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Dogsbody
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"Soon only Sirius was scratching and tearing at the dark, and he only kept on because he had a dim notion that anything was better than cold nothingness."
Politics, parenting, sex and death. [NB: We had a special very small guest on this one, so if you hear the occasional kick or wail against the infinite difficulty of being alive, just remember: it's thematic!]
Transcript available here. Next week we will be discussing Cart and Cwidder!
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Dog's Body
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Emily Tesh. And I'm Rebecca Fremo. And welcome back to Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, the podcast where we talk about books by our favorite children's author. ah This season focused on the book she wrote in the 1970s. Today we're talking about Dog's Body.
Plot Overview of Dog's Body
00:00:15
Speaker
Yes, ah a title with a pun in it, which I was thinking about all the time that I was reading because I don't think that it ever actually registered for me as a kid because I didn't know what a dog's body was.
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm just like, sure, he's in the body of a dog, right?
Parenthood Themes in Dog's Body
00:00:31
Speaker
Yeah, no, perfectly logical. Let's do the plot summary. This is a the book about ah a divinity, wizard, superpower thing, politician, politician, space politician, the soul or inhabitant of a star, and specifically the star Sirius, who is falsely accused of a crime.
00:00:52
Speaker
and as punishment sent to Earth in the body of a dog, ah where he has the lifetime of that dog, to find a lost item. Find a lost item, there we go. And now we do need to pause, I'm really sorry. Oh yes, of course. And this is Rebecca from the future, noting that this is the point where we were joined on the recording by Em's daughter.
00:01:13
Speaker
has nothing to add on Dog's Body. She hasn't read it because she's five months old.
Exploration of Relationships and Writing Challenges
00:01:19
Speaker
But this is, as we've been talking about, in a way, a book about parenthood, good and bad, as all of Diana Windjones' books are books about parenthood, good and bad. So this is, I think, sort of fitting. Yeah, yeah, no, you have a point. um i God knows, I hope I'm not as bad a parent as the bad parent in Diana Windjones. She is consistent.
00:01:41
Speaker
And this book in particular is really interested in fatherhood, motherhood, parenthood, all the ways it can go wrong.
Female Heroes and Kathleen's Struggles
00:01:50
Speaker
And also about I mean, it's, I think it's very interesting that it is interested in all these different kinds of relationships, despite the fact that the central relationship, which I don't think we've yet touched on in the plot summary is basically a classic girl and her dog story. ah Right.
00:02:07
Speaker
One of the things that Diana Winjone says about this book, when she's sort of talking about her difficulty with writing female protagonists in her early books, which is something both kind of externally and I think internally induced, you know, the she says she talks a bit about the difficulty with getting boys to read girls books, which things are considered to be a girls book if they have a girl protagonist. But she also talks about her difficulty with writing protagonists that feel too close.
00:02:35
Speaker
And so one of the things that she says about this book is, I sneaked a female hero passed in dog's body by telling the story from the dog's point of view. So in a way, in one way, the protagonist of this book is Sirius, the exiled
Irish Prejudice and The Troubles
00:02:50
Speaker
dog. And in another way, it's the little girl who finds him who is living out her own problem now? Right, we've talked before about how especially these early Diana Wynne Jones books are very affected by the 1970s.
00:03:06
Speaker
sort of milieu in which they're written and the expectation that children's literature needs to be about problems, which are then explored meaningfully in the book ah so that you can then really ruin children's lives by being like, no escapism for you. Here's a book about the problem you are having. And so this stealth protagonist of Dog's Body, ah who is also a Dog's Body because she is Cinderella. So she's being used as the Dog's Body as a family. But her name is Kathleen.
00:03:34
Speaker
Kathleen O'Brien and she is living with this family that hates her in the context of the early
Personal and Historical Impact of The Troubles
00:03:41
Speaker
70s. She is an Irish little girl ah whose father has been arrested as part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and she has been sent to live with English family who treat her very badly.
00:03:55
Speaker
Now, when you when we first looked at the list of books from the 70s, I think the first thing you said to me was, oh my god, this is a lot of books about the troubles, which we'll get to this more, I think, in later books. But I knew that this one was about the troubles. I couldn't sort of miss the word Ireland when I was reading this as a kid. But this is this is the point where I come in and am the classic clueless American, because when I was 12, I just had no context for this.
00:04:22
Speaker
See, that's interesting to me, because I should say that I am from an Irish and in fact, a Northern Irish family. ah My grandmother was from Belfast, and my grandfather was from Dublin, and they got married in the 50s, and then immediately moved to Japan, so they wouldn't have to talk about politics. Her sympathies were firmly unionist, and his were firmly nationalist. So there really, it was ah it was a doomed relationship. So they had seven children. Wow. Yeah.
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, um but some of my memories from like my childhood in the 90s are sort of driving through Belfast and Derry on our way to visit my grandparents and my very English father putting on an Irish accent at the checkpoints that we drove through because he did not feel safe driving through Ireland as an Englishman with his wife and children in the car.
00:05:13
Speaker
because it was a very dangerous time. And Jones is writing Nog's Body in the early 70s, I think it's from 74 or 75, published in 75. And this is actually the worst and bloodiest period of The Troubles, the undeclared civil war in Northern Ireland.
Empathy for Characters and Imprisonment Themes
00:05:33
Speaker
between the Nationalists, ah who always argue that they are a Republican anti-colonial movement, not a religious sectarian movement, and the Unionists, who are very much a religious sectarian movement, an anti Catholic movement. ah And it is a really, really painful period in Ireland's history. It's a period with a lot of knock on effects. And the early 70s was the bloodiest part because in August 1971, the Northern Irish government with the support of London brought in internment, which is arrested imprisonment without trial.
00:06:10
Speaker
for people suspected of IRA involvement. And this book is also being written shortly after not this the the sort of civil war has been brought specifically into England where Diana Wynne Jones is living at this time. You know, the violence in Ireland has been uh increasing throughout the 70s at this point but I believe it's in 1973 when the the sort of famous bombing incident happens in London? The first one yeah there are several um yeah but this is uh one of the things the troubles did was they very much brought home to England some of the consequences of sort of colonial oppression in a way that
00:06:52
Speaker
I think a lot of English people have been able to ignore for a very, very long time. um The IRA always ah claimed that they were targeting legitimate military targets in a ah struggle for freedom. ah It is possible to argue sometimes with that. There were certainly plenty of civilian casualties along the way. I am trying so hard to be fair-minded because literally this is like a family history of this ex exact argument that you didn't bring up at dinner at Christmas.
00:07:22
Speaker
um uh thank you for being willing to also bring it up on the podcast and i do think uh you know to give jones credit i was sort of braced rereading this book as an adult because i hadn't read it since i was a kid um and i think that she does show kind of a foreign english person living through you know throughout this conflict in the 70s she's and incredibly sympathetic to Kathy's situation. She is shockingly not just sympathetic to Kathleen, ah the protagonist who has, by the way, possibly the most cliched Irish name imaginable. It's right up there with naming the dog Seamus, which is which her her cousins try to do as a racist joke against Irish people. um But yeah, she's Kathleen, she's Kathleen O'Brien. It's noticeable narrative is very, very sympathetic to her.
