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The Homeward Bounders
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"There are no rules, only principles and natural laws."
This week we're joined by the brilliant Adrian Tchaikovsky to discuss heroes and NPCs, gods and demons and sacrificial victory, and the worst fate that can befall anyone: endless nonconsensual cricket.
Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rq7yK8p_adhlQzjyvK3087hiQAV8NqLw/view?usp=sharing
We'll be back in two weeks with Witch Week!
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Overview
00:00:19
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to another episode of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Framo. And I'm Emily Tesh. And we are also very excited this week to be joined by a special guest, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Hi, Adrian.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hello. Thank you very much for having me on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. This is really exciting for us. ah You are our first guest and we are so, so happy to have you. Before we dive into talking about the Homeward Bounders, which is this week's book and probably my favorite Diana Wynne Jones book, I would say, like of the whole over.
00:00:52
Speaker
Do you maybe want to talk a little bit about why you decided that you wanted to come on for this book in specific? Yes. So there are there are two Diane Wynne-Jones books in particular that had a colossal impact on me.
00:01:05
Speaker
Basically, at that very formative time around the like 13, 14, it was my sort of second biggest reading explosion. We had, I did not know how lucky I was. my The school I was at had an incredibly well-developed run library um which was obviously connected to some sort of larger school library network which I have a horrible feeling probably doesn't even exist anymore but they got new books in all the time and i just read voraciously that was basically just what I did for the you know in every free moment at school like like a lot of us I suspect and so I came across the Homeward Bounders probably it must have been fairly soon after its publication or
00:01:45
Speaker
And also Power of Three, that was the other one, which obviously you've done. And I absolutely acknowledge all of your criticisms on that book, but it's still a book that was enormously important to me.
00:01:55
Speaker
It's a really, really good book that I love a lot and have reread many times.
Narrative Style and Emotional Impact
00:02:00
Speaker
But the ah basically, these were some of the first books I read which taught me about things you can do in books.
00:02:07
Speaker
Because this is something that Wynne-Jones does that a lot of authors who are writing for that kind of age group do not, which is she will play games. She will not tell a straight narrative. She will basically make you work for what's going on.
00:02:21
Speaker
yeah he does She doesn't handhold in a way that that but many authors of the of the eight of the time did. So we um the big thing with um with Power 3 that you've discussed is you get that shifting perspective of, oh, these are the bad guys. Oh, no, it's not like that. And then again, oh, no, it's actually not like that. They're living and on mauland in the present day of the book.
00:02:43
Speaker
And it's all just happening in the shadow of some enormous sort of reservoir development. of that kind And that that was just blew my mind. But also the whole, in there specifically, the... The point where you realise the fishy, shape-changing guys are not the bad guys. ahha yeah Because it's not that morally simple story that you tell at that stage.
00:03:03
Speaker
um And in Homeward Bounders, of course, you have this amazing... It's basically kind of the Planet of the Apes reveal. Except that it makes considerably more sense. Because yeah as many people pointed out, the Planets of the Apes reveal doesn't really make a blind bit of sense when you think about it.
00:03:21
Speaker
This one does. It is perfectly executed. And you just have, it is one of the few times you just have a book that you stop and kind of put down and just have to process how you now need to re-evaluate everything you knew about the main character and the way he comes from.
00:03:35
Speaker
And which is just, it was mind-blowing. It's just like those are... moments as a reader that I've remind remembered. And there are moments I am i have tried to then to emulate in my own writing because I want people to feel like that reading it.
00:03:51
Speaker
Jones is so unpatronizing to a child audience, a teenage audience. She just assumes that, of course, a 13-year-old can keep up. There's 13-year-old protagonist and he understands what happened.
Storytelling Techniques and Themes
00:04:03
Speaker
So why wouldn't he leave that?
00:04:06
Speaker
And once, you know, once he figures it out, it's like, yeah, you know, it it makes perfect sense that you as a 13 year old reader are like, oh, of course, because it just makes once I think this book may be among all her others. is One of the reasons that it's my favorite, like makes perfect emotional sense. And it's a devastating and terrible emotional sense.
00:04:24
Speaker
But it is a perfect emotional sense. This one is a tragedy. i was ah saying to this to Becca and sort of our early chats about it. This book. The Homeward Bounders is told in the first person, which is the first time Jones has come back to the first person since the tour de force of the spellcoats in 1979. So this is a few years later.
00:04:44
Speaker
And she actually doesn't use first person very much in general ah through her work. So it's an interesting choice. And it's always, she always has a diegetic first person, right? It's always, I've only said the right, diegetic, diegetic, diegetic.
00:04:57
Speaker
Who knows? um It's always within the world of the text, you know how the character is telling this story and where they're telling it who they're telling it to. And quite a lot of the opening of this book is spent on our narrator, Jamie Hamilton, ah explaining to us the transcription machine that he's talking into and how it works.
00:05:17
Speaker
And he even tells us ah he checked to see whether it would do swear words. And he did. i actually think quite a lot of this, but you can feel her straining a bit about against the constraints of children's fiction here. Cause I feel Jamie Hamilton should be allowed to say fuck. Anybody in the world should be allowed to say fuck. And you sort of get the feeling that he starts out the book. Like he's like, Oh, I said a bunch of swear words just to test it. No, you didn't. You said a bunch of swear words because you were feeling absolutely miserable and you deserve it But it's also like, you know, you kind of he works his way into telling the story because you get the feeling he sort of doesn't want to start telling it because it's a really sad story.
00:05:55
Speaker
Right. That's what I meant about tragedy. Right. ah The book starts at the end. The book starts after all the action has taken place. And he's telling this story of what has already happened. So there's already no escape.
00:06:07
Speaker
Whatever happens in the book, there's no other way the story could go. ah This is like the biggest downer ending of I think all the Diana Wynne Jones we've read so far. And she doesn't shy away from a a heartbreak, but this is a really, really tough one.
00:06:22
Speaker
it's another It's one of my favorites as well. I think we we all share this. This is a favorite book. My copy is literally falling apart. It's my childhood copy and I've read it so many times. There are pages coming out.
00:06:33
Speaker
Beautiful. talking i mean Talking about the ending, that that's another thing I think I learned with the idea is actually this is how you sell a win and and make sure that it's not saccharine. It's not the heroes just kind of getting getting a free pass by from the narrator. I mean, you sell a win by making you win the battle, but you lose your personal war.
00:06:55
Speaker
Yeah, like Jamie ends this book by saving the multiverse, but it's a huge at what
Gaming Influences and Themes
00:07:03
Speaker
cost? ah It's, you know, in a way at the ultimate cost.
00:07:09
Speaker
You know, it's... it's it's ah really Actually, I'm really glad that you brought up Power of Three, because I was thinking about Power of Three while reading this, which is also a book about sacrifice and also a book about, you know, I think a lot of ways is Homeward Bounders is about religion sort of derogatory. It's about feeling like there are, you know, huge players above, you know, who are controlling your fate and what you do about that and the kind of sacrifice you have to make in order to change your fate, everybody's fate.
00:07:41
Speaker
And Power of Three, which I agree, is like it's a great and fun and fascinating book. But the ending, the win of the ending doesn't really come at any particular cost.
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah. And this is the opposite of and you know this is the opposite of that book. This is a book about the sacrifice that you have to make in order to change everybody's fates. Yeah, this is a book about, it's overwhelmingly a book about games.
00:08:07
Speaker
It's a book about different kinds of games you play. it is a book which is explicitly about tabletop gaming. Incidentally, I was like, Madam, you were born in 1934. How do you know so much about 1980s tabletop gaming? its ah she says She does, in her acknowledgments, note that she consulted a friend.
00:08:26
Speaker
but I had wondered if her children were into it. i I kind of wondered that too. like You had three teenage boys and I'm sure at least one of them was a huge nerd. I mean, it was because i mean, I one of the other reasons I love this book was because it is, you know, it is explicitly it's about games. But also, know, you have Adam who is explicitly he is a role playing gamer and a war gamer. And those were things I was very into at the time.
00:08:48
Speaker
But this is this is 81. This is published in 81. She's writing it, presumably like 1980. Dungeons and Dragons comes out in the States. in 74, I think, 76, something like that, 74.
00:09:04
Speaker
So as a hobby, it really isn't particularly widespread. It wasn't something that a lot most people will necessarily even have come across. know, it takes a while to get established in the UK. And there's a, you know, it's fascinating that she's this this up on it that early. I mean, we're two years ahead of Warhammer even existing, for example, at this point. Yeah. Okay, that's crazy.
00:09:26
Speaker
This is so early. And in fact, when we get the explanation of like contemporary 1970s, 1980s gaming from the character Adam quite late in the book, ah it's a focus on war gaming with ah sort of set in the real world. And it describes like a war that looks like wars that our narrator has seen as he travels the world with mud brown soldiers ah digging trenches, ah rather than the fantasy gaming that I'm slightly more familiar with.
00:09:53
Speaker
Oh, no, no, no, no. no um He does also, when he's talking about, um when he hears how um Joris and Constam's world works, he wheels out Dungeons and Dragons, basically. Well, this is that sort of thing. you you've got You have your guy and he's got little yeah different characteristics to show how strong and how tough he is. And he goes into dungeons and fights monsters. So she's obviously, she she is...
