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Deep Secret
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I thought of Uncle Ted's wobbly windows, and I began to think he must really, truly never look through them or anything else. Can't anyone look out there and see that you need not to think of everything in terms of what works or what they ought to do?
Game dev and narrative expert Ariella Bouskila joins us for a discussion of bad colleagues, sick empires, beautiful boys, katabasis ducks, and the magic that can be found all around us if you have the eyes to see but can perhaps especially be found at a 1990s science fiction convention.
NB: As much as we would like not to, this one inevitably contains some conversation about Neil Gaiman.
Transcript available here, and we'll be wrapping up our season in two weeks with Dark Lord of Derkholm!
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Transcript
Introductions and Game Developer Discussion
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the second last episode of this season of 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm Rebecca Fraimow. I'm Emily Tesh and this week we are very excited to have a guest with us.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello, I'm Ariella Buskila and I am here because like Rupert in this book, I'm a game developer. Yeah, we're in the 90s. We're developing video games. I guess we were developing video games also in the 80s. There's a continuum of video game developers in Dinah Win Jones' work, I would say. I think it is vital to remember that in the list of sexy video game developers in Dinah Win Jones, there' there's Rupert, the protagonist of this book, and there's Hal Pendragon.
00:01:01
Speaker
Okay, but is Rupert sexy? Here's the important question, I think. One of the first and most important questions of the book. Is Rupert sexy? He really wants to be. he has a fast car. He has a fast car. He wears a cravat.
00:01:18
Speaker
He has like girlfriends and he clearly thinks he's sexy. And like outwardly, he this is a Howl Pendragon shaped man in several ways. But we're not seeing him from the outside. We're seeing him from the inside. And I would say that from the inside, he's not sexy at all.
Reverse Jonesian Romance and Rupert's Character
00:01:34
Speaker
Okay, I will go one step further. I will say there would have been a lot Jonesian romances in which a sad, shy, unhappy girl meets a dramatic and flamboyant man and goes, oh.
00:01:45
Speaker
This is the opposite. This is actually recalling Mark Harrell in A Sudden Wild Magic, which I think this book is a secret sequel to. Absolutely.
00:01:57
Speaker
Rupert is a boring loser at the age of 26, and he needs to unleash his inner witch by meeting the witchiest, weirdest girl imaginable and falling head over heels.
00:02:09
Speaker
Ariella, can I get you to give your opinion of Rupert Venables as a potential colleague in game development? i would kill him over Microsoft Teams.
00:02:21
Speaker
um Instantly. no the thing is the Sorry, go Can you tell us a bit of like, put them in context, 90s game development while you're at it.
Game Development in the 90s and Rupert's Exaggerations
00:02:32
Speaker
Right, yeah. um So the UK is an interesting place for game development and the 90s are an interesting time for it. In the 80s, the UK had this like mini computer boom. So there were a lot of households that just happened to have computers by this point. And there were a lot of what we now call solo devs. And the term then for them was bedroom developers, people who made games. alone on amateur equipment and sold them like by word of mouth and through ads in just magazines. And Rupert appears to be one of these guys, except that he's not making and releasing games on his own. He is contributing to what is at this point in in our in our world's history, a pretty well-growing industry. um He's got his room full of computers. He is a work from home well before the era of work from home game and developer.
00:03:35
Speaker
And he seems to be doing contract work for a lot of different companies. um He says that he does both non-game software and games, but we only ever hear him talking about games. So in my opinion, he did one non-game contract and was then like, I can put it on my resume. It's it's not only games. I've done i've done more presttient and prestigious work than just video games.
00:03:59
Speaker
Absolutely, this is true. I'm incorporating that into my personal canon immediately. The video game I remember playing in, it must have been the late 90s, which I think is from exactly this world, is the point and click adventure, Simon the Sorcerer. um I do wonder if Jones had somehow come across it because Rupert at one point introduces himself as Rupert the Mage and he's got an older brother, Simon. Who is in fact a sorcerer.
00:04:25
Speaker
But okay, now assess him as a colleague. um I think this is a guy who cares a lot about making sure your documentation is in order, um which is important. But the thing about documentation and game dev is that the instant you put it down and you save the page, it gets out of date because things just change so rapidly. The other thing about Rupert is that he is a guy who is doing contract jobs and then
00:04:57
Speaker
appears to just like wander off to do his own wizard stuff. And when we're in his point of view, we're like, oh, of course, you can't you can't get in your deliverable when you're busy saving the entire cosmos from from this terrible plan. But as his colleague who doesn't know about the Emperor Karyphos the Great, I'm like, we're three days late. We can't we can't release this build until we get in your part of it.
00:05:23
Speaker
Rupert, please. Every time he gets back from the Corophonic Empire, which is a ah an 11 world empire spanning the waistline of infinity, which is a cool concept, cool image. But Rupert is constantly running off the Corophonic Empire to deal with their internal political problems. And every time he gets back, he has a million faxes. because it's 1996. But I want to be clear, he's also a bad colleague to the Coriphonic Empire because they're constantly trying to get hold of him and he is always blowing them off as long as he possibly can. Like, I don't want to deal with this.
00:05:57
Speaker
So in fact, he's not a good colleague in any respect of his of of his various responsibilities. Okay, one more note on Rupert and game dev that I think is important though is that Rupert is creating, quite clearly, fantasy games and he's doing it to spec. And we're told this because the most of this book is set at a con and it's in fact set at the specific con that I will be able to tell you about because I've been to that one.
00:06:21
Speaker
Not in 1996, because I was nine. But Rupert is developing these fantasy properties and he talks quite smugly, quite proudly about how this is part of his job as a secret inter-directional wizard. It has spread the mysteries of fantasy in worlds that don't know about it yet. Except he doesn't seem to give a shit. He hasn't read the books.
00:06:43
Speaker
And one of the key things that happens is Marie goes, you've got to read the books. He hasn't even read Tolkien. No. He hasn't read Tolkien. What's he doing? Yeah. The first real conversation that Rupert has with his love interest, Marie, after they've had a classic, you know, rom-com meet ugly and both of them hate each other's
Thematic Exploration of State Violence and the Coriphonic Empire
00:07:01
Speaker
guts. And she's asking him about computer games. And he says, ah you know, she says,
00:07:06
Speaker
I like shooting aliens, killing aliens, and he says, you get to do a lot of other things too with mine. They're fairly sophisticated. This killed me. This is another this is another like note on the board for my list of times I would kill Rupert as a colleague.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. He says they're fairly sophisticated. It's an odd thought that quite a few of them are based on books that are on sale heel and the dealer here in the dealer's room, so I'm told. And I haven't actually read one of them, not a single one.
00:07:38
Speaker
Kill him. Kill him with sticks. ah Funny you say that. This is a book with quite a lot of death in it, actually. This is something that we talked about extensively in our our prep for for this episode. Because the first chapter of this book where we meet Rupert, horrible game developer,
00:07:55
Speaker
secret magic ruler of the world, close personal friend of the Clintons. He's just come back from Belgrade Accords when the book starts. And the first thing we do is see him go off to the Coriphonic Empire where there's a young man, the Emperor's heir, who's been accused of knowing that he's the Emperor's heir, which is illegal.
00:08:15
Speaker
And Rupert spends this entire scene like, I'm going to get him out of here. I'll whisk him away. It's going to be fine. I'm good at my job. He's not. The young man dies immediately. ah gets executed right there in front of Rupert while Rupert's still like, yeah, I'll take care of this in a couple, you know, in a couple minutes when I get around to it.
00:08:31
Speaker
And Rupert kind of wanders shell-shocked back from this experience to the bedside of his dying mentor, who's dying of cancer, who then dies immediately right in front of him. This is the first chapter of the book.
00:08:43
Speaker
Right. This book begins with two deaths, one by state violence and one by cancer. And I would argue that this book is deeply interested in state violence because even before the deaths it begins with Rupert Ayer saying we've just sorted out some peace in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia he doesn't actually say he's a close personal friend of the Clintons he says he's been talking to the right people to get things done and I go so he's a close personal friend of Bill Clinton right um but this book I think is
00:09:16
Speaker
interested throughout in both a literal cancer, the cancer of the body, and if you'd like a political cancer, ah the cancerous state, the body politic made sick.
00:09:29
Speaker
I want to talk about so much. I want to talk about the underlying structure of the book or the first person narrative. And I also want to talk, I want to do my classics moment. Ariella gets the game dev moment. I get the moments and what we do And I want to talk about the Coriphonic Empire and the sources Jones is pulling on and what she is using to inform this creation of a sick, corrupt imperial state. Yeah, please go ahead and set up the Coriphonic Empire because the plot of the book, such as it is, I don't think the meat of the book revolves around the Coriphonic Empire, but certainly it is the engine that makes the plot go.
00:10:07
Speaker
In fact, this is even more than many Diana Wynne-Jones books. This one is book that has a lot of plot but isn't that interested in it. So the Corophonic Empire, which is the cause of most of Rupert's problems in life that aren't caused by himself, ah is an empire that has been around for 2000 years. And immediately I go, oh, so it's Rome.
00:10:29
Speaker
Right. And we go into more depth, actually, and we're told it is ruled by an emperor. doesn't have a particular religion, but has a kind of unifying state belief in the founding emperor, a guy called Korifos, who Rupert's quite dismissive about. He says this guy ruled for 20 years, 2000 years ago, and they're all still obsessed with him.
00:10:50
Speaker
But he's seen statues and Jones name drops Alexander the Great. He stands with his head on one side, which is an Alexander the Great pose. He had this very specific icon of iconography of little bit of a wiggle in his spot in his position, tilted head and the amazing quiff, masses of blonde hair. blow but he looks He looks like he's from the 1980s and quite sexy about it. He could and he could play tennis against Andre Agassi. Anyway.
00:11:16
Speaker
Or against the wizard Hal. I'm just saying. Right. ah So we are then steered towards an ancient Greece interpretation, right? alex Except that Alexander the Great was famously not a good emperor.
00:11:30
Speaker
He conquered a lot of empire and then he dropped dead of liver failure in his mid-30s and the whole thing immediately fell apart. So this is not the empire that we're talking about because we are talking about something that's endured for 2,000 years.
00:11:48
Speaker
And something that seems to have been very, very important to a lot of people. And it's such that a lot of people, including Rupert, spend most of the book trying to prop it up as it collapses. And there is a dramatic sequence of the Imperial Palace collapsing early on, folding in on itself. And everyone looks a wrap up at it and goes, wow, what a visual metaphor. Yeah. Pretty much exactly that.
00:12:09
Speaker
So I think the empire that Jones is drawing on specifically is the Byzantine Empire. Now, I'm not a Byzantinist, which is ridiculous. One of the things that classics as taught in universities does is it cuts off.
00:12:25
Speaker
very sharply at the point where ancient Romans turn into medieval Byzantines. This is not actually two separate empires. It's ridiculous to pretend that it is, but it has been traditional in Europe for a long, long time to pretend that the Byzantine Empire was not the Roman Empire, even though you know like they called themselves Romae, they spoke Greek, because it's brown.
00:12:50
Speaker
I mean, that's what it comes down to. This is a powerful Middle Eastern state which controls most of the good bits or rather most of the rich bits of the Roman Empire. Europe was crap.
00:13:02
Speaker
Why did the Roman roman Empire fail in Western Europe? Because it was crap. There was nothing there worth saving. This is... but There are actual books you can read about this. This is this is ah the the Emily Tess short summary version. Europe was crap.
00:13:15
Speaker
But subsequent European rulers have been, and still are, obsessed with the legacy of Rome. From Charlemagne to Mussolini and beyond. And still today, you can go on Twitter and see them with their classical statue avatars, feeling like there is a legacy here and it belongs to us. And therefore, you have to stand on top of this legacy and look over at the Byzantine Empire with its probably best, definitely best claim to be Rome's successor. And go, not those people.
00:13:46
Speaker
aha And the words that you will hear in, not in modern scholarship, but in, say, Victorian scholarship, and thinking particularly of the famous one, a Gibbon, decline and fall of the Roman Empire, is degenerate.
00:14:00
Speaker
aha So the Coriphonic Empire is, I think, based on a lot of these Orientalist tropes, drink, where you have this...
00:14:13
Speaker
once great imperial state, but its contemporary expression is disgusting and embarrassing and characterized by polygamous sex succession drama. um And at one point, it's the specific comparison is brought up ah to the Ottoman Empire, which is the successor of the Byzantine Empire. Mm-hmm.
00:14:34
Speaker
and is different from it mainly in that it's Muslim. In other words, really, this is the same state again. Oh God, no, that is too big a claim. I'm sorry, actual Byzantinists and students of the Middle East listening to this. I am being so rough. Anyway, but what's the point is, is in reference to the Corophonic Empire's ah polygamous succession drama, our main characters, I think it is Marie specifically, who says, well, it's...
00:15:00
Speaker
like the way they used to bring up ah Ottoman princes and they'd bring out someone to be sultan with no experience and no knowledge of the world because he'd been secluded all his life. So again, Orientalist tropes, drink.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yes. I've been talking way too I love this stuff. I'm so sorry. No, it's good. and I think it's deeply, you're right that it's deeply important to the book. Like so much of, you know, the underlying mythology of the the poem that makes the book, the other thing that makes the book go is this poem, How Many Miles to Babylon. And we talk quite a lot about this. It doesn't really have anything to do with the real Babylon, except in that she's clearly thinking about it in context of the Koryphian Empire, she's thinking about the Hanging Garden, she's thinking about these kind of ideas and sort of putting them together in sideways ways to be the underlying architecture of this book about a science fiction con in the 1990s. Yeah. And I think the central, the most important figure is actually this heroic founder emperor, Koryphos,
00:15:56
Speaker
who we are, we're given Alexander the Great as a comparison, but I think actually the images invoked are all Constantine the Great, who is the Saint Emperor who moved the capital of Rome, of the Roman world from Rome, which was unimportant and nowhere way near the borders, to the city he named Constantinople, ah now known as Istanbul.