00:08:15
Speaker
but it's also sympathetic to her imprisoned father. Right, and you can tell how sympathetic it is to her imprisoned father by way of the fact that her imprisoned father is a deliberate parallel to our actual protagonist, Sirius the Dog Star, who is imprisoned. it's The word is used over and over again. There are numerous, numerous quotes where he's talking about sort of the horrors of this particular imprisonment and also a number of sort of lesser but equally significant indignities as a dog where he's imprisoned in the backyard, he's imprisoned in the house, he's stopped from doing anything he wants. right The things that will actually save his life, ah because if he doesn't find this magical artifact that he's looking for by the end of the book, then he's just gonna die as a dog. Lae- It is interesting because I feel like explicit sympathy for the IRA is a fairly unusual put position for an English author in the 1970s to take.
00:09:12
Speaker
ah like it's still a fairly unusual position in England now, certainly among the older generation who lived through the worst of like the the period when the IRA was using terrorist tactics to make their point.
Cinderella Tropes and Kathleen's Resilience
00:09:25
Speaker
Right. And there's a I think the quote that I wanted to pull out um is after he's been confined to the backyard by Kathy's evil, she's not a stepmother, she's a guardian, but she's basically an evil stepmother, ah who says that, you know, Kathy's dog,
00:09:41
Speaker
whom she hates, ah has to stay in the backyard while Kathy's at school, can't come in the house, can't leave. And Kathy says, who's named Sirius- Kathleen. Kathleen, sorry. Kathleen says, poor Leo, you're a proper prisoner now. And Sirius saw that she was crying. He was surprised because these days, Kathleen rarely cried. um And you can see that Kathleen is also making this connection between her dog, who's tied up in the backyard. Her dog and her dad, which is what we'll come back to in many ways.
00:10:09
Speaker
So right, this is a this is a problem book in the 70s mold, but the problem is that your father has been arrested for terrorism, ah which is actually not a hugely common problem that many children need to deal with. And also, I'm not sure the book does deal with the problem in the way that a problem book perhaps is supposed to. There isn't there isn't a good answer.
00:10:32
Speaker
There's no resolu- I mean, I think the book kind of teases resolutions to this. um All throughout the book, Kathleen has this dream that her father is going to get out and come get her, and there is a point sort of midway through the book where it seems like he's escaped. You know, she, she, well first she gets a letter from her father saying, don't worry, I'm going to come get you and rescue you from this miserable family. And that seems like what the happy ending is going to be. She's going to hold and endure this situation, which let's, let's set the situation up a little bit. So she has been
00:11:11
Speaker
taken in by a relative of her mother's, Mr. Duffield, and his wife and their two children. And as in the classic Cinderella story of the two children, there's sort of a cruel older child who is at first the main lens, he and his mother are the main lens through which we see the racism that Kathleen is experiencing.
00:11:34
Speaker
and then a useless but kinder younger child who's quite fond of Kathleen but is also the smallest kid in the family and can't do anything and is sort of subject to the will of his older brother and his mother. The father is around.
00:11:49
Speaker
is useless as well, sort of vaguely means well towards Kathleen, but is not willing to notice any of the actual demands that she doesn't like things that make him uncomfortable. And rather than fixing things, he just arranges his life so he never has to see anything that makes him uncomfortable.
00:12:06
Speaker
Exactly. And there's actually kind of an interesting echo of the ogre downstairs where Kathleen also has to do all the housework. The adults, so presumably Mrs. Duffield, who everyone calls Duffy, her job is to make horrible artisan pots. And she doesn't, and presumably at one point, she did take care of the household. At the very beginning of the book, Kathleen finds Sirius, Leo, as a small, mostly drowned puppy, and sort of begs and begs to be able to keep him and raise him and Duffy. And as part of her begging to keep him and raise him, ah she says, I'll do all the cooking, I'll do all the cleaning, I'll do all the housework as long as you let me keep the stock.
00:12:46
Speaker
And Mrs. Duffield is like, great, fantastic, and immediately holds her exactly to the letter of it. Kathleen is a child. She doesn't know how to cook. She doesn't know how to clean. There's, you know, numerous instances of the book of her burning the roast and breaking something while trying to clean it. The Christmas dinner that she can't do. But the fact that also the child was expected to make a full Christmas dinner. And this is one of the moments where Mr. Duffield actually says something, but all he says is you could have done it yourself.
00:13:15
Speaker
he doesn't He doesn't say, please stop abusing this child and making her do all the cooking. is He's sarcastic about it. There's sort of a Mr. Bennett quality to him almost, where he's he's sarcastic about the problems that he observes in the rest of the family. But he will not step in. He will not change them. He will not exert his authority.
00:13:32
Speaker
What Sirius thinks about Mr. Duffield is, Mr. Duffield meant well, but he was too wrapped up in himself to attend to what other people felt. It took a policeman to make him notice anything was wrong, and now he seemed to be making matters worse. He was the most self-centered creature Sirius knew.
00:13:49
Speaker
apart from
Sirius' Trial and Themes of Justice
00:13:50
Speaker
Duckley, his wife. And that's extremely funny because what becomes increasingly clear is that Mr. Duffield and Sirius are actually the two parallel characters. Yes, there's this very, very funny trick that Dannewin Jones does where Sirius gets to be a parallel both of Kathleen's real father, who's imprisoned,
00:14:09
Speaker
and of Kathleen's surrogate father, this sort of useless adult, both at the same time. What we know about Sirius right from the start, and this is why I think the, so again, when I was young first reading this book, I didn't pay any attention at all to the star politics plot. I did not care.
00:14:27
Speaker
But there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on in the star politics plot. And one of the first things that we learned about Sirius when he's on trial for his life, and so the cut you know there's a ah ah trial the court is bringing in charges and says the court has found you guilty on three counts, namely of murdering a young luminary stationed in Orion,
00:14:47
Speaker
of grossly misusing Azoi to commit that said murder and of culpable negligence causing trepidation, irregularity and damage in your entire sphere of influence and leading to the loss of the zoi. Now we know that he did not do the first thing, the murder, the entire book is about proving that he didn't do the murder. I mean not proving it exactly because it's actually clear from very early on that Sirius not only didn't do the murder but knows who did.
00:15:12
Speaker
true yes he could easily save himself and the reasons he chose his not to are interesting i think so i mean there's this book has a few themes one of them is that parents are terrible another is that death is terrifying but the third and most important is that sex makes you stupid Chills are so and stupid. But we can't blame him. We'll get to the sex. But I don't think we can blame the sex on his culpable negligence causing trepidation, irregularity, and damage in his sphere influence. That's all serious. never human
00:15:44
Speaker
that yes And later in the book, you know, one of the other major characters that we haven't talked about yet is Sirius Befriend the Sunk, who's sort of shocked to find Sirius who is his boss hanging out in the body of the dog running around.
00:16:02
Speaker
but I mean, I mean, Sol is also furious. Sol on his star politics thing is like, I can't believe they did this to me. I have so much going on here. I have so many irons in the fire. ah Last thing I need is my boss being a dog in my back garden while I'm working on something. But Sol is so responsible. Right. That's that's clear from very early on. Sol is very responsible and active as like a star.
00:16:28
Speaker
as opposed to Sirius who is irresponsible. And if you write and if you are if you are one of Sol's creatures, then Sol will protect you and take care of you. And Sirius is now one of Sol's creatures. ah There's sort of this weird office comedy in the background of this book where your boss has become like your intern took away and now you've got to to run around because the new boss has come in and he's trying to meddle. um And there's a really interesting line here again when we're talking about the parallels between the star politics plot and perhaps contemporary politics. I don't want to give Diana Wynne Jones too much credit.
