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Time of the Ghost
449 Plays8 days ago
"People write stories pretending you can alter the past, but it can't be done. All you can do to the past is remember it wrong or interpret it differently."
The horrors of the past, the traps of the future, and being cursed, with sisters.
[NB: this is another one that deals more directly with abuse and suicidality in several forms]
For more on Time of the Ghost, check out Em's Reactor article on Making the Metaphor Literal: Fantastic Reality in The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones. Transcript available here. We'll be back in two weeks with The Homeward Bounders, and a guest!
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Transcript
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello
Introduction and Book Overview
00:00:20
Speaker
and welcome to 8 Days, welcome back to 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm Rebecca Framo. And I'm Emily Tesh and today we are going to be talking about the Time of the Ghost, published in 1981? Yes, think right.
00:00:33
Speaker
yes
Autobiographical Elements and Family Influence
00:00:34
Speaker
i think that's right ah And well, so think we said when we were prepping this one that before we even started talking about this book, we have to go back to reflections and some of the quotes that Diana Wynne Jones has said about her own life. Because while a lot of Diana Wynne Jones books have kind of a couple of central myths that they're organized around, the myth that this one is really organized around is the myth of Diana Wynne Jones, maybe more than any of her others.
00:01:03
Speaker
Right. ah Jones describes this book as semi-autobiographical. ah There are several events, several episodes in it, which are taken directly from her autobiographical sketches ah in her essays.
00:01:18
Speaker
The Time of the Ghost is a book about a weird family of four sisters. Diana Wynne-Jones was one of three sisters. And we'll talk a little bit about that change.
00:01:29
Speaker
yeah But it is, in many ways, autobiographical. Yes. It's a book. that So the sisters, Dinowin Jones had two sisters named Ursula and Imogen. Ursula and Isabel.
00:01:43
Speaker
Isabel. Oh my God, I've done it already. I'm going to be doing this the way. Imogen fictional version. I'm going to be doing this all the way through this recording. there Isabel is the real version and was the next youngest after Diana Wynne-Jones. Diana Wynne-Jones was the oldest. We've talked a lot in previous years about how Diana Wynne-Jones' feelings about being the parentified oldest child sort of crop up again and again throughout her work.
00:02:09
Speaker
Isabelle was the middle one, Ursula was the youngest one. She describes ah Isabelle as beautiful um and isabel or Ursula as incredibly funny.
00:02:22
Speaker
um A white waif child with black black hair and a commanding personality. And because of their particular traits, Isabelle being beautiful and Diana Wood Jones herself being brainy, ah their mother sort of had a plan for all of them, a destiny that they were going to carry out.
00:02:42
Speaker
Or at least this is how Jones remembers it. And I think it is um so much of this book, Time of the Ghost, is about interpretation and reinterpretation of the past. It
Themes of Memory and History
00:02:52
Speaker
is notable that ah Jones's own sons in their sort of reflections on their mother, which are published at the end of the book of reflections as kind of a a chaser, ah seem to have a slightly different view of the family history than Jones herself does.
00:03:06
Speaker
And they say that their aunts have a different view as well. Yes. So a lot of this book is about different people's interpretations of the same events or the same memories. Something that, and we'll we'll get a little bit to the past and interpretation of memories and events of the past as we talk about the plot of this book. I think you pointed out, and you are but very smart to say it, ah that it is very striking that this is the first, you know, she writes Spellcoats, which is her first real female POV book, which is about telling and interpreting the past.
00:03:39
Speaker
um And then her next book that she writes about a girl, about a teenage girl, is in also in many ways about, is about telling and re-envisioning, I think in a very real way, her own past.
00:03:52
Speaker
So
Sisters' Upbringing and Neglect
00:03:54
Speaker
in Time of the Ghost, we have four sisters who are like Diana Wynne-Jones, live sort of at, their parents run a school and have very little time for them.
00:04:05
Speaker
And the one, so, oh my God, i' I'm trying to like, guess we can say from the start that the the sister that doesn't exist in, that doesn't map directly to Diana Wynne Jones' real life is probably the sister we spend the most time no i could i disagree I completely disagree because I don't think Sally is an invention or an addition to the dynamic of three sisters I think what we have here again is the Jones double self ah so in real life three sisters Diana, Isabel and Ursula in the book four sisters Charlotte known as Cart ah who is ah brainy tall, fat, difficult to live with very clever, always reading a book
00:04:54
Speaker
yep Sally or Selena, the second sister, who is anxious, motherly, ah in some ways, constantly nagging the others to be good and to behave themselves, constantly tidying up after them and complaining that no one helps her.
00:05:10
Speaker
Then the third sister is Imogen, who is destined to be a concert pianist because her mother thinks she looks so beautiful sitting at the piano. Right, her beautiful profile.
00:05:21
Speaker
Right, and the younger sister is Fenella, who is, I think, very straightforwardly fictionalised Ursula, in the same way that Imogen is a fictionalised Isabel, that keeps track of the characters. But the question mark hangs around these two older sisters, ah Cart and Sally, Charlotte and Selina.
00:05:41
Speaker
Which of these is Diana Wynne-Jones? I would say it is both of them. I think she's cut herself in half. Yeah, you are right. You are right. She has. But I think the thing that is striking, the thing that is most striking of all the differences between Cart and Sally, the thing that is most striking is that Cart knows that their parents are abusive and Sally believes that their parents are perfect.
00:06:04
Speaker
And this is, i think, the central dividing trait that that sets up a lot of the themes of the rest of the book is that Sally... thinks Sally does not want to or is not able to recognize what is very clear abuse.
00:06:21
Speaker
And that's going to set up what happens to Sally throughout the rest of the book. Right. And the experience of abuse these sisters have is an experience of terrible neglect. So their parents mostly ignore them. And we see this over and over again. There's sequences where the girls find there's been no food left for their supper.
00:06:41
Speaker
ah So they have to go next door and ask the school kitchen to give them leftovers. And the school cook says, well, you can't have that. that's not for you and then if they don't get the school food there'll be nothing um or the fact that uh the younger sister fenella wears an unbelievably ugly clothes hand sewn by cart because all the actual clothes uh have fallen apart after being handed down through the older three sisters and there's nothing left for fenella to wear or the detail that fenella has in fact tied her hair into literal knots over her face and nobody has done anything about it
00:07:15
Speaker
yeah All of this stuff is taken from ah Jones's autobiography. She describes this sort of sneaking in to steal food from the school kitchen. She describes Han making her younger sister's clothes herself.
00:07:28
Speaker
um And she describes the episode where Ursula tied her hair in knots and they were just left there for months. And what she actually says in Reflections is, I found I had to tone down both the hanging incident and the knots in the hair episode.
00:07:42
Speaker
No one would have believed the reality. ah And in the book, these episodes do not read as toned down, so she might have had a point. But when we first meet the parents, so the book begins when one of these sisters has been...
00:07:56
Speaker
has found herself as sort of a disembodied spirit. ah I think, and this is possibly just what I'm reading at the moment, I think Diana Wynne-Jones read Rogers Elaston, The Chronicles of Amber sometime in the early 1980s.
00:08:11
Speaker
And it's kind of there because Amber begins with a main character who's been in a terrible accident. I can't remember anything. and then he And then in Zlasny's version, he then bluffs his way into a lot of information by cunningly confronting his sister.
00:08:27
Speaker
ah But Ghost begins the same way. ah character wakes up and thinks, there's been an awful accident. There's been an accident. Yes. And that's the only thing she can remember. And it just, ah it tickled me as a nod. There are other books Jones does, which are a clearer ah reflection or tribute of ah Amber.
00:08:47
Speaker
ah But this one I do think ah borrows a setup. Yeah, that's my next on my to read list because I feel like I need to read it to prep for the rest of the eighty s But the one thing that, so the one thing that this ghost knows about herself, the very first thing that she thinks about herself is, I'm the sensible one.
00:09:05
Speaker
So she knows, I think from the start, the the thing that she knows about herself is that she exists in relation to, she is one of many. Of the one of many, she is the sensible one. Now,
Ghost's Identity and Family Dynamics
00:09:18
Speaker
when we meet the sisters, we realize that several of them could conceivably think of themselves as the sensible one. I think all of them consider themselves the only sane person in the house.
00:09:27
Speaker
Do think that's true, Fenella? No, I think Fenella actually, especially in the later part of the book, is revealed as one of the most rational actors. She's like, yeah, you don't understand how to handle our father. You have to cajole him. I'm getting what I want out of this. I'm doing what I want.
00:09:45
Speaker
So yes, she's a introduced as like ah a deformed little goblin figure crouching on the sink in her green sack that carts main for her with her hair tied in knots. She seems totally mad.
00:09:57
Speaker
But actually, she's a perfectly reasonable 10-year-old coping with a totally mad situation. it's I mean, they're all perfectly reasonable 10-year-olds coping with deeply mad situations in the deeply mad situation in their own. They're not all perfectly reasonable 10-year-olds. Several of them are several years older than 10, and that's important.
00:10:12
Speaker
um But we will get there. But anyway, so the ghost start so they ghost starts sort of exploring her terrain, whirling around, trying to ground herself and gain trust to her identities. And the first people that she sees are her parents.
00:10:28
Speaker
What she says about her father ah is for some reason she knew him enormously well every line of his bristly head his birdlike face and his thin angry body were known to her exactly she felt dred to him but she was afraid of him too she knew he was always impatient and nearly always angry name for him came to her they called him himself And then what she says about her mother is, she looked like an avenging angel who had already had a long fight with the devil.
00:10:56
Speaker
All the same, the papers that she was looking at should have withered and turned black. The bodiless person in the corridor felt a yearning admiration for this angel lady. She knew they called her Phyllis. So she doesn't call either of them mother or father yet. She doesn't do that until Phyllis, who is actually the first person to sense her presence.