00:16:19
Speaker
Not Constantinople. Also interesting to think about that this is, you know, I saw Corobos the Great and coming right off Crown of Delmarc, the first thing I thought was, in fact, not of any of these historical figures, but ah just like Amal the Great, another great ah unifying figure who moved a capital city and founded a modern society.
00:16:39
Speaker
because say we We've kind of got here a situation of, you know what, it is great when the true king reclaims his throne, isn't it Renews the state and cures the cancer in the body politic. remember why I brought up the Ottoman Empire. it's because it was for most of the Victorian era known as the sick man of Europe. So this idea of a failing state as a person who is sick.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yes. And I do think it's quite interesting. So we get a couple of instances of cancer in this book, right? We have ah Rupert's mentor, Stan, who dies of cancer in the first chapter and then hangs out being a ghost for the rest of the book.
00:17:19
Speaker
And then we have Marie's father, ah Ted, who is not Ted. ted's tdgal Marie's father, whose name I forget because she always just refers to him as her little tare dad, Derek, who's also dying of cancer.
00:17:31
Speaker
And when Rupert goes to see Derek, they have a long conversation about the power of positive thinking and how important it is to think yourself better from the cancer, to really like believe that you can get rid of it.
00:17:44
Speaker
Worth noting, I think, not only that Jones's own father died of cancer, but also that she, in the last years of her life, struggled with it repeatedly. And I can't go into any more depth than that because the I don't know the details.
00:17:58
Speaker
And I don't know if it was actually the cancer that finally killed her quite late on. But cancer is clearly something she is thinking about and how you deal with cancer and how you fight against cancer.
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah. So this this book is about sickness and it's about oncoming. It's about different kinds of sickness too. i think it's also really concerned with ah mental health. um This is another instance. So we haven't talked much. We've talked a lot about Rupert. We haven't talked yet much about Marie, who's the other main There are two other main figures in this book, and we're going to have to get to the third one eventually. But I guess first let's set up Marie, who is the the heroine of the book.
00:18:38
Speaker
um she is So Stan has died. at Stan is Rupert's mentor. And he's looking for a new magic to take his place. He's got this list of candidates, and Marie is one of them. And Marie is a depressed 20-year-old vet student who's sort of in the process of blowing up her life in order to get over a bad breakup.
00:18:58
Speaker
She's moved in with her horrible aunt and fine uncle who writes science fiction and their son. She has no money. She's trying to change her major away from veterinary science, even though she loves veterinary science because she can't risk blowing into running into her ex again. And her dad is dying of cancer.
00:19:15
Speaker
And she's just so sad all the time. She's described as speaking with a kind of sob in her voice. That's one of the first things that Rupert notices about her is her voice is so annoying because it sounds like she's about to cry all the time.
00:19:27
Speaker
And she's amazing. I think that it's, you know, we're following up on the heroine of a sudden wild magic who was depressed and blowing up her life and a beautiful fantasy object with Marie who when Rupert first runs into her he's like oh this is a dumpy girl in like ragbag clothes with fingernails that are like six inches long holding up traffic to do a weird dance on the side of the road like there's nothing appealing about this person from outside he actually he gives us her her figure is like a bag of straw with a string tied around the middle Rupert is I think Jones is trying to write him very heterosexual doesn't always succeed Does not always succeed.
00:20:14
Speaker
No, there's some very handsome men out there. um And the thing about Rupert's reaction to to Marie is that till now he has had a vision in his mind of the trainee wizard that he's going to have. And he's going to meet this beautiful young woman who he can train up and who will sort of like rely on him for everything. And he has this vision so strongly in his head. And then he runs straight into into Marie and she is so different from his fantasy. Yeah, what he says is, uh, I had on the basis of her personality trace been building up a picture of a brave person in considerable adversity. I'd been prepared to be wonderfully sorry for her, but all that went away when I saw her grotesque bag-like figure prancing at the side of the road.
00:21:00
Speaker
We hate Rupert. No, we don't. I'm actually very fond of Rupert. He's very funny, but he's also quite hateable. um what The bit I like for his ah his sexy teacher fantasy.
00:21:13
Speaker
Gross, dude. ah she I even allowed myself very agreeable visions of her as a pretty and intelligent young woman whom it would be a pleasure to instruct. I visualized myself laying down the laws of the Magids to her. I saw her hanging on my every word. I looked forward to meeting her.
00:21:30
Speaker
Rupert is 26. i think That's relevant. hello ah I'm going to kill him. I love him, but I'm going kill him. i so Again, ah we've seen Diana Jones has this real interest in From a Sudden Wild Magic on.
00:21:43
Speaker
The socially unacceptable things you do to save your own life. And Marie is really emblematic of that. And I understand that it's vital and necessary for Marie to get out of the car and dance her dance on the side of the road to save herself from the evil forces of extra dimensional depression in the form of an evil goddess. But if she was blocking the only exit to the car park and was doing her little dance and the cars were like lined up 30 behind her and no one could leave, I would also kill her.
00:22:10
Speaker
that's That's the second time she does it. The first time is the middle of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which we have actually seen before in Fire and Hemlock. And this book, like Fire and Hemlock, I think is quite deeply rooted in the physical geography of Bristol. Yeah.
00:22:25
Speaker
But the Clifton Suspension Bridge, known suicide spot, great place to chase off your depression with a dance. One way road, no way to turn around. She's blocking all the traffic. Yeah.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, I would also want to kill her. this is This is the thing. I want to kill both of them. They're both very annoying people. Which is why they're perfect for each other. They deserve each other. Exactly. They really do. This is their meet ugly is Maria's dancing in the middle of the road. Rupert has been trying to find her to see if he can, ah you know, if she's acceptable, um an acceptable magic candidate.
00:22:57
Speaker
And he is trapped on the suspension bridge with everybody else. And he stalks up to her and gives her $100 to drive away. And everybody cheers. And they both walk away thinking, I never want to talk to that person again in my life. So of course, they're going to end up married.
00:23:13
Speaker
And I think this is really our first, again, like Diana Wynne-Jones is, I think, kind of increasingly interested in writing the rom-com. And this is her first real like rom-com beat ugly. Like, Hal and Sophie have the bickering romance, but their meeting is a meet-cute.
00:23:27
Speaker
This is not a meet-cute. I have to point out that both times it is not actually fully Marie's fault that she is doing a witchy dance in the stupid place. Because both times she is prompted to do it by her 14-year-old cousin, Nick.
00:23:40
Speaker
who also both times pretends it was nothing to do with him when she gets publicly embarrassed about it. Is it time for us to talk about Nick? There's a lot to talk about with Nick. Okay, let's talk about Nick. Let's talk about the elephant in the room at the same time.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah. So the thing about Nick, quite famously, is that he is based on a young Neil Gaiman. There's, I think, a very specific scene with Nick late on the book where he has trouble, you know he's sort of in the morning...
00:24:09
Speaker
can't Can't wake up, Maria's piloting him around. This is famously, famously based on Neil Gaiman behavior at conventions, well known. But there's also, I mean, Neil Gaiman kind of runs through this book and Neil Gaiman does run through Diana Wynne-Jones' career. We've sort of avoided talking about it until now because neither us really want to talk about Neil Especially her later work. Yes. Okay.
00:24:32
Speaker
So we we do actually know how they met. 1985, the British Fantasy Convention. And ah this is from, whose book is it? or You find the author for me. I'll read the quote. Yes. Hang on.
00:24:45
Speaker
Gaiman met Diana Wynne-Jones, who was guest of honour at was the first convention she had ever attended. Neil kept her company while she stood nervously at the bar. And downstairs, Alan Moore was reading Jones's The Ogre Downstairs to his daughters as their bedtime book.
00:24:59
Speaker
With the kids safely asleep, he'd come back out and talk about comics. The Art of Neil Gaiman by Hayley Campbell, page 70 71. Right, so this is 1985, so a decade before this book, and this is probably, presumably, their first meeting. At that point, Gaiman would have been 25 years old, very early in his career, but I think ah he was famously a wunderkind. He started getting popular and successful very young, and he was known for being brilliant, being a wonderful man full of great ideas who everyone loved and, like,
00:25:36
Speaker
There are people I talk to at British fantasy conventions today who cannot let go of this image of him because this was the man they knew or thought they knew. And also beautiful.
00:25:47
Speaker
I think this is key. Young Neil Gaiman was a good looking man and everybody talked about it. Yes. So Nick is Marie's young cousin. He's 14, which I think is really important. He's a teenager who is old enough to be selfish and make decisions that are consequential, but still inherently a child.
00:26:05
Speaker
Nick and Marie were close when they were kids. Then Marie moved away. Now Marie is back in the house. And although her experience is miserable because she has this awful aunt and she's depressed and she has no money, the best thing about her situation right now is that Nick thinks she is the cat's pajamas.
00:26:22
Speaker
Despite the fact that we're, you know, from from Marie's point of view, I think a couple of key quotes, Nick has a low opinion of women. Well, so I would have with a mother like Janine. I could see I had awed Master Nick. This pleased me. You have to keep someone like Nick suitably humble or you end up washing his socks while he walks barefoot all over you.
00:26:39
Speaker
And, but then, ah because, you know, he's 14 and Marie is the person who takes him seriously when he talks about, like he's designing this computer game called Bristolia.
00:26:50
Speaker
And so Marie says, Master Nick had decided he wanted to show me Bristolia and the women folk dizz as he wanted. Actually, I felt quite honored that he trusted me both to drive him and not to laugh at his Bristolia game. It put me in a much better mood.
00:27:02
Speaker
So there's something about this relationship where, again, Nick is a child and Marie is an adult and has the power to not take him seriously, to hurt his feelings very badly, which he's trying hard not to do. But the fact that he trusts her, that she is special, that he doesn't like women or respect women, but he does like and respect her is really central to their relationship and to what makes Marie feel good about their relationship. Yeah.
00:27:30
Speaker
So I will add as well, I think Marie and Nick's relationship is more complicated than just they spent some of their childhood together, then grew a back, and now they and now they're close together again. Marie is effectively and described as Nick's mother.
00:27:43
Speaker
she Her earliest memories of him are pushing a pushchair that's almost as big as she is up the downs, that's the the hills outside the city, and then being complimented on her little brother.
00:27:57
Speaker
and taking care of him. Her mother's not interested in babies, so she's the one who takes care of the little boy, um toddler, and tells him stories. We have seen this in Diana Wynne Jones before. This is the sister-mother figure.
00:28:11
Speaker
we not usually see her taking care of selfish younger sisters. And I do think Nick is arguably, as well as a a game and portrait, there are other pieces in him. He's not just that. And one of the pieces in the puzzle must be, as it so often is, Fenella, awful, Ursula Jones, ah the brilliant, selfish, younger sibling with extraordinary talent.
00:28:33
Speaker
But Marie is Nick's cousin. She's his mother. She is literally, it turns out, his sister. ah She is his mentor. She is the one who supports him. ah She's his escape.
00:28:48
Speaker
Nick's mother is terrible. And Nick is quite good at getting away from her. But the way he gets away is through this fantasy world of Bristolia that only Marie is allowed into with him. So they have this shared bond of escaping from this horrible, nasty woman into a fantasy.
00:29:06
Speaker
It is, i think, hard, probably impossible for us to comment really directly on Gaiman and Jones's personal relationship. We don't know either of them as people.
00:29:18
Speaker
Gaiman wrote the introduction to Jones's essay collection, Reflections, and he wrote it with great fondness and affection. He very clearly saw this woman as a much admired mentor. He talks about her as ah simply one of the best. on This is possibly one of the few places where we agree with Neil Gaiman.
00:29:40
Speaker
Jones, in turn, seems to have great affection, tenderness, respect for him as perhaps a mentee. He's the same age as her youngest son.
00:29:51
Speaker
okay I think a question that all of us do think about now, and I certainly think about it every time I see a Gaiman quote on the front of one of her books, which is often um is did she know?
00:30:03
Speaker
And I don't think she can possibly have known what kind of character he was. But at the same time, I will say that if someone created a a pen portrait of me that was Nick Mallory, i would be horrified. He is such a little shit. And a lot of what's a little shit about him is forgivable because he's a 14-year-old character. But at the time this book was published, Gaiman was in his late th thirty s a behavior that is charming and amusing and he'll grow out of it from a 14 year old is oh my god yikes from a man of 37. Yeah you know we've talked a lot about Rupert is hateable and he is and Marie is hateable which she is and I love them both but
00:30:46
Speaker
their character flaws don't really form the the central question of the book. The central question of the book is about Nick's sort of core character flaw, his core selfishness.
00:30:59
Speaker
And we'll get there. I guess we have to we have to work up to that because there's quite a lot of plot and quite a lot of setting that we have to get through first. We haven't even talked about the con yet. No, I think we have to talk about... the car let's before we do that though a key question of the book is is these figures called magids and I think Ariana you had some good points to make about what a magid is and how it's being used in this book Yes. um So the first thing is I was surprised when both of you pronounced it Magid because my whole life since I first read this book at maybe age 12, I read it. I always pronounced it in my head as Magid, like a Hebrew word, because it is. can't believe I never picked up on this. Yeah, Magid is a Hebrew word. In modern Hebrew, it's like, it's a noun for a person the person speaking. It's a way to conjugate speaking. It's like how you would say, i am speaking to him.