00:17:12
Speaker
This line can be read you know sort of a lot of ways, but Sirius has been replaced by a new sort of come-lately star. ah And Sol is deeply, deeply annoyed about this, and it it certain it soon becomes clear that the new Sirius is meddling in ways that are quite bad for the entire domain. Sol says it's just as well. They didn't trust that amateur on his own. He set up some kind of trepidation that's almost knocked my outer planet off course. And the next thing I know, there were floods, droughts, and famines all over Earth. And what Sirius thinks about, so this new star is someone from Castor. And Sirius doesn't know much about people from Castor except that they were vague and untrustworthy and too many for their sphere so that they were always trying to meddle with other people. I mean, if we're talking about anti-Irish racist stereotypes, that's one of them.
00:18:00
Speaker
that's true but if you that if if sirius is so There's a book of Diana Jones's that we're not reading called Change Over because I think it's probably quite bad. um
Contemporary Issues and Existential Themes
00:18:12
Speaker
It was, her first book, it was written about, it's sort of a comedy about ah an African nation, a made up African nation ah achieving independence. um I don't think in any way that Diana Jones was qualified to write about an African nation achieving independence. And I don't really want to see how badly she got it.
00:18:34
Speaker
but it does sort of indicate to me that at least she was thinking a little bit about the problems of ah foreign governments, of being governed from a central location that doesn't know what it's doing, perhaps, in a particular location. Yeah, i will I will give you that. I think um I don't want to give Diana Winjoes too much credit on this one either. I think the politics, the star politics plot is kind of in the background and mostly played for comedy. The the the the serious stuff in this book is all the death, sex and animal cruelty.
00:19:10
Speaker
That is also very true. All of that is happening all the time. do we want well Speaking of death, one of the other things that you mentioned, I think, in the notes when we were talking about floods, droughts and famines, is that people are starting to hear about climate change in the 1980s. I mean, it's just a throwaway reference. There's not much not not not much to put in there, but it is interesting to me that Jones is constantly putting what's contemporary in a media into her fantasy books.
00:19:36
Speaker
So we've got we've got the political situation in Ireland, we've got the sort of early discussions of climate change, and they're all just in there alongside these like quite strange and symbolic elements. As usual, I've skipped to the ending. I'm not going to skip the ending. I'll stop that. Right. We're not going to do the ending yet, but I do think that it's relevant also and that there's kind of ah a doom hanging over this book, there's a death hanging over this book.
00:20:02
Speaker
ah We know that Sirius is under a time limit from the moment that he enters Earth. He is a dog. He's going to have a dog's lifespan. um He's going to die. Dogs do die. He almost dies immediately. Yes. Oh, God. And that opening sequence, right? He arrives on Earth. He wakes up as a puppy. And he like we see like this powerful and dangerous character from the first chapter has immediately been sort of rere replaced, remade, ah into this very blind, this very incapable, and this very unknowing little scrap of life. And because Puppy Sirius can't remember what he was, like the brain's not big enough to contain the the personality of a star.
00:20:43
Speaker
And so we have this sort of opening scene that describes, you know, the the hairy cliff that is the mother dog's body. um And then the humans who come in with their power of life and death over what's helpless, what's defenseless, what's innocent. And they have this discussion, are these puppies worth anything? ah No, because they're ah they're a mongrel. They're the wrong kind of puppy.
00:21:06
Speaker
Right, Bess has been a very naughty girl, is what one of the characters says. Which is also a direct parallel between Sirius and Kathleen. And then the, yes, I'm sorry, baby wishes to contribute. The other human figure, whom we'll come back to, persuades the dog owner that puppies need to be drowned, and they're thrown into a sack and the sack is thrown in the river. And it is an excruciating sequence. It's really hard to read the description of the seven puppies all fighting for life, fighting against the river. Little scraps of life, I think is what she calls them.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah, and let me let me grab the whole quote. It's really, really moved me. Where have I put it? I've lost the one about ah how he fought the darkness and cold as if it were a live enemy. Yes. Soon so only Sirius was scratching and tearing at the dark and he only kept on because he had a dim notion that anything was better than cold nothingness.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yes, that's the bit I was thinking of. And the way it refigures or sort of it sort of replays the series in the first chapter where he's down there through the spinning star moat to the floor. He looked into nothing. He was horrified. It was all he could do not to scream at them, not to make him into nothing. This idea of becoming nothing. And that's what death is.
Motherhood Themes and Kathleen's Role
00:22:23
Speaker
It's just true for the star as it is for the puppy. And then what life is. But there's a subsequent quote that says when he hears the sentence that it condemns him to become a dog's body,
00:22:32
Speaker
He says, it was worse than nothing because it condemned him not only to exile, but hope, hopeless, brutish hope over a whole uncertain lifespan. Right. It is dark. Your choices are nothingness or hopeless hope. And I think that she's, you know, this idea of hopeless hope, that living in hope of something that you don't think will ever happen is worse in a way than immediate death. I think that's something that we'll see Diana when Jones come back to.
00:22:58
Speaker
Absolutely. But I think it is also ah i mean it's a description of Kathleen's situation, where she's sort of trapped in this miserable, miserable life and the very, very slim hope that her father might come and get her is all she's got. And it's a very slim hope indeed. And sorry, I will need to parent for a second. You're okay. You're okay. You're a baby. She is so good.
00:23:24
Speaker
You're one of nature's podcasts. Absolutely. She's grabbing already for the headphones. She's ready to put them on and and start going. So speaking of babies, ah when we're going back to this parenting theme, I think one of the things that you pointed out is that Kathleen then becomes a mother figure to Sirius when she fishes him out of the river, she bottle feeds him.
00:23:42
Speaker
Right, she gives him his milk, she raises him from like, very, very, very early puppyhood, too young to be taken from his actual like, dog mother, who is a character we will meet again later in the story. and And Sirius has absolutely no reaction or response to Bess the dog. ah His interest, like his mother is Kathleen, his mother figure. And she is this like, I'm gonna go here, she she she is like the the Virgin. a hundred percent She is like I mean, it the book is very careful not to explicitly say whether Kathleen is on the Catholic or Protestant side of the divide in Northern Ireland. But she's a Catholic. She really is. And the description of her is like having boundless love for all living things. Sirius is deep resentment of her boundless love for all living things. Because he's jealous. Yeah. book Which also gets some of these themes about sex. Do we want to talk about the companion now?
00:24:41
Speaker
Let's talk about the companion she is. I think the only major character we haven't mentioned. So this is, of course, Jones does actually, I mean, know her stuff about the star. So the dog star Sirius does have a small white dwarf companion star. And the companion is the luminary, the divine or heavenly figure which inhabits this sphere and is Sirius's companion.
00:25:02
Speaker
romantically, sexually. It's not quite clear how luminaries arrange these matters, but it's really clear from very early on, the first chapter, he's got immensely strong feelings for her. He adores this woman, this figure. He'll do anything for her. And indeed, he does, because actually, it is eventually revealed that the person responsible for the murder is almost certainly the companion. And Sirius' refusal to say that in a life or death trial. Is him literally prepared to die for her? And the fact that the judges figure out there something up and then send him to this weird sentence of go and be a dog instead.
00:25:40
Speaker
is always aimed at trying to tease out the truth of who is the real murderer, who is the real monster in serious despair. So the companion is the villain of the piece. And she's explicit. Well, there's two villains of the piece. There's the companion and there's Mrs. Nuffield. And they are explicitly paralleled because everything in this book is paralleled two or three times.