00:11:17
Speaker
The one time perhaps that Phyllis actually pays attention to her or to any of her daughters really deeply in the entire book until the very end, calls her Sally. And then she thinks, and that's how the ghost initially identifies herself as Sally, because Phyllis has felt a Sally-like presence kind of assumed that her daughter's come to bother her, scolded her, and then realized that no one is there and gone back to her work.
00:11:40
Speaker
And in that moment, she calls her mother. And that's how we know who these people are. Right. And it's really sort of striking. the I mean, this is even more than usual. This is a point of view book.
00:11:53
Speaker
It's a book that breaks a lot of rules, a lot of expectations about what a children's book should do. This is, this ghost is the most inactive, this ah most lacking in agency protagonist imaginable.
00:12:06
Speaker
she literally can't do anything. She spends most of a chapter trying to knock over a bin. And when she does manage to knock over the bin, she then can't read any of the stuff she was trying to read inside it. um This ah ghost also, she does start calling herself Sally, but this is questioned a lot early on. We don't definitively find out which sister she is until like,
00:12:31
Speaker
Chapter 12 of this 14 chapter book, ah it's left really, really late um because the conceit of total alien alienation from your identity, total absence from yourself ah runs the whole way through.
00:12:45
Speaker
Sally at the start is a ghost. She's nothing except the name that her mother has pinned on her, which she clings to. Oh yes, that must be me. I'm s Sally. But she doesn't know anything about Sally because Sally is the sister who isn't there. right And actually our ghost goes, oh,
00:13:02
Speaker
They've murdered Sally, possibly. That seems like a thing that might have happened. These horrible monsters that are my sisters, because when she first sees her sisters, the first thing she thinks about them all is how monstrous they look. Vanilla is ah the 10 year old.
00:13:20
Speaker
is a horrible little dwarf in a green sack ah with big insects tied over, you know, on her head or hair tied up in sort of big insect an antennae. Cart is, oh, the description of Cart is so good. I'm going to grab it out directly because we we've talked before about Diana Jones's discomfort with with bodies, with her own body, with with the body of little girlhood, with the body of womanhood.
00:13:46
Speaker
um And when we get Oh, I've got it.
Complex Sister Relationships
00:13:50
Speaker
Charlotte was just as much of a shock to Sally as their dog Oliver had been. She was built on the same massive scale.
00:13:57
Speaker
Like Oliver, she was huge and blurred. Blurred fair hair stuck out round her head. A blurred face like a poor photograph of the angel Phyllis floated in the hair. She was the size of a tall, fat woman.
00:14:09
Speaker
and cased in a dress that had clearly been designed for a little girl. There was about her, blurred and vast, the feeling of a powerful personality, which, like her lumping body, had somehow got itself cased in the mind of a little girl.
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah. There's no question in my mind that this is a self-portrait. Like, it's it's clearly and obviously and so powerfully a description of of a way that Diana Wyn Jones has felt.
00:14:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's and it's the experience of being too big that she talked about ah in her essays when she's talking about writing female protagonists, ah the discomfort with being in a female body that sticks out all over the place and is too big and and too wrong and too ugly.
00:14:52
Speaker
ah Cart is too big for the person she's supposed to be. ah She's a tall, fat woman stuck in a little girl's dress. She's a big, strong personality stuck in a little girl's mind.
00:15:03
Speaker
And I agree with you. I think it's a self-portrait, but it is not a kind self-portrait at all. Neither Cart nor Sally are kind self-portraits. The whole book, none of the book, I think, is a kind, particularly kind portrait to anybody there. It's a powerful portrait.
00:15:18
Speaker
But she even says um that one of the things that she did not capture in Time of the Ghost ah is, which is the thing, but I think I failed to get over in that book was how close we three sisters were.
00:15:32
Speaker
We spent many hours delightedly discussing one another's ideas and look after looked after one another strenuously. And while this is, I think, ultimately a book about, it it it is ultimately a book about the way these sisters love each other.
00:15:45
Speaker
um And the fact that their love for each other is what keeps them alive and together. To get there, you have to get through a lot of how miserable it is to be living with three other adolescents when you yourself are also a miserable adolescent.
00:15:59
Speaker
Right. This is a book about how they all love each other, but how also they all hate each other. and There's a really great sequence where the three sisters whom the ghost has found, Cart, Imogen and Fenella, are sitting around the table having a sort of horrible sisterly squabble.
00:16:17
Speaker
And one of them just sets back, pauses and says, this is the moment when Sally would shriek, I hate you all. And the ghost was just in the process going, I hate you all! And that is, I think, our first and strongest clue. Or...
00:16:29
Speaker
There are several clues. and you know that So the ghost is indeed Sally. It's put into question throughout much of the middle of the book, but for the first couple chapters, when she's just existing, after she sort of gets this identification of Sally, as she moves among her sisters, desperately trying to figure out what's happened to her and to make them hear her,
00:16:49
Speaker
There are various moments where she finds herself thinking like like like the I hate you all moment, um thinking and identifying with the things that they are describing, what Sally would do, what Sally is like.
00:17:01
Speaker
And the ghost does those things at the same time. I think there's a really interesting sort of process of collective identity making. She feels and knows like she is herself when she is one, the role that she plays in this foursome.
00:17:13
Speaker
Right. And I think increasingly throughout the book, you get the sense of Sally as a person, a product of her community, a product of of the other people around her, ah the ghost, when she does finally acquire any kind of body ah in please um in the world of the sisters, it's because...
00:17:34
Speaker
I don't want to get onto the blood sacrifice too early. It's because of blood sacrifice. We'll go into that more detail. but But her body is is donated to her, is given to her by others.
00:17:45
Speaker
ah Her selfhood is given to her by others. But first she has to sort of spend this time without a self. And I do think it is so, so striking that we come to this book right after ah Magicians of Caprona, which is about a loving family where as soon as you shout, someone comes...
00:18:02
Speaker
to pay attention to you and try and fix what's wrong. And the entirety of this book is Sally the Ghost shouting and shouting and shouting and desperately trying to make herself heard and to convey the fact that she is in terrible danger and she doesn't know who she is and nobody can hear her.
00:18:21
Speaker
Nobody will pay attention. she has to go to incredibly extraordinary measures, like use all of her effort to make any impact on on her family, on the world.
00:18:33
Speaker
Right. I think... thinking sort of structurally about the book this really jumped out at me when i was rereading it last night i should say by the way that time of the ghost is possibly my favorite diana wynne jones i think it's an extraordinary book i think it's brilliant i've written essays about it before i'm gonna link them in the show notes because it's really good the essay that you wrote is really really good so what i was thinking about on this reread was structure and it's a short book it's 200 page book uh 14 chapters And the first seven chapters are one continuous narrative of this ghost exploring the world of the sisters, who they are, what they do. And a lot of it is very, um I think i i I said to you, it could be a play, right? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think it would make a fantastic play. I would love to see this staged. And the ghost plays the role of the audience because She lacks so much agency. She can't do anything else.
00:19:23
Speaker
The ghost watches everything playing out as an audience member. And some of it is extraordinarily funny. It is remarkably horrible. Some of it is both very funny and very horrible.
00:19:36
Speaker
But she gets to know her sisters. She gets to know the school. She sneaks into bits of school she hasn't seen before. She breaks in on a Latin lesson that her father is teaching at the school. I should mention, the girls don't go to this school.
00:19:49
Speaker
This is a boys boarding school. ah So it is sort of an old fashioned, quite fancy um education for young men. The girls have to catch the bus like to a different village to go to a local school.
00:20:01
Speaker
Right. And at one point she says, i think, so she she accidentally, she confuses the boys class for her own class and then is horribly embarrassed. But she says, you know the boys school is more real to me than my own school because that's what consumes all her parents time and attention and energy.
00:20:16
Speaker
Right. ah So you get Sally's ghost experience of the three sisters, ah of the parents, of the school, of the boys. And it is revealed that some of these ah young men in the school seem to be having just as miserable a life as the girls stuck out in what was formerly the school stables, which is where they live.
00:20:36
Speaker
yeah And you get sort of some of the teenage boys from the school sort of sneaking over to spend time with the sisters. and There's a little group of three of them. There's Ned, Ned Jenkins, who is the artistic one and does cartoon drawings of the family dog, Oliver.
00:20:53
Speaker
There's Will Howard, whom they all call Howard because it's a boys boarding school. So everyone exists by surname. ah And we're not allowed to look forward, but Howard draws spaceships. I think there must have been a real Howard at some point who drew pictures of spaceships because this is turning up.
00:21:07
Speaker
yeah We'll see this again.
Character Analysis: Julian Adamant
00:21:09
Speaker
And there is an older boy, a fifth former, ah which I had to sort of do a bit of counting in my head because we don't use most of these terms anymore. But a fifth former is, I think, about 15.
00:21:19
Speaker
um And his name is Julian Adamant. And he's almost always referred to by ah first name and surname. Yes, ah there is something different about Julian Adamant. And there is something different about Julian Adamant. I don't think Julian Adamant shows up in any of her other books.
00:21:35
Speaker
Which is odd because he is a remarkably striking portrait. Yeah. And like all, you know, all of her other characters, even in this book, which is perhaps especially in this book, which is so strongly autobiographical, you can see templates.
00:21:49
Speaker
for where they're popping up bits and pieces of them are like a finella for example is just such the archetypal or youngest sibling who is you know in creative and medicine as that' for butnna is arguably a not particularly distinct character from duck in in the spell codes yeah no you're 100 right we've seen the youngest At least twice already we've seen Fenella. Fenella is Doc and Fenella is Johnny and we're going to see Fenella again.
00:22:16
Speaker
But Julie and Adam and never appears before, never appears after. Now, I think it is possible to claim that Julian Adamant has maybe a prototype in Cousin Ronaldo in The Magicians of Caprona.