00:31:59
Speaker
Like speaking in that sentence would be Magid. And it is also crucially, I think, both a term for a specific kind of itinerant Jewish preacher from a certain historical era in Europe, and a term in Kabbalah, I think, for a messenger from heaven or a holy, like ah an angelic figure who speaks through someone.
00:32:24
Speaker
And I came to you like with not not a thought of Kabbalah in my head. Just, a hey, isn't it funny that Diana Wynne Jones used a Hebrew term in her book? And then both of you immediately went, of course, it's Kabbalah.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah. Well, but to go back to that Gaiman quote for a second, the other important figure who's mentioned in that quote as being part of that fateful meeting at the con is Alan Moore, who was reading Dinah 1 Jones' is books to his children at that time, and who pretty notably incorporates Kabbalah into his occult vision of the world. Alan Moore is a practicing ceremonial wizard.
00:33:04
Speaker
The book of his, which had a profound effect on me when I was 14, although I don't think I would risk rereading it, ah is Promethea, ah which is one of the books in which he goes most deeply into his his own wizardry, his own practice, I guess. But it is very much like, Goyeshevois, let me explain the Kabbalah to you.
00:33:25
Speaker
Did I say that right? I'm the only non-Jewish person here. Nailed I mean, I think you said it the way that Alan Moore would have said it. Well done me. Thank you.
00:33:36
Speaker
But yeah, it's like, you know, Kabbalah is... An idea that kind of gets somewhat divorced from its Jewish antestidence in intestines antecedents in...
00:33:49
Speaker
in the way it's used in occult writings. I mean, that's true since the, like, has been true since the 19th century. um It's an idea that gets kind of picked up and tossed around as like, ooh, cool secret knowledge. And this is a book that's all about cool secret knowledge.
00:34:05
Speaker
It's titled Deep Secret. i think one of the one of the key things that's doing work in this book is murds are literally doing magic.
00:34:17
Speaker
This is not a metaphor. This is not about the power of creativity, although it is. I mean, they're also doing that, but they are doing literal magic. And we have a lot of witchcraft, wizardry, practice, esoterica, especially once we enter the world of the fantasy, the science fiction convention.
00:34:40
Speaker
Nerds are literally, nerds be doing magic. And I think we've got sort of not necessarily an Alan Moore portrait, but but ceremonial wizard figures through this book.
00:34:51
Speaker
And the Magids, the Magids, Magids, I think you might say in this context, a lot of their magic is telling and writing and creativity. I mean, Ariel, as soon as you said, as soon as you pointed out that connection, it's like, oh, like the first example of a like famous historical Magid figure that we get in the book is Lewis Carroll.
00:35:12
Speaker
And at the very end of the book, Movert thinks casually, oh, I wonder if Lewis Carroll was a Magid. The stuff that he did seems sort of like that. And then in the book, the the gods basically say, oh yeah, you were right, by the way, it's important that you know Lewis Carroll was was one of these like magical wizards.
00:35:28
Speaker
And the work that they do is putting ideas out into the world, putting stories out into the world, and broadening the mind specifically to Prepare the way for broader belief in magic and wonder. Is that a fair characterization? Yeah, I think so. And I think the title of the book is key here because the book is called Deep Secret and the book is framed as an act of secret telling.
00:35:53
Speaker
which is the work that the Majids do. They c seed secrets throughout the worlds of the parallel universes so that the world will would be ready for what it's not quite clear.
00:36:04
Speaker
And the book is all told in first person and it's all told in found document format, archive format. And we are given upfront the information that this is from the library at Iphorion in the Chorophonic Empire.
00:36:18
Speaker
And we have... The structure is interesting, actually. We start in Rupert's point of view. We have six chapters of Rupert's setup. And then we switch to what seems to be Marie's personal diary kept on her laptop.
00:36:32
Speaker
And we go back and forth between Rupert and Marie until the halfway point of the book where Marie loses access to her computer, after which we don't know hear directly from her ever again. We hear from her at the very end. but I believe. Am I wrong?
00:36:47
Speaker
Isn't that Nick's? No, you're right. It's all Nick. It's all Nick. No, that's the point. We go into a long stretch of Rupert's continuous account of this is what happened in the plot. And then the final chapter, and I would argue the most important chapter, the best stuff in the book, ah is given into the voice of Nick. this 14-year-old brilliant, selfish, creative ah who has, it's very clear, a great future in fantasy.
00:37:17
Speaker
Yeah. I do want to talk a little bit briefly, before we get to the con, about To go back to this idea of sort of preparing the way for a better, more magical future, this is some of the stuff that's in the first chapter of the book where Rupert is talking to Stan, his dying mentor, about what the future holds. And what Stan says, he's talking about his life's work, what he's proud of doing.
00:37:38
Speaker
He says, I've helped clear away a lot of the political garbage that's built up through this century. We've got the deck cleared for the changes due to come in the next century now. When I was a lad, no one even considered that there might be other universes, let alone talking of going to them.
00:37:51
Speaker
But now people write books about that and they talk about working magic and having former lives and nobody thinks you're a nutcase for mentioning it. And I think I did that. Me. I slid us back down the spiral, back to where we should be, which is more than this cosmology. We forgot to set this up. There's i words and nay words. words worlds are more magical worlds.
00:38:10
Speaker
Nay words worlds are less magical worlds. And Stan has this vision of his life's work, of the work of all Majids, that is moving Earth up the spiral away from sort of the conflicts of the 20th century towards a magical utopian I-Word future. The year is 1997. I mean, this was really tragic to read, honestly. It's like, oh, this is a very 1990s moment. ah this is This is end of history stuff. This is this is close personal friend of the Clintons stuff.
00:38:40
Speaker
Congratulations, Rupert, on your work. but it's sad. I think it actually we read it and then I pasted into chat the the famous bit from Victor Hugo, Les Mis where he goes, friends, the 19th century has been great but the 20th century will be happy. These are not predictions you should put in words.
00:38:59
Speaker
It'll just be embarrassing later. But also Stan's claims about the place magic in
00:39:05
Speaker
but also stands um claims about the work the place of magic in his country and his lifetime are simply not true we're given an age for him ah he's 89 so and he says that's quite young for a magic to die uh but that gives us actually some of what he lived through and he lived through the post first world war spiritual boom um like he has absolutely been a world of past lives and people doing magic for much of his adult life but i think
00:39:38
Speaker
Stan's not talking about what he says he's talking about. Stan is talking about, can you write fantasy and be taken seriously? Yes. Shall we get to the con? Do we want to talk about the con now? So quick plot summary to get us to the con. Rupert, after spending the first six chapters chasing around ah various magic candidates to replace Stan, who is dead, having a meet ugly with Marie and deciding anyone but her. I hate her so much because she doesn't fulfill my lovely fantasy of being hot for teacher. Again, I'm 26.
00:40:09
Speaker
He's like, there's nothing for it. I'm going to have to do some serious magic about this. So he does some serious magic. He gets out in his shed, in his garden, in his house just outside Cambridge. there's a This book, again, like a sudden wild magic, is super located in time and space. This is the 1990s. We are in Cambridgeshire and we are going to the only fictional place in the book is Little Town of Worcester.
00:40:34
Speaker
which i will I would say is not that fictional. I looked up where EasterCon was the year before she wrote this. Anyway. It's Heathrow. It's Heathrow. Anyway, Rupert does a great big spell to bring together the fates of all his magic candidates. And he's got, ah he's ruled out Marie, so he's very aggressively going, not Marie, not her.
00:40:56
Speaker
so know It turns out thinking really hard about someone the whole time you're doing a spell is not the way to leave them out of it. But he also brings in a Dutchman called Cornelius Punt, an American called Tanziane Fisk, an English science fiction writer called Mervyn Thurlus. What a name. What a name. What a name.
00:41:16
Speaker
And the last one we are never given a first name for. His surname is Gabrielisevich. from Croatia, ah who we are told has just been involved in the war that was happening there at the time.
00:41:30
Speaker
And Rupert does this great big spell to bring together all these fates. He's like, I have to be super careful about this and not do it wrong. Because if it goes wrong, it could do some real damage to all the worlds because it's very dangerous working. And oh, my neighbor just walked into the middle of the spell to borrow a cup of sugar.
00:41:43
Speaker
Yes, rupert's so Rupert's neighbor is I think where we're outsourcing neither Rupert nor Marie at this point have been just no one has been described in this book as sexy, except for Rupert's neighbor. Rupert's neighbor, he has a completely normal neighbor relationship with.
00:41:58
Speaker
Absolutely. yeah its so nip This neighbor just wanders in from time to time and is like, this neighbor who, by the way, is an inventor and just invents things and then wanders over and is like, I would like a ride to somewhere. And Rupert's like, where? And he's like, I don't know, wherever you're going.
00:42:13
Speaker
And this just happens on the regular. Just a guy who likes road trips. Yeah, they have a great relationship. But let me give you the description of the neighbour walking into the spell, partly because I think it's really funny.
00:42:28
Speaker
We talk so much about this one because we had tech problems last week when we were going to record. We have talked a lot about this book in advance. So here is the neighbour, Andrew, walking into Rupert's spell. I was shuffling forwards along the chalk lines with my arms spread to keep the world in balance when I looked up to see a figure straddling the loop at the far end. I couldn't see the person clearly because he was silhouetted against a stream of orange sunlight slanting from the high window at the barn.
00:42:54
Speaker
Chalk dust and motes from the barn itself were catching the light too and standing round him like rays. He looked vast. Andrew's got a halo. yeah This is a a holy figure with the exact iconography of a Byzantine church giving us Jesus and or giving us, I think more importantly, Constantine the Great, the um founding emperor emperor of the the Byzantine Empire.
00:43:20
Speaker
And i do think this guy is... closer to a Constantine than what he turns out to be, the Alexander. This is Korifos, or some of him. 120th. And this is the actual plot of the book.
00:43:35
Speaker
Yes. Oh, I would just like to point out that we get these majestic descriptions of Andrew every time he turns up in the first six chapters. In the middle of the book, Marie is going to look at Andrew and be like, God, what a dream road. And Rupert is going to say, i don't know, he's just my neighbor. i've That's just my normal looking neighbor. I've never known what what makes men attractive to women in what Rupert says, which I think is very funny because he is constantly noting how beautiful men are. ah But this, after all, is a book which is largely about beautiful men, beautiful boys, in a way which I think chimes interestingly with A Sudden Wild Magic, which I swear is the other half of this book, which is all about how hot Zilla is. In this book, specifically, the women are not hot.
00:44:18
Speaker
They don't need to be. But by God, the men are dreamboats. Yeah, so we get to the con. Rupert goes to the con and there's a solid chunk of this book that is just really affectionate portraiture of the type of people that you meet at cons.
00:44:32
Speaker
I love all these people. I love all these people. I love almost all these people. that's That's fair. There are a lot of unlovable people at this con as well. There's a real sort of tag yourself which con goer are you element to this book. I'm the one who can't talk to people for more than five minutes without having to manufacture an excuse to leave no matter how much fun I'm having. um um But I do think that we need to talk a little bit about the women at this con and the bodies of the women at this con and the descriptions of the women at this con. Right. So this is Eastercon.
00:45:03
Speaker
Eastercon is like it's happening over Easter weekend. In the book, it's called Phantasmacon, but Eastercon has a different name every year. It's Eastercon. It was for a very long time the biggest British science fiction convention. I think possibly still is. Yeah.
00:45:18
Speaker
I've been once. I'm going again next year. I had a lot of fun. oh But this book is full of Jonesian portraiture. It's not just Neil Gaiman. She is putting everybody in there. And some of it, like, I went to various British cons and you talk to people who were around in the 80s, 90s scene and they'll be like, oh that's so-and-so, that's so-and-so, that's so-and-so. And on the principle that none of these people consented to have their actual names announced in a podcast, I'm not going to tell you who the so-and-sos are. But lots of these characters are pieces of real people.
00:45:52
Speaker
Just as the hotels are pieces of real hotels. Yeah, the hotel is visibly the Heathrow Radisson, or at least parts of it parts of it are. And the hotel the context place in is super weird. It has more right angles in it than should be possible. it's You constantly get lost on what theoretically ought to be a square, and the and it seems like the lifts are always moving. And everyone I talked to was like, yeah, that's the Radisson.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think, Arielle, you were the one who was pointing out that there's like a range of, like, with the camera is looking, the camera the the eye of these characters, the eye of the book is looking at all these people at the con. And broadly speaking, it likes all of them.
00:46:28
Speaker
But there's, and it has some like really, you know, really strikingly, I think, particularly sympathetic portraits of the kind of queer people that you get at cons. There's ah this one family, it's it's three gender indeterminate people with long hair and a baby, and they come they show up over and over again. And everyone thinks they're very dreamy. The three beautiful people with the baby were the first time I first read this book when I was about 13. It was the first time I'd ever seen trans people portrayed in ah in any book, I think. And certainly with that loving affection, like I think some of the choices about how the narrative genders them now would raise eyebrows. But it's very clear that the the three beautiful people with the baby are here to have a great time and look fantastic. And everyone goes, wow, look at you having a great time and looking fantastic. We support you. Yes. um But there's also, I think, a particularly striking figure in Wendy the Willow, who's one of the the people that shows up the most at the con.