00:10:14
Speaker
amazingly up on how it all works. She really knows, doesn't she? I love that moment actually, because then Jamie's friend, fellow protagonist, Helen, immediately announces her D&D class. She's an anima-cleric and a magic user. Because Helen Dwight didn't know everything, including the rules of D&D. Ukwara has explained that. There are no rules of D&D. There are only laws and principles and natural laws of D&D.
00:10:42
Speaker
oh But I do think like I actually was wondering as I started this, of course, when the book begins and our protagonist, Jamie, sort of stumbles across these shadowy figures playing a game with
Character Dynamics and Cultural Critiques
00:10:52
Speaker
the worlds. He's from 1879.
00:10:53
Speaker
eighteen seventy nine He has no idea what fantasy board gaming is. But the but the the them, the the shadowy figures, um it's going to be difficult to talk about, I think, aloud, them, because you can't put italics in your voice the same way she does on the page.
00:11:09
Speaker
It sounds bit like an Adam Roberts book, it's true. Right. But they're dressed in these, like, all of them wear these gray hoods that like look like the stereotype of what shows up on the manual of a D&D. And I was wondering if that was a deliberate joke.
00:11:23
Speaker
Because I don't know what manuals of D&D looked like in 1981. I do. It feels like it might be a deliberate joke. um It's not. ah It's not what's on the cover of the of the old sort of early editions, I think, so much. It it turned up a bit.
00:11:38
Speaker
That sort of thing turns up a little later. Well, she was very prescient then. It's a good retrospective bit. She shows up and they're all dressed like, you know, the the the sort of ah lowest effort possible fantasy wizard outfit that you show up to when you're going do your cosplay.
00:11:55
Speaker
And this is the thing that they them are very low effort characters. or seem to be low effort as villains. They're a bunch of guys in a building. ah You can't see their faces. They're wearing cloaks and all they're doing is moving around a machine.
00:12:09
Speaker
and when Jamie describes what he's seeing, ah he describes watching some nerds play a game that you don't understand. And it's incomprehensible. There are some dice.
00:12:20
Speaker
ah There are some checking readouts. But to begin with, the them are not that frightening and they get more and more and more frightening through the book as you understand that their total indifference, almost their boringness, ah is what the monstrosity is.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yes, it's that it's that almost that banality of evil thing that I think it talks about. isn't that Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, of the things that we've talked about a bunch on this podcast is the way that often when you have an Indiana Jones book, the protagonist and the antagonist will kind of reflect each other in some way.
00:12:55
Speaker
um And I think you absolutely see that with Jamie and them, which are, who are you know, they're they're guys who are playing games. They have their little jokes. You know, at one point, Jamie goes to the world where everybody's a little bit drunk all the time. And he's like, well, I thought I figured they thought it'd be a little bit funny to have everyone little bit drunk all the time. I thought it was funny.
00:13:13
Speaker
And I do think like this is such a minor detail, but one of the first things we learn about Jamie is he starts, he describes the games of football that he plays in the backyard and how they have to make up their own rules because they're playing in a little, like a narrow little space to play that game of football.
00:13:28
Speaker
And then he, you know, he goes to the old fort, he sees Masters of the Real and Ancient Game. He's like, wonder what this is. And he goes and looks it up and they're like, well, how about fox hunting? How about, you know, how about cricket? How about chess? It's all just games.
00:13:40
Speaker
It's game, you know, people play games, the them play games. Later on in the book, I think in one of the funniest sequences of the book, Jamie and Joris get trapped in this miserable, endless game of cricket.
00:13:52
Speaker
And this is, ah they're like, oh my God, the rules are, we have we have no idea what's happening. We keep getting... but we kept The ultimate expression of evil It's very, very funny. It's so funny. And it's also, again, like a really, I think, deliberate reflection of the games that the them are playing with the worlds. Like there's a point where ah Jamie is like, like I kept, you know, as we kept thinking that we'd broken the rules. I began to understand that if they'd acknowledged that we'd broken the world rules, we could be out and we could stop playing.
00:14:26
Speaker
But no one would admit that the rules had been broken, so we had to keep playing miserably, endlessly, which is exactly what is happening in the broader plot with the rules we're my I never picked that up. You're absolutely right. That's amazing.
00:14:37
Speaker
ah That's so Jones, though. That's what she does. She layers and layers her, like... imagery starting with like Jamie's constant rule breaking games of football that are causing trouble for other people in his community, right? He's kicking his football into everyone's laundry, right? um And ending up with the game of the world played in all possible directions in infinite universes.
00:14:58
Speaker
And the rules that they're you know that they are breaking without anybody noticing. So it's like from the start, she's saying like these these horrible... These monsters that have ruined Jamie's life for no reason, that are ruining everybody's lives for no reason except their own entertainment, are just like people. They're just they're just people with power who are utilizing their power in monstrous ways.
00:15:19
Speaker
Well, mean, can I... i There's a really, I mean, I appreciate we're putting the cart before the horse because we've not gone through the book or anything, but there's a really,
00:15:31
Speaker
really on point modern analog that I don't know if there was something around it at the time she was writing that would have been equivalent, but them, the them, they are tech bros. They are. They are. There's this amazing discovery that someone else has made that they then basically pirate and um I mean, that's explicit in the book, isn't it? Yeah. the The characters work out that them are stealing all their gaming machines that other people have invented, as well as the ultimate like thing that they've stolen, which is reality itself. Yeah, so they they don't they don't create anything, but they pirate everyone else's stuff and then just use it for their own sort of, well, literally for their own fun and games.
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, a thousand percent. I think Jones has a very keen eye for how people use power or how a certain kind of person abuses power. ah that sa she You're right, she's prescient. She's foreseen tech bros as a class, but I mean, the class of nasty person exploiting others existed long before that. Yeah, yeah. It's just because it's in this particular field, it it it seems amazingly on point right now. It does. It really does.
00:16:35
Speaker
and I mean, she's also writing in the context of the Cold War, right? And I think you can really feel that this is a book that's shaped a bit by the Cold War when they into the sense of war world. And there's like, okay, well, nuclear war, total nuclear war is going to happen.
00:16:50
Speaker
And Total Nuclear War is right around the corner on the world that eventually turns out to be our world. And I do wonder if you also get from that a bit of a sense of people who have taken technology and are using it to play horrible games with the fates of everybody else for no particular for no good reason that anybody can understand on the ground.
00:17:08
Speaker
I think you're absolutely right.
Structure and Multiverse Exploration
00:17:10
Speaker
Shall we actually, are this is quite a difficult book to describe. ah It does some completely insane things, but there is a structure. Shall we go through it quickly? Cause I got quite interested in it structurally. I think by this point in her career, Jones has hit something that works for her that she is using in most books.
00:17:28
Speaker
Cause this is, I think like the third or fourth book in a row that is 14 chapters with a chapter seven to eight, perfect midpoint twist. Um, When you've read as many of them as we have so quickly, you go, oh, hello, you have a system.
00:17:45
Speaker
So yeah, Jones has a system. Jones has a system. She did this in Time of the Ghost, which is the book before. She does actually do it in Power of Three, which is 14 chapters with a midpoint twist. um So in The Homeward Bounders, we start with this sort of prologue sequence of ah the beginning is the end, the end is the beginning. We're stuck in the tragedy before we get going. But then we go back to Jamie's Childhood in 1879, working class England, um playing football, exploring town, eventually getting into trouble. He encounters the them.
00:18:17
Speaker
ah He is told he is a random factor in their game and they've decided to discard him. ah So all the language of the game comes up quite early. And when it first comes up, Jamie doesn't understand it. And the reader doesn't really understand it either.
00:18:31
Speaker
ah It's not clear exactly what is implied by what the them are doing. Yeah, I'm actually going to real quick read out the quote because it comes up several times. I love you, Becca. You actually remember to make notes of these things.
00:18:43
Speaker
The quote is you are now a discard. We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the bounds as you please, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are.
00:18:59
Speaker
The rules also state that you are allowed to return home if you can. If you succeed in returning home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner. Right. And none of this is at all clear ah to Jamie at first when he hears it. It's just he realizes that the options are either they do this to him or they're discussing right before this. Can we reinsert him as a corpse?
00:19:21
Speaker
Right. things are quite delicate. so on a corve And in fact, the discussion they're having around it is interesting because one of them says it would bring your revolution closer. But on my side, I can't afford any social unrest.
00:19:33
Speaker
So you can see the nature of the game they're playing already is about large scale things happening to all of society. So Jamie is a discard. he walked He has to walk the bounds and try to get home.
00:19:46
Speaker
The bounds turn out to be the boundaries between different universes. Every time the them finish making a move in the universe he's in, he is thrown into a new one. and He has no choice about it. He also, through the first half of the book, he learns some more rules that they didn't bother to tell him.
00:20:04
Speaker
He learns that he can't be hurt or damaged. He talks about getting buried alive under a slag heap in a collapsed mine and he lives, he survives. ah He learns that other people who try to hurt him, a child who tries to pick his pocket in one world, immediately gets hit by a wagon and killed.
00:20:22
Speaker
So Jamie learns that he is a danger to others and that he is untouchable himself. And he also has to learn a lot of other stuff very quickly. He learns loads and loads and loads of languages. He learns how to steal, how to get by, how to get a job really quickly, how to pass himself off as nobody in particular anywhere he goes.
