right not just a guide for how to live a Christian life it actually makes me think I'm sorry I'm gonna classics nerd please please classics nerd
Speaker: Okay, it makes me think about the mystery cults. um So this is... Katabasis is a Greek word. The Katabasis, like the classical Katabasis is ah in the Odyssey, where Odysseus visits the underworld.
Speaker: a Question mark, kind of, maybe. But the... The mystery cult of Demeter at Eleusis probably the most famous and most popular of the ancient mystery cults until this weird little thing called Christianity comes along, which is also a mystery cult.
Speaker: ah And it is centered around this descent to the underworld and the rising back. But the the central mystery of a mystery cult is that when you join the cult, when you're initiated, you do the secret.
Speaker: And people outside the cult don't know what the secret is. And in fact, we don't know exactly what happened at the rites of Demeter. We do know that you went underground and that you came back up and something happened in between there.
Speaker: And we do know was associated with the the death and rebirth of Persephone in the Persephone and Hades myth. So sort of the the dying and the coming back. And it was it was a rebirth cult. It was an afterlife cult. It was the idea that, like...
Speaker: by becoming a member of this mystery, by being initiated, you'd have this like special treatment in the afterlife or perhaps a chance at a second life. Again, we don't know the exact details because, see, mystery. Right. um But the Katabasis in Deep Secret makes me think so exactly of the mechanisms of Mystery Cult, of dissent and rebirth as something new and greater.
Speaker: And again, the part of Mystery Cult is there are very strict instructions that you have to follow as taking part in the mystery. And the Likewake dirge does feel like a set of steps for a mystery. And we don't know, to be clear, what happens if you complete the Likewake walk. If you have, in fact, done it and, and you know, walked through the mystery, you have tell us what the mysteries are. But, you know, you could drop an ominous hint or two and we'd love that.
Speaker: um But, you know, this is something. So we got a couple of questions about the like wake dirge from Laurie and from Ariana, neither of which I think we addressed completely. Ariana says in particular, thinking about the song Extremely Christian, which bracket. And about your Kabbalah thoughts, I wonder how major an influence the Magids or Magids are supposed to be on various world religions.
Speaker: Side note, if the Magids have been secretly planting useful knowledge throughout the related worlds, how does that relate to your ongoing theme of knowing the story can save you in Jones's work? I am kind of imagining Magids lurking in the background of Fire and Hemlock or whatever, making sure that the right ballads got into the Oxford Book of Ballads. That kind of thing they do. Yes, exactly. and like Because that is, you know, kind of the tension between a mystery cult where part of the power lies in the fact that these things are secrets. And the point of Deep Secret, ah the point of many of these books, which is that knowing the story does give you a kind of power and understanding
Speaker: these secrets is what allows you to kind of wrest control of the narrative and make sure that it turns out the way you want. But I think the point about the Magist's influence on world religions is an interesting one because it does line up with how Jones treats religion generally. I'm thinking about the Catholics in a Magician of Caprona, the like the one instance of Islam in Castle in the Air where you're by the Seals of Solomon and like who? Wait, what? How? It's never mentioned again. um which is that religion is magic but foreign.
Speaker: Right. Which is like, that's not how she treats kind of good standard Protestantism, right? Which we see happening in, you know, the Crested Mancy books. Charmed Life, yeah. People go to church and that's just sort of normal, boring chore. There's nothing mystical about the church that Gwendolyn goes to. There's nothing numinous in the church in Charmed Life. For numinous, you have to go into the magic garden. Right.
Speaker: Which, I don't know, feels, ah honestly, it feels sub-C.S. Lewis. Aunt Mariah goes to church. This is, you know, the church in England is a respectability marker. It's a social marker. It's a class marker. It's something you do for your status. It's not.
Speaker: as it is in Caprona, as it is in Castle in the Air, something that forms part of the sort of foreign magic world building, as it is in Deep Secret, ah that you're doing sort of as part of building up this this magical impression of a land.
Speaker: Yeah, nobody ever goes, gosh, the the magical wonders of the of the Church of England, which is fair because it's it's not very magically wondrous. um But I think Jones is interested in the numinous, in the sense of the imminent divine, and is not getting it from Anglicanism.
Speaker: You know, there's something interesting about Dalemark, now that I'm thinking about it. So... dale In Dalmark, the ritual, there there isn't really a church in Dalmark. They have these gods.
Speaker: They have festivals that are sort of explicitly separated out from the idea that this has anything to do with religion. There's sort of a repeated point made in Droud Amet and onwards that the Hollanders don't know their own gods, that they have this tradition of throwing Amet into the ocean, but they don't associate that with the god Alhammed. That's just something that they do, this you know this fun this fun ceremony that they have.
Speaker: It feels and there isn't, you know, no one's going to church and saying, you know, saying their sort of standard prayer to. Well, in spellcoats, the family has their rituals.
Speaker: The rituals are very unique and distinctive to the family. They're not something that's part of an organized religion. And all sense of an organized religion seems to have been lost by the time we get to modern Delmarc.
Speaker: Which I think there's something really interesting in that I think, you know, her series, at least past the 70s, where she's talking about pantheons, that deals the most with gods and divinity and with what it means to be a god versus being a human being. And it is sort of explicitly dissociated from any of this idea of organized religion qua religion.
Speaker: Right. It's because I feel like they occupy different sort of areas of Jones's creative thought. She is interested in communities and in even in status communities, respectability communities. The Mrs. Ers in Black Maria are a prime example. But actually, I think going back to the short story, she does quite a lot. the protagonist of this one is this community or going back to Hexwood where the Anne's housing estate is essentially like the sort of community like secondary protagonist is the people of the housing estate working together and rebelling against the Arthurian castle eventually god I love Hexwood sorry I just said that it's like what a brilliant plot so good Off topic, off topic. ah But my point is that that like these are, I think, occupying different places in what Jones wants to think about too.
Speaker: um The kind of the imminent divine, um the numinous, the strange, which don't fit in the same place as the community, which is where the comedy is stored. Like comedy is stored in in the congoers. Right. right Comedy. con is, you know, you I think you can argue that the con is a kind of organized religion for the con goers. think it is. Yes. The closest we get to organized religion in Tyedewin Jones is Easter con. Yes. And I think there is something very true in that.
Speaker: At the last Easter con I attended, I was on a panel with the brilliant Dr. Karen Lord, who talked about religious practice, as something done in communities in not traditionally religious forms and the examples of sports fandom or fandom in general were given. um I think the con as religious practice is quite an interesting and potentially like worth digging into. Right. And it in the end of the of Deep Secret, we have that sequence with all the people showing up in robes and chanting who think that it's sort of part of a religious practice. They don't know that it's an evil spell. They think that they're doing their... fact, those are the same thing, right? to do Doing your your foreign religious practice is your evil magic is he is your... that We come back to it again. um where When you get into things that seem cool and weird, you're actually doing magic. Right. um Which brings me back to, ah while I'm still in... in Yes, yes, yes. Alan Moore's Promethea. Yeah, who's constantly doing this, like all human religious practice is secretly part of one great um um universal, like numinous, imminent divine that you don't understand. But I do because I'm very creative. Yes.
Speaker: Yes. Which is also where. About Promethea, a comic series I really enjoyed when I was a teenager. Which is also where Kabbalah comes back into it, right? Which is many, many of a writer has sort of mined Kabbalah as part of the overall, because it is it is known to be a secret art. That is the important, you know, the the significance of Kabbalah to many a Western writer that has then mined and taken it and put it as part of this overall numinous, all religions are one religion practice. It's not important that it's Jewish. It's important that it's secret.
Speaker: And part of the deep secrets. Yes. I think what I'm getting at is humans really, really love to feel like they know a deep secret. Absolutely they do. And coming back to this question of spreading deep secrets and spreading spreading the answer to the story, I do want to come back and talk about Delmarc to a point that you made when we were talking about Delmarc way back when and never got into the podcast and wanted to make a point to bring in now about Hearn Ghost, the Katabasis journey and the ghost who wants to tell you the secrets, who wants to give you advice about how to understand deep secrets and can't do it. Yes.