00:47:24
Speaker
And we were talking a bit about the sort of the the range of what what is acceptable and what then becomes a joke within this book. Yeah. So let's talk about Wendy. Yeah. um So I think it's notable that we have a lot of women in this book who are fat or in the case of Janine, who are like described as dieting very, very carefully.
00:47:47
Speaker
We have Marie and her ragbag figure. She talks when we meet her, she talks about how she did a lot of comfort eating after her breakup. We have Wendy the Willow, who is just consistently described as fat in a grotesque way. Nick can literally not look at her. He is too too embarrassed, too upset by the sight of her body and the way that her body moves to even look at her. And we have Zinka, who is another Magid that we haven't introduced yet. And she is fat, but in a charismatic way.
00:48:22
Speaker
In a sexy way. It is. Yes, she's sexy. She's very sexy, sexual person. Zinka's here to have a great time. And we mostly applaud her for it. And I think like... that's that zi we'll get to thank we'll We'll get to Zinka. And to me, these characters all stand in contrast to Marie and Marie as... a point of view character, because I think something that is that is familiar to me, an impulse that I have had to beat out of myself as a fat person is that like, as a fat person, you are always aware that to some your body is not socially acceptable.
00:49:00
Speaker
And you have to do things to your body to make it more socially acceptable. and that means like dressing in certain ways dieting in certain ways making mental bargains with yourself that say like you look at other people and you say okay i am the limit of what is what a body is okay to look at look like and anybody who is more fat or like fat and more sloppily dressed than me like at least i'm not that and i think that is a that is like To me, that is screaming out of this book every time Marie looks at another woman.
00:49:36
Speaker
yes yeah Marie is, I think, tremendously self-conscious about her own appearance as... She sounds like basically a normal-looking girl, honestly. She's a bit overweight. She's been comfort-eating.
00:49:50
Speaker
But she is very nasty to herself about it. At one point, she starts eating Janine's disgusting diet dinners and thinking, it must be worth it. Are you okay? There's a that's a real are you okay about the fatphobia of Maria's point of view character.
00:50:05
Speaker
Does Rupert notice it in the same way? I'm not sure he does. He notices women's attractiveness very strongly. He is the one, he we get his point of view about... Marie's mother and then Janine and then Marie in very quick succession and he does note all of their bodies yeah he says Janine would be hot if she wasn't trying so hard essentially well I'm sure she's doing it for you mate yeah but he does And I do think this is important. It's jumping ahead and we'll get there more properly later. But when Marie comes out of the Babylon segment, so Marie gets better clothes. And when she turns up again at the con in nicer clothes, it's clear that people at the con are finding her attractive. The guy who can't talk to anyone for more than five minutes has kind of a crush on her. And this is noted and people.
00:50:53
Speaker
And even though like there's a little con note that says she's very self-conscious about it because she tells Someone finds out that she's been having this bad breakup and so there's a little con bulletin that says this sad-looking lady is nursing a broken heart and so he's like, oh god, every time everyone's nice to me it's because they're they think I'm nursing a broken heart. But actually it seems clear that people like her and find her appealing physically as well as like mentally and in character and so forth.
00:51:20
Speaker
But when she comes back out of Babylon, she is wearing ah her old clothes, the the ragbag clothes that Rupert reacted to so negatively the first time around. And he says, ah you know, because she's sort of become more herself, more like the person that she's supposed to be, a small, small measure of the change was that she now looked good in her woeful old garments. She looked astonishingly good. So there is something I think in this, the the book, I think, wants to convey this idea that it is not necessarily your body shape that makes you attractive or unattractive, it is your confidence and how you move in it and how you carry yourself in your shape and in your clothes. And this all holds up until you get to the way the book talks about Wendy the Willow.
00:52:00
Speaker
Right. It's like this far and no further about ah body positivity. And it's like, you can't be that fat, though. That won't do. That will get you repeatedly, very cruelly mocked by the text ah for the way your body appears. But there's also, I think, this really striking positive moment when they're meeting the people at the con.
00:52:21
Speaker
So Marie is kind of looking around and thinking about how much the con is full of people that she would like to get to know. And she says, this feeling extended particularly to the large sprinkling of shy looking middle-aged ladies, much to my surprise. I found myself looking at the skinny graying one nearest. She was in a bright patchwork jacket and thinking that whatever she did for a job, it bored her and she didn't get on with her workmates. So she clearly lived a passionate life among books instead. And I would have liked to talk to her about some of the things we'd both read.
00:52:48
Speaker
I think this is striking both, again, for you know how how affectionately it's portraying the majority of the Congolors. And because, to get back to Nick for a second, in a lot of Diana Wynne-Jones' work, it's rare for her to write about close friendships or relationships between women, except for sisters. She returns to the sister well a couple times.
00:53:08
Speaker
But when she's writing about girl protagonists, they are usually surrounded by boys or by men and they find these close friendships among, you know, Crown of Delmark, Meiwen, you know, gets thrown into this group of boys and bonds with them immediately.
00:53:23
Speaker
Sudden wild magic, Zilla is at the fortress with all of these hot, capable, interesting women and immediately bonds with this group of boys at the fortress instead. So I think it is really notable when she's writing here, i looked at this and it doesn't like go anywhere. Like Marie does not make friends with this woman. Marie doesn't really make friends with another woman in this book. She's very busy with other things. But this this moment of connection, I think is very striking.
00:53:46
Speaker
Yeah, because it is almost unique in Jones's work is is this idea of of looking at a woman and liking her. That hardly ever happens. Yeah. Looking at a woman and thinking, I would like to get to know this person, what would make me feel good and validated in myself.
00:54:02
Speaker
is not befriending these boys or being Nick's favorite person or whatever. It's knowing knowing these other women who are also interesting like me. It actually makes me think of another Finding Your Place, Finding Nerd fandom book, which is Joe Walton's Among Others. And it's the sense of there is a community for you. There is a space full of people who are like you, who are interesting, ah who care about the same things you care about. And I think this book is about the con.
00:54:35
Speaker
I think the Horophonic Empire plot, with all its succession drama and various people getting shot, not important. It provides drama and things to happen. It makes the book go. But the book is about the con. It is about entering this space full of people who are not like anyone else.
00:54:54
Speaker
And it is about what connections you make or don't make within this, there's the the the nerd space, the con space, ah the magical parallel universe. And I do think the con the con is organized in universes. ah And I mean, it's very funny because you have both Rupert and Marie as complete newcomers this world going, home universe, parallel universe one, where are we? What are we meant to be doing? And constantly getting lost on the way to panels and talks.
00:55:21
Speaker
But I think, Secretly, Joan's is spending the 1990s thinking about how to write fantasy, and especially how to write adult fantasy. And maybe that's not a surprise because she started going to cons in 1985. So she's suddenly in this community. And ah the three of us, I think, were all lucky enough to encounter wonderful people on LiveJournal. Yes.
00:55:47
Speaker
But it's pretty clear that Jones growing up did not have a live journal alike. That was in fact quite difficult to do before the internet. And and in many ways, that's what the the thriving con scene from, I mean, Easter con goes back, I think to the 40s or 50s. That's what the con scene was. it was once a year, I'm going to get together with some people I actually like in a hotel at a cheap room. I can be who i am. who i am i can be among these other people who immediately understand who I am and what I like and what we care about. Yes. And then I think the book questions that because the book is also interested in the limits of these congoers in what they can't see or refuse to see. And especially it's interested in the limits of professional writers. yeah This is Diana Wynne Jones in 1985 starts meeting colleagues, peers and going, well, no.
00:56:45
Speaker
i'm Honestly, one of my favourite characters in the book is Marie's Uncle Ted. Uncle Ted! Uncle Ted. love Uncle Ted. so Uncle Ted is, we are told by the MC, c the best living writer of serious comic horror.
00:57:02
Speaker
I have, ah sorry, I have a note on that, which I noticed when I opened my, so I have the Tor hardcover of Deep Secret. And that's one of the blurbs inside the this book is book list on Dog's Body, which says, unusual serial comic science fantasy.
00:57:22
Speaker
And I wonder, i so I really wonder, is that where Diana Wynne-Jones got Ted Mallory's serious comic work from? wouldn't be surprised. my god, that's so funny. Very funny, but right, it's the micro-genre pigeonholing, but it's also the fact that we've actually seen quite a lot of Ted before he's introduced as guest of honour of the con, and Ted is just some guy.
00:57:47
Speaker
Ted is, in fact, profoundly uncle-shaped as a character, I think is how I would describe it. that Marie describes sitting in... they Ted and his wife Janine, the bitch, who Marie can't stand, live in this ah Regency Terrace house in Bristol. And I have seen some of these terraces and they are gorgeous houses and worth quite a lot of money. And Nick has the basement apartment, which in the old days when they were built would have been the servants' rooms. ah Nick has that all to himself and Marie's up in the attic and the rest of the house is beautifully decorated and there's special glass from the Second World War and they the deadda Marie is furious. ah Marie says, he they will we talk about money.
00:58:29
Speaker
And he she knows that Ted is a brilliant writer. She's read his book. She thinks his demons are great. But she sits there in this living room listening him to explain how this book paid for the apartment and this book paid for an interior designer to redo this room and this book paid for. And it made me laugh so much because, yeah, writers do just talk about money all the time. They do. We do We do. And some of that is that like it's a fairly precarious career even when you're established and successful as ted clearly is meant to be a picture of an established successful science fiction fantasy serious comic horror writer but he's constantly thinking about money and he lives this very middle class life with this wife who diets aggressively and he pays for his son's basement apartment and his son's cds and he worries when nick throws a party and his friends drink his whiskey and he says pay me back for that
00:59:24
Speaker
And even at the con, you have this multiple panel sequences where it's very funny beforehand. Ted is incredibly nervous. He's the guest of honor. He says, don't know anything. i don't know what they want me to say. If I start talking about how I write, they might I might start thinking I mean it and then I'll forget how to do it, which also is true.
00:59:43
Speaker
Because the truth is as well, that a lot of the stuff that people want a working author to say about writing, and this is going back to Carol Annier, right? um A lot of the stuff about inspiration and not controlling it and having this magical relationship with your, but this is bullshit.
01:00:02
Speaker
But is it bullshit though? But it is, but it isn't. i got so excited about that i knocked my tea. I have the quote from the panel. It's kind of a long quote, but I think it's important. so I'm going to read it.
01:00:13
Speaker
So Ted says, writing a book is just a job like any other job, he says. This Maria in the audience. I hope he wouldn't go go on that way, but he did. Shortly he was saying, consider the job as if I were building a bicycle instead. I'd have to plan the frame, call that the plot, and put on the wheels, call that the characters and their motivation, and then I'd put in the gears. Now the jokes are the gears. You have to get them just the right size and configuration, or you wind the pedals, and hey presto, the chain falls off.
01:00:37
Speaker
So I always plan my gags in detail and in advance. The whole book is like a machine planned in detail in advance and well oiled with a smooth writing style. Then Mervyn Thurlis is the other awful science fiction writer says, yes, he agreed in every particular. if He thought humor was more like planting spices for a sauce.
01:00:55
Speaker
Then the woman on the panel upped in her turn and said she agreed with both of them. It was utterly mechanistic. But she said, as if she was very ashamed to admit it, sometimes her jokes made her laugh. At this, Uncle Ted seized the mic again and said he never laughed. It was fatal.
01:01:09
Speaker
And Marie says, by this time, I was really depressed. I thought of Uncle Ted's wobbly windows, and I began to think he must really, truly never look through them or anything else. Can't anyone look out there and see that you need not to think of everything in terms of what works or what they ought to do?
01:01:24
Speaker
Right. The thing is, I've been to this panel. I think we've all been to this panel. This is one of the ways in which writers bullshit about the job because it's very difficult to talk meaningfully about the job. At least I find it that way. I find it hard to talk meaningfully about what I'm actually doing when I'm writing.
01:01:43
Speaker
And I feel so sorry for Ted is the thing. It's so embarrassing trying to explain being a writer. And I think it's Rupert who actually defends him a little bit after Marie specifically tells him not to. um And so that I think he finds it difficult. I think he finds it vulnerable.
01:02:02
Speaker
Yes. Possibly it's the only way he can convince himself to talk about his magical windows, says Rupert fair-mindedly. I am going to talk ah read a little bit more from the end of the panel, because the panelist is also feeling depressed at this point as well. i let this the The panel moderator shows up several times throughout the book and she's just increasingly depressed because she's having all these horrible panel experiences. And I feel for her very much. It's so much fun to watch her. Like, she's not relevant to anything, but it's really fun to have her pop up occasionally with her boyfriend, just, like, depressed at how the con is going.
01:02:35
Speaker
Yes. she says, but what about that extra factor, the miracle ingredient? Isn't there a moment when everything stops being like a machine? Doesn't a joke ever take off on its own for any of you? Let me stick my neck out here.
01:02:46
Speaker
What about inspiration? And Uncle Ted says, no. To work, it has to be all hard graft. You can't afford to get carried away or your book becomes a dangerous out of hand thing and it may not sell. I'll go further, says Marvin Thurlis. If there is a miracle ingredient, it's money.
01:03:01
Speaker
yep Yeah. And there we come full circle to this is what writers talk about. We talk about money. And I think this is true. I think this is this is very sharply and funnily observed as Jones in her comic mode is often sharp and funny.
