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S2 Bonus Episode 3 - Q&A
722 Plays19 days ago
The first time round most of the catching-up you do is retrospective. The second time round you see it happening.
In our final S2 bonus episode, we do a terrible job of not looking ahead to Hexwood as we work our way through a wonderful pile of letters to discuss class, adulthood, lying DWJ fathers, the many (more) layers of Fire and Hemlock, and the real meaning of "The Master."
Transcript available here. This episode wraps up our second season, but we plan to be back in November with Lives of Christopher Chant and a guest!
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Feedback
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello, good morning, and welcome to our q and a episode for season two of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Freyma. And I'm Emily Tesh.
00:00:29
Speaker
Before we get started on any Diana Wynne-Jones related question, there's something I want to say ah so everyone who wrote in saying, please get a better mic, please, please get a better mic.
00:00:43
Speaker
ah To the people who suggested better recording equipment and better recording software. To the people who approached Becca at a con and offered to buy me a better mic. To my brother's co-worker who very kindly ah sent detailed instructions from so from a sound engineer friend on what mic to buy and what to do with it when I had it.
00:01:04
Speaker
If I sound better now, it is thanks to all of you. If I don't, it's my fault. It's fine. I'm just like this. You do sound better. As someone who has been editing, thank you to everybody who wrote it and yelled at us about it.
00:01:17
Speaker
It really helped.
Apologies and Acknowledgments
00:01:20
Speaker
ah Also, before we begin, i just want to mea culpa because ah we recorded this whole season before editing you know and and and airing the season, which meant that I had ample opportunity to listen to these episodes and go, what did I just say? um so when I hit the end of the recording of the Time of the Ghost episode,
00:01:42
Speaker
And I heard myself say, and she never wrote about sisters again. after recording the Howl's Moving Castle episode. So the the mistakes are many. the mistakes are varied. But I wanted to apologize for that one in particular.
Listener Interaction and Themes
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like we actually talk a lot of nonsense.
00:02:03
Speaker
It was so noticeable to me when we had Farrah on last time. And Farrah is so brilliant. Uh-huh. we just don't know anything. We should... Yeah, we're talking out of our ass about half the time at least. It's all right. We're writers, not academics.
00:02:20
Speaker
And that i but therefore, like most writers, we are professional bullshitters. Exactly. love Diana Winshaw a lot. yeah And thank you all so much for sending in letters and thoughts and comments and giving us the opportunity to bullshit a little bit more about that.
00:02:37
Speaker
We got so many really lovely letters. And we we really appreciate each and every one, including the several of you who did, fact, explain the master to us, which I really appreciate. But we'll get there. I think we're going to we've sort of broken down the letters.
00:02:53
Speaker
chronologically um in terms of the episode the question the episodes that the questions relate to. so i Roughly chronologically. I think I was a little bit random. I also think that you know how in the season one Q&A episode we spent the whole time talking about Dale Mark?
00:03:08
Speaker
I think we're going to spend the whole time talking about Fire and Hemlock. I can feel it coming. Yeah. Three hours wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to explain all of Fire and Hemlock. It wasn't even close.
00:03:21
Speaker
So, shockingly, the Hexwood episode is our second ever most listened to episode. Unshockingly... Sorry, the Fire and Hemlock episode. Oh my god, I'm so excited to talk about Hexwood. We so want to talk about Hexwood.
00:03:34
Speaker
The number of times... Alright, anyway. the first Unsurprisingly,
Diana Wynne-Jones Personal Stories
00:03:38
Speaker
the first most ever listened to episode is the Hell's Moving Castle episode. You know what I should have done before we did this? I should have re-watched the movie.
00:03:47
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, well. Me too. Next time. If we need extra episode to hit our eight bonus episodes, we could do a full one on the movie because several people really want us to talk about the movie. And I do have thoughts about the movie, which I can air briefly.
00:04:01
Speaker
But before we hit those questions, um we did have a couple of just full letters that we really wanted to shout out ah because they were really nice and we really appreciated them.
00:04:15
Speaker
There was one that we got that actually, ah so Elizabeth Boyer wrote in, and I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing anybody's names as we go through these, with a really, really nice letter um from Australia talking about her experience encountering Diana Wynne-Jones in Australia. And she, so she says, i disagree with Freymarska's assertion that the librarian in Orange, New South Wales, was the only one in Australia to love Diana Wynne-Jones.
00:04:44
Speaker
Over here in Perth, Western Australia, where I come from, she was so beloved by librarians that their association
Exploration of Themes in Literature
00:04:50
Speaker
held a special dinner in her honor when she died in 2011. I was invited by a friend who knew that I was more than somewhat of a fan. We read out selections from our favorite books.
00:04:59
Speaker
I chose the description of the inhabitants of Coven Street from Charmed Life because that was the page which made me fall in love with her work. Freya is correct in saying that it was very difficult to find DWJ books in Australia. I read The Spellcoats in about 1979 when I was 12.
00:05:12
Speaker
I never saw another copy for a full 20 years. I had begun to think that I had dreamed reading it. When a new edition finally came out in 1993, I was so excited that I wrote her a letter. Please find attached her reply. i had it framed.
00:05:26
Speaker
And so then here's the Diana letter. and it did Dear Elizabeth Bowyer, my turn. Yes, do it. Thank you for a lovely letter. It is truly wonderful to be told that people have enjoyed my books, as you so evidently have, for so many years.
00:05:41
Speaker
I am not surprised you had to read Fire and Hemlock again. Most people do. The first time round, most of the catching up you do is retrospective. The second time round, you see it happening.
00:05:52
Speaker
It was like that to write, too. I thought my brain was going to be in a permanent spiral by the time I had finished it. Nice to think that you come from Perth. I visited Perth on a recent trip to Australia and met some black swans and so forth at the intervals
Classification and Influence of Wynne-Jones' Works
00:06:05
Speaker
between giving lectures.
00:06:06
Speaker
I very much enjoyed myself there, probably more than anywhere else. It was much warmer for a start. I am so sorry you have had this trouble getting hold of my books. This seems to be universal. I do not understand what my publishers do.
00:06:18
Speaker
My feeling is that it is their job to sell books. How they get by not doing this, i never can see. i'm I'm glad to know that writer's complaints haven't changed in the least since 1993.
00:06:31
Speaker
I am so glad you finally did get hold of the spellcoats again. Have you read the other books that go with it? You may be interested to know that when someone rang me up a week or so or so ago and did a telephone interview, when they came to the question, what do you think appeals to people in your books?
00:06:46
Speaker
I simply went and fetched the letter which had just arrived and read out what you said. It seemed to say it so much better than anybody else. Needless to say, i didn't find it gushy at all. Best wishes, Diana Wynne-Jones.
00:06:58
Speaker
I love that whole letter so much. I also... Love it particularly because i read it, i think the first time in our inbox, right we finished recording with Farrah about Diana Wynne-Jones as a writer who writes to be reread.
00:07:11
Speaker
And so it's so lovely to see this letter where she talks about the experience of reacting to other people reading her work. Like, yeah, you do have to read it twice. And the second time, probably you'll understand it a little bit.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, she she wants you to read it twice. She enjoys the thought of her readers reading it twice, at least. ah You can actually, um the lectures she talks about giving in Perth, those are in Reflections.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yes. ah So you can go and read Diana Wynne-Jones' Australian lectures. I think this was one's up one is on heroism. um I forget the other two because I haven't got it right next to me. Wait, I have. ha I can grab.
00:07:48
Speaker
But I remember these lectures have in fact been written down and published. She was such an interesting... speaker thinker about writing as well as an interesting writer but yes a whirlwind tour of australia she wrote on she spoke on heroes on negatives and positives in children's literature and lecture three why don't you write real books i love you diana yeah you can see the contempt she has for some people's uh automatic questions yeah
00:08:20
Speaker
And I think you can see them come out in her stories too. It's like the this this also bounces back to Carol O'Near. was just thinking that. Yep, yep. And the the
Storytelling Techniques and Arthurian Influence
00:08:30
Speaker
frustration with the pat questions that lead to the pat answers that force you not to think deeply about the way that you write and the stuff that you're doing. We're also, I think, going to see this a lot in Deep Secret.