Speaker: See, I was rereading that i thought, i wait, her this is a literature lesson. Yes. This is, Hun is giving us, like, here is the story. the Here is the story. Here is the sequence of questions about the story. Here is, what does the story mean?
Speaker: Decide what this is all about. Lead the revolution yourself. you What you said in our chat way back when was, here's the story. You tell me what it's telling you and you tell me how it changes you. ah Which I think is really pertinent to thinking about how in Diana Wynne-Jones, understanding the story leads you to kind of unlock a different narrative. It's not that understanding the story changes the world around you. It's that understanding the story allows you to change yourself in response to what the story taught you. Yes.
Speaker: And in fact, that's part of why like the the the literature lesson that Hearn gives is can only be a literature lesson. He can literally only say stuff he's already said. He can't tell anything new. The text is the text. What are you doing with the text? Once again, it's Diana Wynne-Jones as...
Speaker: critic yes i mean honestly as diana when jones's english teacher which remember she was married to a professor right and i don't care what the structuralist i care what you think like this runs this is in the family also her son's a professor make the fifty they're all doing this i imagine the table conversations Which I think brings us back to the second part of Ariana's question about the people in many parts who show up through throughout Diana Wynne Jones.
Speaker: Ariana references Andrew the Hot Emperor, who is notably, and I can't even remember the number of parts he's in. know he's a significant number. It's so many. think actually is meant to be infinite because he was like divided into pieces at the very world gate where the world's divided into infinite pieces. Right.
Speaker: very common It's very complicated. Every one of the pieces is hot though, so that's the thing that we really need to know. That's what matters. Carry on. Ariana says, but I feel like she's doing more or less exactly the same thing as she did with Thaper John or even the dog, Man in Howl's Moving Castle, maybe even the house in Conrad's Fate, which we haven't gotten to yet if we're speaking more generally. Any thoughts on that?
Speaker: I thought this was interesting because it almost inverts some of the stuff we were saying in early seasons about how many Jones protagonists find their mirror, right? The other person who is their other self. But this is a point that people, these are not usually protagonists who are getting this, um who rather than needing to find their mirror have ah sort of divided themselves through a house of mirrors kind of. But the house of mirrors thing is exactly what's going on with Andrew where you have multiple reflections of him. Mm-hmm. So I guess it is another take on the divided self.
Speaker: I do find it interesting that it's mostly older men who get this. Yes. It's older men who get this and who can survive it. Like this straight up does happen to Marie. Marie gets divided into two parts and one part immediately gets thrown into the fire and she has to go on the cat basis journey to get herself back.
Speaker: But the, you know, it's a sort of point is made that Andrew is powerful enough to survive this stripping. Faber John is powerful enough to survive this stripping. Even ah Anthony Green sends part of himself capering around the bounds of Cranberry. Even Mark Harrell is one of two guys. i Right, this is really a thing.
Speaker: What if the man was also another man? And what if he was hot? Right. I mean, that is... I don't understand, but John is meant to be hot. I kind of see him as hot, but that might be new problem. No, he's definitely meant to be hot because of the true, your reading of the text, which I take as the true reading of the text. He is the ultimate love interest because Vivian is Vivian.
Speaker: Also, because the it's so clear that the whichever one of the the keepers of the casket... The guardian of silver, yeah, okay, that one's hot. admit That one's hot! And if that one's hot, they're all parts of the same guy, and so they're all hot. You just have to find all the hot... Demonstrandum. All right, carry on. Right, exactly. what's what's the What's the term for when one part shows the qualities of the whole?
Speaker: Yeah. pause but No, Parsantota. No, something else. I don't know. Don't put me on the spot like that. I don't remember either. But I do think that's what she's doing with these men. You have to find the part that's hot. And then the part that's hot will show you the qualities of the whole, which are hot. And that's what's going on with Mordian. Yes!
Speaker: Who is also, i think, less explicitly, but quite clearly split up into various selves or various aspects of himself. Yes. And then our heroine is forced to see the different sides of him.
Speaker: Yes. And some of those sides are, and this is true, I think, with... Many of these split people, split parts, it's certainly true of Mark Harrell as well. Some of those sides are monstrous. You know, within all of these people, within all of these somewhat love interest shaped men, there is a hot side and there is a dark side.
Speaker: And it's more complicated than that for sure. And especially when, you know, Mordian I think is, this is also I think interesting, Mordian is really the only one of these guys who's A protagonist whom we're seeing from the inside as he sort of grapples with these partial selves, these split selves and puts them together into one, into one tries to to integrate them into a coherent personality.
Speaker: And whom we're seeing sort of having to struggle with the fact that he knows that some of these selves have the potential for monstrosity. You know, there's this this metaphor of the net of diamond spikes that he has to pull back in around him to turn back from the dragon into the man.
Speaker: And it hurts. And it's painful. And it makes him feel like a monster. And he has to deliberately choose to be a different side of himself. and I think there is something to be said, perhaps, about how in frame like like so many Jonesian characters are Larger than life.
Speaker: But when she is getting interested in writing romance, writing love stories, she becomes more interested in the sort of multiplicity and variety of who people are or might yeah be. Not just in love stories, but perhaps the the, I mean, sometimes it's there in family stories as well. I'm actually thinking all the way back to Archer's Goon. Yeah. Howard's sort of developing, like understanding of himself as ah as a multiple person, as multiple times. Yeah.
Speaker: But certainly with someone like Mordian, part of the romance is Anne seeing all of him, coming to recognise all of him as aspects of his true self. the more perhaps The more you love someone, the more selves they have, How this applies to Andrew slash the Emperor Korathos, I am not quite sure. Perhaps the more you want someone to be your cool god king.
Speaker: I mean, if you're talking about the once and future king, right, the god king of mythos, because Andrew is also in a way King Arthur. Vapor John. many King Arthur's in Diana Wynne. It's also absolutely King Arthur. And I do think that there is something about, you know, the idea of this this mythical king who comes over and over and over and over again in infinite variations of the myth, infinite variations of the story. Oh, right.
Speaker: Sorry, I just got what you were saying. went Oh my God, that's good. It's like there's always there's always one more self, right? There's always a chance that it's going to come back one more time. And this time will be the good one. Are we meant to understand Korathos then as like the the original heroic masculine whom all the various king lost king myths are based on?
Speaker: I think so. i think that's probably true.
Speaker: is. Infinite Arthur. And also all the other ones as well. Infinite selves. They're all hot, but some of them are goingnna are going to fail harder and do worse than others.
Speaker: I don't think we've answered the question, but we have gone, oh, interesting. Quite lot. And one more thing on this. It goes back to what we were talking about eight days ago or five minutes ago in the first part of this episode about the idea of play as a way to kind of interact with your different selves and choose which of the selves is kind of most fulfilling or most interesting for you to be in at that time. to tie this back together with the literature lesson. The literature lesson does give you a pattern for a self, right? um So in, in, at the end of Crown, sort of the big choice, actually it's going back to the ones in future, case what Hearn gives Mitt is a god-king self to step into.
Speaker: He says, I'm giving you an alternate self to be. You don't have to be Mitt anymore. You can save Mitt for sort of the personal version of yourself that you want to be, that you are now. that perhaps you will be 400 years from now with your girlfriend again. And in the meantime, you can step into Amel. I'm giving you this pattern, this this king name.
Speaker: you Your King Sona. Your King Sona. You can be your King Sona for a while. And that is, in a sense, a different person who is also you. Which I think in a way is why i think of Mitt in some ways is still...
Speaker: ah frozen at the age that he was when he stepped into Amel because that's a personality that he gets to set aside and be like I'm going to come back to that one yeah god trying to imagine the Maywen romance is really oh my god how did that work out Diana oh we dream of the fifth Dale Mark book don't we always and eternally still on deep secret from Nathan Right before you said Byzantium, I had the church on the tip of my tongue.