00:20:40
Speaker
Jamie is, if you like, the ultimate non-player character. yeah but it's he's He's an NPC in every world. ah And he is constantly fitting himself into different shapes, making himself into a like an ordinary person for whatever this world is.
00:20:55
Speaker
And that's the first half of the book, right? It's Jamie learning more about this and Jamie kept eventually encountering a couple of other homebounders and Jamie showing off, if trying to show off what he can do.
00:21:08
Speaker
Midpoint, start of chapter eight, he arrives in a world that he thinks he recognises. It looks so much like his home. He thinks my home has got to be the next one.
00:21:19
Speaker
And after that, we go into an extended sequence set in contemporary Britain. And Jamie has arrived in Jones's world, our world, as of 1981. Which, as you pointed out, is a device that she's, which I hadn't realized. you ah It's power of three again. You hit the mispoint of the book and so learn to modernity.
00:21:41
Speaker
Because you go, yeah. yeah Sorry, I just want to jump in with one one thing. And I don't know if this is just me being oblivious when I read it. Go for it. or And have re reread it. But one of the things I recall is that, although it's clear in retrospect, I don't think there's any specific date markers for Jamie in the early chapters of Jamie's life. And think when you read that, it's written in a way that you are encouraged to think that he's kind of living just a bit of a deprived part of the country kind of now.
00:22:11
Speaker
Or at least not not ah not as long ago as it turns out it actually was. So that your umates you hit the what is obviously like this is very much our world modern day. And we do not realize that that that's where he is. We do not realize that it's it's it's a time journey that's happened. I think you're right.
00:22:33
Speaker
It's a trouble with having read a book so many times since you were a teenager. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. He talks about, you know, he's gone through like a hundred worlds and we don't really clock that actually that's a lot of time that has passed for him because obviously the other thing is he doesn't age.
00:22:45
Speaker
Right. Yes. Which is we not told until quite late, actually. ah wait, does it tell you something? ah He tells you from the beginning, I've gone through about 100 worlds by now and I still look about 13. I thought I must be keeping the time of my own home.
00:23:00
Speaker
She's so good. She tells you everything up front. Yeah, that perfect writer's thing of... she she you don't get the revelation until she wants you to but once you've got it you realize it's absolutely obvious what's going on. and she I think that this is like there's a really little detail that convinces me that you're right that she wants you to think that Jamie is kind of modern until she reveals that he isn't And it's the car.
00:23:24
Speaker
And he thinks he talks about cars. And he like when other people talk to him about cars, he's like, yes, I know what a car is. And then it's only when he hits the modern world that he's like, in my world, car is a fancy word for chariot. What do you mean? These things rolling down the streets.
00:23:39
Speaker
Oh, you're right. You're right. God, she's so good. Sorry. Occasionally, like we're trying to have a critical conversation. Like I just are pure fangirl. Jones is just infinitely rereadable. I think that's one of the things that really stands out to me about any Diana Wynne Jones, but you can read it again and you're like, wow, that's even better the second time.
00:23:57
Speaker
Or the third or the fourth or don't ask me how many times I've read this book. And still finding new things in it. Like, because, you know, as you've said, there are some things that once you've read it twice or three times, you're like, right, I know, of course, he's from 1879. And you don't you forget the first time you read it. It's like, you don't know. You don't know any of that.
00:24:15
Speaker
One thing I wanted to pick out from the first half is the way Jamie talks about the different worlds actually, and there's this, I bet you've got the quote, the coloured wheel of light. Yes. For a while after that I went round seeing all worlds as nothing more than coloured lights on a wheel reflected on a wall.
00:24:31
Speaker
They are turning the wheel and lighting the lights, and all we get is the reflections, no more real than that. I still see it that way sometimes. But when you get into a new world, it's as solid as grass and granite can make it, and it shuts you in just as if there was no way through.
00:24:45
Speaker
Then you nerve yourself up. Here comes the grind of finding out its ways and learning its language. You wouldn't believe how lonely you get, which is something he says multiple times throughout the book. And it is also the last line of the book, which when you know how it ends, reading it from the beginning, the number of times he says this, it is such a terrible cry for help.
00:25:06
Speaker
Like all throughout, he knows he knows what the ending is going to be. And he is telling you all through. right Yeah. And it's a cry that won't be answered. It's it's agonizing. But I was really caught in this reread by the the Wheel of Coloured Lights description because there' so much of the book is about the reality or unreality of these parallel worlds, these multiple universes.
00:25:27
Speaker
And I read the description of the wheel of coloured lights reflected on a wall. And I went, oh, it's all in Plato. It's all in Plato. What do they teach them in these schools? ah Which is, of course, a quote from Jones's favourite C.S. Lewis book, The Magician's Nephew, which is ah the parallel multiple worlds one.
00:25:44
Speaker
ah But it is this idea of, which is from Plato, the idea of the um the shadows in the cave wall. Parable of the cave. That's what it's called.
Themes of Home and Belonging
00:25:54
Speaker
I'm a classicist. Can you tell?
00:25:55
Speaker
um
00:25:58
Speaker
I'm not a very good philosopher, ah but it's the idea of human existence as being just looking at shadows, but somewhere there is something real that all these shadows are based on.
00:26:09
Speaker
And that is kind of a ah ah concept underpinning quite a lot of the book. I don't think she's getting it directly from Plato, though, because we I read Rogers Elasney, Nine Princes in Amber, recently, and I read it and i went, at some point in the late 70s or early eighty s Diana Wynne-Jones read this book and said, I have some notes.
00:26:32
Speaker
And I think I'm right. Yeah, no, i I absolutely think you're right. I also, when you said that, I went and also read Nine Princes of Amber. And I think it's really, really funny to read Homeward Bounders as a response to Nine Princes and Amber, which, real quick summary, is about a, you know, the prince of a magical country, which is the realest place in the world.
00:26:52
Speaker
ah He, you know, he's forgotten who he is, he discovers who he is, and then he and his brothers go on to the shadow worlds, the less real worlds, and collect a lot of people for an army and have a war game with them. And I think that Diana when Jones reading this was like, read this, it was like, one real place, you say?
00:27:08
Speaker
ah whole bunch of masters of the universe who can, you know, pick up people from the Shadowlands and use them as game pieces, you say? Well, fuck that. In particular, every place is real and every world is real, if you believe, you know, to the people who live there. And I do, you know, after the shadow, the colored lights,
00:27:26
Speaker
we get a counter description of the reality of the worlds, which comes from Helen, who's sort of the the secondary, ah the angry little girl that matches up with Jamie, which is a pattern that we've seen before is, you know, you have your protagonist and then you get a very angry little girl who comes and sort of is the expression of anger in the book.
00:27:46
Speaker
And she comes from the a land where they they know a world where they know more about what's going on. And what she says when she describes it is, "'You have sat down in a place of glass.
00:27:57
Speaker
Glass all around you and the place is dark. Now lay a light inside your place of glass. All around you at once there are reflections going back infinitely until your glass place is multiplied many times over.' That is like the worlds in a way.
00:28:11
Speaker
Except that it is not, because now you have to imagine other people in the reflections of your glass place and lights lit on the outside of your place of glass too, so that you can see these lights reflected outside and inside also, over and over and over again along with your own place.
00:28:25
Speaker
By now there are myriads, all shining and overlapping, and you do not know which is real. This is the way of the worlds. All are real. Lights and reflections alike. We pass from one to another like light. This is such an astonishingly complex image for a children's book.
00:28:40
Speaker
And it's beautiful. And I mean, you know, it's, it's, you guys have both sort of, i think, taken this idea and worked of of multiple worlds, multiple realities, various levels of it and worked it into your own books.
00:28:51
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, I do think, I don't know that this was the first book to do it. I'm sure that someone who's done it before then, but it was certainly the first time I'd encountered it.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah, i think I think it's, to me, it's a Joan signature is ah the multiple universes and the multiple worlds. And she writes in such beautiful ways about them and in such complex ways about them.
00:29:13
Speaker
And I think this is the one where she most... ah maybe of all her books about sort of multiple worlds and multiple realities is the one where she's really most grappling with the question of what it means to have a place be real to you, what it means for a place to be your home and the one that you care about saving.
00:29:31
Speaker
I think, you know, one of the reasons i that I've always found this book really striking is that to me, it reads as a diaspora book. um It's about losing the place that you come from and trying to go back there, sort of holding it in your mind as this image of,
00:29:45
Speaker
you know, the real and perfect place, and then going back there and finding that it can't be any such thing, right? That the image that you have in your mind, the sort of the idea of a perfect home is an illusion. It's something that doesn't exist.
00:29:59
Speaker
um Because the act of leaving it and going away and being an outsider in various places inevitably makes you an outsider in the place that you left as well. which is what happens to Jamie. He leaves it and he holds this idea of his home in his head for what turns out to be a hundred years.
00:30:17
Speaker
And at the bu point he gets back there and it turns out to be modern Britain. And it's a place that he doesn't recognize. Even the things that he thinks he recognizes, he's like, oh, that's a little, this can't be my world because it's a little bit different. The yellow canal arches are lower than I remember.