00:08:42
Speaker
I've just been thinking about Carol and Aneer ever since we read it. I think something we didn't get into in the episode that actually I think we should be thinking about more is class. Carol and Aneer is very much ah about the boss trying to break the strike.
00:08:58
Speaker
yeah And the author as authority and not necessarily, ah not at all, in fact, admirably so. The author as a tyrannical and stupid and childish and thoughtless authority.
00:09:14
Speaker
It's extremely funny to me, but also extremely interesting. interesting Yeah. Yeah. We've actually, we had a really lovely letter also talking about class ah that we didn't, We don't want to try and pull a specific question out of because I think the whole letter has a lot of interesting things to say. and do you want to read this one maybe?
00:09:30
Speaker
Yes, let me find it in our... We actually have a lot of letters this time. We've got a really big document of them. We're going to try and get through as many as we can. um So this is from Tony Lowe.
00:09:42
Speaker
who says, Diana Wynne-Jones is, in my most humble opinion, one of the best authors ever to publish a book. I was a child and did not have access to books by new authors. Buying books was not something I was allowed to do, except very rarely in the cheap pile of a jumble sale.
00:09:55
Speaker
My mother always told me I loved Beatrix Potter stories. I did not. hated them. Still do. I was banned from the children's room of the library because my mum didn't think I should read those kinds of books.
00:10:06
Speaker
And so I grew up sneaking books from a local used bookstore, stealing comics from the news agents. I got scorn pulled on from on high when I used my first month's worth of earnings as a restaurant washer up when I was 13 to buy the then five books of Asimov's Foundation.
00:10:19
Speaker
Not because of the subject matter or the author or the content, but because I had purchased books, waste of money. This from my mother, who would show me off around family and friends as always having my nose in a book. This also shouts back to some of the stuff that Farah was talking about, about the different context of reading and book buying and so forth.
00:10:36
Speaker
Yeah. And Tony says, I'm particularly interested in Diana Wynne-Jones and her treatment of class, absent from Ransom and other such authors, except in a derogatory way. Many children's books writers are very much aimed at middle class kids because they buy books, read books and go on to have kids who do the same.
00:10:53
Speaker
I was working class raised and was noted for being a reader. Yeah, it was like that. The Ogre Downstairs feels like a working class book. The violence in that book rings very true to my childhood. I knew people who were the ogre, but far too few were Sally.
00:11:06
Speaker
That moment in Archer's Goon where he meets Ginger and they realise the common interest in spaceships, that was a
Impact on Writing and Personal Connections
00:11:12
Speaker
total across the divide moment where a working class kid sees there is someone else in the world that shares the obsession and won't fight him or pick on him based on it. It sent absolute shivers down my spine.
00:11:22
Speaker
Outside school, never the twain she'll meet. And for working class boys, ideas, except sports, girls and violence, would generally look down on with beatings. I can read the fear and ginger of this getting out, but also the relief that there are others.
00:11:34
Speaker
It's those sidelines that appear in her work that convinced me she was writing for many different audience members. And no other writer of children's books ever felt that way to me. The only other books I ever felt even close to represented it were Sue Townsend's first two Adrian Mull books.
00:11:48
Speaker
but they were really for adults. and It was representative of the life around me rather than me personally. It's such a lovely long letter. I think we won't read out all of it, but we were very, very moved by this letter. And I thought Tony had a really ah really good point that Jones is aware of different readers and different layers of readers for her books.
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that she... you know i we we I think we first saw this in Drowned Amet, which is when, you know well, I guess maybe we first saw it actually in her very first book in Wilkins stkins Tooth.
00:12:24
Speaker
Wilkins Tooth is trying to do a class thing, I don't think totally successfully, ah but it is interested in the sort of range of childhood experiences that in this quite small community can exist.
00:12:35
Speaker
Right. And in the way that children's experiences are completely inflected by absolutely unable to be separated from class, but also have these sort of inflection points and interests and connections that's cut quite sharply and unexpectedly across class ah to form bonds that you wouldn't expect.
00:12:56
Speaker
And the way that children can sort of, an outside force can band children together. um i think this you know this is what she's doing in the back half of Drowned Amet. It's exploring the ways that coming up against something that is bigger and threatening to both of them can both unite and divide according to the experiences that these kids have had.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Very well said, Becca. yeah Sorry, that was like, sorry, I go into teacher mode sometimes and I can hear myself doing it. What a good point.
00:13:29
Speaker
Why not expand on it for the class? I can tell you were a pleasure to have in the class, Becca. Oh, thank you so much. No, I wasn't. I talked way too much.
00:13:42
Speaker
I'll take it. I'll take it over a kid who doesn't talk. Okay. And then what else in sort general questions? Yeah, we had a couple people write in to talk about giving Diana Wynne-Jones to their own children, which is something that you've talked about a bit. I know that you've started reading her to your kids with
Truth and Narrative Techniques
00:14:00
Speaker
some of the younger stories that we didn't talk about specifically on the on the podcast.
00:14:04
Speaker
It's great. She loves weird food so much. It's really funny the way Jones defaults to describing food in an infuriating way. And you're like, that sounds disgusting.
00:14:18
Speaker
And it's Nan from Witch Week. But even reading with quite young children, and my eldest is five, Jones has an interest in things that children find interesting.
00:14:31
Speaker
In food. In navigating silly adults being silly. in everyday domestic experience, which I find just really charming, really delightful to read.
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah. And I love to hear about today's kids still loving her. it's very It's very satisfying and gratifying to me. um So we had a letter from Luciana, again, apologize for mispronouncing any names,
00:14:56
Speaker
who copped to stealing a Diana Wood Jones book as well. We've all done it. ah so Me personally, I have done it. Uh-huh. And also says that ah her kids are lovers of Diana Wynne-Jones, with her 18-year-old son going back to Witch Week when he needs to pick me up, but occasionally using the code sentences from that book, which I love so much. then her 11-year-old daughter just gave Howl to a friend for her birthday after agonizing whether her Power of Three might be a better choice.
00:15:27
Speaker
I think Howl was a really good choice. I never met anyone who didn't enjoy Howl to some extent or another. Howl's a fascinating... I don't think it's necessarily the best starter Jones because it's not... Most of her other work isn't like that, but it's such a good book.
00:15:45
Speaker
Yeah. It's such a good book. Everyone should get to read Howl's Moving Castle in their life. and And to pair up two letters, we also had a letter from Pam who says that her eight-year-old daughter got curious about what she was reading and has started reading many of the books herself.
00:15:59
Speaker
She's now a huge fan and chose the Howl trilogy as a birthday gift for a friend who is also a reader. So we've got these kids passing on the Diana Wynne Jones like a like a virus, which is really great to hear. So thank you for reading it and telling us about it.
00:16:14
Speaker
And that, I think, is all the sort of... Oh, no, we do have some more big general questions. So Eleanor Brondermajer and her girlfriend Erin wrote in. ah Many Diana Wynne Jones do feel quite middle grade or juvenile, but others are complex in a way that's definitely more YA to me, or adult general fiction, discuss.
00:16:34
Speaker
But my library doesn't really have any significant number of her books at this point. Do you remember where her books were classified when you were first reading them? Were they all together in J-fic or broken up by audience? If you were classifying them, do you think you'd keep them together or break them up?
00:16:47
Speaker
And if so, how? oh Oh, I love this because it's putting things in categories. And I love to put things in categories. Yes. So I do remember that all the Diana Wynne Joneses I could find in the library were just in a block in children's fiction back in the day.
Layered Narratives and Genre Influence
00:17:02
Speaker
Yes. But also this is the 90s and I'm pretty sure that YA as a categorization was not really a thing. Yep. um Although I am not a librarian.