00:22:31
Speaker
Julian Adamant is characterized, even as a 15-year-old boy, by a sense of power. The moment he comes into a room, he is in control of that room, not because he's bossy or demanding.
00:22:42
Speaker
ah He just has a natural ability to take control of a group of people. A sense of danger, terrible danger, like a wild animal ah is the way the ghost describes it at one point.
00:22:54
Speaker
And he is a bestial threat and also a sense of terrible sexual attraction. Yes. And in fact, explicitly suicidal sexual attraction. Being into this man is self-destructive.
00:23:09
Speaker
And both Cart and Sally, that is the two sisters who represent Diana, are keen on Julian Adamant. Yes. The first thing that we see, so the first description of Julian Adamant is that he's dark and striking looking with brows as black as vanilla's and eyes nearly as blue and luminous as Imogen's.
00:23:27
Speaker
And he had a wide, curiously red mouth, which looked as if it was laughing all the time. Julian Adamant's red, wet mouth is something that we will be seeing a lot of throughout this book.
00:23:39
Speaker
ah It's obviously the thing that Sally the ghost is paying the most attention to. And the first thing that we see him do, so we see that Cart is clearly sort of into Julian Adamant and the ghost is relieved because the ghost at this point believes that she is Sally.
00:23:56
Speaker
And for some reason, she's very relieved that it seems like Cart is the one who's into Julian Adamant. Like that is somehow going to save her from something in the future. ah Save her the ghost.
00:24:09
Speaker
And we see they're all sitting around this table. and Cart is probably 15, I think the same age as Julian Adamann. We know that Sally is 13. So she's she's described as younger because Julian's the oldest. So I think Cart is probably 14.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah. Cart, notably, is we we'd we'd just seen her. And this this also really stood out to me because she's 14. She's ah got described as having an adult woman's body. And she's wistfully asking if their parents might let her have a bra.
00:24:35
Speaker
which really she needs. And Fenella says no, it costs too much money. Yeah. The girls are, they have nothing, they're given nothing, not even the very basic things they need.
00:24:46
Speaker
And they're certainly given nothing to help them over the horrible transition from little girlhood to womanhood, which Cart and Sally are currently experiencing and which is being miserable. But we know that Cart is at this point.
00:25:00
Speaker
um And while they're all hanging around at the table, Julian Adovan reaches out and just smacks her on the bum. And everything freezes. Because this is scary to all of the other younger children sitting around in the room. They don't know what to do. That this has just happened. That this there's a presence of sexuality is in this room with them.
00:25:23
Speaker
Right. But the way Jones writes about this freeze moment from the point of view of the ghost is it's not just like a ah description of the people stopping. It's the whole world stops and it starts to fall apart.
00:25:35
Speaker
And it's the experience of the ghost's world kind of took turning into threads and the threads coming apart from each other. And behind the threads, there is something else. ah a grey, grubby, maggoty thing.
00:25:48
Speaker
And yeah that is an image we have seen several times in these opening chapters. Firstly, in very early on, while she's exploring the world sisters, Sally finds what seems like one more silly children's game.
00:26:02
Speaker
And it's a little hut that they've built out of old chairs and bits of carpet in the garden. It smells fantastically horrible because it's been there for months and it's rained so it's all mildewy and moldy ah yeah inside the hut there is a doll and this doll has a name her name is monogun uh which i think it is not coincidental that this sounds like morrigan that which is sounds like morrigan sounds like morgan uh i think these are very very intentional echoes we this is This is actually the first Diana Wynne-Jones book in which we get a surprise King Arthur cameo.
00:26:37
Speaker
I know, it's so funny. When I hit it, was like, what? Because I think of surprise King Arthur as like a Jonesian signature move. And I thought, I can't believe it's taken us this long to get to one.
00:26:49
Speaker
um But yes, Monaghan, this Monaghan, this Morgan. You did point out that there might also be surprise King Arthur in Dalmark. Yeah, all right. Yeah.
00:27:01
Speaker
But yes, this is, this is, ah this there's the Arthurian mythos deep in this book in the most unheroic and unmythic way possible, but we will get there.
00:27:15
Speaker
Right. Anyway, Sally encounters the Monoghan doll and we have a description. Monoghan was hideous. A year in the wet hut had turned the rag face livid gray and fungus had puckered it until it looked like a maggot.
00:27:27
Speaker
The rest of Monaghan was misshapen before she went into the hut. One time Cart, Sally, Imogen and Fenella had each seized an arm or a leg, Sally could not remember whether it had been a quarrel or a silly game, and pulled until Monaghan came to pieces.
00:27:40
Speaker
Then Cart, in terrible guilt, had sewed her together again as badly as she had sewed Fenella's green sack and dressed her in a pink knitted doll's dress. The dress was now maggot grey. To make it up to Monaghan for being torn apart, Cart had invented the worship of Monaghan.
00:27:57
Speaker
What an origin story for a goddess. Right. And it becomes clear that the the worship of Monoghan has accidentally, maybe accidentally on purpose, tripped onto something real. That there is an ancient and powerful goddess, demon, monster, something dwelling on the on the downs, on the hills near the school.
00:28:19
Speaker
yeah The hills which are fact called Mangan Downs. ah yeah The name Monoghan is taken from Mangan. And... this goddess has ah happily accepted her place as being worshipped by these children ah in among many other things she's doing in different times and in different places.
00:28:36
Speaker
And the worship of Monaghan is described as lapsed. but then Everyone's got too uncomfortable and stopped doing it. Except it becomes really clear that it's really stuck in everyone's head all the same.
Identity Crisis and Exploration
00:28:47
Speaker
And when the ghost first sticks her head into Monaghan's temple, her her wet hut, she sees three black feathers stuck in the ground in front of the doll.
00:28:56
Speaker
oh Yes. We will later discover... several more feathers stuck in uh kept secretly in sally's drawer in her bedroom the bedroom on the girl's share and we will discover there is a black hen that has gone missing somewhere yep and what we will also discover as sally kind of explores her situation you know other thing this is like i don't know if uh sleep no more ever made its way across the atlantic ocean But Sleep No More is a a sort of interactive theater production that ran in New York for a very long time. I think it might still be running, but it's at its very end, where you, the audience member, are a ghost exploring a haunted hotel. You're given a mask. ah You're set to wander around and explore a haunted space as you see various scenes from Macbeth and from Rebecca playing out around you. And you get to sort of follow characters as they go from scene to scene.
00:29:51
Speaker
And this feels very much like that Sally is the ghost exploring the scene, following players, trying to figure out what's what. Trying to connect the dots while also being quite flatly incapable of connecting dots ah so that we the reader get what's going on with the missing black hen and the worship of Monaghan long before Sally does.
00:30:09
Speaker
Right. She barely pays attention to the feathers. What she does pay attention to is as she's upstairs, she sees that there's a bunch of art on the wall. ah The kids have put together sort of an art exhibit of all of their drawings and paintings.
00:30:21
Speaker
um The worst painting is one of a mother. Right. ah It's one that Sally's done. She signed it and it is a fundamentally, horrifically sentimental mother and child.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yes, we got the description. Yes. The mother was the next painting. She was stretching out her arms, not to a sink, but to a fat simpering baby. baby Sally could remember painting this, and it was awful.
00:30:46
Speaker
It embarrassed her it was so bad. The faces simpered, the colors were weak and bad, and the shapes were floppy and pointless. The mother was like an aimless maggot with a pretty face on top. So there's our maggot image again. We've had it in the monogun doll, the maggoty grey, and here's the maggot who is the mother reaching for a baby.
00:31:04
Speaker
And then at the moment that Julian Adamant's sexual threat enters the scene, Sally is sort of torn away um or the world starts to fall apart. And behind this history this of world that she's been exploring at the sisters, there is nothing but this grey maggoty power.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yes. And there's so there's a sort of web of connections, I think, that are all tied together by this imagery of the maggot that we see over and over again. There is Monaghan, this ancient power of worship that is toying with Sally, the ghost that is behind everything that she's seeing in the past.
00:31:41
Speaker
ah There is her mother, whom this idealized vision of her mother, the the avenging angel that she yearns towards, who gives her purpose and identity. right This divine female power.
00:31:54
Speaker
Right. And the description of what started the worship of Monaghan, you know, there were four children, they tore her apart ah to make it up for her. They started worshiping her is such a like horrible mother myth. Yeah.
00:32:09
Speaker
Yep, that's a story about, oh no, we've destroyed our mother, now we must worship her forever. And actually, Phyllis does present herself to the girls as destroyed. like There's the sequence where she comes in when they're all in bed and she's telling them off. She's complaining about what they've been doing.
00:32:27
Speaker
ah because they'd be making a lot of noise and and she looks so tired she's completely exhausted because she's put all her energy and all her time into running a boarding school um yes being in fact a mother for all these hundreds of boys who were not her own children Yeah. Oh, what's the thing she says? ah Okay, the boys are all away from home and they need attention. Besides, boys are helpless and girls know very well how to look after themselves.
00:32:56
Speaker
So the excuse that she gives herself for not taking care of her daughters is that her daughters are fine. They can take care of themselves. Except... Whenever they try and take care of themselves by, for example, going to school and asking for food, they're scolded for being in a position, for making everyone's lives harder, for being sort of a parasite on their existence just for existing.
00:33:19
Speaker
And it's noticeable that you occasionally get little glimpses of how this might have all appeared to an outsider. Like there's a sequence where the ghost reads Imogen's school report that's just been left on the side gathering dust.
00:33:31
Speaker
And at first Imogen's got a B in music, which given that she's supposedly going to be a concert pianist when she grows up seems a bit strange. ah But also what actually jumps out is the like pastoral report ah where it says Imogen's worked really hard, but still seems acutely unhappy. Please, can we discuss?