Speaker: Corophus is divine, has a second coming in this book. He died like or disappeared like Jesus's corpse 2000 years ago. He died because of an act of someone who worked for him. The relationship between the current Corophonian emperor and the Thorn Lady singularly joyless code of ethics ties the empire to guilt and self-denial. I think it was on her mind. Nathan also points out the occasionally bratty or sulky younger brother appears in Kerry, Duck, Sam Donegal, Martin Slash for Taylor, Duck again, there's a still bratty adult, and Rupert Venables. They age pretty much in order of publication, suggesting they may be based on the younger son of hers.
Speaker: Poor Colin. Oh! We don't necessarily, we should stop saying this. really We are using Colin as a stand-in for Diana Wynne-Jones had three sons seems to have been quite an important part of her life. Yes, as it would be. But is there any chance that one or more of these bratty younger brothers are Fenella?
Speaker: Do her Carol and the archetypes ever cross gender here or elsewhere? What do we think? This has been so I've always thought of this, frankly, as the Fenella or the awful archetype. And I realized that, in fact, seeing all of them listed out, probably most of them are, in fact, boys. But awful is kind of the the prototypical awful younger sibling in Diana what Jones, to my mind. And I've always thought of this as, again, with apologies to Ursula Jones, the Ursula Jones effect more than the Colin effect.
Speaker: Which, I mean, I'm sure that it's a combination of all of these things, right? sure she's borrowing from many people she has known. And I am sure it was sometimes uncomfortable to read her books as a person who knew her. Absolutely. Especially if you know that some of it's you, but not all of it's you, right? Like, you know, so the experience of being an eldest sister is clearly quite significant to Diana Wynne-Jones. And the experience of being a mother to three children is clearly quite significant.
Speaker: And of i presumably observing dynamics between her three children, like the the age difference between the kids, the way an older parentified oldest siblings become less important, but not never unimportant. throughout these texts. I think that both in Hexwood and in Deep Secret, we see this kind of shift from a set of same gender siblings to the, well, no, it's always this older sister, younger brother dynamic, which is is one that's always been kind of significant and that's repeated. And it's not one that she actually lived, which I think is interesting.
Speaker: One that I keep coming back to is Black Maria and Chris and Mig, where it's older brother, younger sister, where I do think it reads as like a an our world mirror of Christopher and Millie, even down to the names. Yes. And Christopher and Millie, we know from her essays, are she explicitly conceived of them as two halves of the same self. Yes. In a secret self, of the opposite gender.
Speaker: And what else are they thinking about? The thing about Black Maria is that is to me, Black Maria Reads is so much reckoning with who gets to retell the stories of the people around you. Mig and Aunt Maria are competing to control the narrative of gossip, which is the narrative of fitting the people around you into your stories and trapping them within those stories.
Speaker: And when Aunt Maria does it, it's pretty clearly and explicitly evil. And when Migg tries to do it, she's not very good at it yet. And fact, the final version of the text is presented as Migg's edited, rewritten attempt to control the narrative of Black Maria, full of these real people that she knows within the world of the book. I don't know, the whole thing reads to me as a sort of self-reflection on what exactly am I doing when I write the people I know into my stories?
Speaker: Yeah, there's something else actually thinking about specifically this older sister, younger brother pair, which is the opposite of what's going on in Aunt Mariah. But when you think about examples this through her books, often it's kind of a a choice or like a false siblingship that becomes a chosen, a real siblingship. it's Again, it's kind of a pattern of a role that people choose to step into and then find that they like it. When you're thinking about Vierin and Martin, they're an imaginary set of siblings. And at the end of the book, it's like, oh, now that's real.
Speaker: When you're thinking about, oh, what was I just thinking about a moment ago? Oh, Archer's Goon. Howard and Awful. An imaginary set of siblings that becomes real. A game that Howard is playing that makes him a better person. Specifically being, I guess that is the older brother, younger sister. But specifically being an older sibling to a bratty younger sibling makes him a better person, makes him more the kind of person that he wants to be.
Speaker: nick Nick and Marie are not siblings, have chosen to act like siblings, discover that they are in fact siblings, but it's a choice first to step into that role and to, and that role is explicitly what makes Nick the best person that he can be. It is only this relationship with Marie that kind of saves him from this, this defensive self selfishness that he's cultivated in order to survive, to go back to the Thorn Lady cult, in order to survive the sort of pressures of the the cult that his mother has put on him. so there is something you know about that is liberatory about finding a sibling to be your alternate self and be like well I am going to be you know
Speaker: I'm going to allow this person to act irresponsibly because I've chosen to take responsibility for them. And both of us are getting something important out of that. I think sort of moving from the sort of seventies and eighties interest in the family of no choice in the, in the, you are stuck with these people, whether you like it or not, there is more and more emphasis in the nineties on choice in families, yes on choosing to step into the role of a sibling, of a parent, especially on choosing these roles of power,
Speaker: of Yes. slip of of protection of choosing to care for other people and what it then means for you that you've chosen that Right. I mean, Hexwood is all about choosing to take on roles of responsibility when in fact it might seem you've been placed in a position where you could be completely unfettered. You know, the the plan, the Banas' plan for Mordian is for him to have a healing childhood experience of his own in the wood. And instead, he immediately says, no, I'm not going to be the child in this dynamic.
Speaker: I'm going to be the parent. I'm going to take responsibility for somebody else. And that is the role that will actually allow me to grow in a way that's helpful for me. But I do think this starts with Archer's Goon and with, you know, arguably kind of the first parents of choice in Diana Wynne Jones and with Katrina and Quentin who say being parents, choosing to become parents to this child who appeared in our lives was the best thing we ever did. it made us better people. It made us happier. It saved our marriage.
Speaker: Yeah. I think at the end of season four, we will come back to the question of like, what are the major Jones? Like if I was building a syllabus, what would be the techniques? got to read these ones. I think Archer's Goon is a very important one.
Speaker: Strong agree. Strong, strong agree. Like just in the arc of her career as a whole, like obviously Fire and Henlock is a big deal. Obviously, we think Hexwood is a perfect book. Archer's Goon is doing a lot of really important stuff that shapes what she does afterwards.
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of deceptively major, I think, because it's so funny. So funny. And then you take a look at everything that's in there and it's it it it goes down, it goes deep. All right, moving on.
Speaker: We have a question from Rachel about ah the thorn lady, Aglaya Walayla, being about the evils of, I think that rather than her being about the evils of femininity, she's about the enforcement of strict gender roles and strict gender norms, see Black Mariah. And the positive i word opposites are about liminality and nuance, freedom, and maybe most importantly, the balancing of gender, a la DWJ's Everyone Has a Male and Female in Herself, which gets us back to these male-female sibling pairs again.
Speaker: Rachel also says, the first thing that i think is important is that ever since my first read of this book as a kid i saw stan as a queer coded character it seems to me that stan is codedly dying of aids at the beginning and is talking about moving the world towards openness and acceptance is another way of talking about queer rights and liberation Stan is also obsessed with centaurs, which are become a bit queer coded in this novel, about much albeit much less clearly.
Speaker: They're liminal creatures by default. They have a different unusual family structure that Rupert, he's so straight, needs explained to him by Stan, which doesn't prioritize his head relationships as the avuncular relationships that are prized over traditional nuclear family.
Speaker: There's a lot of bigotry involved in some of these stances, but I think also some truthful positivity. And then go moving on, Rachel also talks about the Thorne Lady's desire for Marie to be a good girl and wear dresses and the alternate family structures that are shown to us through the con, the queer thruple with a baby. Sorry, I'm trying to summarize. It's a really lovely long comment and I'm trying to summarize it. There's also a discussion of liminality and androgyny in Babylon.
Speaker: Things are one thing and another. Voices are male and female. I think there's probably also 30 minutes worth of interesting discussion about the quack chicks and what they're doing in the novel. Signifiers of everything have a soul in some ways that tie into the ways that Rupert is good with kids and Marie loves animals and Nick hasn't found comfort in either yet. But one important thing about them is that they're a male and female pair.
Speaker: Again, definitely not saying the feminine, evil, masculine, powerful empire reading you're discussing on the podcast is wrong. Just a queer, more hopeful reading that feels right to me. So there's a lot in here and a lot in this comment. And I do think this book is really interested in sort of leaning into the ways that cons are queer spaces. And I think that's often been true and is just observationally something that Diana Wynne-Jones is seeing and wants to write about. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I certainly remember being very, very struck by the wonderful trans throuple with the baby back when I first read this book as a teenager, because I had never seen anything like that in a fantasy book before. And it meant an awful lot to me at the time. You know, that baby would be in their thirties now. Yeah, I think about that.