00:17:13
Speaker
I feel like we need to get a consultant librarian in to say history of genre classification. But I feel YA is an artifact of the 2000s. Yeah, if you are a librarian and want to write in and tell us about DWJ classification for our next Q&A episode, please do. We would love to hear it.
00:17:29
Speaker
um think we had, I'm trying to remember, I think we definitely had like young readers, early readers section, like books that were for like seven and eight year olds, like very early chapter books. And then there was everything else.
00:17:40
Speaker
And then everything else. Children, children's fiction goes from about age eight to about age 15. Right. And there isn't sort of a a split up in the middle of that anywhere. So for example, Fire and Hemlock.
00:17:54
Speaker
reads to me like a book you might just about get if you were 15 years old and reading it. Right. And actually, I think I mentioned this on the episode. I read it at eight and then at 15 because it was in the children's section with all the other Diana Wynne-Jones books. And I read it at eight and I was like, what is going on? Right.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah. That book is too hard for an eight-year-old. Yeah. um I think it's fair to say. And also, I mean, Jones is very conscious of her readers, like on a sentence level, on a language level. yeah You can tell when she is writing for a younger reader because she controls her language perfectly.
00:18:26
Speaker
yeah She has this simplicity, this elegance, which actually is a feature of her writing generally. Like even in her adult books, you can see she she wrote about it, I think, in one of her essays, how how how she rejects cliche and overwriting and writes to be read loud.
00:18:43
Speaker
And she sort of lets, you know, there' when she's writing for older readers, even though she's always reading, i writing, I think for, not for adults, she's very rarely writing for adults, but there are levels of themes that she'll sort of allow to slip into the books that she expects to be sort of more for a teenage audience.
00:19:00
Speaker
Fire and Hemlock, Hexwood, Deep Secret, well, Deep Secret, Deep Secret I think is adult. Yeah. Deep Secret is adult fiction. I'm just thinking through the 80s ones and hang on, let me grab the list and have it in front of me.
00:19:14
Speaker
So like, if I am categorizing the 80s like middle grade and y a I think Magicians of Caprona is middle grade. ah Time of the Ghost is upper a middle grade YA. Time of the Bounders is middle grade. Which week?
00:19:32
Speaker
ah middle grade YA, she does actually do quite a lot of work at that boundary level where you're getting from child to teenager. There's a lot of books which I would hand to a 12 year old and go, you'll love this.
00:19:46
Speaker
Right. In Farah's book, Farah talks quite a lot about sort of the things that stand in for like, like Diana Rondon is never writing about puberty per se. There's never a kid who's like, Oh no, I've just got my period. And what do I do?
00:20:00
Speaker
But there are a lot of things that sort of stand in for, I have to start acting like an adult or I have to start making adult choices in a way that feels very cusp that feels very sort of like an alternative way of of exploring that division, that dividing line between child and adult.
00:20:16
Speaker
I would say that then Archer's Goon, of Fire and Hemlock and also honestly Hal are all YA to adult. Yeah. um in terms Certainly in terms of like enduring audience.
00:20:28
Speaker
Actually, I've just thought of this now. I don't think we talked about this on the episode, but in terms of things that stand in for a puberty transition, Time of the Ghost has a lot of blood in it. So much. and So much.
00:20:39
Speaker
Although I still stand by like the evil chicken sacrifice and covering yourself check in chains was was just a ah sex scene. Right. Yeah. sure which which of course Which is also, of course, a ah puberty horror story moment.
00:20:52
Speaker
Right. Tale of Time City then goes back to being middle grade, I think. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if she, you know, the the point of pushing it a little bit further of of figuring out that you might be the adult that you've been looking up to as a child.
00:21:07
Speaker
That's what you get if she's writing it for a slightly older audience. I think so. I think actually I do feel like just reading through that list in the late 80s, you can see Joan starting to strain against the limits of writing for children.
00:21:20
Speaker
She can do it. She's good at it. She loves it. ah She enjoys and respects her child audience. But there is more she wants to do Like honor on a craft level, on a structural level, ah she wants to write complicated books.
00:21:38
Speaker
And some of them like, you Fire and Hemlock needs not just a 15-year-old, but a pretty bright 15-year-old who reads a lot. And luckily, like Jones found that audience. She got them. Boy, did she get us.
00:21:49
Speaker
um But I'm not surprised that the 1990s is then when she starts experimenting with writing adult fictions. She also starts exploring, and we saw this towards the end of the 80s with some of the short stories as well as with Sophie and Howe.
00:22:03
Speaker
She's starting to explore what it feels like to write an adult protagonist. um I think Sophie is her first point of view character who is not, I mean, we're,
00:22:14
Speaker
setting Jamie aside and arguments about what Jamie is, ah who is not a child and who is, you know, actually an adult who's choosing a career path, who is looking at what her adult life is going to look like. And that's what the book forms.
00:22:26
Speaker
And at that same time, she's writing short stories about a vet, about a clerk, about women who are already in jobs and facing choices related to that. um And we're going to see that more coming into the 90s as well.
00:22:39
Speaker
Mm hmm. So the next general question is from Sarah. I love how you guys pull out themes and meanings and through lines I've never noticed from these books. Do you have any advice on how to read in a more conscious manner?
00:22:51
Speaker
and This made me laugh because the answer is read lots of Diana Wynne Jones. Diana Wynne Jones is why I'm like this. Yeah, absolutely. Although I did.
00:23:04
Speaker
So the thing that I do for this podcast that I don't usually do for other things, except when I'm doing something similar to this, is I actually take notes for myself as I read. I'm pulling out quotes and I'm thinking hard about how things relate to each other.
00:23:18
Speaker
And I got into the habit of this so that when you and I were reading ah the Iliad earlier this year, ah And we were talking about it with other friends. And in order to make connections and keep things in my mind, I found that I needed to have a quote doc open just to kind of write things down for myself. It mostly ended up being a burn book. but I was just writing down all the best things. Iliad is so good for burns.
00:23:41
Speaker
But it was, it it did help to have, not even looking back at it, just kind of a way to impress in my mind something that I thought was important. I think it is really easy to, especially actually if you're reading an e-book on a tablet or a phone or an e-reader, it is so easy to for your brain to start skimming and scrolling.
00:24:01
Speaker
um like When I'm reading seriously, I try to have a physical book if I possibly can just because like the physical activity of a book helps pin things in my head. Like Becca says, taking notes helps pin things in your head.
00:24:13
Speaker
like So much of it is just trying to actually... engage rather than skim over the top. Also, I cannot more highly recommend just having a friend that you're talking to. a Like some of us this is actually, oh God, I've got to impress Becca. Be intelligent.
00:24:32
Speaker
Absolutely. But also it's just like, oh, if I'm stopping to be like, oh, holy shit, that's I just made a connection. And then i have to stop and tell him about it. That's forcing me to stop and think as I go, opposed just zooming through.
00:24:44
Speaker
ah having Have a friend. Read books with a friend. It's great. It's the best thing. Something that I did when I do not recommend this. I was a monster child.
00:24:55
Speaker
And I went through a phase where I asserted that I had to read books out loud in order to force myself to read slowly enough to properly appreciate them.
00:25:05
Speaker
And I would do this in the car with my entire family. I was actually going to say I do slow down and read out loud sometimes if I can feel I'm skimming or going too fast.
00:25:16
Speaker
But I don't recommend doing it in the car with your entire family. They will kill you. Yes. And will deserve it. I was punished for this with car sickness so I can no longer read in the car. This is God smiting me down for my crying.
00:25:29
Speaker
I think God has a point. ah The other question from Sarah is second question. Do you guys have any podcast directs for shows that do a similar literary cultural analysis?
00:25:40
Speaker
I'm not going to be helpful to this on you for this for you, Sarah, because you already know all the podcasts I listen to. But for the rest of everybody, I'm going to out myself here as a big Star Wars nerd.