00:26:01
Speaker
I mean, this is Jones's great trick, right? This is what she's so good at. And it's why even in very short books, you get a kind of sense of depth of character, because every character tells you something about all the others. So the more time you spend with Duffy, the more you know about the companion, the more time you spend with Kathleen, the more you know about parenthood, womanhood, motherhood. Although I think that there's, you know, again, I'm really glad that we decided not to skip the ogre downstairs, because I think there's something really fun in looking at Kathleen and in Ginny, both of those are to two little girls who have been sort of pushed into a mother role who are parallel to a mother role, but are not
00:26:41
Speaker
quite good at it yet. We see Kathleen, you know, Kathleen overfeeds serious, he throws up, she's overcooking, she's breaking things, she's been pushed into a mother role before she's ready to be one. And I think the book is pretty clear that this is not necessarily a role that she ought to have, but it's a role that she has to have because no one else is doing it.
00:27:02
Speaker
Right. So she because she has this sort of boundless love because she is a a a good person. And and like this is Kathleen's main character traitor. She is a very good person. in In a way, I think that I would find quite annoying if she was actually the protagonist. But because it's all modulated through Sirius's point of view. And of course, he adores her he's a dog.
00:27:22
Speaker
He has unconditional love for her. He's the only being in the world who has unconditional love for Kathleen. Although eventually, you know to kind of to go along with this mothering theme, because she's so good and because she's willing to have unconditional love for other creatures, the the two boys in the household, who you know there they're they're also eating her food and living in the house that she makes. and Over the course of the book, they become more, yeah side sides they become more her children than their actual mother's children. Right, because to begin with, both of them, especially Basil, the older boy, ah both of them are Duffy's children. and Basil is cruel and ah makes nasty jokes, incredibly racist jokes, right? Robin doesn't stand up for her because he wants his mother to approve of him. And it is clear that they are getting the nastiness, the anti Irish feeling from Duffy, who
00:28:16
Speaker
What's the quote? What she says about Irish people? Oh god, it's awful. It's not even the worst stuff in the book. Oh, she did. Duffy disliked Irish people. She called them feckless. She called Kathleen lazy and stupid and slushish. And slushish, in particular, is such a particularly awful thing to call like a 10 year old.
00:28:34
Speaker
I will say this is probably sluttish in the sense that my mother used it to me when I was a child, which is to say dirty, um as in making a mess everywhere, rather than the contemporary use of sluts as a sexual ah criticism. It's still a really nasty thing to say to a 10-year-old, but my mum did say it to me when I was 10, and at that particular time, I had him make a mess everywhere. And Kathleen does make a mess everywhere frequently or rather Sirius makes a mess everywhere frequently and then Kathleen takes the blame for it because she is the dog's body as for Sirius in the dog's body.
Villainy and Deceit in Character Analysis
00:29:07
Speaker
Yeah, but also like Kathleen is being blackmailed because
00:29:10
Speaker
ah Duffy holds Sirius' life over her. If at any point Kathleen just does something Duffy doesn't like, Duffy threatens to kill her dog. But I'll take that dog down immediately. And because we've seen what... This cruelty to animals right, which is the clearest sign of someone just being evil in this book. And Sirius learns through being in the dog's body.
00:29:31
Speaker
you know, he learns to recognize when someone's going to be cruel. You know, there are a couple instances through the book, eventually he's able to sneak out of the backyard and go around begging food from various people, and he learns very quickly to identify people who feel like Duffy, people who are just kind of feel bad, people who are cruel, people who are not going to be kind to animals. And then when he finally meets the companion again, because she's come down to Earth to make sure that Sirius is really dead,
00:29:59
Speaker
Because she was actually that other figure who persuaded the dog owner to drown the puppies back in Chapter 2. And that reveal hits, and you're like, oh yeah! Oh yeah! She's been here all along, she's always hated him, she has always been trying to murder him. And immediately, so Sirius' reaction, as Sirius wanted to wag his tail and whine with joy,
00:30:17
Speaker
He wanted to go down on his fringed elbows and lick her elegant feet and then put his paws on her small shoulders and lick her face, but he did nothing. He just stood there for age-long seconds, staring at her, unable to credit what all his green nature and his dog nature had learned while he had been on Earth.
00:30:33
Speaker
He had met people like her while he begged at doors. One of them had kicked him. He knew Duffy, but she could not be like Duffy. She was his companion. And then to think he had spent long, long ages doting on a being like Duffy. And all that he needs to say is that basically she's like Duffy. That's all you need to know.
00:30:54
Speaker
Right. but And it's that sort of is that that Jones thing of the move smoothly from the everyday and normal spear up and spear speak up and out to the like the mythic the spectacular, because Duffy is such a normal human kind of person such a nasty petty bully. And it's it's really well done. It's very details. Duffy's cruelty is calculated. ah She doesn't do it in front of her husband. ah She doesn't do it in front of her friends. So when her friends turn up to her pottery shop, and they admire the dog, because he's a big handsome creature, Duffy suddenly switches from being horrible about Sirius to being quite smug and proud about him. Because she's only interested in status and power.
00:31:38
Speaker
And she is very calculated about how she makes sure she gets it. And actually, I think she is, I mean, the awful mother figure turns up in Diana Wynne Jones almost every book, like a lot, a lot, a lot. But Duffy is, I think, a particularly strong example. But what's interesting is the way that Duffy and the companion are paralleled. They are very similar characters, except that the companion is yeah beautiful. She is attractive.
00:32:07
Speaker
Whereas Duffy is always described by Sirius as how much she hates her fat pink legs. Yeah, her horrible legs and her blocky feet. Because that's all you can see, because he's a dog. He's just a dog. Right, but then that then gives you the parallel between Sirius and Mr. Duffield, this stepfather, this uncle of Kathleen's, who, why is he doting on a being like Duffy? We don't know. We've known nothing about their relationship, except what we know by seeing it paralleled with Sirius and his companion.
00:32:36
Speaker
and accept what we know about the fact that Sirius has been oblivious to his responsibilities because he's been so busy doting on his companion that he hasn't been doing his job. Right. and There's a sense of not seeing what you don't want to see. And I think the the third but there's a third point in this triangle, if you like, so there is Duffy, ah the horrible evil stepmother, there's the companion, this ah beautiful monstrous star, and point three is Patchy, who is a bitch, ah not as in a nasty person as in she is literally a female dog. She's very sweet, she's just not very smart.
00:33:15
Speaker
Right, Sirius meets her early on and Sirius is instantly interested in her because she looks like him and it does turn out she is one of the other puppies who was nearly drowned alongside him.
Maternal Themes with Earth and Sol
00:33:26
Speaker
So, Patchy looks like Sirius and he wants to be friends and all she can say is yeah hello.
00:33:31
Speaker
and And he realizes she's one of the stupidest creatures he's ever met. And he's very disappointed and he goes off and doesn't want to think about her again. But later on, he comes back and Patchy is suddenly interested. Interesting to all the dogs in the neighborhood. interest Every single male dog who can get loose is sitting outside the gate waiting to say hello to Patchy. And Sirius, even though he has like an urgent quest to find a lost magic item, is like, yeah, I've got to stop this. I've got to sit down here and wait. There's nothing else to be done. she's
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah, Sirius simply doesn't have a choice. His dog nature insists that he needs to be with Pachi somehow, anyhow. And there's ah quite a funny sequence of Luminary Soul getting frustrated with him and like, what are you doing? Why are you there? That's that's a random, stupid dog. I think so. Two more lines of parallel. I realize that I'm drawing sort of this, at this point, we're getting very red string. but A star.