00:33:48
Speaker
and Sally the ghost, Imogen's just always unhappy. Right, why would that be notable in any way? Right, and in fact, all sisters are constantly describing the way Imogen behaves, where she goes silent, she starts to cry, ah she says everything's hopeless, um she can't imagine the future, and they oh, Imogen's grieving again. Mm-hmm.
00:34:08
Speaker
but like This is a pretty clear picture of somebody who is unbelievably depressed, a really, really unhappy child, ah Imogen's grieving, and they all they mock her for it. Cart tries to comfort her. The others ignore her.
00:34:21
Speaker
But it's the language that they all use around it. the way they all echo the same phrasings actually reminds me of the way Sally talks in the scene with their mother, where she starts to talk in their mother's voice. yeah The ghost figure starts to echo the things that she thinks her mother would say. It was one of Cart's silly remarks. It was one of Fenella's silly remarks.
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah. um So I think this language of grieving to dismiss Imogen's misery ah is again taken from their parents. And, you know, we've talked before about how all, you know, increasingly Jonesian protagonists, you know, in Spellcoats, for example, in in Drowned Amet, Jonesian protagonists always echo a little bit of the villain of the book. The the villain of the book is something someone that they see themselves in, someone they could become.
00:35:04
Speaker
And all of these sisters are in one way or another echoes of their mother. um They reflect their mother, they identify with their mother. Imogen, who is the only one of the sisters who is described as beautiful as a child, she's strikingly beautiful.
00:35:17
Speaker
looks like their mother. She acts like a ministering angel. Sally has entirely adopted her mother's way of thinking about herself and her sisters in their future. Like they're all, they've they've they've all sort of taken their identities from their mother. They can't help it.
00:35:32
Speaker
One thing that jumped out at me in sort of rereading Jones's reflections on her actual, like the ifff does distinction between the fictionalized autobiography and the actual autobiography is actually when she talks about we just saw it as normal yeah I can't stress this too strongly how ordinary this seemed if anyone showed us a factual story at that time in which our particular problems were represented we were bored and disregarded the story as just ordinary or by the time we had reached our teens and were dimly aware that our life was by no means ordinary we responded with acute distress
00:36:05
Speaker
And here actually she's talking about the limits and the failures of the problem book as a ah method of writing for children. ah the The story with a ah real problem, which the story will show the child how to cope with.
00:36:16
Speaker
If it's just normal to the child, they don't recognize that it's a problem. Yeah. They're either bored or distressed by it. um And yeah from this, I concluded very early on that it was both unproductive and unkind to write the kind of book that was a factual presentation of any social problem.
00:36:33
Speaker
Teachers are wholly insensitive to how helpless a child is before problems imposed by parents or society. Yeah. Yeah, and this is a book about helplessness.
00:36:45
Speaker
And it's also a book in which in order to show the sort of monstrous distortion of their lives, she has to completely dissociate herself from it. She has to you know rip away her own identity and memory and come to the situation with 100% new eyes and look at these, ah you know, these figures. This is a ah ah girl who's too big for her body. This is a desperately unhappy girl. This is a, you know, a very strange little girl and and force herself to recognize them and start to recognize herself in them. But to see them as these sort of almost like Edward Gore-esque caricatures first before she sits throws herself inside it.
00:37:26
Speaker
And that's the only way to start seeing this situation for what it really is. I think, how did I get onto that? I was starting to talk about the structure of the first seven chapters of the book. Yes, sorry. All the way back then. And we got we got off track because there's so much to say. And I think really necessary, especially to understand the role that Monaghan played in the very beginning as a figure of divine motherhood, of monstrous neglect, um of the...
00:37:52
Speaker
the threat that lies behind the scene of sexual harassment when Julian ah slaps Cart. Right. um Because that is the third link between like this these maggot figures, the the maggot that is Monaghan, the maggot that is the idealized mother, and the maggot that is Julian Adamant.
00:38:11
Speaker
I don't think the maggot is ever represented as him, rather that he opens the way for it to come in. if you like, that his actions are what give the Maggot its power to um disassociate Sally from herself.
00:38:27
Speaker
So ah we've got this whole long sequence of s sally of Sally the Ghost as audience, as totally lacking in agency, watching these different scenes play out. And eventually, and we're still in the first half of the book, ah she gives up on these awful sisters who she thinks she hates.
00:38:44
Speaker
And she goes to look for Sally. Because she's discovered that the Sally of the four is not dead, as she initially thought. It's actually all a cunning plan. The sisters are trying to prove to their parents they don't care and need to pay more attention by faking Sally's death.
00:39:01
Speaker
Charmingly, this plan simply doesn't work. The parents never, ever notice that Sally was gone. Nope. um I say charmingly, it's horrendous. Yes. It's really, really upsetting.
00:39:12
Speaker
Yes. But the ghost goes looking for Sally, ah who is actually staying over with a friend. And this is where we sort of get the really, the first doubt that the ghost is Sally, because the ghost expects, having you know decided throughout the course of these first seven chapters that she probably is Sally, that ah The ghost sees Sally and expects to feel a sense of kinship, a sense of instant recognition.
00:39:35
Speaker
And she feels nothing. She feels no connection to this 13 year old. Right. Sally like just looks like a normal 13 year old girl to her. Like... but there's no sense of that's me.
00:39:47
Speaker
yeah And in fact, she watches what Sally then does.
Rituals and Coercion
00:39:50
Speaker
And Sally has her own agenda when she's staying over at a friend's house. um And the ghost watches the whole thing and goes, I don't remember any of this.
00:39:58
Speaker
And I don't see why she's doing this or what she feels about it. And what Sally does is striking because she sneaks out in the middle of the night across the field to a a stand of dead elm trees ah where she meets with Julian Adamant.
00:40:12
Speaker
Uh-huh. Yeah. I think you said that this book is, in a way, a horror novel. and I think it's horror. i think I think the book works on such a sense of tension and secret central monstrosity.
00:40:28
Speaker
But the secret central monstrosity, the this this moment at the act exact midpoint of the book, is Sally's meeting as a 13-year-old with Julian Adamann and what they then do.
00:40:39
Speaker
yeah And what they then do is pretty clearly... ah a satanic ritual or something inspired by the if you like the the aesthetics of a satanic ritual ah it's Julian who killed the black hen and he makes fun of Sally because she was upset by it yes um and he's he's actually got it ah he's buried it in that elm grove and he digs it up along with a bunch of chains i think they're meant to be bicycle chains yep And they do the ritual summoning of Monaghan that Cart wrote, but but it's changed. It's been rewritten.
00:41:13
Speaker
Either Sally or Julian has added a lot of words about ah inflaming their souls with bloodlust that weren't there before. And then Julian starts anointing ah Sally with the blood of the chicken he killed and draping the chains on her in order to dedicate her to Monaghan.
00:41:32
Speaker
Yes, I'm just going to read this passage. Once more, the ghost threw herself at Sally and tried to make her run away. But Sally just stood there, her eyes shining and blinking quietly in the light of the candles, letting Julie and Adam and Draper in heavy chains as if she was bewitched.
00:41:49
Speaker
The Monaghan feeling was in among the candles now, hanging its heavy presence on Sally as heavy as the chains. It knew the ghost was there. It was cruelly amused at the ghost's efforts to frighten Sally. But to be on the safe side, it threw contemptuously to both the idea that this was just a game.
00:42:05
Speaker
Just a game Julian Adamant was playing. As a result, Sally felt a mixture of disgust and amusement and horror. It seemed awfully silly and gruesome that the clanking chains should be sticky with hen's blood, which shone in the candlelight mixed with rust and earth.
00:42:19
Speaker
It was a silly touch when Julian Adamant saved a separate length of chain to hang round his own neck. We have bound ourselves to thy service, O Monaghan, he said, and laughed to show it was silly.
00:42:30
Speaker
Right. And Julian's laughter at things which are not funny has has been striking before because he was he laughed and said it was a joke. uh in the sequence where he's sexually harassing cart uh and it's part of the way he keeps control of a situation is to laugh and to smile and there's a lot of attention paid to his sort of smiling wet mouth yes oh it's so creepy uh it's so creepy and i actually i i think i messaged you and i said this this is a sex scene isn't it it's
00:43:02
Speaker
I think 13 year old Sally, ah by implication, lost her virginity to this very nasty boy in an elm grove in the middle of the night. yeah i go It fades to black. Monaghan's power becomes so great that the ghost is totally shaken out of this entire timeline and it ends up somewhere else.
00:43:22
Speaker
And we'll talk about that in a minute. ah But Sally and Julian are left having chained themselves, bound themselves to Monaghan's service and sealed it with a blood sacrifice, the murder of the black hen.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah. um Which Monaghan encourages the ghost to go and drink the hen's blood. And it's clear that doing so would be a terrible, terrible mistake. And it is, you know, fundamentally this is a scene where a 15-year-old boy takes a 13-year-old girl out into the woods and teaches her a funny little game that involves chains and blood.
00:43:56
Speaker
That is what we know. But also ah tells her, also they're both treating it as a joke, as something not serious. Don't think too hard about what's happening to your body. Don't think too hard about them The implications of what you're saying, don't think about the blood.
00:44:10
Speaker
I think even even if it's not a sex scene, it fills the same purpose as a sex scene. And in fact, we will find out that in the future, Julian Adamant has been Sally's no good boyfriend for seven years.
00:44:24
Speaker
Since this scene, since the events of this these two days that the ghost is experiencing, which... are so, you know, something about this event and something about these seven years have been so traumatic that they have completely dissociated her from her identity, which is a trauma response.
00:44:40
Speaker
She can't, you know, looking too hard at some of these scenes, she can't witness them, she can't fully remember them, she gets shaken apart and ends up back in the future.