00:25:51
Speaker
I listen to a more civilized age, which is a sort of deep dive, critical thinking, all encompassing podcast on a bunch of different Star Wars media. And I enjoy that quite a lot. I can't recommend because I actually have a terrible confession to make, which is I barely listen to podcasts.
00:26:09
Speaker
Emily, you are an award-winning podcaster. That's different. I love talking. no but Actually, I don't process ah speech out loud very well. I can't do audiobooks either.
00:26:21
Speaker
ah So if I want to know something, I have to read a book about it because like if i if I'm hearing it, it's not happening. But that's really important because when we started doing this, the first thing you said was we've got to have transcripts because that's how I process MediaVest is having the transcripts.
00:26:36
Speaker
So the fact that we've had these beautiful, high quality transcripts from the beginning, that's all M and does every single one. And it's invaluable. Woo! Partial deafness! No, I actually, ah i've I've been partially deaf since birth and i always say, not a real disability.
00:26:54
Speaker
I'm fine. i can hear. i can cope unless there's crowd or other background noise or anything else going on. Or if I'm at live music, I can't cope with any of that. The pandemic hit and everyone started wearing masks.
00:27:06
Speaker
And I went, oh, I am disabled, actually. I have no idea what the fuck is going on. I can't see your mouth. So when we record, we do with it we always record with video. Yes, I've seen such a beautiful range of my pajamas at this point. You have lovely pajamas.
00:27:23
Speaker
I'm also very fond of your pot plant, your bookcase. I feel very emotionally attached to your study at this point. Oh, same, same. It's beautiful. All right. Next question. This one actually came in via Blue Sky.
00:27:36
Speaker
And the question is, where does Diana Wynne-Jones start the end? It turns out the MacGuffin has been in the book throughout thing. It's in House of the Castle, of course, but is that the origin? I think that she's always done this.
00:27:48
Speaker
That's in Wilkins Tooth. Yeah. that's That's right back in the first book. ah Everything has to be there from the beginning. So in Wilkins Tooth, I think it's the the the missing family treasure turns out to be ah the mess that's all around Biddy's hut that we saw in chapter two.
00:28:03
Speaker
Right. I was trying to think if, I mean, I do think that eight days of Luke and Dog's body, if you're counting the MacGuffin as the object, They do have to go find the objects in those books.
00:28:18
Speaker
She kind of leaves that behind as a as a thing after that. Right. where She stops being as interested in quest object. and I mean, even then, even at the beginning, quest object is, it feels a little bit like Burglar Watch.
00:28:33
Speaker
Right. right. and We've got to do a stakes. Right. Right. I was having such fun doing all this character work and now there need to be stakes.
00:28:45
Speaker
ah um They have to go and find the thing. burglar attacks, you know, whatever. I think it's mostly, so actually, Dog's Body and Luke, now that I'm thinking of it, both the stakes are engendered by this misapprehension that the object has been around and in the possession of the people all along. The bad guys keep turning up and saying, ah, the object.
00:29:05
Speaker
I'm looking for the object. I bet it's right here. It never is. You have to go and get the object from the other place it is. So I guess she is subverting a little bit, but she's like, actually, the object was here all along.
00:29:18
Speaker
And then we have, oh, back to younger readers again. ah Leone asks, what do you think about the barriers to melding and sidestepping genre in adult fiction as opposed to writing for younger readers? Can you imagine Jones's creative project addressed primarily to adult readers?
00:29:32
Speaker
Another question that's probably been asked already is whether Diana Wynne-Jones an influence of either of your own work and in what ways. 40 episodes of podcast about how much Diana Wynne-Jones is an influence in our work.
00:29:44
Speaker
um that's the The melding and sidestepping genre in adult fiction, Jones writes about this actually. I can't wait actually to to do the episode on the sudden wild magic next season because Jones writes very interestingly about running into the expectations of adult readers, which she found very frustrating because they wanted her to make the book stupider.
00:30:06
Speaker
Yes. I think that you know a great example of the way she sort of seamlessly melds genres in a little microcosm is Dragon Reserve Poem 8.
00:30:18
Speaker
I loved that story! It's such a good story. and and You can imagine the full book that comes out of that and you can imagine it with its spaceships and its dragons and its Hegs.
00:30:30
Speaker
And its little green van that's just driving down the road. And its little green van. And all of that just, you know you don't blink at it. It's introduced in two seconds that all of this exists in this world.
00:30:41
Speaker
And throughout the whole book, you can imagine the full book that just has all of these things and I don't think a child or an adult expects that, you know, has an expectation that that's otherwise. Those things all just kind of fit together perfectly.
00:30:53
Speaker
But I think back to adult books that have similar conceits and there's always like such a divide between the world of science and the world of magic. I think this might be a... um I am thinking out loud here, so I may be talking absolute nonsense or indeed bullshitting.
00:31:10
Speaker
ah But I think a word that we haven't used much about Jones is world building, which is one of those like... ah special words that comes up all the time when you have to when you're talking about fantasy fiction is if you have to talk about building a world in order to talk about fantasy fiction which is fascinating because actually this is all from Tolkien directly and his his little essay on his private vice which is how you which is so he considers considers his world building it's an embarrassing little habit like smoking um like except that smoking wasn't embarrassing because he was a mid 20th century Englishman Jones resists
00:31:49
Speaker
world building to me. ah Joan Jones is not interested in doing the travelogue effect, if you like. right here here Here's a world and you want to hear all about it and here's all the things that are different and interesting and new about this world and I'm sure you'll be fascinated to discover that here we have dragons and spaceships and little green vans. She doesn't do that.
00:32:10
Speaker
There's never a sense of the I'm coming back to Farrah's book again. Farrah's book was so good. You guys should all read it. Great. ah But there's never a sense in Jones of the sort of the portal quest effect where you've got a character standing in for the reader on the outside of fantasy world looking in going, gosh.
00:32:29
Speaker
A dragon? What a surprise. This dragon is not like other dragons I have heard of. It wants to play. The closest that she comes... is it I'm thinking about this Farah called out Tale of Time City as one where you do have the protagonist walking in and looking around and going, gosh, isn't this weird?
00:32:48
Speaker
And that's very intentional, I think, in Time City because immediately coming in, she wants us to critique Time City and to start thinking about what Time City is analogous to and is using that as kind of a critique of things that we might be familiar with.
00:33:02
Speaker
i And also it's a Narnia joke. I'm sorry, I can't get over it being a Narnia joke. I am really interested in how this is going to look in Dalemark when we hit Crown of Dalemark.
00:33:16
Speaker
Delmark has always been, i think, in a lot of ways about technological change. um Drowned Amet in particular is about, a you know, what happens when you're starting to introduce industrial technology to a world that hasn't had it previously.
00:33:31
Speaker
And in Crown of Delmark, cheating and looking forward a little bit, what you have is someone who comes from a modern era, much as with Charmed Life, actually, which resists the portal fantasy effect because we're not through Janet's eyes, we're through Kat's eyes.
00:33:44
Speaker
In Crown of Dalemark, we do have someone who comes from the sort of more technologically advanced future walking around the past. And I'm really curious what that's going to end up looking like, because it's the first time she's really doing it straightforwardly.
00:33:57
Speaker
I think on this like the idea of the adult and child reader and the the the the expectations of the reader, I think almost the the adult looks back on childhood, perhaps, as a kind of fantasy land,
00:34:13
Speaker
Childhood has so much cultural valence attached to it as a time of innocence and a time when things are different. And in the old days, and it might be your actual childhood or it might be your teenage years, but that sense when you are an adult of looking back and something was different and something, there is something that you will never have again, which actually is not having to pay bills.
00:34:38
Speaker
But sir children are able to take fantasy land perhaps on its own terms without that one step backwards, which is I am looking into something which is not mine and where I do not belong.
00:34:52
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know. I'm thinking about that. You mentioned that just made me think again of Archer's Goon, which is such a funny pointed jab back at fantasy is the time of innocence and joy where you don't have to pay bills.