01:03:16
Speaker
But a lot of the con stuff, ah that panel in particular, but I think quite a lot of it is talking about, is interested in the difference between science fiction and fantasy as experienced by fans and as experienced by commercial professionals.
01:03:31
Speaker
And Uncle Ted is team commercial. yeah And it's clearly tragic that he's team commercial. And it's also clearly false. He wouldn't, I think, again, as Rupert says, he wouldn't be able to write the books if he actually believed this. Yeah, he's he's talking about things in terms of money because it's the only way he can talk about them having value. And I would love here to circle back to Uncle Ted's beautiful wobbly windows. Yeah, um I've got I've got the quote pulled up here. So the Ted, the the Ted that house lives in the house that ted lives in has these beautiful wavery glass panes from World War Two. And Marie says, now I had been fascinated by the glass in the windows.
01:04:14
Speaker
I remember it from when I was small. It waves and it wobbles. When you look out at the front, particularly in the evenings, you get a sort of cliff of trees and buildings out there with warm lighted squares of windows, which all sort of slide about and ripple as if they're just going to transform into something else from some angles. The houses bend and stretch into weird shapes, and you might really believe they were sliding into a set of different dimensions. From the back of the house, it's just as striking.
01:04:43
Speaker
There, you get a navy blue vista of City Against Pale Sunset, and when the streetlights come on, they look like holes through the orange sky. With everything rippling and stretching, you almost think you're seeing your way through to a potent, strange place behind the city. And this is one of the most striking images in the book to me. And it's it's notable in ah in a couple different ways. Like this is what inspires Nick to make his game Bristolia, is the image of his city where he lives as something like strange and magical and different. And this is an image that has clearly stuck with Diana Wynne Jones because I believe it is the foundational image in her later book, Enchanted Glass. where you have a house that has two sets of colored panes of glass that wobble and waver in the same way and that do actually reflect a different world.
01:05:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I think she she clearly had experienced these windows and saw the magic in them. Right. And it comes back to actually a very old Jonesian theme, which is the the magic of the everyday, the magic that's in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
01:05:56
Speaker
um Right? All the way back to Eight Days of Luke. yeah ah just if there is There are other worlds right in front of you if you're willing to look at them and see them and name what you are seeing. And Ted's arc in the book, such as it is, is a slow drift towards actually naming some of the magic he's seeing. like There is a sequence where...
01:06:19
Speaker
mid close to the midpoint of the book actually, a little bit after the midpoint. So we're at the we go out the convention and Rupert and Marie have a very cute morning wandering around together in the course of which Rupert realises he fancies her. Marie's feelings on Rupert are still less clear.
01:06:37
Speaker
And then ah Rupert's brother Will comes to visit and he's he lives in another world so he comes driving his car between the world and he accidentally has a car accident on the steps of the hotel convention as he bashes into somebody else who was coming through the the space between worlds at the same time, which is a centaur.
01:07:00
Speaker
A young centaur named Rob. So real quick, we're actually collapsing a little bit of the Marie and Rupert timeline here. First, they have a lovely hangout at the con where Marie drags him around to buy all the books that his games are based on.
01:07:12
Speaker
Then, Marie and Nick follow Rupert took a bit on a visit to his brother in another world. um They're like, oh, something' clear something weird and magical is up with this. No, they're just trying to find him actually to talk about nick's Nick's video game that he wants to develop. Yeah, they just want to pitch a video game. Teenage boy wants to pitch his video game to the only game dev he's ever met, which I think is probably something that's happened to Rupert before. Yes. So they accidentally follow him to Rupert wants is has going is going to visit his brother who's also imagined. Rupert has two brothers who are imagined. We're not going to meet Simon until the very end of Simon the Sorcerer until the very end of the book. Will is happily married.
01:07:48
Speaker
Big family. And by just kind of following him through the weird turns of the hotel, Marie and Nick end up at this family dinner. Rupert is furious because they've done something extremely dangerous and also because they've intruded on his private home life with his family.
01:08:03
Speaker
Then the next day, Rupert is still, has realized that he fancies Marie, but is also still furious about this trip. When Will turns up, hits the hits the centaur with his car, and they all have to deal with the centaur coming through the cong.
01:08:16
Speaker
Right, but the best part to me of the centaur sequences are you have this boy, this teenage centaur who has been hit by a car, so he's losing a lot of blood and terrified, goes careening through this the convention, flings himself up the stairs and runs for the lift. And everybody's seeing this. All the Congoers are there and you watch the Congoers in real time go...
01:08:42
Speaker
wow, great costume. Did you hire a horse? And Rupert is frantically, for some reason, supporting this. Yeah, yeah, just a costume, and not blood, tomato, ketchup, while running after this centaur who's been hit by a car going, he needs medical attention, obviously.
01:08:59
Speaker
ah But it is so funny watching everyone go, did I just see? No. And Ted is one of the people who's like, no, obviously not. No, no, no. That wouldn't be sensible. It doesn't make sense.
01:09:12
Speaker
And I do think so. I like the way that Ted talks about Ted is clearly a very good writer, despite the fact, you know Marie reads his books and thinks that they're good, despite the fact that he can't talk about it except as applying formulas. But I think that Diana Wynne-Jones is also, you know, again, we've talked about how she's just off editing the encyclopedia of fantasy. She is writing Tough Guide to Fantasyland. She's thinking about formulas and she's thinking about creativity and how you can have less of one of those things and more of the other of those things. There's there's a thing in this book that I think is a little bit of a joke about
01:09:47
Speaker
where ah Rupert meets the Croatian, Gabriela Sovic, who's very excited to meet Ted Mallory because he's confused. He thinks Ted Mallory is in fact the Mallory who wrote the, the oh, why am I blanking on the name of the Arthurian book? Mortarthur. Mortarthur, who wrote the Mortarthur in the 12th century.
01:10:07
Speaker
He says he came to this con because he wanted to personally thank Mallory and Tolkien. And he assumed that they would be there because they're the fantasy writers. And I do think if you take, the sort of racism of the joke out of it and we'll get to Gabrielle Osivic a little bit more later. ah The presence of the idea that Mallory and Tolkien are alive and well and at this convention that that is in this book that Diana Wynne Jones is writing at the same time as she's reading what she, all endless reams of what she calls California fantasy of sort of the, you know, the big battle between good and evil and here's the orcs and here's the elves and we're all about to go off and wave our swords and tell some things.
01:10:46
Speaker
The Anglo-Saxon Cossacks. This is a joke she makes in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which I think is the real like expression of how much she did not like many of these fantasy books. um The Anglo-Saxon Cossacks, I haven't got the book to hand, ah is how in every fantasy universe you have a lot of Anglo-Saxons who, for some reason, ride a lot of horses.
01:11:06
Speaker
This not being a thing that Anglo-Saxons historically did. And the centaurs... who've become a major plot point in the back half of Deep Secret, are wildly Anglo-Saxon and have kinship rules and sister-son rules, which are clearly taken from Jones's Old English back at university. And I find it very, very funny. She is making a Riders of Rohan joke, but all so more than that, she's making a joke at the expense of everybody who's copied the Riders of Rohan without knowing what they were copying. Yes.
01:11:38
Speaker
And I do think that like, like, it's not that Diana Wynne Jones is at like, clearly, she knows that you need to plan a book and that there's a lot of structure and work that goes into a book. We've seen her write essays analyzing the complex structure underlying Lord of the Rings.
01:11:52
Speaker
But there is kind of an argument here in this discussion of what writing is like in this sort of satirization of writing is like a bicycle and you put in the gears and the wheels or whatever. For the argument for wild magic, for uncontrolled writing, for for writing without knowing the end or the purpose, that we saw her make in A Sudden Wild Magic, which was a book that was writing without an end or a purpose. And therefore didn't quite work.
01:12:14
Speaker
And therefore didn't quite work. Right. and as I keep coming back to A Sudden Wild Magic because even though it is in many ways a problem Jones and a weaker to Anna Wynne Jones, I think it's so foundational for all the cool stuff she does afterwards. But this book in particular, I think, is rerunning a Sudden Wild Magic with this same wonderful, cool witch versus dude who needs to get over himself.
01:12:42
Speaker
But also this same world of here are all my cool friends in contemporary 1990s Britain. and What are they doing? They are doing magic. Yes. They they are more actively making our world a better place by doing magic.
01:12:55
Speaker
a more magical place, a place where more people will recognize, will look at a pair set of magical windows and go, Ooh, that's magic. And maybe see a centaur as a centaur and not as um a teenager riding a horse covered ketchup.
01:13:09
Speaker
yeah Yeah, absolutely. I want to move on to the back half of the plot and Babylon and everything there. But before I do, can we talk a little bit more about the romcom arc and the visit to Rupert's family? Because, Ariely, think you were the one of us who pointed out first that Rupert, how much of a Howl rerun Rupert is. Yes, he's he's Howl, but he's not cool.
01:13:35
Speaker
um And ah so in Howl, halfway through, we get the visit home. We get Howl and Sophie go transit between worlds to a strange new place that Sophie doesn't understand. She sees jeans and is like, I don't understand these these hard pants. um And notable, I think both in Howl's Within Castle and in Deep Secret, Howl and Rupert are both pretty good uncles, or at least Howl is a fun uncle. um he He shows up and he bribes his nephews with a text adventure that he magicked out of thin air based on his own house.
01:14:13
Speaker
And Rupert shows up. He's got six nieces. He's a great uncle. Marie is shocked that this guy who shows up to assigns a fiction convention in a full suit and who irons his jeans and wears silk cravats who miles edgeworth fully at the at the 97 fantasy convention um he shows up and he's letting kids swing off his arms he's like romping around with them and i think it's really notable that When the the meat ugly really turns into like, this is the reimagining each other and seeing each other in a new light. And it is this very domestic setting where Rupert shows himself to be a great uncle and Marie shows herself to be great with animals and great with kids and great with the family.
01:15:00
Speaker
It's Darcy at Pemberley. it's Look at this guy. It's Darcy at Pemberley. He takes care of his estate. Exactly. We are actually pointed to notice it by the contrast figure of Nick, who hates animals and children, and makes it very clear that he's deeply uncomfortable with everything that's happening here. At one point, he says, I wish I was in a cage.
01:15:21
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of but there's a lot of ways in which Nick and Rupert are paralleled in this book. I think there are a lot of ways in which they're sort of the same guy. Like we get when when we meet Rupert, he's 26 and he's self-employed and he's a powerful man and et cetera, et cetera. But once once his older brothers appear in the narrative, they remember annoying baby Rupert, who was always, you know, very full of himself and sliding away from things and like had all these, you know, creative ideas that no one would take seriously. Rupert was a Nick.
01:15:50
Speaker
Rupert was a Nick. They compare him to Nick a bunch of times. And Rupert is often looking at Nick and being like, I know what you're going to do because I would have done the same thing. But Nick has a core of selfishness in him that I think Rupert doesn't actually have. Rupert actually does more genuinely want to improve the world around him and help the help the people around him.
01:16:13
Speaker
in a way that Nick doesn't care, couldn't care less about. I think it's interesting as well. that It's after this, this like really rather lovely interlude that we get our last bit of Marie point of view in the book.
01:16:24
Speaker
And it's kind of heart-wrenching. Yeah. So she and Marie have, so sorry, she she and Rupert, she's not quite that self-involved, she and Rupert have kind of reached a rapprochement, an understanding. You're like, this is sort of the, perhaps this is the tentative beginning of something beautiful. It's becoming clear that Marie is going to be the Majid who Rupert trains next. Maybe they'll even do Rupert's sexy teacher fantasy. Yeah. But Marie ends her last point of view section with a description of how she feels, which is just so sad.
Marie and Rupert: Power Dynamics and Personal Struggles
01:17:02
Speaker
Have you got it somewhere? Is this the one? so I think they've they've actually, they've just had their fight. And Marie says the unforgivable thing, which is oh, yes, and who keeps everyone ignorant? Rupert van Abel's the secret ruler of the world.
01:17:19
Speaker
I think it was the unforgivable thing to say. Rupert sort of drew himself up. He didn't even pin me with his lens. He just stood icily. I don't know exactly what Will said to you. he said, but you couldn't have misunderstood it more. So they've just had this fight.
01:17:30
Speaker
And she says, hey ho, I think the only thing I really mind is about my little fat dad having cancer. I don't even mind about my ex-boyfriend anymore. I just wish I wasn't me. That's all. And that's the last we hear from Marie in her own voice.
01:17:43
Speaker
I wish I wasn't me. Yeah. And this is not she doesn't disappear from the book at this point, because in fact, we're coming into the centaur sequence in which Marie's training as a vet turns out to be useful. you know what I thought of suddenly? ah The master, right? Yeah, yeah actually. like Jones has been batting around this idea of what if you were a vet and you had to work on something magic for a while? What if you had to work on sort of a weird half-human kind of sexy creature made as part of a weird breeding experiment, which it turns out is sort of kind of what's going on with the centaurs.
01:18:18
Speaker
Book really surprisingly concerned with what if you could bang a centaur. This book is so very, very focused on have you thought about banging a centaur? Oh, something else I wanted to say, though, before we move on as well is to talk about Thorn Lady, because I don't think we have directly.
01:18:35
Speaker
Not at all. And Marie's depression has a voice and a face. It's the voice in her head. is the terrible dream she has. In fact, when she's doing her witchy dances that Nick encourages her to do, it's to chase away this dream, this voice, this face. And she calls it the Thorn Lady.