Speaker: i think about that often. I hope that baby is still going to cons, though. All childhoods are weird. um as But I think, right, there is an interest in, as Rachel says, like a non-traditional family structures in families that defy the norm, um in the actual meaningful family bonds in Deep Secret, above all, are Nick and Marie.
Speaker: Which is not to say that... like Deep Secret also, I think, pretty strongly argues that a ah traditional seeming family like Rupert's brother with his wife and their five beautiful daughters and their nice farm in the countryside is also very clearly a very happy like family that's working for them. But it's not the only family. And it in fact, it's also quite weird. That is also going to be a weird childhood um for the for their daughters. Right.
Speaker: I think I do find it hard to read Stan specifically as anything other than a depiction of cancer. But that might just be me. That to me, cancer is looming large over Diana Wynne-Jones' work from the beginning, actually, in the figure of Cankreden and Dale Mark. But also, i mean, this is this is the season i i we recorded while my father was dying of cancer. And I like i read it. Oh, my God. Oh, fuck. Which perhaps that's part of Jones's choice in choosing to keep it ambiguous as to what exactly is killing Stan and what.
Speaker: In that he says he's dying young or young for a Magid and it's clearly a great loss. But I think actually the the queer reading does also make sense.
Speaker: I'm trying to remember if maybe do you remember if in the in sudden wild magic one of the many sort of ills that are brought up at the beginning of the book is mentioned yes explicitly in sudden yeah like as something that has been inflicted on our world by the other world trying to study study what's wrong right which is kind of a fascinating off-handed element I think Obviously, it's something that she was thinking about. You can't not be thinking about it and the in the 80s and early 90s. know a lot of 80s and 90s books managed to not think about it just fine. Great point.
Speaker: But yeah, i think I think you are right, Rachel, that there is... I skipped over this bit in the middle when I was trying to figure out a way to condense this, but i I'm going to go back and say that it's important that when Rob goes to Babylon, Will says something like, it seems you should be asking for the rest of your soul.
Speaker: rob coming from this extremely gender segregated joyless separating compound and then he when he goes to babylon he it does seem that he asks for the other piece of his soul having incorporated the feminine and masculine horse and human he's whole enough to be a true option for ruling the koryphonic empire there's something there about needing access to kind of the full range of selves and in some ways, the full range of of compassion, of gender, of seeing yourself in in others, including other people of the opposite sex who can express other parts of yourself that allows you to become a whole. And there is something really consistent across her books in these male-female alternate selves, in in needing...
Speaker: another person who expresses the other half of you and that person usually is of the opposite sex that seems to have been you know sort of the the Jungian archetypes that Diana Jones is really interested in working with.
Speaker: But I think Rachel's also right that like the the the decision to sort of center it around these half human half horse people is like drawing our attention very explicitly to a person can be two things at the same time. A person can be multiple people. Now, everybody quick look at these mirrors. What do you see? Right. And that said, I do think, you know, we've seen Diana Jones's kind of struggle with femininity and struggle with The idea of the perfect masculine seems to come easier to her than the idea of the perfect feminine.
Speaker: The perfect masculine is something that can be the once and future king, can be glorious, can be sublime, and can be sort of presented in this completely positive way without really the uneasiness, the qualms.
Speaker: that you get with this idea of there's no sublime femininity in Diana Wynne-Jones that isn't a little bit evil. That's a little way to put it, actually. Especially in the 1990s, the decade of the feminist Arthuriana retellings, you're never getting the moon goddess without her, and you're never getting your triple goddess figure without and Gladys is there, and she is totally amoral. Right.
Speaker: Yeah, the closest to a a sublime femininity that we get is Zilla. And Zilla is immediately is presented, even though she's you know she's the absolute wow-wow. She walks in and everyone's jaw drops. She's also perhaps the greatest fuck-up across the campus. Yes! ah Being the sublime feminine is terrible. Yes. um And...
Speaker: Whereas being the sublime masculine, I think, is admirable. Although it's not that Jones is incapable of criticizing and analyzing it. I go back to Hexwood and look at Sephor's. Right. This knightly figure, this figure of heroic and handsome violence. You're like, yeah, this is this is a stupid asshole who gets eaten by a dragon and he deserves it.
Speaker: And in fact, this is one of the archetypes of Faber-John. There's the one who's sort of a Sephor's figure, who's sort of a... So may is Fever John the different types of heroic masculinity summarized? Discuss. yeah fact one There is the one who is C.S. Lewis. There the one who is an arsehole on a horse. Right. And there's one who is very bad at climbing hills. Yes. the type of men that there are yes exactly and if you put them all together then you end up with the perfect king and or the perfect husband despite some very questionable decision making that i would not at the end of the book that i would perhaps not call perfect ah any how often we come back to time city which it is a flimsy jones has not a major one and yet there is so much in it
Speaker: Well, there's, you know, in a way it feels almost like some of the short stories in that it's a, it's not complete, but it's a playground for ideas that will go on sort of blossom to become these more interesting books.
Speaker: Right. Speaking of the short stories from Melissa, I've been confused, annoyed and intrigued by The Master since the first time I read it as a teenager. I think the other letter writer is certainly correct that it's a dry run at Hexwood.
Speaker: I recently read it to my partner who had another take I wanted to get your thoughts on. He said it may be partially inspired by Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow. He thought the dreamlike quality was evocative of the king. And there is also Eggs the Fool.
Speaker: who is said when he's cut himself and is leaning to death to go pale as if he was wearing grease paint one of the poems in the king is inside of the jester and the following one concerns a clown and his powdered face i found this interesting i need to read the rest of the king in yellow what do you think god damn i meant to read the king in yellow before we got to this one i know i also need to read the king in yellow i'm especially interested in this concept of the king in yellow as a potential inspiration because of the idea of the haunted text the text that dooms you, which I think is thematically relevant to much of Diana Wynne Jones' work.
Speaker: I think more and more in the ninety s I said this already, I think I said this last week or half an hour ago, depending on whether you are us or the host listeners. More and more, I'm finding it hard to keep up with the sheer breadth of Jones' reading.
Speaker: Yes. But all of, you know, I want to, a lot of it is stuff that's been on my list for a while anyway, and I'm like, goddammit, I meant to get around to that. And someday I will. Perhaps someday we'll talk about it. Talk to us at the end of at the end of season four and we'll see what we've got around to reading then. Melissa also says, do you think the other writers at the Deep Secret Convention are based on real real people?
Speaker: What about Mervyn Thurless and Marie's Uncle Ted? I have my own theory about Uncle Ted, but don't wish to bias you. And I have no idea who Mervyn Thurless is based on, especially since he is canonically not a very good writer.
Speaker: Okay, here's the thing though. I feel like it'd be really rude to be like, we know who Mervyn Thurless is and it's this guy. right Right. Also, I don't know who Mervyn Thurless is. that I don't know, but I don't want to speculate about it either because like this is a character who is defined in the book by behaving tremendously badly, annoying everyone and not even being that good. Right. I bet he's a real guy. absolutely bet he's a real guy. Sure, he's a real guy. I'm sure they're either both real guys or compilation of real guys, right?
Speaker: Like it's possible there are two Mervyn Thurlises out there and one of them behaves really badly and one of them is not that good. Uncle Ted also feels like a real guy to me. I do think I've met him. think I've occasionally been him. Like the exact, like the thing of sitting on a convention panel being asked how you write a thing and thinking, oh fuck, I'm talking some absolute nonsense because you don't care talk about the real thing because you sound and feel so stupid.
Speaker: Yes. Yeah. yeah This is very relatable. Sorry, Uncle Ted. It's a real danger mode, right? um Which I think goes back maybe to the idea, maybe this is a stretch, but goes back a little bit to the idea of deep secrets, of the things that are too numinous and too important to be able to be said out loud. And the con...