00:30:31
Speaker
And it's because the memory warps. They can't not warp once you leave a place. It becomes a little bit, you know, the the reality doesn't match what's in your head about it. But also I thought with that, is it not that things have built up? So in fact, the canal arch is the same, but everything else is bigger.
00:30:46
Speaker
i think you're right. And also that he was a child, and the childhood memories of big buildings. Yeah. I mean, I do have a thing I wanted to say about the the way she describes the worlds and the way she sets them up. Because yeah one of the other things I think... but There's a lot of multiple world stuff going on. I mean, what I guess one thing that's happened before this is we get like the the parallel evil world e from start start Star Trek.
00:31:09
Speaker
Oh, yeah, for sure. Everyone has an evil twin. And the thing is, again... Beloved as it is and ah as an idea, the Star Trek iteration of it makes zero sense. You've got a world where everything has been different, so everyone is evil, but the same guys are serving on the same ship.
00:31:23
Speaker
Right. um In kind of the same position. So it's like, and I appreciate that that is narratively convenient. And they do this in sliders a lot as well, for example. but it doesn't make any logical sense. But the way she's got it here is just so all of these worlds are very different. And occasionally he'll run into it, oh, this person looks a lot like that person.
00:31:40
Speaker
Yes. and And maybe they share a few personality characteristics, but you don't get that one-on-one mapping that is so beloved of those sort of stories. She has a much more, I think, realistic grasp. So, that I mean, there's another bit where Constam is relating different words. he Obviously, he's got the idea, right,
00:31:59
Speaker
you look like you might come from this sort of part of my world. Right. Where he says to Helen, for example. And so you've got that idea of there's that kind of commonality going on, but you don't have this idea yes, wherever you go, you meet like the versions of the same heroes doing different jobs or being evil in another universe.
00:32:17
Speaker
and Because whilst that makes for story, it doesn't really make for any kind of sense. Right. Instead, what Jamie gets is sort of an infinite variety of people who he will never get to really know or have any connection with. He never gets to have like this idea of like multiple versions of the same person, so there's no like ongoing relationships anywhere.
00:32:36
Speaker
And this is where the loneliness comes in, right? there's There's no commonality, there's no threads of continuity between the worlds, which is why when Jamie finally meets other homeward bounders in the same position as himself, that it becomes so important and powerful to him.
00:32:51
Speaker
so And this is actually, i think a contrast and a deliberate contrast to the last time we saw her doing multiple worlds, which was Crestomancy. Crestomancy, the whole conceit is there is a virtue of you in 10 different worlds.
00:33:04
Speaker
And these are the other lives that you might've lived in 10 different worlds. And I think if you're going to write about multiverses for like, certainly for me, it would be quite tempting to write the same kind of multiverse every time. ah But Diana Wynne Jones is better than that.
00:33:16
Speaker
And so for her, you know, it's, and it's, as you said, it's not about the, let the mapping between people, the worlds are linked, but you know, there's only two times in the book that people see kind of an exact replica of somebody who looks like someone they recognize.
00:33:30
Speaker
ah The first time it's some, the printer who works down the street from Jamie and he sees a guy who looks just like him herding cows. And it's like, well, It makes me homesick, but
Hope, Power, and Heroism
00:33:39
Speaker
that's it. And then Helen, who sees someone who looks very much like her mother in a crowd, and Jamie has to basically hold on to her. They're being two halves of a pantomime horse at the time because it's in the drunk, silly world, and stop her from going up to her because she won't know you. She won't know anything about you. This is just someone who happens to look like your mother because faces sometimes do that.
00:34:01
Speaker
And I see the other thing. that is very subtle there is that in both cases, it's very soon after the relevant person has become a founder. So again, she's occluding that time, the amount of time that's going on.
00:34:14
Speaker
yeah And the reason that Jamie isn't running into people he, he, he thinks he and looks like he knows from his own time is obviously those people have all, They're all dead. Yeah. go Time has moved on.
00:34:26
Speaker
And then the third time that he thinks it's happened, of course, is when he sees a photograph of someone that he thinks looks a bit like his sister from 100 years ago. And that is another little game that Diana Woodjohn is playing with us, because, of course, that does indeed turn out to have been his sister.
00:34:42
Speaker
Right. and That is sort of what that's when the tragedy starts to hit as Jamie starts to have the realisation of what he's lost and the way that them have cheated at this game ah by giving him the possibility to come home in space eventually, but never in time.
00:35:03
Speaker
There's no way to come back to his own time to where he began. Yeah, there's there's this. So the other running theme of this book is this idea of hope. um the The sort of the phrase, the quote that gets that's pulled out a lot is hope is an anchor.
00:35:18
Speaker
And throughout the first half as Jamie. So Jamie does meet several other Homeward Bounders in the first half of the book. ah Notably, he meets the Flying Dutchman and his crew. Which is great. Like that whole sequence is just a brilliant bit of like ghost ship description. It's pure rhyme of the ancient mariner.
00:35:35
Speaker
ah Jamie is pulled out of the sea by this ghost ship. He thinks they're not even human at first when he sees them because these guys have just given up and they don't eat anymore. So they all look like skeletons. like I was literally picturing that sequence in Pirates of the Caribbean. Really precisely dating myself there.
00:35:52
Speaker
And they're all terrifying. And they don't eat. They don't drink. Jamie is hungry. He's thirsty. He's miserable. And they say, well, yeah, us too. and We have seven holes in the bottom of our ship, but we just keep going. And and they tell them they tell him they threw away their anchors.
00:36:06
Speaker
Right. And Jamie says, ah hang on, I've got the quote. That's you lot all over with your stupid negative attitude. Can't you think up for once? You wouldn't be in half this mess if you did.
00:36:18
Speaker
Fancy throwing anchors away. and they say, what we took them off to show that we are without hope. Hope is an anchor, you know. But in fact, Jamie's thinking positive is honestly the stupidest thing he could be doing.
00:36:34
Speaker
I was so interested in the way this book writes about hope. Hope is is ah popular concept. There we go. People like hope as an idea. It has good PR.
00:36:45
Speaker
It has good PR. ah But Jones, I think in her ongoing allergy to sentimentality, this book is not kind about hope as a concept, as a virtue, as a thing to hold on to.
00:36:58
Speaker
ah the Homeward Bounders argues, if you like, ah that hope is... an anchor in the worst way, it is slowing you down. It is dragging you back. Hope is what keeps Jamie blind to the truth and to his own ability to do something.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yes. Because we actually find out, or if you're paying attention and you've read it many times, we find out quite early on that Jamie, as a discard, as a random factor, ah under the rules of the game the them are playing, has the power ah to hurt the them Because nothing can kill a homeward bounder. Nothing can interfere with a homeward bounder. He's worked this out.
00:37:38
Speaker
That includes these like godly demonic powers that have done this to him. They can't touch him. So Jamie gets this information quite early on and doesn't do anything with it.
00:37:50
Speaker
Never thinks of taking the fight to the the actual monsters. Sticks within the rules of the game he's been told and keeps on staggering on hoping that he'll somehow get home in the end. And that is what dooms him.
00:38:04
Speaker
And it's once he lets go of hope, it's once he despairs that he's able to actually fight Yeah, if you if you will, hope is the thing that keeps you playing by the rules. um That is the, you know, if in if if the world is a game and the rules give you a chance to win, then people keep playing the game.
00:38:22
Speaker
I think this is where your tech bro comparison becomes really apt, actually. ah the The myth of capitalism, right, is that you have a chance to strike it big. And if you have the chance to win and- Everyone's temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Exactly.
00:38:36
Speaker
but I mean, I think it's almost it almost feels like um in a horrible sort of way, ah a political thing as well as ah an economic thing in the idea of, well, that's fine.
00:38:47
Speaker
Why don't you have a petition? Why don't I have a nice quiet protest over here? Because as long as you can have your nice quiet protest and you can make you can do your petition, you know, you've done a thing and therefore you're not going to say sharpen the guillotine or anything like that. Exactly. Right.
00:39:01
Speaker
Hope is a way to almost sort of use up your energy without achieving anything. yeah And in fact, there is like quite late in the book, we get the arrival of the hero.
00:39:12
Speaker
Jamie has been sloping around being an NPC for many, many chapters. And just in time, Constan Khan arrived. We can't talk about Constan before we talk about Joris. We haven't even introduced Joris.
00:39:29
Speaker
We have to talk Joris. We haven't talked about the other kids. Okay, let's... Put a pin in Constam. I love Constam. He's very funny. Come back to Helen and Joris. So Jamie, after being alone for a really long time, encounters two other homeward bounders who, like him, all appear to be children.
00:39:46
Speaker
First is Helen, who is a magic user and a cleric. um Helen and Joris both come from D&D worlds. They both come from fantasy worlds. But also quite high tech fantasy worlds. Right. magic This magic is a science.
00:39:59
Speaker
Right. And they both know more about the bounds than Jamie does. So Jamie has been you know sloping along and, you know, he's he's been I think it's very funny. He's been role playing. You know, he sort of takes on these various different parts as he goes from world to world.
00:40:10
Speaker
But he never really figures like he's gotten very good at playing by the rules that they've given him, but he never figures out a way to alter or change or like, you know, sort of slide under the rules until Helen and Joris come along and are like, oh, no, this is how it works.