00:44:55
Speaker
Right. Because this is the point at which the ghost, you know, in absolute terror, thinks she's about to confront Monaghan. ah Right. the The scene with Julian and Sally fades out and she starts to see a monstrous maggoty creature wrapped in white like a mummy and is disgusting. And she's horrified by it. And then sort of she slowly comes to and is like oh, that's my foot.
00:45:17
Speaker
Yeah. It's not fade to black. It's fade to foot. which I think is an extraordinarily funny cut. But also bathos of the surprise of what actually is happening here is the Sally and the physical, real s Sally is in the hospital looking at her own foot, which is swathed in plaster because she is in hospital and she has been very, very badly in injured.
00:45:43
Speaker
There's been an accident. Yep. We found out on page one. There's been terrible accident. This also is the, so this is the third part of the link between Monaghan and their parents and Julie and Adam and right is that Sally is the sister who does not want to recognize and cannot recognize her parents' abuse. It's abuse, ah whatever they want must be correct. She lets them hang, she lets Julie and Adam and hang chains about her.
00:46:06
Speaker
And I think this is really, really the same as her accepting but what that what her parents tell her about her life is correct. She lets her parents hang chains about her. She does not protest.
00:46:18
Speaker
She lets Julian Adamant hang chains about her. She does not protest. And she dedicates her life to Monaghan in the same way that she dedicates her future to her parents. Right. And we discover, like, almost at once we we find out more context for the accident.
00:46:32
Speaker
We are given what happened to Sally, which is that she was thrown out of a car. Yeah. and And the way she describes it doesn't describe something that happened to herself. It's like she's so watching it from a distance. This disassociated trauma response.
00:46:44
Speaker
She sees an angry man arguing with a woman in a car and eventually shoving her over, throwing her out of the car door. Her foot gets caught in the seatbelt and she's dragged along the road behind the car and then finally breaks loose and the car drives off without her.
00:47:00
Speaker
And this is what has happened to Sally. Yeah. She describes this. She describes seeing the girl fall out of the car. She tumbles just like a doll helplessly to the road and like a doll went tumbling for yards and yards and When at last her foot came loose, the car door slammed shut and the car sped away, leaving the doll-like crumpled lady lying at the side of the road.
00:47:20
Speaker
And this also is a link between Sally and Monaghan, a crumpled, abandoned doll. Sally is part of the villain of this book, or the villain of this book is part of her.
00:47:32
Speaker
Yes, the ways in which she has sort of taken on the role of of Phyllis, ah in insisting that everything's fine, that everything's perfect, that that there's nothing to... nothing to be angry about here, yeah you like.
00:47:45
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. Has made her monogun servant. Yeah. Now what I think is fun also in this sequence is even though she knows she's just watched Julian Adamant throw her out of a car, she's still thinking, but Julian Adamant isn't important.
00:48:01
Speaker
I don't really care about him. i have no emotions particularly about him. And then Cart comes to visit her. Actually, no, I mean, Carl's not the first sister to pop in.
00:48:13
Speaker
True, true. The first sister to pop in, ah confusingly, appears to be Sally. Yes. And this is like this is the identity disabilisation point where the patient in the hospital bed goes, wait, what?
00:48:26
Speaker
I thought I was Sally. but and But she meets this very miserable, unhappy woman ah who looks a bit like ah the 13-year-old Sally yeah grown up and goes, ugh.
00:48:38
Speaker
then wait, which one am I? Right. eats So it's not as if coming back to the future answers any of her questions. It actually makes it more confusing. She thought she was pretty sure she knew which sister she was at the midway point of the book. And now she doesn't again. Right. Yeah.
00:48:55
Speaker
And seeing all her sisters grown up is, you know, this, it takes her a moment, you know, to recognize all of them as they come in one by one. When she was a little girl, she knew exactly who she was among these sisters. As an adult, she has no idea who she is.
00:49:08
Speaker
Right. But we meet the adult cart who has gone from being this tall, fat, too big teenager to being a pretty university student. ah we We learned that she's a student at Cambridge.
00:49:21
Speaker
ah So she's had the sort of brainy career path so far that her parents wanted for her, which is of course the brainy career path that Diana's parents wanted for her and which she took when she went off to Oxford. um And Cart like ah I feel like Cart is kind of brought in to fu fulfill the role of, and now I shall explain some things in intelligent words.
00:49:42
Speaker
And in fact, right because you've stopped being so clever ah because she talks, because Cart analyzes Julian Adamers. I think he really, he represented our suicidal urges. And you're like, thanks Cart.
00:49:53
Speaker
ah Do you have any other notes on the book you'd like to give us? Right. oh But it is because it's, you know, they, they didn't, you know, none of us really cared two hoots about him, even you.
00:50:04
Speaker
And it makes me wonder if Monaghan wasn't really a manifestation of our common thirst for excitement or our suicidal urges or something. So Julian Adamant and Monaghan are both just like, there they're bad ideas, but they don't matter in and of themselves so much as how the fact that the sisters picked them up matters.
00:50:24
Speaker
Right. it's It's sort of a sort of I'm trying out, but it's their externalisations of the sisters' urge to self-destruction and the urge to self-destruction, which makes it so hard to choose between the sisters to decide which one you are because they've all got it.
00:50:39
Speaker
And it's there because they are so miserably abused and neglected by their parents. um
Family Dynamics and Trauma
00:50:46
Speaker
there's I mean, the sequence where early on, little girl Imogen hangs herself.
00:50:52
Speaker
Yeah, which is a real thing that Dana Woodrow describes as having happened. That's another autobiographical episode, right? Her her sister Isabel, they hung from a bean using skipping ropes.
00:51:03
Speaker
And Imogen has a similar experience in the book. And Sally is horrified because of the way that none of the sisters seem to realize she is suffocating and dying while they're doing this.
00:51:15
Speaker
ah This idea of of of slowly... destroying yourself trying to look pretty and that's the goal of the the hanging episode she's trying to look like a pantomime fairy so slowly yeah it's not a subtle metaphor no it's not it's slowly destroying yourself trying to look pretty while your sisters shout advice and nobody notices you're dying um yeah yeah no jones is allergic to subtlety it's great
00:51:40
Speaker
um But then the ghost realizes that she sort of is able to go back and forth. You know, she's she's she's able to sort of push herself back into the past again, which is when we start getting these thoughts about time.
00:51:51
Speaker
What Cart says as, you know, the the ghost or the the present ghost, the present day sisters sitting in bandages, healing from this horrible injury, is sort of trying to explain to her sisters what's going on. Something happened seven years ago. i was that ghost.
00:52:08
Speaker
And Cart says, people write stories pretending you can alter the past, but it can't be done. All you can do to the past is remember it wrong or interpret it differently. And that's no good to us. But of course, it is exactly what they need to do is remember the past and interpret it correctly.
00:52:25
Speaker
um Because over the course of the next, the back half of the book, the next seven chapters, where we're skipping between the ghost going back, trying to influence events and witnessing events as they occur, and then coming forward again and talking about them with her adult sisters to try and make sense of them and try and figure out if there's a way to release Monaghan's hold on her. Because Monaghan, having dedicated herself to Monaghan's service, it's been seven years, Monaghan will take a life.
00:52:54
Speaker
Right. Unless she's cheated somehow. Right. So she's been given this opportunity somehow to see if she can save herself from Monaghan, from the um the the power of Monaghan to claim a life after seven years.
00:53:09
Speaker
ah One thing that jumps out at me, actually, is that this is the Jonesian thing of the adults get pulled into the action with the children. ah Oh yeah. Adults in the future who are the adult versions of the sisters and the friends, the boys from the school, ah they are deeply invested in helping the children, but they can only do it by discussing and reinterpreting and advising each other on what happened in the past. What did the ghost do? And they all remember this episode, right? They all remember that ghost was there and that they did something, ah but they're trying to figure out what exactly they did and how or why it worked, if it worked and if it's possible to change anything.
00:53:48
Speaker
And they remember it fuzzily and imperfectly. And that leaves room for movement, I think, room room for alteration. Because for, and you know, there there's these two sort of visions of how time works, right?
00:54:00
Speaker
There's how time works for humans, for the sisters, which is you can remember things differently, you can interpret them differently. And that is the way that you can, that retelling the past can impact the past. Reliving the past can impact the past.
00:54:12
Speaker
And then there's the way it works for Monaghan. Monaghan being a goddess exists, it's said, in all time bands at once. So she is simultaneously seven years ago and now and in the time of her prime when she has warlords rampaging around, you know, doing sacrifices in her honor.
00:54:28
Speaker
And all of those times are real to her. Changes can happen at all times to Monaghan. Changes cannot happen at all times to human children. And it's this sort of simultaneous, this double reality of how time travel essentially works or how how the past works as is really interesting. interesting Right. it's it's It's the mythic in the everyday again, which is which is a Jonesian concern and has been since eight days of Luke.
00:54:50
Speaker
ah But here the the mythic and everyday running alongside each other is kind of they're running into separate streams ah where human experience of time and divine experience of time are completely different, but also strongly overlapping.
00:55:05
Speaker
Yes. And Sally is borrowing a little bit of the divine experience of time in doing these jumps as someone who is both alive and dead, sort of simultaneously. It's almost like you have to pass through death to get power.
00:55:18
Speaker
Yeah. And I think I mentioned should to you, ah this is the old, I was like, oh, this is the only book that's so fundamentally about death where there's no death in water. And then eventually they go on this quest to the downs, to the barrows, and the woods around them sound like the sea. And Cart says, this whole area used to be underwater. I'm like, all right, I take it back.
00:55:38
Speaker
Yeah, because the the the chalk downs in where the barrows are, chalk is a formerly underwater landscape. Yeah, but before before we get to the the barrows, though, um well for we have to well first we have to do just the ghost i think but ghost's quest to figure out who she is as she goes back and looks at each of her sisters, like, all right, if I'm not Sally, who am I? we Can I see myself in you? Right, ah so this sense of um doubled self.