01:18:55
Speaker
And it's a bush that is a goddess that tells her she is failing at being a woman. Yeah. I actually, you know, I got to the end of Black Maria and I was like, okay, so so your mother-in-law is no longer going to live rent-free in your head then. Interesting. Interesting.
01:19:13
Speaker
But it turns out one's mother-in-law can be very creatively productive. ah Because i think that I think this is a version or a variation of Aunt Maria again. yeah This is the figure of the older woman who is respectable and who judges you for not being respectable. He comments on the fact that Marie lived with her boyfriend. She keeps telling Marie she ought to drop out of university and get married the way a lady should.
01:19:38
Speaker
This is also making Marie suicidally depressed. She is so, so unhappy. And in fact, that's specifically noted when they are on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the suicide spot, is that this is what Nick is concerned about and why he tells her, you've got to do the dance right now. Get her out.
01:19:55
Speaker
And I do want to take a quick second before we move on to like where the plot really picks up in the Babylon section. to talk about the, real quick about the other MAJID candidates, because I do think that in, they're all kind of reflections of, as is always the case of Diana Jones, the worst case futures for Rupert and Marie.
01:20:13
Speaker
So the other three candidates that Rupert sort of meets an increasing despair, the other four candidates, There's Tansy Ann Fisk, who is grey psychic blanket, is how she's just described. like She just sort of catches people in the lobby and ah traps them and tells them about her troubles and just makes you feel grey and sad and miserable all over. And then offers you a massage you really don't want but it's really hard to get away from. This is a character I feel is probably a portrait.
01:20:40
Speaker
Absolutely. i feel like I've met this person at conventions and you really don't want to accept that massage. Oh, But I do think this is a reflection of, you know, a worst case future for Marie if she gives into that depression.
01:20:57
Speaker
There's Mervyn Thurlis, who's the horrible little writer man who's so bound up in his own sort of important, like every time we see him, he's mad because he's know but he's not being treated as importantly as they he thinks he's supposed to be. You know, he's supposed to be a guest of honor at this convention um and he's getting disrespected and he puffs himself up and goes and like is really obnoxious about someone about it.
01:21:18
Speaker
And then there's Cornelius Pont, who is a he's the Dutchman. he is He must also be a portrait of some guy that she met at some point. He's very specifically, he like he makes terrible puns, and he enjoys watching drama and encouraging drama so that he can experience it.
01:21:38
Speaker
He's a voyeur. He's a voyeur. Exactly. One of my favorite scenes in the book is the scene of ah Case. He goes by Case versus Nick, where Nick attempts to get the best of him by asking him what is written on his T-shirt.
01:21:54
Speaker
And Case just says, it says, I am a hobbit. in Elvish and leaves and Nick is completely defeated by this insane thing to say. Yep.
01:22:06
Speaker
And Rupert actually, so he has high hopes for Case as a potential magic candidate because he thinks, oh, it's important to hold yourself back and to hold yourself apart from what's happening so you don't get emotionally involved in it. And then he looks at what Case is actually doing, which is holding himself back and being emotionally apart because he just likes to spectate because he's not involved in the world around him. And sort of recognizes this as his own failure mode or potential failure mode as imagines that he's not been involved in the world around him. He has thought he was better than it.
01:22:34
Speaker
Right. And the point is that Case is has technically done nothing that wrong, but is a person capable of being seriously unethical without even realizing it because he doesn't care.
Critique of Fantasy Conventions and Stereotypes
01:22:46
Speaker
Yeah, this is a man who should not have any more power than he already has. Because if this is sort of like, if all he does at the con is stir up drama and laugh at watching other people get mad, what is he going to do in a circumstance where he has any power more than...
01:23:05
Speaker
ah helper at a science fiction convention. Right. And that's really what Marie is getting at when she accuses Rupert of enjoying being the secret ruler of the world. And that's why it's the unforgivable thing to say is because that's what he's afraid of being is someone who has power and enjoys using it secretly and unethically.
01:23:24
Speaker
And then on the other hand, there's Gabriela Sovic. Yeah, we got to talk about this. So Gabriela Sovic is Not a character. I'll say that. I think in a book which is so full of persuasive pen portraits where you're like yeah I've met this guy. I've met this woman. I know these people.
01:23:42
Speaker
I don't believe in this guy for a moment. Nobody's met this guy. This is not real. And I think he is meant to represent the ultimate failure state of a failed state. That's a terrible way of putting it. I'm so sorry. I don't like the jangle.
01:23:57
Speaker
Gabriela Sovyk has been involved in the war in in the former Yugoslavia. And he is deeply traumatized and he has killed. And he has come to this convention to thank Mallory and Tolkien for saving him. Literally very thick books. He had them by his heart and they blocked some bullets. um But also the the worlds that he's read about, he feels, have saved him in this time of war and suffering. And he's yeah clearly out of his mind insane.
01:24:27
Speaker
But he is also... like We were reading this i was like this guy could be an extra in the first act of Dracula because he has somehow every racist stereotype about Eastern Europeans simultaneously. And I think, I think Joan should have gone with the other problem state from her opening pages and made this character Irish.
01:24:50
Speaker
And I think if she had, she would have spotted the problem. ah She's actually consistently pretty good about writing her Irish characters thoughtfully. But Gabriela Sivic is a racist caricature of a damaged man. Yeah.
01:25:05
Speaker
Yeah. And he's... So he has killed with his bare hands. He describes himself as someone... Oh, he smells magic on people. This is his power. And he goes up to ah Rupert and Zinka at some point and says that he smells magic on them and threatens them.
01:25:26
Speaker
But like he threatens to kill them if something if if they do something magical in front of him. And that, like, it's not that it's the it's the smelling thing. It's the physical yeah unthinking the animal body. pure Yes, animalistic is is a good way to put it.
01:25:46
Speaker
Yeah. And Zinkor after is like, oh, a real witch sniffer. You don't see those much these days. Anyway, he's completely insane and it's incurable. Yeah. Now I will say, so what he says about Mallory and Tolkien is, these are books that inspire the heart to greatness, to serve, to fight against odds, to crush the enemy, to smite so that blood bursts from the nose and the ears. I have two English books of great inspiration with me as I fight, both folded in my breast. I have your book and the great Tolkien's. So this is not unlinked to English fantasy and to english England's history of of violence and violent fantasy, but...
01:26:22
Speaker
Like, I think in a charitable reading, you could draw the connection between those, but that doesn't make this particular caricature any less racist. Yeah, I think there's there's something to be said about the the the undeath of Tolkien or the undeath of Mallory. Again, we're we're in the ninety s This is peak Arthuriana, although when is it not Arthuriana time?
01:26:45
Speaker
But this idea of... a perpetual fantasy that is always informed by violence by the battle between good and evil which is a battle and there will be blood coming out of people's eyeballs which is a holy battle a righteous battle right I believe the blood bursting from the ears and the eyes might be a direct quote from the nose and the ears might be a direct quote from Mallory don't hundred I haven't double checked but I think it is wow um But yeah, and I think actually there is always an undercurrent of there could, things could go wrong at this convention in that some of these people, although most of them are Russian with great love and affection.
01:27:27
Speaker
Like one of the first things we hear about the convention is that security is being run by something called Hitler Enterprises, no swords for Sundays. and You're like, okay, so there are Nazis at the convention and we're not we're just not talking about it.
01:27:40
Speaker
But yeah, there are Nazis at the convention. We do in get in fact get at the end a bunch of mysterious people with swords and Viking helmets. So we we we I think we have got the 90s nerd neo-Nazi quorum.
01:27:52
Speaker
turning up ah to take part in the final battle with Gabrielosovic right in the middle of them. These figures of violence and cruelty and madness, I guess.
01:28:05
Speaker
Yeah. And the other person who's right in the middle of them is Wendy the Willow, who they're disappointed to see her right in the middle of them. They liked Wendy, even though they also, you know, everyone, there's there sort of a physical cringe from the page every time she shows up.
01:28:18
Speaker
But I do think that's also not unlinked in that I do think that there is a a sharp observation there that people who are often the butt of the joke are at in fantasy convention world.
01:28:29
Speaker
It's very easy for those people to get folded into kind of evil in-group enterprises. Yeah. The other evil in-group that is constantly appearing in the convention sequence is the hooded and robed figures from ah Universe 3 Esoterica, Graham White's Wizard Circle.
01:28:48
Speaker
And the character of Graham White turns out to be quite important, but is almost never on the screen in the first half the book, except when we briefly see him talking to Mervyn Thurless and Rupert notes that both of them, in fact, I think he does say smell, yeah smell of bad magic.
01:29:03
Speaker
So I'm going to fast forward us through a little bit of plot to get us to Zinka because I want to talk about Zinka. Fast forwarding through some more plot. Rupert goes back to the Corophonic Empire. He's trying to find their lost heir because the emperor and all of his wives have all been blown up in this terrorist explosion. The empire is clearly falling. They're trying to find someone who can basically who can be the heir. There's a sense that it is intended for it to fall. But nonetheless, there needs to be kind of a a failing child emperor for the last couple of years. So he's trying to find, there's this elaborate like hunt for the missing heir plot and he gets to where he thinks the missing heirs are just in time to again prevent them all, not to fail to prevent them all from being murdered.
01:29:42
Speaker
Marie and Nick follow him there this time on purpose because they do know he's magic by now because they were on the earlier trip. In trying to get there, Marie is the victim of an assassination attempt and is stripped, which means that half of her personnel, essentially she's she's standing in the middle of a world gate when it opens up, and half of her is on one side and the other half is on the other, and unfortunately the world gate was opened straight into a volcano, so there's only half of her there.
01:30:10
Speaker
This is a fatal condition. So, The only way to try and get her back is to launch into this magical ritual for this deep secret called Babylon. We're gonna talk about that in more depth. I'm racing through here because in order to get help, Rupert goes to his friend Zinka, who's another magic who's at the convention just to have herself look good time. At what point is he carrying, Marie?
01:30:33
Speaker
That's before we get Zinka, because we do need to back. Yeah, well, it's tied together, right? Because it's part of, Zinka, I think it's emblematic of the weird and interesting way this book thinks about sexuality. There's a line in this book that I was asked about twice, separately by separate people, knowing that we were going to be recording this episode.
01:30:52
Speaker
It's when Marie has been stripped and Rupert sort of picks her up to carry her back into the hotel so that they can, thinking that she's about to die. And Rupert says, i stood up with her easily and was puzzled to discover that holding her like this, light, limp, and frost cold, was one of the most sexual experiences I have ever had.
01:31:12
Speaker
I also had to fight myself not to cry. What? Okay. I would read this as Rupert really hasn't got laid enough recently.
01:31:26
Speaker
less Less likely, I think this is about Rupert's total isolation um that he's talked about. these ah It can be quite lonely being imagined. And he is so lonely, so isolated. He didn't recognize his attraction to Marie, their meet ugly. He thought he despised her. He doesn't know his own feelings. He doesn't know himself. He doesn't have what he wants. And then he finally figures out he's into her and she immediately nearly dies or is dying. Like stripping is going to kill her.
01:31:55
Speaker
this This is a half of her that's left. Picks her up and and and is like, when was the last time you touched another person, Vanneval? Yeah. yeah and which is actually what he calls himself when he feels shit about himself he says are venables which is his pompous sonar yes he he's he is so removed from the world he's even removed from himself and he recognizes that at some point that like it it has been a failing and i read this weird moment of his as like
01:32:28
Speaker
Marie means so much to him and he's so attracted to her that like the first time they touch it's half of her and even half of her has this powerful of an effect on him. Yeah.
01:32:39
Speaker
It's also weird as hell. yeah It's so weird. And I do think there's something about the atmosphere of the con. Like this is in its own way as sexy and sexualized a book as a sudden wild magic. Like there's no sex murder strike force. There is an orgy.
01:32:55
Speaker
On the stairs. which which is Which is real. Yeah, those are real. The stair orgies did happen. I have people lovingly reminiscing about them when I was at the con in November. um And apparently Diana used to sit at the top with with a bottle in one hand.
01:33:10
Speaker
Good for her. Zinka is there when Rupert finds her to help with this. Zinka is there at the Stare Orgy engaging in what I would call a moment of Dubcon. She is drawing a design on an unconscious man who...
01:33:26
Speaker
I thought was Rupert's neighbor, Andrew. You guys don't agree with me here. a different hot guy. There can be two hot men at one convention. where Every time we see a man and he's hot, it's either Nick or the centaur or it's Andrew. Andrew has been at the convention, by the way. That's not true.
01:33:43
Speaker
Sometimes it's Rupert's like, I'm in the lift with a beautiful transvestite boy. That's true. And and then that then we do actually get my favorite moment, my favorite joke in the book, which is somebody looking looking at Rupert as he was like, that? Rupert the mage, I love him. He's so straight. Yeah, it's really funny. Deliciously straight.
01:34:04
Speaker
And the three trans people with a baby talking to Nick about Rupert. And it's like, A, yes, absolutely. But also, you did have to put that in to remind us because Rupert has just been telling us how beautiful Nick and Rob the Centaur are. oh Anyway, Zika is drawing a design, ah ah magic design on this unconscious hot man on the staircase designed to make him hers later that night.
01:34:28
Speaker
We pass by this without comment. This is normal con behavior for magic people at cons. Yeah. I don't know. i I've been in a con orgy. Do you feel I've missed out? Maybe I can't tell her. don't know, you have to learn how to draw magic sigils.