00:40:23
Speaker
You know how it works, right? He's like, I know how it works for stealing food. I'm very good at that. Right. ah But what's striking is that Jamie immediately feels that he needs to take care of these two to help them, to protect them.
00:40:37
Speaker
And this brings me to my big theory about this book. but you You know how every Diana Wynne-Jones book has a bad parent in it? I think Jamie is the bad dad of this book. I think this is story about finding yourself responsible for some 13-year-olds and thinking, but wait, I'm still an angry 13-year-old inside, right? What do you mean I'm the adult here? What do you mean I'm the grown-up? Because the shift from Jamie the child to actually Jamie at the end of the book is a very, very old man. He's over 100 years old. He's a skeleton. He sees himself as
00:41:14
Speaker
I mean, he still has the body, the appearance of a child, but he has the life experience of someone very old and very unhappy. But that ah taking on responsibility for Helen first and then for Joris and looking after them, even though he only kind of knows what he's doing.
00:41:32
Speaker
But they definitely don't know what they're doing, but they think they do because they're new and they don't understand. So he's got to do something. And I was like, this is parenting. and this is um this This is the experience. that Oh, God, I'm the grown up.
00:41:48
Speaker
There's also so much stuff, especially in the back half the book of Jamie, like, well, and then I went out and did errands. I cooked dinner and none of them appreciated me like Jamie, you're not the bad dad.
00:42:03
Speaker
You're the mum. You're the most these people and none of them bothered to say thank you. And I mean, do think that that's something that's quite true about... Jamie is that he he will always like throughout the book, there are very, you know, he, Jamie is often in self. I love him very much. He's often insufferable. He thinks he knows best. He's, you know, he's, he's can be a deeply annoying child.
00:42:24
Speaker
um But at any point where someone is in trouble and he has the opportunity to help that person, he will help that person before he helps himself ah in the middle of the book.
00:42:35
Speaker
he meets a man chained to a rock who's being harassed by a vulture. um And this man is very thirsty. And Jaime is devastatingly thirsty himself because he's just come off the ghost ship and hasn't had a drink for however long.
00:42:48
Speaker
um But first he gives a drink to the man on the rock before he takes a drink himself. And similarly, when he meets Helen and Joris and shortly thereafter, he thinks he sees home on the horizon.
00:42:59
Speaker
And he's like, well, i could I can think the next world is home. I can try and get home. But I've got to make sure that Helen and Joris are settled first before I can do that for myself. And that, if you like, is actually Jamie's true heroic quality, despite the fact that he has none of the the sort of traditional heroic epic qualities that we will later see in some other characters.
00:43:20
Speaker
Right. This book is full of protagonists and Jamie just isn't one. So Helen is, so we meet Helen first, right? And she is the chosen one of her world. It is prophesied that she will bring back the wider times, whatever that means.
00:43:33
Speaker
um And she has been sent into exile for more or less the same reason that Jamie became a homeward bounder for realizing what the them were up to. But she understands exactly what's happened and she is angry and she is determined to do something right away.
00:43:47
Speaker
So that's the heroine of the book, right? But then we meet Joris. Joris is a a young man with a tragic backstory. He was sold into slavery when he was five years old. He's been adopted by a wealthy and powerful family and taught how to be a demon hunter, but he will never truly be one of them. This is also a protagonist.
00:44:06
Speaker
Jamie's just picking them up like ducklings. Yeah, what do you guys think of, before we get into Constum and the cons, what do you guys think of the the slavery plot in this book? I... It's absolutely fascinating because it's it's really just because it is just kind of there.
00:44:26
Speaker
It is a thing that is obviously, a lot of characters very uneasy about, but the the world that Constum and Joris comes from, that's just kind of how things work. And they kind of...
00:44:38
Speaker
There are various points where they're sort of trying to export it just to, well, this is just how people do things, isn't it? How much for your sister, exactly? And that's just that. And it's, um i I'm assuming what's going on with this is just the idea, well, look, there are a lot of worlds. And even in worlds where you get, you just genuinely, basically good, decent people like Joris, those worlds are not perfect worlds. You don't, you they still have hierarchies and power systems ah and that ah can be enormously problematic in a way that isn't
00:45:10
Speaker
There's no suggestion, I think, that that is something that the them have put into that world or anything like that. That's just how those people of that world do think. That's actually... there There is, in fact, a specific quote where Jamie is looking at the brand on Joris and says... ah Hang on.
00:45:26
Speaker
I'm finding a quote. He says... or do I have the quote? He definitely says something like, I wonder if this is something that the them do to humans, or is this something...
00:45:38
Speaker
It's an anchor. Yes, the brand is an anchor. um Yes, I fell to think it's a... He says, though it doesn't don't worry, it didn't hurt. And Jamie says, it may not have hurt him, but it worried me.
00:45:49
Speaker
I fell to thinking about them and whether it was them who did this kind of thing to people or whether people did it to themselves. Yeah, I mean, it may simply be that she wants to make clear that she is not letting people off the hook for doing bad things just because they're in this system run by a bunch of evil god wizards.
00:46:07
Speaker
that people are still entirely capable of being bad people. Yeah. And yeah you don't get to shirk responsibility for your evil deeds just because someone else is rolling the dice. And speaking of evil god wizards, I think I could be wrong, but I do think that the only time the actual word god is used in this book that's clearly about evil god wizards is when Jaime is talking about Joris talking about Constam, the great god Constam, his owner, who is 10 feet tall and handsome and kind and heroic and rides a you know ah romantic fast car.
Character Development and Moral Complexity
00:46:42
Speaker
Which is that which eventually Jamie realizes is not a carriage. It's a car with an engine. um But I think that's... Oh, sorry, go further. up I was going to say in terms of the slavery plot, I think Jones is using it to talk about devotion.
00:46:56
Speaker
And that's devotion as in votive, as in belief and admiration and adoration of a god, a divine figure, because Joris loves Constan.
00:47:08
Speaker
Constan is his owner. and this is quite clearly presented as something that's horrendous and wrong and something that everyone around Joris, Jamie, is certainly quite uncomfortable with.
00:47:19
Speaker
ah But the way Joris talks about Constam is with constant admiration. Constam did this for me. He did that for me. He bought me and gave me his wonderful life. ah And he took care of me and he's taught me all this demon hunting. And he's so rich and he's so handsome and he's 10 feet tall.
00:47:34
Speaker
And then when Constam shows up, he is shorter than Joris. And it's extremely funny moment. That is the funniest bit of the book. It's so funny. Yeah. But what I was interested in about it was that Constam is effectively Joros' saviour and his creator and his loving father figure.
00:47:53
Speaker
He is Joros' great god Constam. And Joris does genuinely love him. like This is the best possible imaginable version of this awful relationship. And it is still awful.
00:48:06
Speaker
And we eventually get Joris admitting that, that it's horrible. And it was actually quite a funny sequence where Jaime is like, he carefully waited until the most possible people were looking at us before he started shouting about it.
00:48:18
Speaker
um Because this is also the sequence where Joris, who first comes into this book as this sort of very controlled and quite cool, and Jaime calls him posh, he's clearly a posh, competent boy.
00:48:29
Speaker
um Joris is sort of revealed as quite an aggressive and stroppy and emotional teenager, ah which I found interesting as almost proof by contradiction. The more obviously Joris is a teenage boy, the more clear it is that Jaime is not.
00:48:43
Speaker
Because Jaime doesn't. Doesn't have these moments of emotional release. Doesn't get stroppy or aggressive. Doesn't have a crush on a girl that he knows. Because Jaime's not a kid. He might look like a kid, but he's not one.
00:48:57
Speaker
Anyway, um I was actually talking about Joris and Constam, right? The whole point of it is that Joris adores his his god, but why should Constam get to own him?
00:49:08
Speaker
And I think that is an echo of like the essential... doubt about the whole concept of divinity that's in this book okay there are these ultimate these powerful figures why should they get to own you I am actually, so I'm wrong. There is one other point where the word God shows up and it's when they meet, whether in you know the the up first adult homeward bound, three of them meet is Ahasueros, the wandering Jew, of which there's a lot to unpack there.
00:49:40
Speaker
um But one of the things that Ahasueros says is they hung me in hope. They gave to me to hope. They hung me in hope as one in chains and put a goal before me and set me on my way. And they put a lie in my mouth so that I may not tell the world about them, but must say that I sinned against God.
00:49:57
Speaker
But this is a lie and there is power in numbers before three of my own kind and may speak the truth. And this is something that comes up again, too. You know, Jamie finds as he travels the worlds that people don't believe him when he talks about, you know, evil demons playing games.
00:50:10
Speaker
He has to say that he was cast out for spying on forbidden sacred mysteries. There's this idea, this sort of mirage of divinity that's around them that is false, that is a lie.
00:50:21
Speaker
ah They don't have a divine right to play games with people. um there's There's nothing that gives them the the correct rules and authority. And in fact, when when Joris goes on about Constam, speaking of you know these kind of reflections that that ah Jones always has between characters, Jaime immediately thinks of the guy on his rock who's being picked at by a vulture, who he thinks does embody all these virtues that ah Joris is going on about with Constum, but he's the one who says there are no rules. There are no gods. He doesn't say there are no gods, but it's pretty clearly implied. There are only principles and natural laws.