00:35:06
Speaker
Archer's Goon is fantasy is making you pay more bills and worse. Because the fantasy is mad But also Archer's Goon is very much about a character who hates his adulthood so much he is retreating into repeated, time-looped fantasy land.
00:35:24
Speaker
What if I was an ordinary little boy being raised by two parents who likes me? i Right. Instead of the science fiction, what if I took my spaceship and went away forever?
00:35:37
Speaker
um Speaking of slipstream and of, you know, kind of easy, easy meshing of magic and science, Archer's Goon, again, just does it completely effortlessly. And in a way that I think also just completely effortlessly walks the line between being a book for and about children and a book for and about adults.
00:35:55
Speaker
I didn't get Archer's Goon the first time I read it. Because it's so complicated. That one and Fire and Hemlock, she's really like pushing the envelope of what you can get away with in a children's book.
00:36:06
Speaker
Yeah. And she's going to push it further and farther and eventually ah start writing for adults. I'm so excited. to so Speaking about where books were shelved, I never read A Sudden Wild Magic except when I was a teenager once because it wasn't shelved with all the other Diana Wynne Jones books in the shelf where I went to go find Diana Wynne Jones.
00:36:28
Speaker
So I'm so excited to read it now as an adult myself as opposed to as the 13 year old when I read it I was like this isn't like the others goodbye. i can't wait for you to read it it's ah it's a weird one.
00:36:39
Speaker
It's a weird one, Charlie Brown. Okay, we should actually hurry up. We've got a lot of questions and not that much recording time. Yes. So let's hit the questions about the actual books.
00:36:51
Speaker
um We don't have questions about all of them. I think the first one is Time of the Ghost, where someone wrote in and said, I think that the Julian Adamant character archetype does reappear in a later book, actually.
00:37:01
Speaker
I'm pretty sure he's reused as the leader of the throwback Griffins in Year of the Griffin, whose name is Jessac. Yeah, I read that and thought, oh, God, yeah. But also that is another instance where you hit the character like, oh.
00:37:13
Speaker
Yeah. Like, which makes me think of the master again, Diana Wynne-Jones writing Sexual Threat. Yeah. and She can make it really creepy.
00:37:24
Speaker
And that is something I think she's going to feel more and more comfortable writing throughout the 90s a little bit. Like, again, that's... That's an interest of hers that she's sort of been tamping down because it's not appropriate for 12 year old.
00:37:39
Speaker
um Julian Adamant, I think is about, and Julian Adamant, I was about to Julian Adamant about as far as she can go. Julian Adamant is about as far as I want her to go. Julian Adamant is terrifying. Yeah. but Which is a a nice object lesson, I think, on ah how to write something that is both terrifying and serious without being gratuitous. Because but there's barely anything on the screen in terms of Julian's sexual threat. He he he he slaps a 15-year-old girl's backside.
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah. It happens all the time. He does it in a room full of people. She's fine. Nothing like it ever happens to her again in the course of the book. It's the worst thing ever. Yeah. We'll get to Year of the Griffin. I'm really excited about that one as well.
00:38:21
Speaker
Year the Griffin is, among other things, a teaching book. I can't wait. Yeah. Speaking of teaching and of schools, our next question is about which week?
00:38:35
Speaker
So Miranda Jell-Brates in and says... I always enjoyed the episodes on those books that were particularly meaningful to me as a child. Witch Week was definitely one of those, and I appreciated your queer reading of it, definitely also something we noticed when I read this with my kids.
00:38:48
Speaker
I wondered if you considered also a neurodivergent reading. This was actually what jumped out most strongly to me in my last reading. Of course, much of the theme is just about children who are different in some way and punished for being so, which is applicable in multiple ways, and is part of why the book resonates for so many.
00:39:02
Speaker
But some parts feel to me almost explicitly neurodivergent-coded. For instance, the real boys and real girls section. I think there's something really interesting here that suggests how neurodivergent individuals can feel like outsiders, as though they somehow missed the memo about how to be a proper person.
00:39:17
Speaker
Often this failure can be linked to gender performance too. So many neurotypicality standards are heavily gendered. Charles's double-barreled glare sounds like a classic flat affect often seen in autistic people, and the way he connects immediately with the witch but not his family or most other people reminds me of the double empathy problem, the idea that autistic people don't lack communicative or empathic skills so much as do them differently.
00:39:40
Speaker
The witches are real to one another, even if they are unreal by neurotypical standards. I also saw what you were saying regarding the disappointing nature of the ending. Taking away their magic feels like a terrible loss.
00:39:50
Speaker
But equally, I think I always viewed it not so much as a loss as a change, as something different that is precious and useful to you, but that just expresses itself differently in this new world. Perhaps this interpretation works better with a neurodivergent reading than a queer one.
00:40:03
Speaker
Well, Well done, Miranda. That's completely correct. I have no notes. yeah oh I think that's a brilliant reading. I think that's a very true reading and a very persuasive one. um I mean, I do think the Crestomancy books are the neurodivergent series.
00:40:18
Speaker
We've said that before, haven't we? I do remember when i first hit the essay where Diana Wynne-Jones talks about cat as potentially neurodivergent or autistic. And I remember being surprised because i was like, well, I'm surprised that you would say cat in particular, not Charles Morgan, which seems obvious.
00:40:34
Speaker
um But it is, it runs through all of the books. um I think it's a real thread that we're going to hit and we have hit in multiple places and ways.
00:40:46
Speaker
I'm so looking forward to Lives of Christopher Chant. Yeah, me too And I do also want to mention ah one of the things, so was on a Diana Wynne Jones panel at Worldcon, and this is one of the things that came up there. um And also other people spoke really eloquently about the the sort of the way that she writes from inside a child whose the world is not understanding, who cannot express themselves effectively to the world.
00:41:13
Speaker
um And the like absolute frustration of that experience of just kind of running up against the barriers of adults who who are constantly misinterpreting you in the worst of ways. I think that's something that she writes really eloquently about.
00:41:28
Speaker
And ties into her interest in... in heroic self-expression in characters like Nan, like Tanakui, like Polly. This heroic act is the act of writing, of creating, of expressing something meaningful through art.
00:41:45
Speaker
even I would say even actually Jamie in his his story, his storytelling, which is explicitly within the book, Jamie is telling the story to be told and to be shared.
00:41:58
Speaker
yeah And it's a heroic act and it's part of his heroic sacrifice is that he is able to tell the story, even as he is completely isolated and will remain isolated forever. Yeah, but I think that she doesn't, you know, because we see a number of these children to whom writing comes easily, it's a hunger, it's ah it's something that they need to do.
00:42:19
Speaker
I think it would be easy and it is often, i think, a trap that authors fall into is that they're writing for and about kids who can write and who want to write. And I do think something that is important about Diana Wynne Jones in general, notable in Witch Week, is that she is also writing for and about kids who can't express themselves in that way, who want to, but are running, you know, charles Charles Morgan, just absolutely not having the words for the kind of things he wants to say. He doesn't know how to talk about being happy.
00:42:47
Speaker
Yeah. God, now I'm sad about Charles Morgan again. Me too. Let's move on, speaking of writer kids, to the many questions that we got and comments that we got and insights that we got about fire and hemlock.
00:43:00
Speaker
and I feel like I've been reading a lot of them. and Do you want to take a couple? Oh, yes. sure So Harris Powell Smith says, um I've been thinking a lot about Laurel and Monaghan, deceitful, profoundly abusive feminine forces feeding off life force who can be escaped only by using their bindings and contracts against them.
00:43:15
Speaker
yeah Yeah, that's correct. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about the parallels between these entities, how they fit in with Diana Wynne Jones' archetypes of villainous female figures. ah hu I am thinking about the companion.
00:43:26
Speaker
Yeah. Who is also beautiful and blonde. Yeah. This like warped mother goddess. Yeah. I think is actually i mean it's mean, it's Phyllis as well as Monaghan.