Speaker: if you will, is kind of an attempt to pull deep secrets, these numinous truths, out of writers by putting them in the most banal situation imaginable, which is on a series of little chairs with a little glass of water in front you next to some of the worst people they know and being like, all right, can you tell us something true and beautiful now? You're right. is like going to church. Yes.
Speaker: Exactly. you have to, you know, can you find something true and beautiful in this sort of community religion? Can you pull that out? Or do you end up saying something that's just as banal? Saying something that's been said before, repeatedly, saying something that is rehearsed and not very meaningful. Repeating the rituals.
Speaker: Yeah. This is the kind of thing you say on con panels. The other Uncle Ted thing I found tremendously relatable is before the con, he's going, I don't want to go. i I'm going to hate it. And the minute he's there, he's having a wonderful time. Yes.
Speaker: That is also very, very true and relatable. Yeah, I do think the con as church and the con as struggling vehicle for deep secrets are both true there. And and funny. and And funny. I think actually it is so critical to Diana Wynne-Jones as an author that all of this is funny. Yes.
Speaker: And I don't say that lightly. I do actually think it might be one of the reasons she's sometimes like underestimated as the way before she is in fantasy writing. Like she's funnier than Susan Cooper and she's funnier than Alan Garner and they both get taken more seriously. But absolutely do think that Jones seems to feel very strongly that humour is a vital part of truth. That if you're going to write in a way that's truthful about the world, you have to point out when it's ridiculous. which it's so weird. And this is, of course, the this is the the satirist's angle, right? And she comes out out as full satirist in the 90s. Deep Secret is already most of the way there. And then by Dirkholm, we are writing fantasy satire. Yes, which moves us into the couple of questions that we got about Durkheim.
Speaker: The first one comes in from Catherine. Your point about Mr. Chesney's dominion making various characters into little Mr. Chesney's made me think strongly of Vorbis from Small Gods, speaking of other satirists. Then I found this quote, which I think is what sprung to mind. The worst thing about Vorbis isn't that he's evil, but that he makes good people do evil.
Speaker: This is punished for killing and colllette isn't but i think the difference is that kit is masterriding the bibles battles and encounters he's dehumanizing everyone as he has such fun planning it all even though it both kills and turns others into murderers colllette a large carnivore kills for revenge and dramatic circumstances but has not overseen a wide-s scalele program of killings this is true ah The tourists are forced to kill too, making you wonder about how much Chesnification has happened in the other world.
Speaker: I remember an experienced wizard guide complains to Dirk about his party being cowards when they refused to kill the Dark Lord. Then one sad lady says it deserved life after he canned his interherge to shove the Dark Lord into the bottomless pit.
Speaker: Even Dirk, who earlier told his son that it would probably feel bad to think yourself a murderer, sympathizes about this because these people's reluctance to kill has been an inconvenience. But I guess that's how one becomes a little Mr. Chesney.
Speaker: A thing I wanted to point out sort of related to the Chesnification of the world is we talked about Mr. Chesney as Mr. Disney, i think. her But there was one we missed that you pointed out after we recorded. Yeah, I think this is also Dick Cheney.
Speaker: I think you're right. Mr. Chesney is a cross between Dick Cheney and Walt Disney. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry about the geopolitical history of my nation. Especially since... do not hold you personally responsible for the Yanks.
Speaker: Thank you, I appreciate that. As long as don't hold me personally responsible for the Brits. pen But there is this plot line specifically in Durkholm about going to other countries and mining them for resources. The the magical the magic that they take out of out of the land of, I'm forgetting the name of the country in Durkholm. out of this nation is is used, they describe it as doing all the things that oil does in the United States. Mr. Chesney is is running a proxy war in order to generate energy resources for our world.
Speaker: I don't think you can say that it's coincidence. And it does, you know, the ripple down effect of evil, of of of this kind of sheer convenience mindedness, profit mindedness.
Speaker: is what has this sort of corroding impact on everybody in Durkholm. That's absolutely true. And you are right, Catherine, that the crime, Kit's crime is not so much killing, which is not so much of a crime and in Durkholm as doing it emotionlessly, um ah doing it for, in a way that dehumanizes people. It's not the killing, it's it's the gaming.
Speaker: Yes, it's the game. He's being the them. Yes. He's being Adam McCready. He's at the game table running running the game and enjoying it. And yeah that is the monstrous behavior.
Speaker: Yes. It's optimization of the bad. It's turning it into something that you can optimize and maximize for fun and profit.
Speaker: The thing is, it does sound fun. and I love a spreadsheet video game. Yeah, you're right. You shouldn't do that in real life, though. shouldn't do Well, that's why, I mean, that's why you have tabletop games, right? That's why you have video games. It's because sometimes this does sound fun. Sometimes walking, you know, into a, like, walking in with your big sword and being like, all right, how am I going to get from point A to point B and get the treasure is one of those human impulses that you have these fun little ways to channel so that you don't do it in real life.
Speaker: I have for unrelated reasons been, which Becca knows the reasons, been doing a lot of academic reading about video games. um And one concept that keeps coming up is militarized masculinity. And it's this idea of performing conquest, domination and violence through a game.
Speaker: And ah these games of could be all different kinds of games. you might Your character might have a gun and be shooting people. Your character might be like a a camera in the sky controlling where the resources go and who gets them. But they are like a ah thesis, a logic behind these games of...
Speaker: What if you had this militarized control of the world and you were the one with all the power and it was the power of violence? And I don't have an actual point beyond that. i was like, yes, this really cool concept for a thing I have noticed and didn't have words for. Yeah, but I do think there's something about these play spaces that is important. To go back to the concept of play that we talked about ah couple times on this, to give you kind of a taste for play what this kind of version of yourself is in a way, you know, the video game space, the tabletop space is meant to be a way to get a taste for that and to try it out. And then to be like, well, actually, I don't know that I like this version of me. Maybe I'll do something else with it.
Speaker: All right. Here's a thought, though. the The video game, as opposed to going all the way back to a very early Jones essay, The Children in the Woods, the game space gives you a set of rules yes you cannot mess with those kit is having amazing fun playing his game but he's playing by mr chesney's rules yes within a world where he has to ultimately achieve mr chesney's goals not his own goals and Mr. Chesney's goals for this game are these people who are down on my list to die will die. This battle will happen like this. This is the outcome.
Speaker: And Kit's having fun playing that game, but it's not right. It's game. Whereas the children in the woods essay in reflections is a very early one is Jones reflecting on children's play and the ways in which children negotiate play, argue about the rules, rethink the rules, change the rules. And that play is part That play with rules is part of learning to see which rules are even necessary and which are not.
Speaker: Have you seen the film Grand Theft Hamlet? I have not. It is a documentary about a group of people who are playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto during the pandemic. Out of work actors, specifically, who are playing a lot of ah Grand Theft Auto during the pandemic. And decided at some point that instead of continuing to do the Grand Theft Auto thing of running around and with your guns and stealing other people's cars, they were going to try and put on a production of Hamlet inside Grand Theft Auto, which is specifically kind of outside the rules of what Grand Theft Auto wants you to do. It's a very funny, really interesting movie, i think, about moving in a space that is designed to have specific rules and a specific kind of action and choosing to have, you know, choosing to ignore those rules and to try and do something different.
Speaker: I need to see this. It's great. I would strongly recommend it. And it feels really relevant to this concept of, you know, it's, it's, it's MIG doing the silly dance in the orphanage.
Speaker: It's throwing off the rules of the space you're in and entering this space of like play for the fun of it, of joy. Right. But this is creative play, right? Yes. In order to do creative work, you have to be willing to look at the rules and throw away the ones that don't make sense.
Speaker: Yes. Which reminds me that we need actually look at the essay on the rules. Sorry, I just got up and walked away from my mic. No worries. What Emma just said, to think the the audio got very quiet, is that we need to look at the essays on the rules of adult fiction, which you're right, is a vital text for this season.
Speaker: but Talk about rules. Page 83 in Reflections. I have used this book so much for this podcast. Which I think is a really interesting essay because it's written right after right after publishing a Sudden Wild Magic.