00:34:27
Speaker
We're joining a yes we're a great big star. When we're talking about parenthood in this book and we're talking about responsibility in this book and sex and death, what I was going to say is that we have another pair of parental figures in this book. We actually have several parental figures in this book. So wrote there was so many parents in this book. I'm going to start lowkey first because I think this is a very funny parallel to all the bad mothers in this book. We have Tibbles, who is the cat of Sirius' household, whom and She is the companion as well. ah In fact, she's explicitly compared to the companion. um And at first, Sirius hates her because dogs, cats, etc. The cats hate the dog. The dog hates the cats. He's profoundly jealous over Kathleen. The cats used to snuggle with Kathleen, who was the only person in the house who was kind to them until Sirius chases them away. And like the companion, they set up a trap for Sirius to get him in trouble and get him executed. They're in fact,
00:35:24
Speaker
<unk> paralleling the the attempt to get him condemned for murder. um But it doesn't work because their cats and Sirius is sort of a god and therefore smarter than they are. And so he is able to easily see through their trap, ah at which point the cats get in trouble and Sirius rescues them. He comes to their defense because he doesn't want to see Duffy abusing the cats. This is quite clearly pretty terrible animal of abuse.
00:35:54
Speaker
And then after that, they hang out together. And once they start hanging out together, Sirius is able to appreciate how beautiful Tybbles is. And when he thinks about his companion, he calls her as small and white and nearly as elegant as Tybbles.
00:36:12
Speaker
beautiful white cat. And she is, of course, a mother. She's the mother of the other two cats who are called Romulus and Remus. And she is a companion figure. And she is a scheming potential murderous. But also she's a lovely cat, she has an affectionate nature. And she is one of the only two beings in this book who is explicitly described as more beautiful than the companion. So you know, if romance is getting you down, you could try getting a cat. We love it when they're murderous. It's very cute and charming.
00:36:39
Speaker
But ah the other sort of escalating up from Tybals, the best mother in the book, perhaps the second best mother in the book, the best parents in the book, I think, are Sol and the Earth, the the Sun.
00:36:54
Speaker
and and the ground. um We see the Sun mostly, or we see Sol throughout the book, trying to help Sirius, getting very annoyed when Sirius will not go out and help himself and is instead stuck sitting at the gate of a very stupid dog in heat for a week. But Sol is consistently deeply concerned about his creatures in, I think, a very parental way. When the companion comes down to Earth, Sol immediately intervenes politely, politically, but with utmost scorn. ah And she's, you know, she's trying to argue that she has the right to kill this one particular dog. She says to blazes with you and your creatures, they're not important. And Sol says a correction of full agency. Everything in my sphere is important to me. So somehow Sol is able to effectively care for everything, which no one else in the book has demonstrated an ability to do.
00:37:52
Speaker
Right, but Sol is as well um proud. He's got that proud parental feeling about about Earth especially. There's that great bit at the end where Sol sort of sideways asks Sirius, so what do you think of Earth then? And she's like, you know it's a masterpiece.
00:38:11
Speaker
ah But Sol is very smug about how good Earth is. um about And he has this sort of, he's also jealous, much in the same way that Sirius is jealous about his companion, jealous about his, jealous about Kathleen as well. Right, this kind of father husband, yeah jealousy where you're like, is it Is it meant to be parental or romantic? It's really not clear. It appears to be both. Which we will come back to in future books. And eventually, Seoul does get to meet Earth and sort of comes to the realization that, or Sirius does get to meet Earth, and sort of comes to the realization that Seoul has been kind of keeping Sirius from Earth. Out of this kind of jealousy and protectiveness, Seoul doesn't really want Sirius talking to Earth. But eventually, when when hiding from
00:39:01
Speaker
his murderous companion. Sirius crawls into a hole in the ground and in in like every opportunity sequence. And the creature starts talking to him. And at first he thinks it's whatever lives in the hole in the ground. And the the creature starts asking about the companion. Is she, you know, she's so beautiful. Is she as beautiful as Sol? And Cirrus is like, well, I guess they're very different. Is she more beautiful than the moon and Sirius size and He hasn't seen the moon often, but he knows the moon is just kind of a dead white thing. He says, oh yes, he could tell the creature was not at all pleased to hear this, so he tried to explain in terms it would understand. Put it like this, she's more beautiful than the moon, about the same as Sol, but nothing like as lovely as that meadow with the flowers out there. And the voice in the ground is thrilled to hear this. Because of course the voice in the ground is Earth, who is the meadow, and who is the ground, and who is
00:40:01
Speaker
the parent of all everything on the earth, everything on the planet.
Mythology and Sirius' Transformation
00:40:09
Speaker
I don't say mother, because specifically not a mother. Very, very interestingly, Sirius asks, are you male or female?
00:40:17
Speaker
and Earth answers, I have no idea. I've never considered it. I do like that moment. I do think in, I mean, Earth sort of comes across as a mother figure in parallel to Kathleen in the, firstly there's the whole sequence where Sirius goes into a hole in the ground and it is.
00:40:36
Speaker
um and it does does feel symbolically like a return to the mother he'll then also after eating a meeting earth does immediately meet the actual inhabitants of the hall which is a very protective of her cubs and serious tries to go over and make friends and the vixens like you cannot do that i do not want them learning that dogs are friendly dogs are not friendly not if you're a fox cub right especially not in england in the 70s because this is the full fox hunter's outlaw it's it's interesting and kind of fun that despite these very very clear mother parallels mother imagery the fact that like a mother she's very protective of the last figure of this book that we haven't talked about who i think we're going to get to quite soon she's not diana explicitly avoids gendering earth and in a way i think you know soul is more of a father figure than a mother figure but you get you know i think she she does want to destabilize that a little bit
00:41:29
Speaker
I think you're right, yes, Sol is he, so he gets male pronouns. so um but again is is it is not the same as a human mother and father that's really really clear at the same time though it does have like that sort of mythological like gods feeling of you know uh the earth and the sun came together and brought forth life. I think that is really what we are definitely what we're intended to read into the situation uh these are the parents of everything on earth earth is the partner of soul more than earth is soul's child but also kind of soul's child and
00:42:06
Speaker
Yep, yep. In much the same way as eventually we're gonna get with Sirius and Kathleen, but I don't think we're quite ready to talk about the end yet because first we do have to talk about the other the death thread a little bit more. So when Sirius is on the loose running around looking for other different you know looking for the secret of the Lost. It's really such a MacGuffin, the Zoi. It's a magical artifact. We don't know anything about it. It could look like anything. It's very powerful. It really doesn't matter what it is.
00:42:40
Speaker
You do get a sense you're not meant to be able to understand what it is. that It's something that's like way above the level of anything that's ever been born on earth, even soul. And I don't want to. see I don't want to touch it. I don't want to deal with it. It's too big and too powerful for me. But while he's running around, he finds not just patchy, but also a collection of other dogs who all kind of look like him, who are all his his lost siblings, who many of whom did survive and were adopted.
00:43:04
Speaker
ah by other families, and one of whom actually has interesting things to say. And that one, Bruce, the the only one of his sort of litter of siblings who is intelligent for a dog, mentions that he's been out and seen, and he actually I think Sirius actually meets one of these other dogs as well. Well, yes, yeah because it's in fact his father.
00:43:26
Speaker
but There's this another parent yeah we haven't actually talked about. The the mother and father dog, the parents of parentss body, the dog's body. <unk> and Because one thing that becomes interesting is that they're there the the but the dog body is as magical, as mythic as the star inhabiting it.
00:43:46
Speaker
connected to with a completely different strand of myth and power that Sirius has no idea about. And ah when he goes, when he sees that dog, that dog had no interest in him, completely disavows him. It's a strange, cold hound with red ears. And eventually he learns that Every so often, these hounds go on a hunt, and perhaps Sirius and his sibling dogs, ah who look more or less enough like these strange, cold dogs that they can sort of blend in at a first glance, could join this hunt ah if they try really hard and sort of push themselves to the limit.