01:34:45
Speaker
Apparently. like i really cannot overstate how much everyone at this con is doing magic all the time. Yeah, just like low-key normal person, normal fantasy fan magic.
01:34:57
Speaker
Zinka blends right in. zinka is you know Zinka does not live on Earth. She's doing magic several worlds away. She just comes to this con to have herself a good time and to display her sexy fantasy art. in this room Zinka's in the dealer's hall selling pictures drawn from life of sexy magic magical sex scenes with ah magical creatures from other worlds.
01:35:20
Speaker
And immediately, you know, Rupert pulls her away from the orgy because it's very important and a life is at stake and gets her to the hotel room where we have Rupert, his brother, Rob, the deeply injured centaur, who we've barely talked about but is in fact vital to the plot, Nick, half of Marie,
01:35:38
Speaker
And Zinka immediately looks at Rob the Teenage Centaur and is like, hey.
Empire Succession and the Return of Emperor Koryphos
01:35:45
Speaker
So this is a cute gravely injured centaur you've got in your room.
01:35:50
Speaker
Rob is beautiful and knows that he's beautiful. There's a lot of both Rob and Nick know that they're beautiful and this is important to the plot. Rob is... actually the secret heir to the Empire. i think i'm just going to go ahead and say that. Okay, I will say actually it's quite complicated who's the secret heir to the Empire because it depends which rules of succession you follow and it's not very clearly explained. So I had to draw a diagram which I think you posted on Blue Skull. Yes, I will repost it when we actually post this episode.
01:36:19
Speaker
But what it comes down to is the Empire has the Emperor has multiple wives of different ranks because he likes to grade people. And various characters we have met are possibly the true heir to the throne.
01:36:35
Speaker
One of the strongest candidates is Marie, who is the emperor's oldest daughter by presumably one of his most high ranking wives. ah Marie and Nick were both brought away when they were babies. oh I pre presume actually if Nick was a baby, Marie must have been six. Right.
01:36:53
Speaker
brought away to Earth and adopted by Earth families. And the person behind this is Janine, whose real name is Consort Jalala, one of the most junior wives of the emperor, whose great ambition throughout this book has, in fact, been to get Nick on the throne.
01:37:09
Speaker
So, yes, Nick is a potential candidate, ah but the emperor also had sex with various centaurs. So Rob is the emperor's son and a potential candidate, except that it has historically been a human only post. And then there are several younger children who all got murdered when Rupert was trying to find them.
01:37:26
Speaker
So those are the three living possible heirs. This is where we get the parallels between Rob and Nick because Rob has been part of this plot in a way. He's he's involved in the plot to put Nick on the throne.
01:37:38
Speaker
And he's not fully a aware that the other children living at the compound where he grew up are all going to get murdered. But he also doesn't feel any kind of way about it at all until Will and Rupert start yelling at him about it.
01:37:53
Speaker
Right. So a lot of the Corophonic Empire plot is actually resolved by Rupert and Will yelling at Rob during the Babylon ritual. Which of these do we talk about first?
01:38:06
Speaker
I think we do. So tell me you agree. I feel like we should save the Babylon ritual to the end because that's where it is really in the book. yeah We get the Babylon ritual happens, right? The broad outlines of the Babylon ritual are the only way to save Marie is for someone to take her into this sort of, on this sort of magical journey using this ancient ritual to a place where they can make a wish. She can wish for the other half of herself back and whoever goes with her can wish for whatever they want.
01:38:33
Speaker
And then as long as they survive the dangerous journey, they'll come home and she'll be fine. Right. So this is a a catabasis, very clearly in structure. It's a journey to the land of the dead. Marie is half dead um in order to get her back.
01:38:46
Speaker
And Marie and Nick and eventually Rob as well, and also two small magical ducks, all go on the Babylon quest. Meanwhile, we don't see what happens for most of it because we are left in Rupert's point of view, sitting in a hotel bedroom, wondering what's going to happen and yelling at Rob.
01:39:06
Speaker
Yes, navigating quite a lot of con business, dealing with Zinka, dealing with Janine, but mostly Rupert is not the actor for this section. Rupert ah makes it possible for Nick to take Marie on this quest.
01:39:19
Speaker
Nick brings Marie back from this quest. She's fine. We'll get to how all that happened later at the end. Then they gear up into the final sort of battle at the con where everything is revealed.
01:39:31
Speaker
Graham Robb the- Graham Robb- Graham White the evil mage leads some con Nazis in an evil magic ritual. They win. Everything's fine. And the Emperor Korosk returns.
01:39:43
Speaker
And that's the end of the book. That's the end of the plot of And Janine gets killed. emperor and The rightful Emperor killed. Janine gets incinerated in yeah front of Ted, who has been married to her for years and adopted her baby son.
01:39:57
Speaker
And Ted finally admits that magic might be real. Yes. Marie is going to become a magic. The Emperor Corifos, who was his neighbor the whole time, leaves him his house and thanks for all those carpool rides he gave him. Don't worry about it. The plot is done. The plot is wrapped.
01:40:13
Speaker
And then at the end of the book, we get this long final section from Nick's point of view that explains what actually happened during the Babylon sequence. which in some ways is the heart of the book I think it's totally the heart of the book it's the best stuff in the book like this stuff yeah this has stuck with me ever since I first read it which is more than 20 years now good it I mean it turns up again and again in my own writing but this is a journey into the darkness to save someone yeah and it's
01:40:49
Speaker
very beautiful and very powerful but what it turns on the key question of the whole sequence is can nick make an unselfish choice yeah i love that it's so strongly in question that rupert genuinely is spending the whole night waiting in this in this armchair in this hotel room and he doesn't know which way nick will jump Yeah, so there's this quote about Rob and Nick.
01:41:16
Speaker
Rupert is sitting there watching them go. Both of them are going to go try and support Marie to the end of her journey. And Rupert says, I had no idea what Nick did want, really, except I was sure it was not to rule an empire because Nick had a dark private core.
01:41:28
Speaker
Possibly he didn't know what was in there himself yet, but he knew enough to duck out if that core was threatened, and he would. I knew that. Rob and Nick shared deep in their genes a very strong selfishness.
01:41:39
Speaker
It was that same selfishness that had made their common father set up the whole damper set up the whole mad mess suit in the first place. Marie seemed to me to have escaped that selfishness. It was one of the things I had come to like about her, one of the many things. I wish I dared hope there were things that she had come to like about me, but I couldn't think of any.
01:41:57
Speaker
Right. And I think Nick's selfishness is one of his heroic traits as well as his great flaw. Like we find out that Nick actually knew quite a lot about the Corifoning Empire because Janine, Jalala, was trying to get him in on this plot to claim the throne and Nick's whole...
01:42:15
Speaker
Bristolia, his video games, his private fantasy world are his way of avoiding his mother's demands and control over her over his life, which is expressed through her worship of an evil goddess manifesting as a figure of feminine respectability who is also a thorny bush.
01:42:35
Speaker
So Janine is a worshipper of this goddess, the Thorn Lady. ah Janine is the one who set the Thorn Lady on Marie. So this this is depression. shes literal She's a literal goddess and she's possessing your aunt to to destroy you.
01:42:50
Speaker
But Janine has also been trying to control and enslave Nick his whole life. And Nick avoids it through fantasy. Yeah.
01:43:01
Speaker
To return to it only very briefly, I do think this is part of the Gaiman portrait. Gaiman famously the child of Scientologists, quite senior Scientologists. And Nick's world is a world of escaping the dry and ugly and miserable cult that his mother belongs to and the power she thinks he ought to have there.
01:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's notable that the Nyx birth father, the Emperor, Timos IX, is also a worshipper of the Thorn Lady. And the Thorn Lady cult also turns up when we meet all the centaurs on their in their little in their depressing little compound.
01:43:39
Speaker
um So even though the Thorn Lady is this is this dry feminine figure who's in Marie's nightmares, very focused on the right behavior as a woman. She's also like broadly worshipped by men as well.
01:43:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's okay. here here's Here's my read. ah The Empire is the sick man of the multiverse and the cancer that's poisoning it is femininity ah in the form of a respectable older woman who hates everything you are. And the only thing that can redeem it and renew it and restore it to the glory it's iss destined for, which is clearly what's happening at the end of the book when the the chosen emperor reclaims his throne.
01:44:22
Speaker
And he's back. And it's him, Andrew, your neighbour. He was the Emperor Korathos and he is a literal demigod, it turns out, which is why even though he's been, what happened to him was he was stripped 2,000 years ago and divided into 20 pieces. He's been a recombined into something incredibly powerful and incredibly sexy and incredibly masculine, which is why every woman in the convention gasps and sighs when they see the sheer power of his manly beauty. So he's our new emperor and he's already chosen his heir. And it is Rob, the centaur, who we have been told repeatedly is very, very beautiful. And also, by definition, is hung like a horse. um
01:45:03
Speaker
I think, I don't know if she meant to do this. i can't can't can't see her doing it by accident. She's a very clever writer. This is about femininity is the poison of the empire. Bring back real men.
01:45:18
Speaker
And their giant cogs. And their beauty. Which is a hell of a weird place to end this plotline. Yeah. And it's so it's so great that he's back and it's going to fix everything. Yeah. But also, Orientalist trope drink, the feminized nature of the of the degenerate em empire where the children have been raised in women's worlds inside the palace and therefore are not prepared for power and ruling and the lives of men. This is just such a standard part of like this story, this very Victorian story about specifically the successes of Rome. yeah
01:45:58
Speaker
You're just doing it totally unironically. with yeah there's with a horse there's something else that just clicked with me as as they were as you were talking about the chorophonic empire again which is that it so the cosmos the multiverse is shaped like an infinity sign with this loop and the chorophonic empire straddles the loop and emily you you said you used the word straddle there again and i was like Well, that's where that's where Istanbul is. It's straddling the loop between Europe and Asia.
01:46:34
Speaker
And we have the A word side, which is still full of magic and the N word side, which is lacking magic. And so I think there's a really strong parallel there that jonas and Jones is making.
01:46:49
Speaker
You're absolutely right. Now, the one thing I do, i have many questions about the return of the Emperor Koryphos plot. ah that This man is going to, you know, is going to fix the empire that he set up with in the first place. That's so miserable and so depressing for everyone who lives in it that when Rupert gets there to the terrorist bomb that sets off the whole plot at the beginning, he's just like, can't blame him.
01:47:13
Speaker
Had to be done. But somehow Andrew is so great that being there is going to... Him being there going fix everything. It's because he's beautiful. This absent-minded... Beautiful man. Yes.
01:47:25
Speaker
Also, he's he is specifically better than human. um We learned this right at the end, that neighbor Andrew, Emperor Koryphos the Great, is an archon. He is a member... like The Magids have this very strict hierarchy and there is this upper room of figures who who sort of like tell everybody what to do and they are missing one of their quorum because that is neighbour Andrew who went who came down from heaven to begin the Corophonic Empire. He's literally a saint emperor, okay? We're back to Constantine the Great.
01:48:04
Speaker
But the religion is magic. emperor. The words glorious conquest are never said in context of the end of the book. It's no, he's going to stabilize the empire and everything's going to fine. But we have told multiple times that several worlds are trying to leave the empire now. It's been destabilized. So presumably they're going to be re-stabilized back into it, whether they like it or not.
01:48:24
Speaker
But it's going to be good this time.
Symbolic Journey and Inner Conflicts
01:48:26
Speaker
Yes, and we do know that he was a figure of glorious conquest and was very impressive at it, so I guess he's going to be doing that again. The one thing I do like about this resolution to this plot is the way it forms the the resolution of Rupert's own arc when he gets to the end of the book and he's thinking about all the various mistakes that he's made over the course of the book and he has this talk with Korophos and Korophos thanks him for what he's done. And Rupert says, I couldn't think what on earth or elsewhere anyone should thank me for. I'd done nothing but blunder about. In the end, I concluded that Coripos meant all the driving about I used to do for him. So Rupert starts the book like, well, I've just come from sorting out the Ireland conflict. And he ends the book like, the one actually important thing I've done was be nice to my neighbor.
01:49:10
Speaker
There's something kind of nice about that for Rupert. Yeah, I think a lot of this book is in fact about puncturing Rupert's sense of self-importance. um So it's ah it's good that the Empire has been restored because Rupert now has a clearer sense of what a loser he is. Right.
01:49:29
Speaker
Plus, he's getting Andrew's house, which has a pool, and he needs the pool because he's a pond. I'm sorry. It's very different, especially in the context of like a muddy English garden.
01:49:40
Speaker
Yeah. He needs the pond because he's adopted adopted these beautiful ducks that went to Babylon and came back. and I love the duck catabasis. It's so good.
01:49:51
Speaker
It's beautiful. He can't provide these wise sage ah ducks that have been to hell and back with a good life unless he has a pond. The moral of the story is if you try give your light neighbor enough lifts, one day he might give you his house.
01:50:08
Speaker
His really nice house.
01:50:12
Speaker
That wraps up the plot, the plot. But it doesn't tell us anything about Babylon. Right. I find the, I mean, I've said already the Babylon sequence is great. It's all in Nick's point of view and we are told, first of all, we have been told repeatedly that Babylon is a secret. It's one of the secrets of the Majids and the only piece of it that's widely known on earth is the nursery rhyme. How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten.
01:50:38
Speaker
Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again. This turns out to be part of a spell. You need to carry a candle as you travel through this road to mysterious city. which is not in any way, shape or form the actual historical archaeological Babylon.