Speaker: which is, I think, her least, you know, clearly an important book in the trajectory, but perhaps her least successful adult novel. No, it's in this one of two where there's a talk about rules and then there's the one on adult writing, which I think is two kinds of writing.
Speaker: page 20 yes both of these i think are vital for understanding how jones thinks about rules and how she thinks about genre yes and actually are looking at how long they are maybe we need to mini mini episode them yes well you know what let's do it let's do it all right let's put a pin in that we do need to talk about that i think it's vital let's not do that right now let's not do that right now let's instead move on to the true state of affairs yes God, this particular story knocked me out. Anyway, we've got a ah message from Jocelyn.
Speaker: I am the proud possessor of a physical copy of Everard's Ride, 815 of a thousand print run. I am so jealous. Oh my God, me too. The story, A True State of Affairs, made little impression on me when I read it and I hadn't even recalled it as a Dale Mark story. It was odd and had a sad ending. I didn't understand it and moved on quickly.
Speaker: Now I 100% subscribe to your theory that this is the Adon's backstory. also makes tons of sense as a mirror to Crown of Dalemark, which is unavailable to me since I would have read Everard's Ride shortly after publication in the late 90s before Crown came out.
Speaker: Because Emily is our protagonist, I uncritically adopted her point of view and did not realise she is a portrait of a figure that Diana doesn't like or admire. I believe the ending was as that was satisfying for but Diana because this was a morality play of Emily getting her comeuppance. Wow.
Speaker: Hmm. You really sold me that she's the object Diana's judgment when you point out how she used womanly whiles to protect herself, how she thrusts a romantic narrative out of whole cloth on a near stranger. Something I took i took at face value in Storyland, but which is the kind of character, though, that would frustrate Diana as not true in other stories, which she would enjoy skewering.
Speaker: I would love spend some moments of the Q&A contrasting Emily and Maywen. Go on. I do think that this is perhaps more strongly than we felt about Emily, or certainly than I feel about Emily.
Speaker: I think that Emily is a really nuanced figure, which is part of the reason that I find the story so interesting. I don't think that Diana is casting judgment on her using womanly wiles to protect herself.
Speaker: To be honest, i think that she's I think that she has a lot of pity for the narrowness of the situation in which Emily finds herself, in which she is forced to use womanly wiles to protect herself, in in which her only roman imaginative outlet is this romantic narrative that she puts on Asgrim, that Asgrim is deliberately encouraging in her.
Speaker: There's, I think, of very I think Emily, although certainly not treated uncritically, I think treated, you know, in many ways, very critically, is a really sympathetic portrait of exactly the kind of thing that we see in Rob in Deep Secret of someone one who is placed in a small and narrow place, and who then becomes Small and narrow.
Speaker: Become small and narrow because of these circumstances, because there is no other way for them to think. There's no room for these kind of big, splendid ideas. Yeah, I think the metaphor of true state of affairs is very straightforwardly, gender is a prison. Yes. emily and Emily and Asgrim are both in prison, but their prisons look different. And I think that is... ah straightforward easy to read allegory for what their situations mean to each of them Emily is in a limited world and she is as a result a very small and limited person but I do think the narrative treats that with pity rather than judgment that like the ultimate outcome of Emily's story is that she can leave the prison
Speaker: but not the one in her head. but There's no point in her leaving the physical prison because she is still emotionally, spiritually, and socially, if you like, imprisoned in the role of a woman in historical Denmark.
Speaker: And I think that this is, you know, kind of really emphasized in the way in which her parallel figure, you know, the the one who ends up being sort of her true other self in this, Wolfram, who is also really explicitly kind of constrained into smallness.
Speaker: by virtue of gender, by virtue of being someone one who's considered not not masculine, who's who's a bastard, a queer bastard, as in many of these sort of sinister and evil figures of of classical tales, who has no grand and and open way to express his personality, the things that he wants. And so it becomes small and twisted and ah predatory. And this too is kind of the, and I think Wolfram is also treated quite sympathetically for this. You know, it's it's a messy allegory. It's, you know, problematic in various senses of the word, but there is a real connection there to the fact that both of these people are kind of locked out of the thing that would allow them greatness, the thing that would allow them splendor, which is traditional masculinity.
Speaker: Yeah. So the comparison of of Emily and Maywin, I think, becomes very interesting because these are two really similar situations. this is both In both cases, this is a modern young woman thrust back into historical Delmarc. Emily, more explicitly, is from our contemporary Britain, whereas Maywin is from a a contemporary 1990s-esque Delmarc.
Speaker: But both of them have that modern sensibility and come from a world where there are more possibilities open to them and have been pushed into the past and into a narrative where their choices are constrained and there is only one way for one way forward.
Speaker: But they're quite different. Yes. I actually do think so. First of all, I do think that Diana Wynne Jones has evolved in her ideas about gender and whether or not it's the only thing that it can be is a prison between the 1960s and the 1990s.
Speaker: She's ah throughout the 90s. You know, there's this sort of explosion of writing about adult women who are happy, more or less happy with being more or less adult women and have found power in that status.
Speaker: may when when she I think it's important that Maewyn, when she transmigrates back into the past, the role that she takes or that she finds herself in is someone one who is older than she is. North is 18 to Maewyn's 14.
Speaker: i don No, Maewyn's 13. Maewyn's 12. Maewyn is 13, I think. Maewyn is 13. And North is someone who's already kind of learned to be comfortable in playing both sides of that masculine feminine self. When we first meet North, she's cross-dressing. She's the boy named Rith that Mitt first starts crushing on. And when we see her later, she's, you know, the second time we see North. She is this, you know, sort of well put together queen to be.
Speaker: And she seems perfectly happy and comfortable in both those roles and spaces. This is a world that has room for her to be both of those things. And this is the person that Maywin steps into being. Is this, you know, speaking of looking forward to roles you can play, this is a vision of an adult self that uh maywen has been kind of forced to to step into the shoes of pushed to try to be right and in fact maywen does quite well as norrith like she is a very plausible imposter queen they all buy it yeah she gives good advice she's so good leadership skills she's got good leadership skills she's charismatic she's bringing sort of broader ideas from the she has the opportunities
Speaker: to bring broader ideas from her time back into the past. She attempts to teach them about unions and strikes. Well, this is, um and I think it's pointed out in in Jocelyn's letter, that Emily also tries to do this, tries to suggest modern ideas to Asgrim.
Speaker: as and and And I think it's one of the moments where she seems to feel most powerful, most proud of herself, is like maybe she can have an influence on the future of Delmarc and what's going to happen to the thralls.
Speaker: is through suggesting her political ideas to this powerful man. And Maywood does that as well. Right. Well, and the thing about Emily that I don't know if I said, if we said outright when were doing that episode, is that it is possible that this happens. One of the sort of central questions of the narrative is, did Asgrim get that final letter? Because if he got that final letter, then it means that Emily made a contribution, a major contribution in two ways. She told Asgrim that his son was free and then gave him the opportunity to escape.
Speaker: And she gave him these thoughts about the future of Delmarc that he could then take on and sort of put into practice, even if he doesn't credit them to Emily or think about Emily. And we are left with the ambiguity of the question of whether any of the stuff that Asgram did is due to Emily or not. We don't know. She wrote it, but did it matter?
Speaker: Oh, God. Yeah, we keep coming back to the Joanna Russ, didn't we? Right. um But yeah, no. Does this woman in history get credit? Does anything she did in her small conscribed prison world have any effect? If it did, it could only possibly have affected anything through the men she was a communication with in their slightly larger, wider, more open prisons. with And this, in fact...
Speaker: This is a direct parallel to Mip, who takes Maewyn's ideas and does put them into practice, and then makes sure that she knows it by naming the palace after her to say, yes, you did do this. This was you.
Speaker: Which is quite romantic. Which is very romantic. Asgrim doesn't do that because he sucks. Right. Something really funny that someone said to us on Tumblr or someone commented on Tumblr after we posted the episode, they found a note from Minor Arcana as an introduction to the story where Jones explains that the inspiration for the for for this story is a story, a true story by King James of Scotland called the Kingsquare about the time he was in prison.