00:56:09
Speaker
Obviously, we've got the duality of Cart Sally as self-portraits of the ah shouting, angry, difficult, too big teenager ah versus the anxious, trying hard to be good, hate you all teenager.
00:56:24
Speaker
ah Yeah. So that's a doubled self, right? But also, especially once the ghost has encountered the adult version of the sisters and is trying once again ah to identify herself among them, ah we have the doubled self, which is the siblings.
00:56:40
Speaker
The I'm you and you're me of we have these shared experiences. You and i understand each other are the same in some way. Am I you?
00:56:50
Speaker
Could I be you? Which one of you am I? Yes, there's the, you know, i've reading Four Quartets broke me because now I keep hitting these moments and thinking, what, are you here? Well, see, I'm broken too, but like in a less highbrow way, because I have been replaying Persona 5, which I told you. And the key, Persona is explicitly a video game series about the Jungian self.
00:57:14
Speaker
There's a cut scene about it. um But the the key words the seat of the sequence are, I am thou, thou art I. And I keep going, oh, we did it again. did it again, thou art I. But right, so Sally goes on a quest as the ghost.
00:57:28
Speaker
Well, the ghost who thinks she might not be Sally after all goes on a quest to find out who she is. And this time the children are aware that she's there. ah They manage to figure it out. And the clue is actually the family dog keeps both growling and whining affectionately at her.
00:57:43
Speaker
Right. The family dog knows that she's one of the sisters, but also it's very weird. Right. But it is also noticeable, like Fenella can always tell when the ghost is there. um Yes. And Cart could usually tell and Imogen can't seem to tell at all.
00:57:57
Speaker
ah And Imogen is the one who's actually most scared of the ghost. But the point is, at this point, we actually do have a classic that Jones hasn't done for a while. Somebody picks up a book and goes, I know the story we need.
00:58:11
Speaker
yeah And it's Carp. The brainy older sister grabs the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, and goes, it's in one of these. I know it is. You boys. So she tells that the boys who are at this fancy school with their with their Latin teacher father, which of these books is it where they talk to the dead?
00:58:27
Speaker
And the boys don't know. And Carp's like, I thought you were having a classical education. which is great. Very funny moment. I will say as a person who has had a classical education, it's the Odyssey. She is talking about sequence in the Odyssey where Odysseus performs a blood sacrifice, fills a trench in the earth with blood and uses it to summon the ghosts of the dead from the underworld and give them the power to speak.
00:58:51
Speaker
And this is what the children decide to do. They decide to do some Odyssey and witchcraft. Yep, and so they send out a general request for blood from the students of the school. ah It is perhaps the funniest sequence in the book is the blood sacrifice.
00:59:06
Speaker
It's small boys turning up demanding to be punched in the nose for the price of a pound 40, which the girls don't have. So they write out endless IOUs while 10 year olds stand around. About 60 pounds, which is ah we are post-decimalization now, but only just. This is quite a lot of money. Uh-huh.
00:59:26
Speaker
And all of these 10 year olds are standing around in a circle, dripping hopefully into a bowl. Right. And Fenella goes and steals some ox blood from the kitchen. And that goes in the bowl. um And the girls actually cut themselves open and drip blood from their wrists into the bowl.
00:59:42
Speaker
And there's a quite a funny sequence of Cart trying to do it and be like, why is it so hard to cut your wrist? People are doing it in myths all the time. Right. That is one of the, you know, the ways of committing suicide, which again, suicide is like that as you're running Coming back as the underlying theme.
00:59:58
Speaker
So you get this sort of group collection of an enormous bowl of blood and the ghost is watching that. This is horrifying. This is really disgusting. I don't want anything to do with this giant bowl of blood. And in fact, because the girls have made such a huge fuss about collecting all this blood...
01:00:13
Speaker
ah They get caught. And there is a both funny and horrible sequence where their father himself turns up and first the boys have to hide. And one of them ends up hiding under the kitchen sink with two girls standing in front of him to hide. rise Because they're meant to be in lessons right now.
01:00:29
Speaker
ah And meanwhile, himself is trying to tell off the girls. But the way he's found out is the school cook has realized what happened and she's called him in and himself is longing. And and and the book says he what he wanted to hit them and call them bitches.
01:00:46
Speaker
But he's not going to do it in front of the servant. So there's this miss really, really nasty tension of all the girls know that this man is violent when he's angry.
01:00:59
Speaker
They're all waiting for it to happen. Everyone's waiting for it to happen, but it's super clear that he can actually control himself and he is choosing to control himself to protect his own status.
01:01:10
Speaker
But if they were, if there was no one watching, if he had the power of isolating these girls, he would be hurting them. Yes. I think himself is the actual villain of the book.
01:01:25
Speaker
yeah The portrayal of him is largely comic, ah but there's the seat there's a moment later on when Sally says she's spent the seven years since dedication trying to please himself and Julian Adamann and eventually realising that she can't please himself because he just doesn't care enough, so she spends her whole time trying to be everything Julian Adamann wants her to be.
01:01:46
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, so this is the only time that we actually see their father interacting with the girls. She, he's a presence throughout, you know, a background presence throughout the back of the book. They, they hope, and they hope that their mother is going to come help them. They never expect that their father is going to come.
01:02:02
Speaker
Sally yearns towards him and is afraid of him. The one time we actually see him there is when he's, about to shout and rage and call them bitches. ah we have We have seen glimpses of him with the boys.
01:02:14
Speaker
And I think it's pretty clear that as a teacher, he's very good. ah He gets on well with his students. They like him. They make jokes with him. like there's There's a moment where he snaps at a student, the student comes up with a comical response, and someone in the back of the room whispers, 15 all.
01:02:32
Speaker
It's a game. It's fun. It echoes actually a moment where the ghost has seen older boys playing tennis against each other. Because, of course, that's a tennis score. um But also we've seen himself sort of going out with a group of boys and a metal detector to investigate a possible Roman horde that he's heard about. And eventually he's going to dig up this metal that's been found that is Julian Adamant's chains and the dead chicken.
01:02:55
Speaker
And this scene with the girls. He's having a great time. The whole time we see him in the school, laughing at the school stuff, taking care of the boys. he's ah There's ah a side of him that Sally is deeply drawn to and admires.
01:03:09
Speaker
Jones writes about her own father. that he was he he He ran this conference centre that ah ran courses for young people. And she describes him as an educator and entertainer who could hold a room.
01:03:22
Speaker
And she says that himself is a portrait. And I think it's quite a heartbreaking portrait of this man who is capable of being charming, expansive, delightful, but none of it's ever for you.
01:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, and we also see the echo of that. So all of the girls echo their mother, but Cart also specifically echoes their father. And there's this really, really interesting contrast where we see adult Cart and Sally thinks, oh, I've misjudged Cart and, you know, thinking all these horrible things about her in the past. i thinking iss such all Adult Cart is a good and loving sister and Sally thinks she's wonderful and is like deeply warm when Cart says, listen up.
01:04:03
Speaker
Kat actually says, look, I see you this badly injured. It reminds me how much I love you. You have got to save yourself. You've got to get back there and be the ghost. Right. And then she gets back and the first thing she sees is teenage Kat, who has inherited their father's awful temper and is absolutely kicking off because she's woken up and she's a bad morning person. Right. And she is it's comic, but she is raging. She is a physical threat. The other sisters are scared of her.
01:04:29
Speaker
She rampages downstairs. She destroys some furniture because she wants to get her hands on the other girls for waking her up. And she can't. ah This is think you said and I think you're right that this is another echo of Ogre. This book is an echo over downstairs. It's a rewriting of Ogre downstairs to get it make it harsher and and more bloody and more real.
01:04:47
Speaker
um And Cart is is the Douglas here. Cart is the bestial eldest who is who is both a protector and a threat. Yes. And that's their father, except that the difference between, as with ah Douglas and the Ogre, the difference between Cart and their father is that when she is not being terrifying and raging,
01:05:05
Speaker
She does listen and pay attention ah and and tells this you know can tell the knows the sisters in deeply as as the people that they are, which is something that the their father, who can't even get their names right, and actually in this scene, they call him out for it because he rampages in and starts yelling at them all indiscriminately. He does not notice that Sally is not there, but he mentions her name several times because he he can't tell the difference between his daughters.
01:05:32
Speaker
And Fenella tries to call him out on it. It's great. e I love every moment when Fenella is the most honest of the girls. She just doesn't waste time lying. Like, yeah, you don't know who we are, do you?
01:05:43
Speaker
It's brilliant. It's funny because it's, ah you know, it's said several times about Fenella that Fenella doesn't know how to explain things. It is physically difficult for her to explain things straightforwardly. But in many ways, she is the most straightforward. She just says what she thinks.
01:05:57
Speaker
And she doesn't think necessarily the way other people think. I think that Fenella has a little bit of that sort of ah the the sideways child, ah the child child who thinks in in a different way that we see in the Crestomancy books.
01:06:09
Speaker
um But what that comes out is her being sort of more more direct and knowing where knowing where the ghost is, seeing exactly what their parents are at all points. um And just not bothering, you know, not being able to explain it in the way other people might expect to hear it.
01:06:23
Speaker
Right. Anyway, blood sacrifice is where we're at. Blood sacrifice. yeah We're in the sort of the the the comically awful telling off sequence, which ends with Carl ordered to get rid of the blood.
01:06:33
Speaker
And she does like... a very silly subterfuge where she manages to hide the blood and but get a different bowl and pours that bowl ostentatiously out in the garden. But they save the blood.
01:06:44
Speaker
And then do a ritual. And Cart is high priestess. Cart, every time there is some kind of ritual moment in the book, earlier they tried to exercise the ghost. Cart grabbed her prayer book and started reading out common prayers.