00:44:26
Speaker
And we're actually given, this is ah classic Donowyn Jones, the story already exists. you If you know the story, you you'll be able to unpick the the puzzle here. We're given very early in the book, Kathleen reads to Sirius what the text calls a book of fairy tales, but is in fact a direct quote from the Mabinogion, which is the sort of collection of Welsh myths written down in about the 12th or 13th centuries. Of all the hounds he had seen in the world, he had seen no dogs the color of these, the color that was on them was a brilliant shining white and their ears red, and as the exceeding whiteness of the dogs glittered, so glittered the exceeding whiteness of their ears. And that is a quotation from the first branch of the Mabinogi, but it is also a description of the dog body that Sirius has found himself in.
00:45:14
Speaker
and with the red ears in particular. And talk a little bit more about the dog body for a second before we move on to kind of the big grand mythic epic finale. um I do think there's a really interesting strain in this book of the various ways in which Sirius' is dog body, which is is a prison, but also important. um The fact that it's half magic is important. The fact that it's a dog is important. um There's various points in the book where, ah you know, like he's he's running around trying to find the mythical artifact.
00:45:41
Speaker
says his green nature became angry and bored to his surprise it was his dog nature that helped him here it was used to being bored and it seemed to be able to stick patiently to its work long after the luminary was howling with impatience so the sort of like self-centeredness and unconstrained that he has as a star is really mediated by the determination and the loyalty and the sort of understanding of what it is to live as a creature that he is imposed upon him by this dog's body.
00:46:13
Speaker
Right, that sequence, I think the first moment when you kind of see Sirius having redeeming qualities, honestly, ah is the moment when he ah comforts and helps and rescues Tybals after she's been punished ah by Duffy yes for breaking a pot or breaking several pots in the pottery shop.
00:46:31
Speaker
which, by the way, the pots are always describing us perfectly ugly because Duffy is such an ugly person that everything she makes must be ugly as well. But the the rescue of tibbles is described as a combination of the series's green self, his star self sense of justice, combined with a dog's hatred of strife in his family. um And it's it's that combination of the sort of great and powerful and ethical star nature
00:47:03
Speaker
with the the the love that Sirius experiences, the dog that improves him, makes him better. As a dog, he sort of learned like he already we know that he already and knows how to experience romantic love, possession, jealousy. He has that already from his relationship with his companion. As a dog, he does learn to love and protect and be loyal to not just Kathleen.
00:47:26
Speaker
ah but also Tibbles, the other two cats, Romulus and Remus, the other two boys. he he you know He actually does learn to have a strong affection for the other two kids.
00:47:38
Speaker
but also lots of people yeah just out and about town as he's exploring looking for the macguff in the zoi he meets loads of people he makes lots of friends with like kindly butchers old men sitting on benches a little old lady whose own dog has died and she really misses him who immediately recognizes that Sirius is smart enough to understand what she's saying and is like well i'm pretty sure that you probably belong to some little girl who's going to be very sad if you don't come back and Sirius who has been intending having first escaped not to come back, it's like I'm just making things worse by being there, I need to focus on this hunt for the zoi, has to go back because of these sort of chains of loyalty and chains of love that keep him attached to this family even though it's by far in his best interest to just leave.
00:48:24
Speaker
Absolutely. I think it might be a good time to talk about the final figure in the book. Yes. Because if we're talking about the mythic strand of the dog's body, yes, so serious sort of, from very early on, it's become clear that there are these magical dogs out there and they are in some way connected to everything that's happening. Yes, serious his own physical existence is down to the fact that one of these magical dogs jumped a fence and and had puppies with Labrador. Yep. A very sweet Labrador. She's so nice. Right. um And eventually he does glimpse the dogs, he sees them out at night. ah And it becomes increasingly clear that there's nowhere that the Zoi can be except in the possession of the owner of these dogs, the master of the hunt. Yes. And the only way to get it is going to be to run with this hunt, which is
00:49:15
Speaker
the wild hunts of mythology and its master is the the otherworldly king of the underworld, um who textually it's complicated what his actual name is, um who he is. ah Earth calls him her dark child. Right. His his existence is hinted at um by Sol, who warns Sirius that there are some dark and formidable things on Earth, ah by Earth who is protecting her dark child.
00:49:44
Speaker
who can't come out with this very strong parental protective love. Right. Yes. And in this case, this is one where Earth is explicitly the protective parent of this child. Sol doesn't trust this child. This child can't interact with Sol. This is specifically a child of the darkness and the night. Because he's a catholic god. Exactly. Because he is. And it's not until the very end of the book, the children who have read the stories, meet this figure that they start putting names on him and they say, you're a ruin, aren't you?
00:50:14
Speaker
and Arorn is the king of the underworld in Welsh myth. Yes, but they also name him as Ryan and Actaeon, who are both sort of mythical ah hunters from Greek and Roman mythology, actually Orion in the Odyssey, I think, is Sirius' own master. They're linked, which is kind of a fun little joke. um And they are also both figures who are torn apart by their own by by the hunt, by Diana of the Hunt, by ah by dogs, by Orion's dogs.
00:50:46
Speaker
And when so when Sirius runs with the hunt, it is one of these very Jonesian sort of mythic sequences um where meaning is not totally clear um and the symbolism feels deep. And you have Sirius experiencing both being urged on to chase a stag, um even though he's exhausted and miserable and everything hurts, he can't help wanting desperately to catch it. And at the same time, knowing that the person who's urging him on, the huntsman,
00:51:14
Speaker
is also somehow the stag. Yes. And it is the Huntsman that they're going to kill, and they're going to tear apart and they're going to eat. Yes. um And then he is going to still be there afterwards. And the symbolism if you like this is I think where it really comes down to this is a book of death.
00:51:32
Speaker
the huntsman as a figure of the death giver who is also the life giver. um The huntsman in well especially in a pre-modern society where people are more connected to their food, um your huntsman is literally going out there and getting you food is the reason you can live, yes ah but also ah is killing animals and that sense of cruelty to animals as a great evil yes runs right through the book and these death at the stag is intentionally horrific and upsetting. yeah And it is also this sense of death and rebirth which we're about to see echoed
00:52:09
Speaker
just a couple pages later with Sirius. um that you know There's the sense that you have to hunt and become the hunted, that you have to die in order to become reborn.
Mythical Elements and Children's Perspectives
00:52:18
Speaker
And Sirius has, throughout the whole book, been hunting the zoi, this strange, mysterious thing. They find it, and immediately, because the the kids and the other dogs and the kids, these sort of very mundane creatures that Sirius has bonded with,
00:52:35
Speaker
throughout that have nothing of the mythic about them except for the fact that they're associated with Sirius and I guess for the other dogs the fact that they're also in a you know they have this this link to the hunt but they're still like most of them are very stupid dogs But it's these, you know, by hanging on to the collars of these other sibling dogs, the kids are, you know, enter this mythic space and immediately start arguing. ah And when they find the mythical artifact, the kids start arguing about the mythical artifact. And the one thing that Kathleen knows is that she can't let her dog touch the mythic artifact. It's dangerous. You don't let your dog touch dangerous things.
00:53:12
Speaker
it It's great, but it's also really striking that all these like mortal creatures, these creatures who are genuinely creatures of Earth, ah seem to understand what's going on better than Sirius does. They get it. Even the dogs get it better than Sirius does. It's this, at least, stupid dogs. Because Sirius' nature is opposed to everything that Arorn is.