00:50:54
Speaker
ah Even though I am, I think it's it's eventually revealed ah that he is one of a race called Titans and his name Muforsight. This guy is Prometheus. I actually thought it was interesting that we it didn't have a moment, as you were doing quite a lot of earlier Jones books, where where somebody actually comes out and tells you that.
00:51:11
Speaker
You do actually have to go away and do the reading if you want to know it's Prometheus. Yes, and but i I think... I thought when I was... when i was listening to your first series and the fact that you get this idea, this repeated moment of, oh, I know this story.
00:51:23
Speaker
but yeah Yeah. yeah this It's completely flipped on its head because I think she's assuming that most of her readers do know the story, but Jamie's completely oblivious because he's just not had that kind of education.
00:51:34
Speaker
And in fact, Jamie not knowing the story is vital. ah for how he eventually it plays out. It is pure luck that nobody tells him the story because several people come close. Right, Jamie sees the vulture and there's no moment of recognition. It's why he's just like, ugh. I do think, um just a side note to this, the way that a variety of... um myths and legends are worked into this. So the presumably do those are the myths and legends. So we know the story of Prometheus and we know the flying Dutchman yes and we know the wandering Jew. And in this book, those are all just echoes of the real characters and events um that have happened in, in the realer sort of wider, wider sort of scheme, scheme of things.
00:52:22
Speaker
And, One of the, ah you know, we talked a bit about the way that the the the the worlds are built and the way that she she brings them to life. But one of the things I absolutely love is the fact that she's obviously starting to think, right, well, all of these words exist in this wider metaphysical framework.
00:52:38
Speaker
And people in these words are going kind of going to be able to work out work this out so that in Helen's world and in Joris's world in particular, they have just just basically put to get scienced together pictures or have been told by um this kind of Titan figure how parts of it work. And, you know, in Joris's world, they've got the whole thing. Well, they've worked out the whole demon business and the whole two souls business, all of which turned out to be immediately applicable to them and how the basic, you know, what the rules system of the world, what the principles and national ah natural laws actually are.
00:53:13
Speaker
But even on other worlds, you get things like, well, people always tend to mark the way the the the points that the boundaries touch. You might get a stone circle, you might get a hill, or a yeah a mound or something like that. But the idea that because the world the universe, the multiverse works this way, this does tend to bleed into people's understanding of just how, you know what what what are your physics? What is your what are your beliefs? Right.
00:53:37
Speaker
The human beings consistently across the world are not stupid. And in fact, that's one of the things I like, as you get sort of the Jonesy and Beat near the end of the adults involved in this story.
00:53:48
Speaker
are not stupid. They figure it out, which is why Constan turns up. Jorius has been discarded, ah like all the others. ah But he's got a grown-up who cares about him, who also has demon-hunting world-traveling tools, so he comes to get him.
00:54:02
Speaker
And there's this great moment in like a suburban house in Bristol somewhere. Doorbell rings. Okay, I'm going to read this. It's so funny. I have to read it. Someone outside said, forgive me, I have a hot reading for this house.
00:54:15
Speaker
And then a man dressed just like Joris leapt energetically into the middle of the hall. Guess it was Constum Khan, ten foot Constum himself. I didn't really believe it at first, any more than you do, but he was really there, standing just in front of Fred the Skeleton with his white spot plants boots planted wide in the hall carpet, looking anxiously at Joris. But when he saw Joris rushing at him in one piece, he smiled, showing amazingly white teeth, and his face sort of glowed.
00:54:43
Speaker
Like, you know, the door opens and the hero has arrived. It's great. ah But um that brings me back to the point I did not make earlier. because that Oh, we haven't even talked about Joris yet.
00:54:54
Speaker
Constam is the hero showing up, right? And the hero turns up and he's like, what? A world full of demons playing games with human fates? We must defeat them immediately. This is his life's obsession. This is what the hero does.
00:55:07
Speaker
So he puts together a squad of four teenagers. um And they all go together with the power of positive thinking and some hand-rigged, like, homemade tools that that Jamie has run errands for ah to go and take on the them. And Constam is really positive and believes this will work. And, like, this is absolutely the stupidest decision anyone makes in the book.
00:55:33
Speaker
It does not work. You cannot defeat the gods with the power of five angry teenagers and some positive thinking. LAUGHTER And a few meters of copper wire from the local ah machine shop.
00:55:47
Speaker
Right. Yeah, JB's out. JB doesn't even know all the the tools that they've brought because he's just out running errands going, you know, again, the most sort of unheroic part. They're like, go fetch something. He goes and fetches something and he listens to everyone kind of overcoming their personal crises.
00:56:02
Speaker
You know, Helen and Joris both go through, during this part of the book, they both kind of go through these big emotional revelations where they kind of come to terms with their own anger and the the damage in their past, right? Their trauma.
00:56:15
Speaker
Helen has various, you know, sort of cathartic, she has this ah this, what she calls her gift, which her father has told her is a deformity, um which she secretly does believe is a deformity, which is she can turn her arm into anything magically. It's more spirit than body.
00:56:29
Speaker
And, you know, over the course of these conversations, she sort of comes to terms with this power that she has and starts thinking of it, you know, less less like a deformity. And Joris has it out with Constam where he explains that he hates being a slave and Constam's like, oh, well, I've never thought of you as a slave.
00:56:46
Speaker
We have the freedom papers all wrapped up. It's fine. I actually thought that was quite striking in terms of Constam says, well, once you're an adult, that's the law, then you'll be free. And like, oh this is injustice of childhood stuff again. this This is, well, why should your parents get to own you?
00:57:02
Speaker
Why do you have to wait until you're an adult before you're a free person? And yeah, absolutely. And I do think, I mean, I think, you know, you're right that Jamie is sort of in a weird space of not quite child, not quite adult, because he, you know, he's he's either a child role playing as an adult or an adult role playing as a child, depending on the context.
00:57:22
Speaker
And he can't, where Helen and Joris head of have that anger ready available to them, they can access that anger. And Jaime can't. Not until after Helen has had her arc and Joris has had his arc and the whole thing has failed.
00:57:37
Speaker
And he's seen sort of the ultimate, you know, once once he realizes that, oh, we haven't talked about Adam yet either. We haven't talked about Adam. We were in our we haven't talked about our favorite boy. Okay. Okay.
00:57:49
Speaker
okay Adam McCready is a major character in the second half of the book. ah He is one, like the last of Jamie's little gang of friends. He is the evil cricket boy.
00:57:59
Speaker
The cricket boy is a standard of Diana Wynne-Jones. ah The Adam version ah is the one who forces Jamie to play the awful evil game of cricket, which is the most monstrous thing anyone has ever done to a fellow human. Horrible. it's also Very, very funny. with Which Joris rather enjoys. Joris is I get it.
00:58:19
Speaker
this Joe is like I'm having a great time except this is pathetic. I have nice. oh But also Adam is like yeah you pointed this out and i and I laugh so much Adam is somehow ah very, very early.
00:58:33
Speaker
the glinting glasses anime boy. um He has an evil little gag of posh boys and they they're going to take them to a back alley and he's directing their little schemes and he's trapped them in this game.
00:58:45
Speaker
um Except then everything takes a turn because of the rules. Because Joris doesn't want to, Joris does not want to be bullied by a bunch of posh boys from a cricket club. He pulls out a knife he is not going to be having with this.
00:58:58
Speaker
And Jaime, once again, and you know, I think it would be very easy for Jaime at this point to be Jaime, the ultimate NPC, to be dismissing the other people around him that aren't Homeward Bounders as NPCs. They're people who are in these worlds that are not real to him.
00:59:12
Speaker
This is something that he never does. He's always really concerned about rule two, which is the rule that someone will get hurt if they try and hurt him. So immediately from the start, he's trying to deescalate and defuse that situation.
00:59:23
Speaker
to make sure that no one gets hurt. Joris is not, these these kids are not real to Joris. He does not care what happens to them. He has pulled out a knife. He is ready to fight his wife free. And because of the various kind conflagration of, you know, collision of rules, ah Jamie is the one who gets stabbed.
00:59:39
Speaker
And that pulls Adam into cahoots with them, as it were, because now there's this child who's been stabbed, which is much more of an escalation than even an evil cricket boy was ready to be was ready to deal with.
00:59:50
Speaker
And I think you're right, Adrian, when you you say that, you know, so Adam is the war gamer. And the the child who teaches them about war games, I think that, you you know, Adam must have been, must be sort of a riff on one of Wynne Jones' sons teaching her about war games. He's also a riff on, he's Edmund from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
01:00:11
Speaker
Oh! Absolutely. um He does, i mean, he's basically Edmund denied the opportunity for a good betrayal. You're so right. He's ready to sell him sibling out for for Turkish delight in a moment. If when they made they make their assault on them, if one of them had turned around to Adam and said, we have a space on this table, what do you say? You're so right.
01:00:34
Speaker
You are so right. I'm saying this from a position of fondness because I love Adam. He's possibly my favourite character. Yeah, he's great. Because he is kind of like, he's just sort of, yes, he's one of the good guys, not particularly for any virtue he has. He's just like, that's how, literally how the dice fall turns him into ah turned him into what one one of the gang. Except for one thing, which is the trait he has in common with Jamie, which is terrible, self-destructive curiosity.