01:06:58
Speaker
Cart leads the ritual of um giving the ghost this blood sacrifice so that it can speak. And the ghost is appalled. It doesn't want to do it. It's so gross.
01:07:10
Speaker
Right. It's disgusting. But... I found this sort of really striking as a reframing, as a sort of as an example of the idea of of the reframe, the reinterpretation, which changes the past.
01:07:24
Speaker
The ghost suddenly sort of flashes back to the future where she can hear the doctors and nurses around her as she is very seriously injured, calling for more blood. and And she, when she's back in the past, she suddenly newly understands the gifts of blood from her sisters and all these schoolboys as a ah transfusion, a donation.
01:07:44
Speaker
Here is life given to you by other people in a desperate attempt to save you. It's a blood sacrifice in the noblest possible way, which is the exact opposite of what Gillian Adamant did when he killed the black hen because he wanted to kill a black hen, when he indulged in violence and cruelty for its own sake.
01:08:05
Speaker
So this blood sacrifice, Sally drinks the blood or the the ghost takes the blood and manifests to the to the children and explains the problem. Kind of.
01:08:17
Speaker
Kind of. It's, ah you know, she's her she comes through like a bad television signal, a strange broken mutter and moaning pieces of words. And she says things like, Monaghan, Monaghan, help, help future now, only you, help blood Monaghan, seven years, help life, dying, seven, help.
01:08:36
Speaker
um Which isn't very helpful. Right. But it is just enough information to really worry the sisters and their friends. And they organize an expedition to placate Monaghan.
01:08:48
Speaker
They're going to go out to Monaghan's place on Mangan Downs. They're going to ride out there on their bikes and they're going to make offerings to Monaghan to try to redeem Sally's life.
01:09:00
Speaker
And it's all the central characters. It's the four sisters. It's the three boys. It's also poor Audrey, Sally's friend, who she kind of ah befriended in order to have an excuse to spend a night away from home and is now ah vigorously shedding, having decided that it wasn't much fun to spend a night at her place and she wasn't very interested in her anyway.
01:09:18
Speaker
um but The only reason Audrey is involved in any of this is that she was an excuse for Sally to be somewhere she could sneak out to meet Julian Adamant. Right. And they all go and they all attempt to sacrifice something to Monaghan in order to try and placate her and and ask her to exchange these things for her life.
01:09:37
Speaker
And this is when we go up on the Barrow Downs. Yeah. which is positively Tolkienian and ah they call it the dreamscape and it is a dreamscape and it's very beautifully described.
01:09:49
Speaker
Jones is sometimes at her best describing in this book, like some of the colours, the shapes, Even just just read the opening chapter. that Everyone can can read the essay I wrote on it.
01:10:02
Speaker
You can link it in the description. I have a lot of feelings about this book. It's astonishingly well described. And of course, our ghost character is eventually revealed to be an artist or desire art.
01:10:15
Speaker
And we've seen like little glimpses of Sally the artist all the way through, including her very, very bad drawing of a mother. Yes. And we've also seen a very, very good drawing that she did that she feels no connection to at all and doesn't recognize. And I think that's that is also really, really striking to me in this portrait of Sally, how instantly she recognizes her bad art and how disconnected she feels from her good art.
01:10:38
Speaker
Right. Are you only the worst art you've ever made? Are you only all your most embarrassing and sentimental impulses? Is there anything in you that's actually good? um So they go out to the Downs and they go past the barrows and the ghost is able to perceive that all these barrows are haunted. Yeah, it's so this is real horror. It's ah she began to see things sliding and changing and dissolving in the gas. These were things which had been done in honor of Monaghan.
01:11:08
Speaker
Dim blood flowed, an axe and now a knife glinted as it struck. phantom mouths open to scream all these and hundreds of others like them melted and moved and reappeared as they went down the slope right so that that is like on their way to this like sacrificial center of monoghan's place but even before that they're going past the ghosts uh and the ghosts are actually sending up alarms and warning monoghan that they're there uh so that they're surrounded by monoghan's power and monoghan's servants on all sides and it is very very very creepy yes uh but the children
01:11:42
Speaker
Mostly, do it. they They get to Monaghan's place and they make sacrifices. And the ghost is able to recognise that Monaghan takes the sacrifices even though they aren't good enough and they won't save the ghost's life. She's going to take what she wants anyway.
01:11:59
Speaker
Because Monaghan is cruel and Monaghan doesn't play fair. She takes everything. She gives you nothing in return. And the only child who refuses to take part in this is Imogen, who goes, this is creepy.
01:12:09
Speaker
You're all horrible. And she leaves. She away. She's not the only child who refuses to take part. Sally and Julian also don't take part. Sally and Julian they will not leave. Yep.
01:12:22
Speaker
They've already made their sacrifices. But right. All the others ah sacrifice various things or try to. The only thing Monaghan refuses is the family dog. yeah Because he's got a bad leg, which means he's an imperfect offering. He's not good enough.
01:12:37
Speaker
Right. And the rest think they're sacrificing small things. But of course, Monaghan works on the level of the symbolic. So ah Howard, one of the boys, has a gold tie pin with a Union Jack on it, which he throws in.
01:12:48
Speaker
He says, sacrifice of gold. And ah in the future, ah Howard has moved to Canada. He has been kicked out of the UK because he sacrificed his UK tie pin to Monaghan.
01:13:00
Speaker
Right. he's like He's lost his homeland because... And we we in fact find out that he was very unhappy about this and tried to run away from home when it happened, but he couldn't escape. Monaghan took what what he gave her without realizing he was giving it.
01:13:12
Speaker
And in the same way, um Audrey has been picking a bunch of flowers ah with Ned, just casually. she She throws down the bunch of flowers and we discover she then spends the next seven years bitterly humiliatingly in love with Ned who never returns her feelings.
01:13:28
Speaker
Because Ned has drawn a picture of Sally, which he's thrown into the ring. And Sally sees that the thing that he sacrificed is the picture of her. And it's like, oh, that's why he's always so interested in getting coffee with me.
01:13:42
Speaker
Right. And Fenella also makes a sacrifice and she sacrifices a bit of her brain. She says just the part that girls do A-levels with. yeah so So her academic ability. Yeah. ah But the ghost is watching all this in horror and despair because it's just not good enough. It's not good enough.
01:13:58
Speaker
And she goes back to the future and tells them all it wasn't good enough. Nothing we did was enough. And at this point, the book's actual heroine turns up. And I would say that this book does have a heroine and it is not Sally.
Imogen's Sacrifice and Redemption
01:14:12
Speaker
Sally is, again, our viewpoint character, our protagonist, but she is neither particularly... There's not not much to admire in her, let's say. And I think that's intentionally a very cruel portrait of who Sally is and how many ways she's failed.
01:14:28
Speaker
But there is a character who consistently has been the most moral, who stands up to Julian Adamant on multiple occasions. ah The only one who's not fascinated by him. Right. Who sees through him, who sees through their parents.
01:14:42
Speaker
And this character is Imogen, the acutely unhappy Imogen. It's one noticing, actually, that Jones dedicated this book to her sister, Isabel. Yes, absolutely. is Imogen who now reappears in the future and says, listen, there's one more thing that we can do. You have got to get that ghost to go back and make me do a sacrifice again.
01:15:02
Speaker
And it's notable at this point that as we've seen the sisters in the past and the future, Cart and Fenella are introduced as monstrous as children. And when they first show up as adults, they are beautiful.
01:15:14
Speaker
They are happy. They are glamorous. They are, in fact, I think, strikingly, perhaps Diana Wynne Jones's most positive portrait of beautiful and glamorous adult women that we will ever meet. It's all right if she's your sister.
01:15:25
Speaker
Right. She looks at Cart in you know looking so fashionable and hot in her like university jeans. just like It was awesome. It was a reflection of the confidence that she felt inside showing outside. And Fenella shows up in in makeup and in glam clothes and having cajoled money out of himself for it. And the narrator is like, you go, Fenella. This is wonderful.
01:15:45
Speaker
But Imogen, who is beautiful as a child, is drab and miserable and unhappy as an adult. In fact, this is the the thing that caused confusion for Sally. When she saw adult Imogen the first time, she went, that must be Sally. Right.
01:15:59
Speaker
Because that can't be Imogen. Right. So wait, who am i But no, the patient in the bed, the the ghost, the girl who is doomed to die seven years after dedication was always Sally. And it was Sally who spent seven years hung up on Julianne Adamant, Sally who got thrown out of the car,
01:16:16
Speaker
But it's Imogen who is now, who's grown from this very unhappy child to a just miserable, depressed adult woman who is currently at the music college. Yep. Learning to be a concert pianist. Despite the fact that one of the things that we've learned in going back is that Imogen, despite having great technical skill at music, doesn't play music like it's alive.
01:16:38
Speaker
There's a scene where Sally, the ghost, is hearing Imogen practice, and they actually start talking. It's one of the few moments when Imogen can kind of hear her, and they have this conversation, semi-conversation, and Sally's like, well, don't you play it? You know you have to play it with more feeling, or you have to practice more, and Imogen goes, I think I hate it.
01:16:54
Speaker
And then someone else comes and the conversation is interrupted, an image and Imogen realizes there's there's no one there. This is actually a really similar portrait, I think, to the portrait of Lenina in Cart and Quitter.
01:17:05
Speaker
It's yeah a beautiful but very unhappy woman who is being forced into a musical lifestyle and someone else's vision of her future that she does not want. And it's also how Jones talks about her sister Isabel and their mother's sort of vision for her as a child that she would one day be a ballerina.
01:17:22
Speaker
ah eventually it becomes clear that Isabel was never cut out for this career at all. It was just what their mother said. Yeah. And there is a bit of rewriting and reinterpreting the past here on multiple levels, because what she says about Isabel is that there was ah a night when Isabel realized, it was told by one of her teachers that she would never be a professional ballerina.