00:43:40
Speaker
um Where else do we i see her? wonder actually if it's also not the Witch of the Waste. Yeah. Oh, I absolutely think it's the Witch of the Waste. And I think it's a very interesting move to have the Witch of the Waste be, well, it's a move that we can, we see in Fire and Hemlock.
00:43:58
Speaker
In Fire and Hemlock, I don't know, Fire and Hemlock almost sort of allows for this move because in Fire and Hemlock, she's the mother figure because she's also Ivy. And she's also Tom's literal stepmother before she's his wife. Right.
00:44:10
Speaker
So in Fire and Hemlock, we see this move from mother figure to romantic figure of, you know, that this character that has been on it. And Dog's Body, I guess she is a romantic figure.
00:44:21
Speaker
So she's constantly kind of shifting between mother and, and bad mother and bad bad wife. Sexy bad mother wife.
00:44:31
Speaker
Yeah. As a parallel to a pathetic and in need of rescuing father-husband. Right. Yeah. um The bindings and contracts point, I think, is also really interesting, though, speaking of the power of words and the power of, you know, so many of the little girls that we see are little girls expressing themselves in writing through words, through through using words as kind of this outpouring of feeling.
00:45:01
Speaker
And I do think that there's something really interesting that you're pointing out here, Harris, about how these the bad mother wife, who is often an echo of the little girl. you know Polly is explicitly a reflection of Laurel, who can be defeated by turning their words against them.
00:45:18
Speaker
This also is is a danger mode. Which I'm just thinking back to, you know, I think about Puss in Boots. Jones' favourite fairy story, which culminates with the the clever cat tricking the wizard into using his powers ah to make himself vulnerable.
00:45:37
Speaker
Jones just, I think she finds something really satisfying about that. um The power rests with this enemy, this monstrous figure, this wizard, this goddess, and it's all in what you can get them to do. Yeah.
00:45:52
Speaker
what you can get them to say, what you can get them, the contract that you can get them to make and then break. Catherine Mann says, I noticed that leaves kept being mentioned through the book.
00:46:03
Speaker
At the beginning, Nina and Polly are catching leaves in the garden and Nina declares each leaf caught one happy day. Polly catches seven and Nina 35. So I counted. Polly and Tom actually meet in person seven times across the book. Oh my God. yeah This was the point where I lost my mind.
00:46:18
Speaker
Catherine, you're brilliant. Yeah. Of course, these are not all happy days. Not sure what Nina gets 35 of unless those the days she and Polly lose when their memories are changed, but that seems like too few. At the end, when they enter Laurel's land, there are big hand-shaped leaves, which sounds sort of creepy. Yes, it does sound creepy. I can't get over the seven happy days in sight, though. That's genius. Yeah, I do think... I also can't think of what 35 might be for Nina, but I do think that there's something kind of telling about Nina's
00:46:50
Speaker
declaring something is true magically and that coming true for Polly and not for Nina who exists kind of outside of the magical space of words coming true that Polly lives in. Part of which of course is sort of the the cruelty of Laurel's spell in in dividing up Polly from her friend.
00:47:05
Speaker
Yes. ah Because of Nina's like mad capability to reject shame which Polly needs to be separated from. Then we got quite a lot of great insights from Tumblr, actually.
00:47:18
Speaker
So Tumblr user Glimmergleam, and glimmer queen says, ah one point I'd like to push further. You talk often about the dual realities operating in the book, and I think the magical monster made of newspaper scraps can be understood that way as well.
00:47:31
Speaker
The trash monster chasing them is really a man, their friend Sam, who in his monster form is very dangerous and can only be stopped with violence. That's a pretty direct metaphor for Tom, isn't it? Tom is both a man and monster, a friend to Polly and her predator, an abused child perpetuating the abuse onto a new generation. He has always boasts things at once.
00:47:49
Speaker
And Polly's heroic act is to confront the shame of her abuse, to look her predator in the eye and reject that monster wholeheartedly. She breaks the cycle and makes tom makes Tom fully reckon with, one, I have been a monster.
00:48:00
Speaker
Two, who am I without the monster? Janet and Tam Lin wins Tam Lin's freedom from the Fairy Queen by clinging to her man, but Polly sets both Tom and herself free from the Fairy Queen by rejecting him. The possibility of a happy ever after is maybe the most magical part of the novel.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah. So many of the like the really smart comments that other people make I'm just like yeah. Yeah. Yeah you're right good one. Monster is really a man and you have to be him both ways and try not to run him over with a car.
00:48:28
Speaker
but i love I love the way Fire and Hemlock just keeps opening itself up to you can think about it more and there's always more to think with. I actually I so I just made the connection between this and And a hit-ups, where how do you how do you fix the the monster burglar problem in your house? You run it over with the car.
00:48:45
Speaker
ah But in Fire and Hemlock, you can't solve the monster by running it over with the car. um Because the monster is also ah human being. And the solution has to account for the humanity of the people involved.
00:49:00
Speaker
Fire and Hemlock is really very generous to Tom. Honestly, the more I think about it, i like well, yes, it's a love story. It has to be generous to Tom. But also, gosh, that book is kind to Tom.
00:49:11
Speaker
Yeah. I think maybe he could stand to be run over with a car a little bit. Maybe a little bit. He doesn't get over with a car, but he does get pretty thoroughly squashed by a haunted house.
00:49:25
Speaker
He doesn't escape completely unscathed, but yeah. Yeah, because you have to have the sexy hurt comfort sequence. Exactly. we can all even all make fun of how stupid a sexy hurt comfort sequence is, which I still feel called out by.
00:49:37
Speaker
It's really funny. But again, are, Siren Hemlock, it's always two things at once. We're making fun of the sexy hurt comfort sequence while engaging fully in the pleasures of the sexy hurt comfort sequence. We are having our cake and eating it. And that is Nowhere and Nowhere. Exactly.
00:49:56
Speaker
The other Tumblr comment, which made us both go, oh, of course, was Tumblr user Circushet says, Polly separating herself from Tom works because it forces Laurel to draw back from Morton. If Tom can't draw power from his fairy queen, then Morton can't either and Morton is weaker than Thomas. I saw this i was like, wait, is it that simple?
00:50:13
Speaker
Wait, that makes perfect sense. Is it that simple? It's just basic math. It's just basic math as long as you understand what Diana Wynne Jones is always doing, which is the child protagonist is always the same thing as the villain.
00:50:28
Speaker
But if Polly is Laurel, which she is, if Polly is the fairy queen trying to keep her king alive, which is what Laurel is doing too, then Polly refusing to help Tom means that Morton can't have any help either because that was explicitly the deal they made that anything Tom uses, Morton can use too. So the moment Tom uses Polly, Morton can use Laurel.
00:50:49
Speaker
right Yeah, and I'm like, wait, that's just logic. That makes perfect sense. And then we've been told for the whole book that Morton is visibly already dying. Yeah, yeah, he's not doing great.
00:51:01
Speaker
And he is not, you know, there's sort of a whole parallel world this opens up in thinking about Morton and Laurel's relationship and the sort of layers of using each other and abuse in the way Laurel uses her various men.
00:51:17
Speaker
that they are just never going to be able to address the way that Tom and Polly can address the many messy layers of what's been going on with them. In conclusion, it sucks to be Seb.
00:51:28
Speaker
Yeah, it really does. i was just thinking, you you were saying the fire in Hemlock is really very generous too. And I was waiting for the end of the sentence and thinking it's not generous to Seb. Nope.
00:51:39
Speaker
So Archer's Goon, Annalisa Wilson says, at the start of Archer's Goon, on the page which she lists the 10 facts novel will prove there's one fact I've never been able to work out how it relates to the story. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch.
00:51:51
Speaker
Can you please explain any theories you have on how this one relates the story? As the other nine are fairly obvious. Yes, I can. I know this one. Jillian Farms Police. Yep. She's the pigs.
00:52:02
Speaker
Yep. That's the other one. Joan said ACAP.