00:53:35
Speaker
Sirius is, and and this comes out at the end that the the Zoi is revealed to be like the force of life, if you like the force of movement and motion in the universe. And everyone says, well, then I can't use it. Because I'm the opposite of that. Yes. And Sirius as a luminary, who is presumably immortal, which is why the sentence to death in the beginning was so horrific.
00:53:59
Speaker
just has no concept of what Arorn is and what the underworld is, what death is, in the way that all the children instantly know. yeah And the children instantly know. And actually, side note, what is the John Peel joke? Do you know what that is? So... Oh, John Peel, it's not a joke. John Peel is, I think, 17th or 18th century Huntsman in the north of England. oh he famous famous hunter, a friend of his wrote a song about him, which became a very, very, very famous hunting song. Do you can jump peel that would I googled John Peel and I got a DJ from the 1960s and 70s. I was like, that's a different guy. ah Probably that's probably a different guy. If it's the same guy, I have questions for him. That makes more sense. Thank you. But yeah, the ah the idea is that these mythic figures can be modern as well as ancient that they're
00:54:47
Speaker
They're like ticking off Welsh mythology, Greek mythology, but then they're also saying, oh, it could be just like the figure from the folk song. Right. And they all immediately know what each other. This is sort of a, again, a thread in Diana, when Jones, like the kids know they're able to, as soon as they encounter the myths, they're able to recognize them and they're able to understand what they mean in a way that serious, as you said, can't.
00:55:08
Speaker
and then the so there's so we have the kids and the kids see the zoi uh that iran offers the children gifts the the youngest kid robin says that he wants one of the cold puppies and gets a cold puppy which i'm sure is gonna work out fine The older bullying child who's sort of, you know, over the course of the book has come over more to Kathy's side. He's been fossil hunting. He wants a fossil. He thinks the Zoe is a, sorry, saddle. Meteorite hunting. He thinks the Zoe is a meteorite. He wants that meteorite. He wants to show it off to his meteorite hunter friend.
00:55:46
Speaker
And ah seriously, instantly like that would be a really, really, really, really bad idea. Don't give it to a small boy. you a mean small boy Like we come to have affection for Basil over the course of the book, but he's a mean small boy.
00:55:59
Speaker
he is i mean Well, no, he's explicitly like shown as imitating the behavior of the adults around him. um like Both like the nastiness to Kathleen, which he gets from his mother, but also there's a scene later on where the two boys see Kathleen being bullied by a gang from school ah with really, really horrible racist bullying. And these two stepbrothers are standing on the other side of the street watching and feeling awful and doing nothing about it.
00:56:26
Speaker
And then later on, ah it's Sirius who comes charging for the rescue. And then the police are called for because that's a dangerous dog. It's been attacking children. Yeah. ah And it's the boys who have to speak up and say that's not what happened. That's not why it happened. But Mr. Duffield, the father says, well, why didn't you do anything about Kathleen being bullied. and They're like, we were on the other side of the street, so we couldn't do anything. Yeah, but again, it's the imitating the parental behavior. They don't do anything because he never does. Yeah, which by the way, I meant, to this is going back a little bit to the politics, but I do think it's interesting that there's the whole scene with the policemen.
00:57:03
Speaker
where the policeman comes to take Sirius away for defending himself and defending Kathleen. And Sirius immediately has to make very nice and very stupid in order to get the policeman to go away. um there's There's something, again, with the parallels with Kathleen and her father, there's I think something quite interesting there.
00:57:20
Speaker
But to go back to the end of the book, Kathleen wishes to understand her dog. She wishes that they can speak to each other. And Iran says, I think that's a bad idea. And Kathleen says, no, that's what I want.
Sacrifice, Loss, and New Beginnings
00:57:34
Speaker
And he grants the wish. And right immediately following, they still can't speak to each other. And Kathleen is like, I was cheated. And Iran says, no, you don't know what you were asking for. And then we get to the final sequence.
00:57:49
Speaker
Right. And Sirius takes the Zoi. And it turns out, Kathleen was right. That thing is dangerous to dogs. Some things dogs, you know, a star can touch, but a dog can't. And sometimes you have to die to be reborn. And so having touched the Zoi, Sirius, he's found it. he's He's achieved the terms of his imprisonment. He's a star again. And the dog's body dies.
00:58:16
Speaker
Dead on the ground, Kathleen crying over it. And this again is a parallel to Kathleen's father because we, in the middle of the book, Kathleen's father sends the letter saying he's coming to get her. Then we find out that he's escaped. And then right before this whole sequence, ah right before the big climax, we learn that he was actually killed and escaping. Right. And Kathleen's discovered he's been shot and this triggers her actually to finally fight back against Duffy's cruelty and then to run away from home.
00:58:46
Speaker
um And she doesn't have really a plan at all. And it's Sirius who's trying to find like a way for her to be happy, right a away for himself. And it's this so awful bait and switch in the book, because you're led to believe as you're reading that, you know, Sirius is thinking, okay, well, her her father can just come and get her if we can find a better solution for Kathleen, I'll be able to leave. And I won't feel guilt about abandoning her because she'll be in a better place, she won't need me anymore. And then right before he's on the verge of achieving freedom and he learns that this other freedom, that you know that Kathleen's freedom is never going to come. Niamh It's really, really horrible. it's I mean it's not ah in any way the only time that Diana Wynn-Jones does this really quite strong downer ending
00:59:36
Speaker
we talked about it a bit with eight days of Luke, even the the idea of looming tragedy of the bad thing is coming. ah But in dog's body, I think it's particularly sad because in Sirius's moment of death and rebirth as he transforms back into his luminary self, his star self, ah Kathleen looks up at him and they can talk to him. She's gotten her wish. That's what she wished for. But she doesn't want to anymore. It's, you know, they have this very distant, polite conversation where Sirius is so awkward. so sad. And Sirius is trying to say, I'm alive. I was your dog.
01:00:13
Speaker
Look, and Kathleen says, I'm sure you're very nice. I mean, she she doesn't love a star. She loved her dog. And Sirius the dog was a combination of Sirius the star and the dog's body that he was in. We've seen over and over again throughout the book, how this this personality, this character that we've come to know was a mix of his his composite green nature and his dog nature. And the dog is dead. He's just a star again.
01:00:40
Speaker
That's not all a downer ending for Kathleen, because this little old lady that Sirius has befriended is like, well, I'm happy to take in a sad child who also loved this dog. ah So at least she doesn't have to stay with the awful abusive family anymore. But she's lost the thing but the two things that she loved most in the world. And when we end the book, and Sirius has gone back to his position, is his place,
01:01:03
Speaker
in the universe, and he doesn't have a companion sphere. Yes. Yeah. niy And he keeps his companion sphere empty. Yes. And he doesn't have, yes, because he is hoping somehow that, well, I, what does the book actually say? Hang on, let me find the quote. It's the last The last page of the book, Kathleen is looking at a new puppy, and she says to Miss Smith, the old lady who's adopted her, I was just thinking that Sirius needed me to look after him, whatever shape he was, only I didn't notice because she's been his mother oh yes ah the hood the whole time. time
01:01:39
Speaker
And Ms. Smith says, where there's need enough, away can often be found. And then it says, uh, Polaris often remarks to Sol these days that Sirius loses his temper much less often, but the one sure way to send him into a flaming rage to suggest that he finds a new companion. Sirius will not hear of it. The small white sphere circling his goes untenanted because he hopes that what Ms. Smith said is true.