01:17:39
Speaker
And it was the work, you know, it was a horrible night. ah You know, she was so she was depressed and, you know, Diana Wynne-Jones thought that she might, you know, die, that she was frightened by how upset she was.
01:17:49
Speaker
But in the past, ah Sally is able to go back and convince Imogen to make this, to make a heroic sacrifice, the supreme sacrifice.
01:18:01
Speaker
the sacrifice of her music career. It's brilliant, actually, this whole sequence. Firstly, it's the one moment where the sort of mythic world of the past fully penetrates into the future, because what happens is not the ghost goes back to Imogen and convinces her, but they manage to bring time close enough together that the little girl Imogen is brought forward into that hospital room with all these adults around her saying, this is what you've got to do. And it's the adult Imogen who turns to her and says, you know what to do, you know what you have to give.
01:18:30
Speaker
Yeah, and she does. Imogen goes back and she knows how to talk to Monaghan. She knows how to sell it in the way that none of the others do. ah She says, the supreme sacrifice, it's better than a life.
01:18:42
Speaker
I'm going to give you honor and glory. You'll get cheers from the masses and the applause of the audiences. You'll win prizes and have people writing your life story with all sorts of glorious experiences for you and other people.
01:18:54
Speaker
I'm going to give you years of hard work and the prospect of my serene profile, contemplating beauty and relaying it to others. The rise of my beauty into the limelight. I'm giving you my musical career. Right.
01:19:07
Speaker
And we've seen again and again, right, that Monaghan cheats. She does not play fair. What's great about this climactic sacrifice is that Imogen is cheating too.
01:19:18
Speaker
Because even at age 12, she knew perfectly well she didn't want this musical career. She didn't like it. She hates it. And also, it's completely made up. It's perfect because it's made up.
01:19:29
Speaker
It's all in her imagination. That's right. And Sally is then able to say to Monaghan, but I'm not a perfect offering, am I? I'm all in bits. Right. This is perfect.
01:19:40
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with it at all because it it's a dream concocted by a little girl and her mother between them. Right. And Monaghan accepts Imogen's sacrifice, ah which releases the adult Imogen from having to be a musician, which she
Art, Identity, and Resolution
01:19:55
Speaker
hates.
01:19:55
Speaker
Right. It's reinterpretation of the past. She has real, you know, in the seven years in the future and only seven years in the future, she's able to look back and be like, I already gave this up. I don't have to do this. Right. Right.
01:20:07
Speaker
And at that point, Sally knows she is going to recover. She is going to survive. Yeah. She's escaped from Monaghan's bargain. She's not going to be killed. And she's also survived. So Sally and Imogen are mirrored as much as like Sally and Cart are the two halves of Diana Wynne Jones.
01:20:24
Speaker
But Sally and Imogen are mirrored. They are both frustrated artists. They've been living together. They're both very unhappy as adults. And there's this description of the two of them living in a flat together, kind of mirroring their own unhappiness and frustration back at each other.
01:20:38
Speaker
And Imogen's grieving ah Sally's self-doubt, which the book, you know, she has this this period of, I don't, you know, I don't know whether all these sacrifices were worth it to save me. And everyone goes, oh, come off it. And in the same way they go, oh, come off Imogen's grieving. It's a different kind of depression, but they're both very depressed.
01:20:54
Speaker
And Sally realizes that she does love art. She loves, you know, the one thing that she can think of that's good about herself is that one good painting that she did. And she wants to go on and make more paintings. The fact that she wants to do more art is what's going to push her through to survival. Yes.
01:21:08
Speaker
And in fact, it's the art made out of the horrible experience she's just had. She wants to paint the things she's seen as a ghost. yeah ah She wants to reinterpret them with her adult artistic skills.
01:21:19
Speaker
And it's this is is triumphant, this heroic moment of, yes, I am going to live and I'm going to paint. I'm going to live and I'm going to write, maybe. Yeah, absolutely. that is That is, I think, the way in which Sally most profoundly reflects that.
01:21:33
Speaker
the The girl that Diana Wynne-Jones is always writing, the the little girl who was an artist, who was a creator, and who is using her powers of creation to remake the past. But then, of course, we do get a punchline.
01:21:46
Speaker
Yes, we get a punchline. Monaghan cheated too. Monaghan said she'd take a life seven years from that night of dedication. She didn't say whose. Yeah. And we discover at the very end of the book that Julian Adamant crashed his car up on Mangan Downs and died in the crash.
01:22:02
Speaker
Bye, Julian Adamant. No one cared enough to try and save you. No one cares. No one's sad. Nobody bothered trying to save you. You never got to be a ghost because ah you were never good enough to think about the past. You never mattered at all. That I think is the most profound thing about Julian Adamant yeah is that he did not matter.
01:22:20
Speaker
But the other thing, this happens one page before. What's happened is their mother has finally turned up. Right. She's finally turned up. She's managed to get away from the school because even though she didn't drop everything to run up when she heard that her daughter was the plane. finished all her work first.
01:22:38
Speaker
She had to pack all the boys' suitcases at the end of term. But she did come because she does love Sally in her own... She comes with tears in her eyes. She kisses Sally and it hurts.
01:22:50
Speaker
Yeah. And she says she's going to come and stay in Sally's flat. And Sally's horrified. Right. And she brings the one thing that she remembers Sally caring about, which is the Monaghan doll.
01:23:02
Speaker
She says, i thought you, know I found this and thought you might want it. And Sally was shit not. So, yeah, right. The total failure of understanding at the end.
01:23:15
Speaker
um Her mother has kept this this doll safe all these years. She's stored it in the linen cupboard. She's clearly dried it, washed it, tenderly looked after this doll, which represents failed mother love.
01:23:26
Speaker
Yeah. So in the last pages of this book, it's like it's this striking contrast because we have the triumph. Imogen and Sally have have freed themselves from the the curse of Monaghan, the curse of their mother's expectations. Perhaps they're going to live. They're going to find things that they care about. And it's triumphant. Early on where the ghost says what? No, it's not the ghost. I think it's one of the ah it might even be Imogen says, why am I cursed with sisters? And that's the book, right?
01:23:51
Speaker
I'm cursed with sisters or are you cursed? With your sisters. Exactly. So they've broken the curse. It is a happy ending. But also on the last page, we have these three things linked together again. We have their mother and we have Monaghan and we have Julian Adabern who's just crashed himself to death in the woods.
01:24:10
Speaker
Right. there's a triple monster of abuse, yeah of neglectful abuse. You talked to me about um collective self, right? Yeah. Yeah.
01:24:20
Speaker
About the self that you make by defining yourself with and around and against other people. And the self that Sally makes out of Monaghan and her mother and Julian Adamant.
01:24:32
Speaker
is so hollow, so empty, that at the start of the book, she's a ghost. There's nothing left of her. And I think that the implication is she was a ghost as her adult self as well. There was nothing it inside her. ah the um By letting herself be defined by these abusers, she shrunk down into nothing.
01:24:51
Speaker
yeah And it was by rediscovering the love of her sisters, ah how much they love her, how much they're willing to sacrifice for her, how much their friends love her and are willing to sacrifice for her. Because ah Ned and Will, just as important, Ned and Will Howard.
01:25:06
Speaker
The fact that they see her as someone who is worth sacrificing for and worth loving allows her to start to see herself that way. It's reinterpreting the past in yes really powerful way. It's so good.
01:25:19
Speaker
Yes. So this is the the book where Diana Wynne-Jones makes her own spell code out of ah the pieces of her past. Her own story turned into art, reinterpreted through art, ah divided up into multiple selves.
01:25:33
Speaker
Yeah. And after this... And recreating a self out of it. It is so raw and so real that I think, you know, we're not supposed to look forward, but I will cheat a little bit and say after this... Nearly two decades before she ever writes about sisters again.
01:25:48
Speaker
She writes a lot about siblings, but never about sisters. Right. It does feel a little bit like she's exercised something here. ah so A personal ghost, perhaps. Yeah.
01:25:59
Speaker
Shall we call it there? Let's call it there. Awesome. Oh, and next, sorry, real quick. Next week, we'll be doing Homeward Bounders. And we're going to have a a guest, a guest appearing for for the first time on that one. So look forward to it.
01:26:19
Speaker
Okay, ah so we had to come back here real quick because we realized we forgot to think of talk about King Arthur. Right, and you can't not talk about King Arthur. So um just at the very, very end of ah Time of the Ghost, on her way to find Imogen, the ghost encounters another barrow.
01:26:38
Speaker
And she's seen the tombs of Monaghan's servants up on the downs. This is not like that. This is a barrow that she finds in a quiet woodland, which she describes as being like church.
01:26:49
Speaker
And she encounters the ghost who lives in it. And it's the ghost of a king. And he's waiting. He's waiting for something. He's waiting for someone to come and wake him up. He asks, are you here to get me? Are you here to wake me up?
01:27:04
Speaker
And she says, no, I don't know who you are. Who are you? And there's this awful pause. And the ghost says, I have forgotten. yeah And this is our first King Arthur cameo.
01:27:20
Speaker
ah Yeah. And it's it is so striking to me that this is a reflection of Sally. It's Sally's future. It's this is what happens if you're a ghost for too long. You forget who you are.
01:27:32
Speaker
you're You're lost and dissociated. You're left permanently dead lurking in Monoghan's shadow. Monoghan is the only thing this ghost remembers. And he is afraid of her. And we said, didn't we, that Monoghan as Morrigan as Morgan feels like a very intentional echo.
01:27:49
Speaker
Yes. And Sally sees this ghost and recognizes it as another, it's an it's another echo of our heroine, Sally, who is another echo of our author. And it's the heroic ideal.
01:28:00
Speaker
It's it as a haunting. Yeah. Right. That's the King Arthur bit. See you next week. Yeah. See you next week.