00:52:07
Speaker
And ah she lives on top of the hill in the fancy suburb and her house keeps disappearing. Pigs have wings! Making them hard to catch! I didn't know this one. I've never understood this one until I think Farah explains it in the book. oh and so So thank you Farah.
00:52:25
Speaker
You explained the pigs to me. I've also never understood the pigs. And then Hal's Moving Castle. Should we skip for now questions about the movie? Because neither of us have seen it recently enough. Yes, I do. We are going to try and talk about the movie at some point.
00:52:37
Speaker
um I do think it is worth talking about the things that the movie is and isn't doing in relation to the book. But I think we both would like to have it fresher in our heads before we come to that.
00:52:50
Speaker
And on a point that is not in the questions, but I just want to talk about it. We need to talk about truth and Hal. Yeah. Let me think how to phrase this. The climax of House Moving Castle turns on the John Dunn poem and in particular the like the climactic little phrase, find what wind serves to advance an honest mind.
00:53:11
Speaker
And it's Hal's turn from dishonest to honest that proves he's in love to Sophie as well as to to us, the audience, the readers. And Becca, you and I were talking about this.
00:53:22
Speaker
Yeah. And we were talking about it in terms of father husbands. Yeah. Because what's consistent about fathers in Diana Wynne Jones is that fathers are people who don't tell you the truth.
00:53:34
Speaker
Yes. Yep. ah So a father is a a man who tells you lies and a husband is a man who has to stop lying and tell the truth. And we were talking about this of Tom in Fire and Hemlock hu and his motion from ah dishonest to honest, ah finding it finding the wind that advances his honest mind, ah which is the motion towards romantic concord.
00:54:00
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Anyway, I don't actually have a conclusion to draw from this, but Jones is fascinated by, interested her creative project is, I think, about truth.
00:54:12
Speaker
Yes. so I mean, this is my big thesis statement. Diana Wynne-Jones wishes to write about the truth. Truth is the fire that stretches thunder. We've said it previously. We're going to say it again, I know. Yes, it's a great line.
00:54:24
Speaker
It's a great line. Well done, Diana. anna Good poem. And I think like del going back to Delmark and thinking about these fathers that tell lies and the ways, and it's not always, you know, they're, they're complicated figures, right? Like we don't, Clennon, I think is one, maybe one of the most complicated care fathers in Diana Wynne Jones. Cullen and Lena are some of the most complicated parents in Diana Wynne Jones for all but we don't see very much of them, but the mix of lies and truth that Clennon tells his children is the cause of everything that happens in that book.
00:54:54
Speaker
Mitt's father lies all the way down. All of the problems in that book are brought about by Al's lies. Spellcoats, which I think has one of the unequivocally best and affectionately rendered fathers in Diana Wynne Jones, but he's Klosty the clam. He can't tell that even the best father cannot tell the truth because he doesn't talk.
00:55:15
Speaker
Whereas again, as you say, as we start to look at what a romantic figure is like, it's Howl who becomes able to tell the truth at the moment of romantic climax.
00:55:25
Speaker
It's Tom who enables a happy ending bye being willing to confront the truth or being forced to confront the truth and being able to accept and live with it afterwards.
00:55:38
Speaker
But even thinking back to Dog's Body and Sirius' relationship with the truth, yeah um the truth of Sirius puts an end to his relationship with Cathy as her dog, but gives him hope for some different relationship with her in the future.
00:55:57
Speaker
weird I'll just put that out there um but also it means she ceases to be his mother figure at the moment of truth ah which is part of what opens up the possibility of something else but also Sirius' unwillingness to face the truth for most of the book and unwillingness to face what the companion is and has done is part of his own dishonesty he's not just lying to Kathy he's also lying to himself which I think the book actually says that Yeah.
00:56:28
Speaker
Yeah. Anyway. and We're going to keep coming back to this, I think. it's We're going to be looking at dads and romantic leads throughout the 90s as well. Oh, yeah.
00:56:40
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And people facing painful truths and and writhing uncomfortably on them for a while. Yeah. I'm not saying it.
00:56:53
Speaker
I'm proud of you. so proud of us. We do like Hexwood a lot. We didn't answer the question of how how our own work is influenced by Diana Wyngers. Oh, right. We didn't. um Hexwood is in it. Hexwood is in in a lot. Homeward Bounders, for me, Homeward Bounders is also in it a lot.
00:57:09
Speaker
I think maybe I did say this on the Homeward Bounders episode, but everything I've written really goes back in some way to Homeward Bounders. into this idea of where home is, whether you can go back there.
00:57:26
Speaker
Spoilers, you can't. um I think there's there's a little bit of that in everything I've ever written. yeah For me, the the big one is actually Lives of Christopher Chance. So I'm going to save that for the start of next season. That is an influential book for me, like anything, ah because it's the book that taught me what point of view is for.
00:57:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that, you know, again, what Homeward Bounders taught me is what an unreliable narrator is. Yeah. Right. Going back Howl's Moving Castle, um we got a really nice long letter about Howl's Moving Castle, about what the whale storyline does. and I'm just going to mostly read it out.
00:58:04
Speaker
So years ago, Karen writes in, years ago when I was first trying to understand stories as a writer, I tried outlining Howl's Moving Castle to try to understand how such a chaotic story works structurally. Not that I think all stories should follow Western structures, but they can be helpful.
00:58:18
Speaker
Anyway, my attempts never felt right and I haven't revisited the story in quite a while. The meta approach to fairy tales and the inciting incident being the moment she realizes her sisters have broken out of their assigned roles seems obvious after your discussion but never put it together before.
00:58:30
Speaker
This new perspective also helps me make sense of the Whale storyline, which I'd always loved as a quirky bit that feels typical of Diana Wynne Jones but perhaps doesn't totally fit in if looking critically. The visit to Wales functions as a midpoint in the story, showing that not only does Sophie not need to follow the prescriptive storyline she thought she was in at the beginning of the story, which she accepted when she became an old woman and set it off, but also that she doesn't need to follow a fairy tale storyline at all.
00:58:54
Speaker
Our real world, which doesn't follow fairy tale tropes, is real after all, and we also see that Howl chose his own path by leaving Wales, as well as by flouting expectations of what a wizard should be. So if it doesn't accept this just yet, and in fact she resists when the black suit is revealed to be the uncharmed version, and she's faced with loving Howl not because of some charmed role she's forced into, but because of her own self and complexities, he essentially accepts it when she believes she's taking responsibility for her own actions by going off to save Miss Angorian.
00:59:21
Speaker
even though she doesn't believe herself as a hero character, romantic or otherwise. At the end of the book, she's not just in a different fairy tale, she's broken out of fairy tales altogether, starting at the midpoint in Wales. This leaves her able to choose her own life and her own happiness outside of the bounds of any prescriptive story.
00:59:36
Speaker
Through the course of the book, she sees multiple novels of older women and she returns to her youth with a better understanding of the complexities of them as well as the complexities of who she can choose to be. That's brought home when Hal says, I think we ought to live happily ever after.
00:59:48
Speaker
And Sophie acknowledges that their happiness together won't really be happily ever after in a fairy tale way. Meanwhile, women who she now understands are more than stock characters circle them. And then Calciper comes back talking about the real world annoyance of rain because he doesn't have to follow a story role anymore either.
01:00:03
Speaker
To an extent, the midpoint in Wales also breaks the entire book out of its fairy tale structure in a postmodern way. Howell's tropic characteristics aren't just shown in a twisted light, but broken down completely, he gets sick.
01:00:14
Speaker
ah The quintessential Diana Wynne-Jones chaos really starts to build after the midpoint instead of only following the rules laid out by the curse. Complicating this observation is the way the sisters are paired off at the end, and that we do see the pieces of the curse on Howl fall into place over the second half of the book.
01:00:28
Speaker
I think the lack of evil stepmother sisters breaks out of story tropes a bit, but I'm still not sure how fully it fits into my argument. I do see the progression of the curse paralleling Sophie's journey out of a storyline. as it leads to all of the curses breaking down and all of the characters free to live outside of fairy tale tropes.