01:02:01
Speaker
I don't hope that it's true, for the record. That sounds like a bad outcome, honestly.
Exploration of Love and Possessiveness
01:02:07
Speaker
Yes. But yeah, this isn't interesting. This is the book where I think Diana Wynne Jones is attempting to write about being heterosexual. Yeah. And it seems like a bad idea.
01:02:17
Speaker
It seems like a terrible idea. um So it's mothers and fathers again and again. It's sex makes you stupid. It's caring for someone in a parental way. way It's failing to see someone properly because sex is making you stupid. And ah this idea that romantic love in this book is both inextricable from this kind of parental love. They're all intertwined all the way through. Like there's there's no relationship that is not sort of tinged with this and that it's about jealousy and possessiveness and keeping the thing that you love to yourself. Right. And I do want to- Kathleen could have her very own father-husband one day god to replace everything she's lost. And there's there's this quote from reflections that I want to pull out that i even though it's not directly about Dog's body,
01:03:09
Speaker
But Diana Wojone says, many of the stories, the myths were unutterably sad, particularly those in which the gods took a hand. So much so that when I heard the saying, those whom the gods love die young, I thought that though thoroughly unfair, it was probably a profound truth. ah This makes me very worried for David in eight days of look, and it also makes me very worried for Kathleen.
01:03:32
Speaker
Actually, yeah. Honestly, I'm not sure how either David or Kathleen is is poss ever going to survive like adolescence yeah growing
1970s Children's Literature and Writing Style
01:03:41
Speaker
up. You've got this jealous god looking over your shoulder. yeah Protecting you, question mark? Protecting you, keeping you? yeah um it's it's like On the surface it's a hopeful ending, but I find it profoundly ominous.
01:03:59
Speaker
Because Sirius is an ominous figure, honestly. i mean he has He has changed in the book, he has improved. He loses his temper less often than he did. ah His dog nature has affected his star nature that much. He's ah become wiser, more able to understand kindness, more able to control himself and put up with boredom and impatience. More able to form relationships that aren't this singular one romantic relationship that dominates his life.
01:04:23
Speaker
But he still doesn't understand Earth Dark Child. um He didn't understand ah what he was doing to Kathleen yeah by being so determined to become a star again. He was still fundamentally quite selfish. yeah Yeah, it's a weird one. It's it's a weird one. Beautiful. It's like the whole ending sequence. I, you know, I don't think we read out too many quotes from it, ah because I didn't take that many quotes from it, because it's just all of pieces, incredibly gorgeous sequence that seemed ashamed to isolate out bits. It's incredibly worth reading, but it's a very strange book.
01:04:59
Speaker
it is. um It is I think this is actually the first book where I got really hit by Oh, yeah, that's Diana wind Jones prose. Yeah, this is something that I've always admired her for, but it's becoming more visible as she gets more practice writing. And of course, she's written all these early books, basically back to back in about 18 years, the 70s, which is also this, you know, this this period of time, I think, that's very where the the mythical and the numinous is really emerging in children's literature in a way that It hasn't necessarily before. Yeah, she's she's contemporary with what Penelope Lively, Alan Garner? Susan Cooper, ah Ursula K. Le Guin. I happened to be reading ah Tombs of a Toon right after I read this book, which is also about death and death gods and the underworld. And you know there's something about children's publishing at this time that allows you to be deeply real about the the wonders and horrors of the the dark side of existence.
01:05:56
Speaker
Yeah. And Jones talks in an early essay, or actually, it's not that early, it must be from the from the 90s, because she's talking about writing for adults. And she says, I'm paraphrasing here, ah she thought that writing for adults finally, after years of writing children's books will be freeing. ah But instead, she found she was expected to write in cliches more. Yeah. ah And that actually, because as a writer of children's books, she'd always written to be read out loud.
01:06:23
Speaker
she found herself taking that across to adults books, even though adults are not necessarily reading out loud to themselves, ah because otherwise you ended up writing Slop, ah which I remember the first time I read that and I went, huh, huh. And I do actually like, we are both writers. I read out loud my own stuff when I write now. Yeah. And it does make a difference yeah when you hear it. It really does. um Can I say, ah so I just, I just had this thought right now. The other book that's published at the same time as this one is Susan Cooper's Greenwich,
01:06:53
Speaker
which is also about a strange, weird, dark child that's outside of the normal conflicts of the light and that has a weird, mystical object that's taken into possession of itself that the children have to quest after. That is exactly the same here. I think this like period is just when everybody is reading the Mabinogion. Yeah! There's some good stuff in here! My kids!
01:07:20
Speaker
there is some good stuff. I reread it this week and I'm like, yeah, this is good shit. Yeah. What was I saying? The pros now I do want to just pull out one quote. Yes, all the stuff actually where she is writing about serious experience of life as a dog. Yeah, she's got that classic Jones pacing where like the first half two thirds of the book is remarkably slow and then the climax all happens at once. But it's slow because she is enjoying writing dog life. Yes. And it's It's great fun to read as well in the scene where the puppy Sirius enters a meadow for the first time and starts smelling things. And it's just, it's just beautiful, galop-ture sense. What was he looking for in all this glorious green plain? He was looking for something. He became more and more certain of that. This bush? No. This smelly lump then? No. What then? There was a scent beyond which was vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was that that he was looking for.
01:08:14
Speaker
Sirius galloped questing towards it with Kathleen in desperate pursuit and skidded to a stop on the bank of the river. He knew it, this whelming brown thing. He dimly remembered and his hair stood up slightly.
01:08:26
Speaker
But just that firstly, really, really careful control of rhythm, like those short sentences and um and the long ones, the use of those questions. um Just a couple of word choices, galupchas, overwhelming. And then that really humorous description of like, this isn't just how a dog runs around a field, right? I'm looking for something here. Any dog, any dog possibly is on a quest for the zoi. You never know.
01:08:55
Speaker
entirely true. But then when he runs to the river and he meets death and he just stops. Yeah. filming Brown thing where he nearly drowned as a puppy is like, it's gorgeous. It's so good. oh She can write the the integration of the like, comedy of just what it like, I think we've made perhaps made this book sound quite grim. But again, it's so funny. It's so funny. He's so good at writing from the perspective, like what it's like to have a dog, anyone who's ever interacted with a dog will read this book and be like, Oh, yeah, that that is, you know, if you if you put a god into a dog, that's how it would think.
01:09:31
Speaker
And it's just these, you know, these extremely, you know, human recognizable moments of dogs doing dog things and being silly. And then you get these, you know, abrupt, dramatic encounters with with the numinous, with but the the mundane numinous, with death, which we all have to exist you know in in the context of. It's just incredible.
01:09:56
Speaker
And of course, a family pet often is one of the ways in which children come into contact with death early on. yeah um And Kathleen's loss of her dog is that sort of moment of human understanding of this is something we all
Conclusion and Future Discussions
01:10:12
Speaker
have to deal with. That thing that Sirius doesn't understand that all the children do, it is death. It's a part of Earth's existence on Earth is death. And he's never had to deal with it before until this one year ah in the body of a dog.
01:10:27
Speaker
Should we call it there? Let's call it there. This has been ah eight days of Diana Wynn Jones. ah We will be continuing with Diana Wynn Jones' works of the 70s throughout this season. And then thanks for listening. Yep. Thank you very much. Cart and Quitter next, I think. Cart and Quitter next, yeah. We're going to do Denmark. Yeah, we're going to do more about the troubles. Yep. and Even more so, possibly. Yeah. All right. I'm going to stop here.