01:50:56
Speaker
This is a word that she's chosen, a name that she's borrowed. There is, I mean, my Near Eastern archaeology is bad as is traditional for classicists, but even I know Jones's is worst.
01:51:10
Speaker
Yes. Anyway. But everything that happens in Babylon is deeply symbolic. We're encouraged to look at all of it this way.
01:51:21
Speaker
Right. And it's secret. It's secret. It's secret. Nobody's meant to know. And I think it's important that the first thing we're told in Nick's narrative is how he has managed to rescue this secret. And he has, he's not meant to know this himself. It's meant to have been wiped from his memory and he's written it down and hidden it everywhere so that the secret can be revealed. Yeah. And therefore it is being revealed to you, the reader. And I think here Jones is actually leaning on the structure of the book as found document, archival document. yes This is the deep secret and you are being told it right now when you read it. Therefore, this is true. It's a piece of a deeper truth that is being revealed to you. I just find it fascinating how she is framing it. This book is an act of truth telling.
01:52:08
Speaker
And truth, of course, is something that comes up again and again in Jones. Truth in fantasy, truth through fantasy. Fantasy has to be true to have power. So let's see if we can read the symbolism or even we're supposed to.
01:52:23
Speaker
Some of it we're told, right? some of werere We're given hints. There's lots of little bits and pieces. ah know there's There's a part where they encounter, you know, they they have to, birds attack them and they're they're stripped of their clothes.
01:52:38
Speaker
And even Marie in her sort of half state is like, this is so embarrassing. This is so embarrassing. It's the one thing that she can say as she's moving through. And then they find old clothes on a bush. It's clothes that they've given away.
01:52:52
Speaker
Clothes that they've given it to charity or to Goodwill or whatever. And Rob, who's there with them, has never given away any clothes because the cult of the bush goddess is so small and closed in. they They're not allowed to give things away. They're not allowed to be generous. They have to wear their clothes until they rot off their body, basically.
01:53:11
Speaker
So as they' the Nick and Marie are able to put on these clothes that they've given away and stay warm throughout this journey, and Rob has nothing because he's never given anything.
01:53:23
Speaker
That bit, I think, is pretty clear to me. Yeah. And then they're telling the story to the upper room and the upper room says, so what were the birds? And they go, I don't know. What were the birds? It's yeah in interesting the because in a lot of ways, i think I think we can ask questions about who is the protagonist of this book. I think a lot of ways the protagonist of the Babylon sequence is actually Rob.
01:53:47
Speaker
Yeah. Rob the centaur. takes a long time to admit that he needs to go with them. And it's only after he's been yelled at by Rupert and especially Will that he realizes that he owes something.
01:53:57
Speaker
I think he even has a conversation with Zinka about it and she tells him it sounds like you need a new soul. He goes to Babylon. That's his conversation with Marie, I believe, as they're walking together through through Babylon and Nick is behind them and what Nick overhears is Rob discussing with Marie what ah what is Rob going to ask for what is it that he needs and Marie's conclusion is it sounds like you need a new soul right because Rob in the course of this book has realized that actually the Children who were murdered um as part of this plot that he is willingly taken part in were his siblings. ah He grew up with them. They had the same father and he did nothing to protect them and nothing to help them. And ah he feels guilty. He feels ashamed for the part he's played and he doesn't know what to do next.
01:54:47
Speaker
The kids have in fact showed up on the road. They're just staring at him. They're the ones that the birds attack. they The birds are distracted from attacking the children by the the gang scattering ah seeds and salt in front of them. And there's two kinds of birds and one kind of bird eats the salt and one kind of bird eats the seed. And the big question there is like, what's going to happen to these poor children when the birds are done eating the seeds? And there is there is no answer. They just have to move on.
01:55:19
Speaker
Right. I think it's one of the clearest moments there where the we have entered the land of the dead is that these dead children are there. um And that Rob clearly understands this as shame on him.
01:55:32
Speaker
yeah um These children are there because of him, because he did nothing to protect them. And all they can do at this point is scatter seeds for them. But we are specifically asked by the text to think about what did the birds represent?
01:55:47
Speaker
Decide what this is about and write a second verse yourself. Right. Like, I do think I don't have an answer about the birds. I don't know if either of you guys do. But I do think that we are encouraged as readers to think about this as a secret we can solve, as a way that we can, we as readers, can add a little bit more magic to the world by internalizing the way this Katabasis journey works and by thinking about it as a piece of magic that we now have within us.
01:56:16
Speaker
But we've been given detailed instructions on how to perform. Yeah. we We've got all the bits of the secret that we need. We we could do the Babylon ritual. We could go to Babylon right now. Yeah, what would you ask for? I think this is also a question the book might want you to think about.
01:56:32
Speaker
But the climax of the sequence is that they come to, and at this point nick Nick's narrative gets very vague and is ah very unspecific about who exactly or what exactly they are asking for their wishes. But Marie goes first because Marie is the one who has been half killed and needs to come back from the dead.
01:56:51
Speaker
And Marie makes a wish. And Marie says, I wish that my little fat dad be cured of his cancer. And Nick is furious. yeah Because Marie is supposed to wish for herself. She's supposed to save her own life.
01:57:07
Speaker
But we know Marie is not going to do this. The last thing we saw Marie say with her own voice is, I wish my dad didn't have cancer. I don't care about anything else. I wish I wasn't me. What else is she going to do?
01:57:19
Speaker
Right. But also, I think it's really critically important that Marie instantly and without any doubt, and it's quite clear, actually, as soon as she says it, this is what she was always going to say. And she never intended to wish for herself. Marie is unselfish.
01:57:31
Speaker
That is in fact her defining characteristic and the thing that distinguishes her from the rest of Team Us the Knight's extended family, including Nick and Janine, is the thing that Rupert likes most about her. Marie cares for others and in particular she cares for her little fat dad who she's been very upset about all through the book and who I think by this point we do know only has cancer because he was spitefully given it as a piece of magic done by Graham White.
01:58:00
Speaker
Poe is also an adoptive dad. I think it's really important to draw that parallel here that this is a family of choice. And in fact, it makes me think again about Quentin and Katrina back in Archer's Goon, the best parents, perhaps in Diana Wynne-Jones, the parents who love their kids the most because they're kids that they got, you know taking kids into their home that they had a choice about.
01:58:22
Speaker
made their family better, made them better and happier. That's not true for Marie's parents who are in fact divorced, but it's clear that she loves her dad so much in part because she knows that he chose to bring her into this family.
01:58:35
Speaker
Yeah. And actually that is balanced out as well by Ted's feelings about Nick at the end, when Nick is actually, after his mother's death, quite scared about what's going to happen to him. And it becomes clear that his his adoptive dad is a much better parent to him than his biological mother ever was.
01:58:50
Speaker
Yeah, and Ted is also, I think, in in many ways, an echo of Quentin, the last commercial writer that we saw. Yeah, there's um to to circle back to the three trans people at the con and their baby is that there's there's this bit that I bookmarked in in my copy where Marie and Nick talk about them in the baby. And and Marie says they're both so beautiful, but that baby is surely having a weird upbringing. Nick said in a vague way, all upbringings are weird. Yes. and at that point, we don't know yet that Nick and Marie are the children of Timos the Ninth.
01:59:29
Speaker
And we think that Nick is only talking about like my weird mom and my weird dad. But I that is a really striking moment to me for like Nick is someone who is capable of recognizing that every family is is weird in a very particular way and that weirdness has nothing to do with how happy your family is.
01:59:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. And like on the surface of it, Ted and Janine are appear to be one of the most normal and appropriate families in the book.
02:00:04
Speaker
Proper families, maybe. We have middle class dad with a with a good job, making enough money to renovate the basement. a Middle class mother who runs ah runs a shop and diets and looks very smart in her jumpers. And their teenage son, um whom she adores. She does everything for him, doesn't know anything about him.
02:00:22
Speaker
But that... is a lie, that appearance of respectability, there we go, thorn lady's favourite thing is a lie. And when Janine dies in front of Ted and Nick at the ah at the end of the book, one of the last things that the upper room asks Nick for his account after he's it's told the you know told the tale of Babylon, explained how much he didn't want to give up his wish for to save Marie and did it anyway.
02:00:49
Speaker
and how he brought them home. They ask him some other, where they ask him what he thinks the birds were, and then they ask him how he felt about his mother. And the way he answers is, I think, really striking. He compares it to, he says, last year I had a boil on my neck.
02:01:05
Speaker
It was quite impressive, it grew and grew, and it was a sort of purple-red. And all the time it was growing, it was wonderfully neat and well-shaped, quite round and pointed and regular with a funny little dip in the middle at the top. When I looked at it, I used to think it was such a perfect shape that it almost seemed as if it was a proper part of me and meant to be there.
02:01:21
Speaker
But it hurt more and more in a dull sort of way, and it made me hold my head on one side, In the end, dad marched me off to the doctor with it. The doctor took a short look, then he lanced it. That made the most appalling mess, and it hurt ten times more.
02:01:33
Speaker
When I got home, it looked even more of a mess. It was not even a good shape any longer, and it kept running and felt horrible, but the pain was a much better sort of pain, even though it went on for a long time, and I've still got quite a mark.
02:01:45
Speaker
Yeah. So... It's a really strong image. Yeah. The... Losing his mother... is like The book doesn't try and pretend it's not painful.
02:01:57
Speaker
and But it's necessary. Describes it as a necessary thing for Nick. Yeah, in fact, he has been sort of surgically detached from Janine to the vast improvement of his life and future. And I do think it's important.
02:02:12
Speaker
Nick does tell us what he was going to ask for, doesn't he? He does. At the yeah very end of the book. um He wanted, think was like, am I remembering this from the sequel? No. He wanted to become a Magid himself. So Nick was going to ask for power, right?
02:02:29
Speaker
He was going to go down to the ah the heart of the realm of the dead, where on his way back, he does in fact go, this is a bit like the Orpheus story. I better not look back in case you missed that this was the realm of the dead. Yes. And it goes down and makes his wish. And the wish he was originally going to make was a wish to be a powerful wizard ah with secret abilities and secret knowledge and the ability to shape the destiny of the world.
02:02:55
Speaker
And I do think one of the things at stake here is that if Nick had done that, that would have been very, very bad. Yeah. Nick also inherits an arms factory at the end of the book, which is already more power than I'm comfortable with Nick having. 14 years old minutes with his own guns,
Fandom as a Community and Shared Magic
02:03:12
Speaker
yes. Especially not whole gun factory.
02:03:15
Speaker
But yeah, I think you know the the this ends this section ends the book both because I think it's the most powerful section, the deepest secret. And because in a real way, the central question of the book is not who's going to inherit the empire or what's going to happen at this con, but the struggle for, you know the question of Nick's soul, is he unselfish enough to ask for Marie back?
02:03:46
Speaker
Yeah. And in this book, he is. Let's call it there. I have one more thing I want to say. Let's not call it there. that's what Real, real quick.
02:03:57
Speaker
Just because I was scrolling through our quotes doc and I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before because I hadn't heard you say before um about Diana sitting on top of the stairs and watching the stair orgies.
02:04:08
Speaker
And I noticed that in the stair orgy scene, Cornelius Punt and Rupert are sitting at top the top of the stairs with the glass together, looking down at looking down at the orgy.
02:04:20
Speaker
thinking about how being a imagined, whether it requires you to hold yourself apart from the rest of humanity, or whether you're just being the voyeur. Ah, now that's interesting, because I think it is fairly easy to read Marie as a little bit of a self-portrait, this sister-mother figure, this young woman who is wildly unhappy and finally finding her people.
02:04:44
Speaker
But I think Rupert as a Jonesian self-portrait, is a striking one because this is the question of, as a writer, as a storyteller, as person who does these pen portraits, are you being Cornelius Punt? Are you a messy voyeur who loves drama and is using the people around you to create it?
02:05:09
Speaker
I do wonder how the next year's EasterCon read this book. One has to, right? One one has to wonder. But it's such, you know, I think in many ways, there is, as with a lot of her books of this decade, there's something really messy about it.
02:05:27
Speaker
There's so many things in it that you're like, I don't know that that choice is the choice that I would have made. But there's something really real in it. And she meant there to be something real in it. And there's something really loving in it as well. I think this book, insofar as it comes down in favour of anything, is in favour of fandom.
02:05:48
Speaker
Fandom as a silly place, as a funny place, as a place of community and belonging, as a place that Diana Wynne-Jones didn't know about until 1985 when she was a guest of honour for the first time, as a place where you can meet other wizards like you. Yeah.
02:06:05
Speaker
A place that's a little bit wild and a little bit uncontrolled. You can come out of your... I was going to say, to bring her back to Rupert, Rupert sits alone in his home at his computer and he works from home and then he comes to the con and he's like, oh, I've been too alone.
02:06:24
Speaker
Oh, i needed company like this. Just as you have, like it's so easy to read that into Diana Wynne Jones herself. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're 100% on the money because I do think when it comes down to it that ah people who write fantasy, it's very who are involved in fantasy, it's very clear in the context of this book magids, are magical.
02:06:48
Speaker
And those things are inextricable. Now let's play that all right that call it it that. Thank you so much for joining us, Ariella. I deeply appreciate it.
02:07:01
Speaker
And for telling us how much of a horrible colleague Rupert would be. ah vitally important to know. um Next week we'll be wrapped, not next week, in two weeks, we'll be wrapping up our season with Dark Lord of Durkholm.
02:07:13
Speaker
So tune in for that and we'll see you we'll see you next time. See you next time. Bye. Bye.