01:01:02
Speaker
And this is what got Jamie into trouble in the first place when he spied on the them trying to figure out what it was all about. And it's that same kind of curiosity which drives Adam to listen to the home rebounders when they talk about the trouble they're in and to get involved and to try and find out more at every turn.
01:01:19
Speaker
And of course, that echo between these two characters starts off as just like a an echo and becomes more and more telling. they They're exactly the same size. It's Adam's clothes that Jamie tries to steal when he's trying to steal a school uniform to fit in in our world.
01:01:34
Speaker
They have another trait in common too, which is they're both extremely commercial minded. Helen is always making fun of Jamie for his commercial mindedness, for asking how much things cost. ah Adam hears about slavery and is like, huh, how much do you think my sister would bring on the open market?
01:01:51
Speaker
She's a redhead. Does that help? Right. ah And in fact, Adam's like avariciousness is very, very funny. um But it is slowly made clear that this ah similarity between ah Jamie and Adam is not pure coincidence because Adam is Jamie's sister's great, great grandson.
01:02:15
Speaker
this is This is family. this is a This is a connection over time, but it's a very, very distant connection. Yeah. Yeah. They are, in fact, you know, there're there' there's a direct relation. They are the same, which is what the, you know, sort of the the final thing that pushes Jamie over the edge to absolute despair.
01:02:35
Speaker
Once this assault, this well-planned assault, well-planned by heroes who have, as you've said, sort of the knowledge and the tools and the technology to undertake this. And, to you know, I think reasonably think given the information that they have to undertake this, Constam hasn't seen them.
01:02:51
Speaker
Nothing in his experience has prepared him for the scope of the them. he understands how to fight demons and he's very, very good at it. First time it's under the impression they're only going to be fighting two of them because that's what everyone has seen so far in the world where they are is there are just two them playing there.
01:03:09
Speaker
And it's only when they make the assault, they realize that this is just of one slice of that infinite reflection of mirrors and that there are them all around them. Yeah. And they all get cast out to the bounds, except Jamie, who is right where right where they were.
01:03:26
Speaker
ah Jamie's been sent home and he goes home. He goes to Adam's house and meets Adam's father. The one time we actually see, you know speaking of the adults arriving, he meets Adam's parents and they're nice and they're normal and they are willing to listen and they understand about, you know, they they start to understand who Jamie is.
01:03:47
Speaker
And Jamie's like, if I stay here, i will just be a living skeleton. I am a ghost here. ah There is no home for me. Home never... The chance to go home, that this idea, this hope that I've held on to, that I was going to go home and everything was going to be normal, was an illusion from the first year that I was gone.
01:04:08
Speaker
Which that that's, I think, the moment when it's most clear that Jamie is an old, old man when he stands there and next to this. Adam's father is a doctor. He's got a display skeleton up in his front hall. And and Jamie stands there next to Fred's the skeleton.
01:04:24
Speaker
and like about It's like, that's me the I don't want to be the skeleton. um he And he runs away. Yeah. And that's really when, you know, after Helen and Jamie have sort of accessed their fundamental traumas and worked through them and entered their heroic destinies.
Rebellion and Revolution
01:04:41
Speaker
Now Jamie is looking his sort of fundamental tragedy in the face for the first time. And it leads him to his destiny. yeah Which is there. So he is also in a way a prophesied one, right? Which is,
01:04:56
Speaker
That, you know, when he ends up going back to the man on his rock with the vulture, and when he gets there, he puts his hand on the man's chains and they start to rust immediately.
01:05:09
Speaker
And that's when he learns... It's the chains. It's the anchor. It's the anchor they're connected to. That symbol of hope. When Jaime arrives with all his hope finally stripped away, his total in total despair,
01:05:21
Speaker
It's that despair that gives him the power to undo the anchor that is chaining down him on his rock. Yes. And eventually what what he's told is that ah when, so this the man on his rock is the one who first discovered the truth about worlds.
01:05:36
Speaker
ah He says, they put it about that I was imprisoned for starting fires, which is such a fun, it's a great joke, but it's also a really nice metaphor, right? For for information is a fire that that starts, you know, that that lights up.
01:05:51
Speaker
sort of danger and power at once. And it's also, I think, speaking of echoes but with earlier books, I do think there's something ah that in a lot of ways, Jamie and Ukwar are kind of a rerun on David and Loki from Eight Days of Luke.
01:06:05
Speaker
Ukwar is red haired. He's in chains like Luke when he starts fires. And when Jamie sees him and frees him, he recognizes something in this enormously powerful person that they are fundamentally the same.
01:06:19
Speaker
But what Uggar was told by the them when they chained him up ah is they said, if you are chained, there will eventually be someone for whom no place is real and he will come along and release you and you are bound to hope that he will come.
01:06:35
Speaker
And then they went and told all the early homeward bounders this to all of the early homeward bounders who've already learned long ago that there's no chance for them to get home the way they think of home. They're like, well, one day I'll be free because this child will, you know, someone will come along who's hopeless and will free him. But we are stuck with this hope that someone, you know, that the rules say that there's a way out.
01:06:55
Speaker
And it's only towards the very end of the game when they have these last couple of homeward bounders on the bounds that they have to stop telling them that to keep the rules, to to give this opportunity that someone will come along who is truly hopeless.
01:07:08
Speaker
Right. Because what the them have actually done is stolen reality. Yes. And it's, it's maintained because they've made it a game and the game is rigged. But long as, but as long as people know that they're playing a game and there is a tiny, tiny chance that you can yeah know roll that dice and get the result that will,
01:07:27
Speaker
let you win, they will keep playing rather than trying to go outside the rules and rather than trying to to rise up. Right. You keep playing pulling that slot machine and sooner or later it's going to come up triple cherries or yeah whatever.
01:07:39
Speaker
But Jamie has, you know, Jamie is sort of in this perfectly balanced position between, as a child and not a child, between the adult homeboard bounders who have you know, who who are early enough, who are old enough that they have been given this sort of training. They they know the rules better than he does.
01:07:58
Speaker
And the children that he picks up, ah Helen and Doris, who have the fierce, fresh anger that he sort of lost over the course of 100 years. And by being sort of in that middle position, neither a child nor an adult, he is the only one who can become this this absolutely hopeless person was through who can break the rules, who is in you know who is the absolute randomest factor.
01:08:19
Speaker
And the reason that this happens to him, i think going back to the idea of Constance as the hero and Jamie as the ultimate NPC, is because the them underestimate him. They look at this cast of of heroic characters and then they look at Jamie and they're like, well, he's not the one we have to worry about.
01:08:34
Speaker
And so he's the one that they they immediately remove from the bounds. They sent him home. But is is it not also because he's actually got home? Yeah, that's true as well. He's there already. don't He's not a homeward bounder at that point. and they don't He doesn't know. he doesn't realise he's not a homeward bounder until he wakes up after they've lost. He's like, I do recognise that canal bridge. I am home.
01:08:56
Speaker
Yeah. And he says, they thought I was the most harmless one. But then I went and chose to go on being a homeward bounder. And that made me real. It made me like the Joker in a pack of cards. No wonder. Always the game metaphors with this one. Yeah. Like when Adam first meets ah Jamie and Joris, he's like chessmen.
01:09:15
Speaker
Red and black. Yeah. ah because Because Jamie is constantly different kinds of game pieces and different bits of card. But now he's the Joker. He's free. He can act.
01:09:27
Speaker
And that brings us to the ending. I mean, Adrian, you said at the beginning that it's it's a win, right? it's in In a way, it's a happy ending. It's a qualified win. Yeah. So, I mean, do you want me to just... ah Go for it.
01:09:40
Speaker
Yes. So basically, once Jaime has freed the um the Titan, who's who's basically referred to i think, just as him. Yes. Him on his rock. Yeah, we've got him and them in this book. It's not an easy one to talk about out loud Yeah. But it does... it does it does bring over the idea that both he and they are this this other class, this kind of elder class of being, really. Yeah.
01:10:04
Speaker
um but and And there is there is one... one that He frees him and there is this beautiful scene where he goes back to this rather desolate valley that was his home. And as he's there, it just starts coming to life and the colours sharp and all this, which is just yeah just an amazing, very, very understated piece of description.
01:10:23
Speaker
It's so beautiful. He's becoming realer because he is there and because he believes in it. basic Your home is real because you love it. Yeah. And then... you, you well I mean, then you basically have the the multiversal revolution. They just get every single homeward bounder together. And Jamie re you he reconnects with all of his friends with Helen and Joris and Concep and all that.
01:10:50
Speaker
And Adam and the flying Dutchman and you and the entire crew of kind of cadaverous monkey sailors and absolutely everyone we have run into and all of the others that we haven't.
01:11:03
Speaker
And they storm the gates of heaven. Yeah. Basically. It is very, very no gods, no masters. yeah yes Yeah, it's brilliant. it it's it's It's a revolution of the the non-player characters, the discards.
01:11:16
Speaker
And i will say, you know, ah youve i love Adam, but he's not my favorite character. i think, well, Jamie jamie and Helen are maybe be tied for my favorite character. One of the things about Helen all the way through is she has this destiny. She's this sacred figure. They joke about her sacred face because she always has her hair over it.