Speaker: Staring out from his cell, he fell in love, courtly love, with a girl he only ever saw in the distance. Of course, it all stopped when he was released. It occurred to me to wonder what the girl felt about it, so I wrote the story. In the mid-60s, I sent it to an agent.
Speaker: In the early 70s, puzzled to have heard nothing, I went to see the agent. She gave it back to me, untouched, explaining that she had not bothered to read it because no one wanted to read this fantasy sort of stuff. She thought I should give up writing. She did her honest best to discourage me. I am really no credit to her at all. When I took this story out of a drawer over a year ago, I was quite unrepentant and I still think it well worth reading.
Speaker: So thank you, Setnet. I think this introduction is also a vital text in thinking about about this story. i think the vindication of finally getting it into print 30 years later must have been quite something ah but I also i i think that does cement my feeling that by the 1990s Jones does not see herself as a children's writer anymore she never really wanted to be a children's writer yes or at least that she that's not true she wrote some really first-rate children's books I think her work in children's fiction was important to her but it was not the end of her ambition ah right she wanted to do more she always wanted to write adult fantasy she wanted to write adult women and by the 1990s there seems to have been space for her to do that yeah there in the mid 60s I think there's something really poignant about the fact that this story about
Speaker: woman's writing that may or may not write that may or may not matter gets sent to an agent who says no your writing doesn't matter actually stop doing this yeah and she doesn't stop doing it and she keeps doing it and eventually she gets to write Maywen who's gets to live out the same story as Emily did and succeed at it and make the impact and and have the adventure and do the change and be splendid yeah there is splendor in Maywen's world which never existed and never could in Emily's yeah Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: All right, there's another... Oh, another Delmark question. I finally got around to listening to the Delmark bonus episode. I've been thinking about the Guide to Delmark appendices thing and how it calls into question some of the narrative as we've experienced it.
Speaker: Then I remembered where else I'd seen that in Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen, which interleaves myth, legend, song, ballad, and history with the actual story. It was published in 1988, so after the first three and before Crown. which makes me wonder if it's something Diana read in the intervening time that had an influence on the shape of that guide. This is from Madison. I have actually read this book. I i haven't. I was like, is the purpose of this podcast to connect reading list people to each other so you can all read it and then tell us what you think? That'd be great. Please That'd be great. I have actually read this one. i do think it's it's a great comp and it is...
Speaker: one of those really interesting forms of story that sort of lets you call into question its own premises because of the way in which it's framed and interleaved and commented upon.
Speaker: I don't know whether Diana Wyn Jones read it. I don't know that she needed this to influence her in thinking in that direction, because I do think that's always been part of her interest. You know, to tie this back to the earlier question about the maggots running around and putting significant ballads in significant books, ah one of the main things that she's interested is that you don't know what's going to be significant. You have the option of choosing what's significant.
Speaker: I do think, though, it's generally safe to assume that if it was published in the yeah UK in fantasy between 1980 and Diana probably read it. Almost certainly. you read a lot.
Speaker: So, so much. I dream of reading as much as Diana Wynne-Jones read. So this brings us to the end of our question list. There's one sort of big...
Speaker: general question that we saved for last because I think we're gonna have to spend a lot of time on it. Yeah, so this is a question from Amy who tells us, I'm in a pretty unusual position of having read the vast majority of Jones's work aloud to a child. The thing that's always struck me, which I've heard you mention, is just how efficient her writing is. She packs in so much and so few words. And when you're reading aloud, you really notice her skill at explaining what's happening without obviously telling. It goes like this.
Speaker: Read a sentence, child looks a bit confused, literally the next sentence clarifies the thing they're wondering about but without patronising them. Because a chapter is often a bit long for how much we want to read in an evening, I tend to split chapters over two or more nights.
Speaker: Doing this makes you notice how many pages there are in a chapter and how this is often incredibly consistent across a whole book. The thing I want to ask you about is how Diana wrote, how she achieved these very tight narratives.
Speaker: My understanding is that when she wrote a manuscript, she literally just started writing by hand at the beginning without any preparatory notes. Hence the unfinished Islands of Chaldea manuscript presenting a challenge for the family as there were no indications of what was intended to happen next.
Speaker: About six months ago, I went in a pilgrimage to Diana's Archive at Seven Stories in Newcastle and spent a very happy afternoon browsing through a range of different boxes, exercise books from her childhood, letters from her editors, an unfinished manuscript and the original manuscript of one of my favourites, Conrad's Fate. I was blown away to see how close this handwritten version was to the final printed book.
Speaker: There was so little editing afterwards. Here's my question. Is this normal? LAUGHTER
Speaker: What a great question. Such a good question. Because actually, Becca and I have talked about this, not on the podcast, but we talk about Diana Wynne-Jones a lot. Right. The short answer is, nowadays, no.
Speaker: This is not normal. But historically... Maybe. And I think this brings me to something I think is quite interesting to think about, which is Diana Wynne Jones' career spans actually an invisible but important sea change in how books are written. How does one actually physically get the words from head to page? right And of course, Jones is writing out longhand, which was historically how books were written. Jane Austen wrote longhand.
Speaker: But during her career, during her life as a writer, people move from you write it longhand, you type it up, or if you're J.R.R. Tolkien, your wife types it up for you, not just him. This was a really interesting thing to have a wife for.
Speaker: I believe there are other purposes to wives, and mostly it's typing though. Anyway, point is, you write it, you type it, the typescript goes to an editor, the editor then tells you what to change. You literally physically cut and paste bits of your manuscript and Or if you're Diana Wynne Jones, you don't. Who famously sometimes did not, you know, would get the editorial comments and send it back saying, I've done it, and then would not have done it.
Speaker: People do still do this to editors, to be fair. um I think the the anecdote I like best is the time she cuts it out and then sticks it back in the same place. Yes. So that's ah the editing. And then you type it out again.
Speaker: And the it's printed and ah from that typescript. And that is a profoundly different way of writing a book to the version where you have a screen and you have a delete key and a find button. yeah And like, okay, I'm going to talk from my personal experience a minute.
Speaker: The way I write is that I start at the beginning of the book and I go all the way through to the end and then I stop. And then I go back beginning and I do that again. And ah usually I physically print out the first draft and and retype it from scratch. This is about as close as you can get a sort of word processing writing style to doing it a very old fashioned way. But it's still not what Jones was used to and what she grew up with because I have a delete key the whole time. Yes.
Speaker: And there is, I think, something psychologically profoundly different about being able to delete a sentence you don't like and replace it versus crossing it out and writing it the you wanted instead.
Speaker: Having to see the physical evidence of the thing that was wrong all throughout the whole Banyu script is a very different experience. i I know people who do who still do their first draft longhand, who think best when they have sort of an open notebook in front of them. That's not me. I'm addicted to the delete key. And while I do write more or less in that same way, starting at the beginning and going to the end almost entirely, that's really a disingenuous way to put it because often what that means is I'm writing a chapter and then the next day I'm going back, I'm rereading that chapter, I'm editing it as I go to get to what I think is the right starting point for the next chapter I want to write because now I've had a day's time in between writing it and looking at it again. which is not something you can do if you' if you don't have word processing software. You are stuck with the chapter that you wrote yesterday.
Speaker: Right. And it's like both of us, again, I think are unusually linear. I know a lot of writers who will have like a bit from here and a bit from there and will start in the middle and go back to the beginning and fill it in and then do a bit more of the middle and then go, no, I've got to restructure the beginning again and go back and forth and move around through the book. And there are some, like we should have got Freya Mask back on. Yes. So I could describe to you the experience I had of sitting next to Freya Mask in a coffee shop, watching in kind of horror and wonder, mid-sentence, wrote the rest of the sentence, and then went back to the beginning. and was like, what?
Speaker: like like Even for non-linear, that is very non-linear. But that is something you can do with word processing software, whatever process works for you your your computer will make it happen.
Speaker: If you are living in the world of the longhand notebook followed by the typewriter, you have got to think linear and you have got to get it right fairly quickly unless you want to pay for an awful lot of typescript.