01:11:32
Speaker
But she says from the very beginning, I don't believe in Ukwar. I don't believe in the gods. She is sort of the ultimate... A powerful atheist right from the start. And she has the ultimate God destroying weapon in her arm, which is the, the hand of Ukwar God's hand that destroys gods. It's so good.
01:11:49
Speaker
And so she comes charging in and they all, yeah, they, they, they, they fight against the gods. And they yeah, they they knock over all the machines. And there there is a certain amount of metaphysics about how you you have to kill them multiple times and you each homeward bounder can't kill multiple of them. There's very literally this very complex numbers game that they are having to run and they have to play by the rules and they, to them, do not have to play by the rules.
Final Reflections and Themes of Sacrifice
01:12:15
Speaker
And leading into our kind of our final sort of our bittersweet twist, of course, is when things start to go badly for them, some of them run away. Yeah. Before they they basic yeah they basically just vanish off into the white and into the the maze of the worlds and abandon there their fellows.
01:12:35
Speaker
And that's the thing that that screws everything up for Jamie. Right. Because if the them are still alive, if they are still in existence, then they could start it all again somewhere else. They could build themselves a new secret reality.
01:12:48
Speaker
they They could retake possession of the realness of everything. Yes. and so less Unless it has a custodian yeah who is just going to keep walking from world to world, keeping everything equally real, keeping the distribution of reality even but across the world. It's a very, very metaphysically complicated book for someone who's for the age group it's aimed at. yeah Right. the The ultimate fate that Jamie faces is that as the person to whom no worlds are real,
01:13:19
Speaker
he creates a kind of like a distribution of unreality, which makes it impossible for the the them to build their their heaven, if you like, um that their their secret secret gaming room in the back door of the universe.
01:13:32
Speaker
um but take can say come There needs to be someone to whom nowhere is real ah to prevent that ultimate place of reality where the them controlled everyone else from ever existing again.
01:13:46
Speaker
And Jamie says, and it's me. yeah He has to go on being not a homeward bounder because he is the man without a home, just bound, walking from world to world forever along the boundaries.
01:13:59
Speaker
yeah And this is the tragedy, right? Because by the time you hit... Jamie's fate it is clear that there is no way out there is no cheat there's no rule break ah there's no way to get around it because the them cheat but people good people don't ah so Jamie is trapped by the rules still if you like and these are the rules of metaphysics these are the the natural principles.
01:14:27
Speaker
Yeah. yeah And he's been, but he's been trapped from the beginning because from the start, you know, as the years passed, as he went on a hundred worlds, there already was no way for him to get home.
01:14:38
Speaker
There was, there was you know, the thing that he's been holding onto was impossible from the start. And I think, you know, this is also ah in comparison to, i was thinking about this in comparison to spell codes, which is also written diegetically. It's a couple, it's, it's two stories being told by the protagonist,
01:14:53
Speaker
But in Spellcoats, there's a break in the middle. There's two coats. There's a point in the center of the book where but where the protagonist is telling the story from that things could go differently. And in this one, it's all being told from the end right at the beginning.
01:15:08
Speaker
There is no turning point. There is no way out from the start. And in fact, Spellcoat ends, it's still first person, but it ends as a prophecy of what will happen. Yeah. We don't know no hasn't happened yet.
01:15:18
Speaker
Everything in the home of Bounders within the world, the book has already happened, cannot be changed. It's actually, it's time, isn't it? It's it's ah time is the thing you can't get away from in this book. The time has already happened.
01:15:30
Speaker
time has already had its way with you and there's no way out. ah And the thing that's so sad about it is that time will go on having its way with him because, you know, the thing that happens in the back half of this book is that Jamie does form these profound, important connections with everyone that he meets.
01:15:47
Speaker
You know, he's, he's spent a hundred years not forming connections. He has a couple of months of forming these intense bonds with Helen and Joris and Adam and, you know, even Constance.
01:15:59
Speaker
ah And Adam's sister, Vanessa, and all of them. And then he he has to face the fact that he has formed these connections with these people as, you know, despite, you know, as guardian, as taking care of them, but also as peers, as as children banded together. He's never met another child on the bounds before.
01:16:14
Speaker
And they're going to get older than him. And he is going to continue looking eternally 13. And their relationship is going to shift and shift and shift until it doesn't exist anymore. And then they're going to be gone.
01:16:26
Speaker
And he's still going to keep going. It is so painful. I do have a really strong emotional memory of reading it for the first time as a teenager and going, oh, my God. It's a really, really painful ending.
01:16:39
Speaker
It is. But it's also, I think, narratively and enormously satisfying. Yes. because Everything they win. And they yeah they win a whole multiverse away from from them. It is earned by i what Jamie has to pay for it.
01:16:52
Speaker
Yes. And everyone but Jamie gets their happy ending. It's sort of that, you know, there's there's books that i've that I've read where the main couple or the main the main character gets their happy ending and everyone around them sort of falls away, dies, or or gets, you know, a sort of contrasting bad ending.
01:17:08
Speaker
And this is the exact opposite of that. ah Joris gets his freedom. Helen gets, you know, to come into her own and fix her world. Constam and Adam's sister fall in love. They're going to go off and be demon hunters together. This happens, you know, almost incidentally off page.
01:17:23
Speaker
adam I guess Adam has a pretty bad time of it, but Adam gets to know the secret truth of the world. And you know that Adam loves that. Yeah. Everyone gets a happy ending. And Ukwar, of course, is free to go back to his home.
01:17:37
Speaker
Having, you know, having been sort of the ultimate sacrificial character for the first millennia. Now it's Jaime taking up the mantle of Ukwar to become sort of the second eternal sacrifice.
01:17:48
Speaker
Yeah, I read this I was like, is Jamie Jesus? and Spends quite a lot time turning the other cheek in order to avoid accidentally murdering people with the with the rules of being a homeabounder.
01:18:01
Speaker
um Tries to give Adam the clothes off his back, eventually sacrificed for the sins of all the worlds. ah Also, easy he appears to be a holy ghost at the same time. Is this boy Jesus?
01:18:13
Speaker
Kind of. It really is, though. it I hadn't really thought about it, but it is a fascinating inversion of the standard kind of fantasy plot you tend to get, where it's just like, well, all right, yes, we had that whole battle and several thousand people died and And this you know this guy guy, this person got to hit sort of heroically sacrifice themselves to hold the gate and all that sort of thing. But it's okay because the right person's the king now.
01:18:34
Speaker
Right. And it's it is absolutely the opposite of that. It's just like, no, big so so that everyone else can right have have the good time. this work It's all it's all it's always almost like someone say, right, yes, I will go into the whole anomalias.
01:18:47
Speaker
Yes. yeah Yes, that's it. A thousand percent. this This is the child who will suffer forever to create the better, not just the better world, but the better multiverse.
01:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's the exact opposite of it. Instead of, you know i was thinking about this in terms of Constam as the hero and sort of the inversion of that. But you're right. It's like, instead of the right person is the king, it's the right person is the sacrifice.
01:19:09
Speaker
We found the terrible, the terrible ah terrible shaped to fit in that terrible hall. But it's also, it is, as it's the triumph of hopelessness, if you like. It's despair, it's hopelessness that is the turning point, that is the power in this book that gives Jamie the ability to set himself free and then set others free.
01:19:32
Speaker
And that hopelessness has to continue for that freedom to continue. There has to be that sort of linchpin of despair for the freedom of the world to exist.
01:19:45
Speaker
If Jamie had hope that, oh, now things are going to be fine, that would almost undo everything that he achieved. Yeah. And I do think also it's, it goes a little bit back to Drowned Amit as well.
01:19:58
Speaker
The secret to, you know, the the person who makes the ultimate sacrifice, the the Jesus and, you know, the father, the son and the Holy Ghost. um But it's also just, you know, all throughout, he He emphasizes from the beginning, I was the most normal kid you ever met.
01:20:12
Speaker
I was bog standard child. I got through 100 years by pretending to be just an every person, a background NPC. I have none of the heroic qualities that you get from a Constam or even a Helens.
01:20:24
Speaker
i am you know So it's it really is, what if God was one of us?
01:20:31
Speaker
like Thank you, Becca. Thank you for that. but it is' like you know fit you're God is not God. God is just a person. job you know The hero is not just a person, just the most average person in the world.
01:20:47
Speaker
Right, it's the reject rejection of divine specialness. Sorry, I'm interrupting you because I'm excited. No, no, no, it's important. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, the the the your hero is not Constam, this person you worship or or slavishly admire. It's not even him who who Jamie worships, admires. It's got to be you and you're just this normal kid.
01:21:08
Speaker
taking responsibility and it's an awful responsibility but if not you then who else which is a terry pratchett quote yeah
01:21:19
Speaker
yeah ah do you guys have any any last words on homeward bounders before we end it there I mean, I had a whole page of notes I wanted to talk about. Please. No, we have organically covered every single one of them in the course of this discussion. I have absolutely nothing left on my page now.
01:21:35
Speaker
Go us. No, we've had such a wonderful time talking with you, Adrian. ah It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for joining Thank so much for joining us. This was a blast. I'm really, really glad we got to do this.
01:21:48
Speaker
ah thank all Thank you very much for having me on. All right.