Speaker: Yes. I think the thing that's, remarkable about Diana Wynne Jones really is not so much the linearity of it as the neat kind of assemblage of it in her head without, as far as one can tell, external notes, external references, and external guide to say this is what's going to happen and then this is what's going to happen and then this is what's going to happen.
Speaker: the The way that it kind of falls into place, that the the vision of the story becomes clear, the turn of the story pulls the rest of it into a tighter shape is really consistent and really remarkable, I think.
Speaker: She is very, very tight structural writer and it's clear she's got a lot of it in her head before she starts work. how far she's in control of that process. I always think of her very beautiful and thoughtful essay, lecture on the construction of fire and hemlock, which is followed up immediately by the anecdote of how she showed that essay to her editor who laughed at her and was like, you're lying. It wasn't like that at all. And they're like The distinction between the the the Uncle Ted process, if you like, the building of the bicycle, of knowing, you for example, your 14-chapter children's book structure with a twist at the seven-chapter midpoint, which she does so consistently yes that it does feel like a bicycle. And I think actually by Castle in the Air, it's beginning to feel like a slightly creaky bicycle, yeah one that she's a bit sick of.
Speaker: But the distinction between that and the the numinous, the sudden wild magic, um the process-driven, rule-breaking creativity, which clearly is like...
Speaker: The word I keep trying to use is infest, which is not right. Infuse. Is infusing her her books ah from the ground up. Is fascinating. I think some of it, like we do have to put that out there, some of it is just that Diana Wynne-Jones is an extraordinarily intellectual person.
Speaker: yeah This is a person who thinks in words and who thinks in word structures and who thinks in narratives. This enormously clever woman. And her enormous cleverness is a big part of how she is able to hold all this in her head.
Speaker: she's always drawing parallels and connections. Like as much as I talk about red string theory and kind of pulling these things together, you know, you read the essay on fire and hemlock and you see how much more of a bigger web of ideas and bits and pieces of different narratives and themes and characters she's pulling together to have them reflect against each other. And when you are doing that to a certain extent, I do think What you give yourself is something so extraordinarily rich that by the time, it's like a cat's cradle. By the time you pull it all together, the structure is going to look perfect. Yes, it's like a weave. It's Tanakui again, or Gladys who talks about the weave. And I think this is a metaphor she comes back to for a reason. She's got this this rich pattern of threads to work with. yeah like When we talk about red string theory, I think we are always thinking of the, what's the meme called? It's a meme.
Speaker: The guy. Right, the guy with the murder board. Yeah. But the point of that meme, right, is he looks crazy. He looks insane. He's doing the mad thing like drawing these wild connections. But the the way Joan's work is it's not crazy. She just does genuinely know how all these things connect. And there are so many more of them than you thought.
Speaker: Yes. And I do think like one thing that I find when I'm writing linearly and the reason that I write linearly and that it works for me is that usually I have to like sort of meander around for a while for the first half of whatever it is I'm writing. And by I hit the midpoint, I've put enough kind of ideas on into the manuscript that something clicks and I start to see how they all come together and what kind of conclusion I'm actually working towards. Now, the difference between me and Diana Wynne-Jones is that then after writing the back half of the book, I have to go back and completely retool the first half to make it actually make sense with the back half. And for her, it seems to have been a much cleaner process where she put all the ideas out. She saw the way, I think that's, maybe that is why you often get these kind of mid book twists in the children's novels, especially, but there is something that happens that shifts the perspective and the paradigm of the text that makes everything that's happened before that come clear. It puts it in a different light.
Speaker: And then she writes sort of briskly to the end with this new vision, this new idea of what's been happening. Right. if the If the linear writing process is like you push the boulder up the hill to the midpoint, then you're like, oh, and you topple it down the hill again. right And you and me, we then have to go back to the original hill and go like, wait, that was the wrong hill. Let's try that again. Diana seems to know which hill she's going up to begin with. Right, right. Absolutely. All right. Thank you. That was a great question, Amy. And I will mention that ah Amy also linked us, Amy's an academic researcher and linked us ah the book that she's working on, um Fashion Fictions, Imagining Sustainable Worlds, ah which talks a lot about parallel worlds influenced by the Crestomancy books this is one more thing I will link in the comments when I get to the many many links that I'll be putting in the comments of this episode
Speaker: We've got one more question to to end on. We decided to save the silly one for last. From Kate, in the past, two of Diana Wynne-Jones' titles have been adapted for the screen, Archer's Goon in the 1990s and Howl's Moving Castle in the 2000s.
Speaker: If you could each choose two titles and or series to be adapted, which would they be? And what would you look forward to seeing most on screen? Hexwood. It's Hexwood. We've had this conversation many times. Anyway, yeah, listen, ah if you are a TV producer listening to this, option Hexwood. Produce Hexwood. We can promise you literally dozens of additional viewers. And millions of dollars to cover every single one of the variety of sets that you will lead in order to do justice to this story, including Outer Space, an Arthurian castle, a grocery store.
Speaker: No, but we did talk about Hexler quite a lot, I think, back when I was watching Interview with a Vampire. And I think I messed with him with like, can we cast Asad Zaman as Hume? Yes! Can we get this beautiful man to play both the sort of wide-eyed teenager and the ancient god wizard planning an intergalactic war? He could Absolutely he could do it. The big sad eyes. And then we were like, who do we cast for Reyna Wan?
Speaker: i And the answer is Ian McKellen, who deserves to play a baddie again. It's been a while. We would have so much fun. I still think that, I said this actually in the first half of the episode, but Chris Eccleston 20 years ago, if I could get Chris Eccleston 20 years ago for Mordian, that's my dream. But the other, aside from Hexwood, which I do just desperately want the Hexwood adaptation with all of my heart, I don't want to have to be the person who has to write it, who has to adapt it for television. I want someone else to have to do that, but I do to see Yeah, somebody else do that. It's already complicated.
Speaker: But the other one that I think would be quite fun and... Fun in the way that adaptations can be fun where changing the structure of it, like speaking of Interview with the Vampire, which I think is a really stellar adaptation in the way that it brings, it uses kind of strange, the change in narrative structure of it being a television show of, that's many years after the original, to comment on the original and bring all kinds of thoughts and ideas and stories into question. I think a really fun adaptation that you could do of Crown of Dalemark, or of the Dalemark Quartet,
Speaker: would be to start with Crown of Delmarc and then have the earlier books be sort of narratives that get inserted into your Crown of Delmarc television show from the point of view of the people who... Yes, I want this prestige TV series. Thank you.
Speaker: Great idea. So badly. I want to have to see, ah you know, Mitt's explanation of what happened in Drowned Emmet. And then we'll meet Kialan and Kialan will have a different explanation. ah And then we'll meet Hildi and Hildi will have a different explanation again. Well,
Speaker: Delmark is an epic fantasy. It's an epic fantasy framed differently from your typical 90s epic fantasy, but that is what it's doing. And I think it would make a a fantastic epic adaptation. You're right.
Speaker: Absolutely. High budget. ah Go find every single one of those MacGuffins. Have a different filter for like, you know, have have the like misty magic filter for the time of mist and magic. And then i have a different person tell exactly, you know, have Wend tell them what happened and have Tanakwe tell what happened and have a different color filter on those different memories. ah So that's my dream. ah Someone call me and ah again, I won't write it for you, but I'll give you my vision.
Speaker: And we can promise you literally dozens of viewers. So to the literally dozens of listeners of this podcast, thank you so much for for following along with us on our season three journey. This was going to be our last bonus episode, but it sounds like we've given ourselves more homework for another one. Let's save that till after season four. Yes. I mean, we have to stop recording for a bit. It's about to be the kids' school holidays. I can't do anything for two months. Yes. So we'll probably be picking up with season four in September-ish and running it through, you know, fall and winter. And then we're going to come to the end of Diana Wynne Jones' books, which is truly wild to think about. I am a great believer in finishing things. I think you learn the most from a project when you complete it. So I am very excited to finish this project with you.
Speaker: Me too. I can't wait for some of the stuff we're going to talk about in season four. In the meantime, thank you all again for listening and we'll see you in a few months. See you in a few months. Thank you for listening.
Speaker: Bye. Bye.