01:00:42
Speaker
I think there may be something to say about all this in comparison to Fire and Hemlock, but I'm less familiar with that one because it takes place in our world and I wasn't interested in that when I was younger unless there was a romance I wanted to root for. I'm returning to this Fire and Hemlock at the end.
01:00:54
Speaker
Because I do actually think, I think this is a really interesting and smart argument. And I think the thing that occurs to me in bringing this back to Fire and Hemlock is, of course, that in Fire and Hemlock, things are always two things at once.
01:01:05
Speaker
And I think this is true for Howl's Moving Castle and its relationship to fairy tales as well. I think the thing that Sophie needs to realize is not necessarily, not that life is never like a fairy tale, but that it can be like a fairy tale and also profoundly real and break all the rules and unrelated to, you know, and and and and unrelated to any of the tropes that she's familiar with at the same time.
01:01:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's it exactly it. It's it's the the the doubled reality, the parallel reality. like that Jones's interest in multiple worlds and parallel worlds is...
01:01:43
Speaker
so fundamental to her what it is. I was really surprised when I realized how late in her work it starts to show up. But I think the, the whales midpoint storyline in house moving castle is in some ways a standard Dern and Wynne Jones structure. The intrusion of the real world into the fairy tale is like it's power of three. Yeah.
01:02:03
Speaker
And it comes at the midpoint and reframes the story into something else. I think, and i think this is a really good argument. I agree.
01:02:13
Speaker
ah But i I think the... the
01:02:18
Speaker
I think my brain just switched off. Sorry, that's coming. No worries. I'm going to jump in and say, actually, the other thing that's made me think of as far as it's sort of an exact reversal of the midpoint of Archer's Goon, which is you leave the quote unquote real world and go into the past and find out some truths about yourself and who you are and who the people around you are.
01:02:41
Speaker
Which I think is really fun to consider those things as juxtaposed, where you sort of have to leave the narrative that you're in in order to understand that there's, that the narrative that you're in is sort of a bubble and that it is a consciously created bubble. In this case, Sophie has been kind of consciously creating it for herself and that there are other perspectives that you might need to take into account when thinking about the story of who you are.
01:03:07
Speaker
And it's sort of it's not a direct parallel because when Howard goes to the past and meets Hathaway and Hathaway's sort of trying to drop hints at him about who he really is, that is who he is. And when Sophie goes to Wales, she's learning about more about who Howell is rather than who she herself is.
01:03:24
Speaker
But When you marry it to this argument about how the intrusion of Wales sort of breaks the fairy tale illusion that she's been walking around in and the story of her particular narrative of her life is neatly aligning to these fairy tale tropes, I think you can come up with some really interesting comparative there.
01:03:41
Speaker
Yeah. There's always, I think that the thing that Diana Jones always wants to do at the midpoint of a book is switch your perspective around and make you understand that the world is bigger than the protagonist thinks it is.
01:03:52
Speaker
Yeah. All right, anything else that we want to say on Howl before we move on to Tale of Time City? Let's move to Tale of Time City, where Zoe Snape says, please share any butter pie recipes you're aware of.
01:04:04
Speaker
I want to try it now, something like... One, fill the bottom of a pint glass with a couple of inches of hot homemade butterscotch sauce. Two, wedge a thin round crispy cookie, maybe a Florentine in, just above the level of the sauce.
01:04:15
Speaker
And three, cover with a scoop of nice store-bought caramel or vanilla or sweet cream ice cream and smooth it out a bit. The challenge would be in assembling it quickly enough, I think. That sounds so good. That sounds delicious.
01:04:27
Speaker
um So I do have a friend who tried this and I meant to ask for the butter pie recipe. And unfortunately, ah life has prevented, but um i will I will plan to ask for that recipe at a later point and I'll share it in ah in notes or on Blue Sky or on Tumblr if I can find it.
01:04:44
Speaker
But this one sounds really, really good. It is, I think, the loveliest food that Diana McJones has ever described. Usually, as you mentioned, she's describing gross food. But this time she let herself, she let herself something good.
01:04:58
Speaker
Sam Baltimore says, i adored your Time City episode and had to chime in with my support for Emily's theory. Might the adjective lordly that she uses so often for Jonathan be a hint at his eventual time load status? That's hilarious.
01:05:13
Speaker
I wouldn't put it past her. She loves a pun. No, that is exactly like having read some of her essays where she looks straight out at the audience and is like, Obviously you should have picked up that Tom is Cupid because he's blind and has a bow.
01:05:26
Speaker
Like, obviously you should have picked up that Jonathan is lordly. It's exactly the kind of thing that she would say. And then Allison Miller says, i have a question. How do you think that the Arthurian significance of the name Vivian, either as the Lady of the Lake or as Merlin's captor, fit in with the themes of A Tale of Time City?
01:05:45
Speaker
Now, this is something I've been thinking about, and I've particularly been thinking about it looking back at something that was a huge consideration in the 70s and has less been less present in the 80s, which is this like heroic masculine as a ghost haunting the narrative. yeah And in Time of the Ghost, we have pretty clearly, I think, King Arthur ah sleeping in his tomb, waiting to be called forth to save Britain. And by the time the ghost shows up and meets him,
01:06:12
Speaker
He doesn't remember who he is and she has no idea either. And it's a really so tragic little moment. And then it kind of disappears yeah for the decade and reappears in Time City. But we finally have, again, the sleeping hero who will come to save the country. And like, oh, oh, it's King Arthur.
01:06:30
Speaker
And the subversion in Time City is that it's not the long lost king. It's the evil witch who's sleeping under the city. And she's not the evil witch. She's the rightful queen. but And indeed, we'll be running the place from here on in.
01:06:44
Speaker
And you have this, I mean, I think that pulling out the significance of the name as Merlin's captor specifically is really smart because the story of Vivian of Nimue is that she puts Merlin to sleep in something somewhere and that he's not around at the time when the round table really, when when Arthur really needs him.
01:07:04
Speaker
And to so it plays into this expectation, the myth that's been told about the Time Lady, that she put Faber-John to sleep and then bounced And so neither of them around when we need them. And so to have it be her who's asleep underneath um and have this sort of, I think subversion of the heroic masculine myth is really fun. And I think very intentional.
01:07:26
Speaker
And I think that, The fact, like the names, I'm sorry, I'm going to look forward to Hexwood again. then i was just thinking that. And Yeren are so similar and thematically so linked. We're going to have a lot to say about this next season, I think. I do think she hasn't fully decided yet what she wants to do with the Arthurian mythos.
01:07:44
Speaker
like it's It's kind of been hovering around her books for a while now, but she'll start playing with it in earnest in Hexwood. And then I don't think it really hits its full developed form until the Merlin conspiracy, which is very late.
01:07:57
Speaker
But it's it's a fascinating to think you know she's halfway through her career at this point and she still has so much stuff that she hasn't said and wants to say. And I think it's interesting to look at what she's clearly...
01:08:09
Speaker
interested in in the Arthurian mythos right like the some of the stuff that I think comes part and parcel with a lot of the Arthuriana that we see now like the love triangle etc she's that's not part of her project what she's interested in is the sleeping king the lost king the past haunting the future um the way that a myth turns around and what happens to the person trapped inside it ah Which makes me think of Eight Days of Luke and Brunhilde asleep in the flames.
01:08:38
Speaker
Yeah, actually Brunhilde asleep I think is something that yeah that links forward to this time lady. Yeah, it's it's this heroic, tragic, trapped figure ah who has made perhaps a worthwhile sacrifice or perhaps not.
01:08:58
Speaker
Well, Brunhilde actually is what the Time Lady is accused of being, right? Someone who, out of anger or resentment at the rest of the Pantheon, took something important and out of an actual desire for revenge.
01:09:13
Speaker
that That is part of the legend of the Time Lady and not the truth of the Time Lady. She's more and more interested, I think, in in legends that aren't true, in myths that aren't true, and part of that project of truth again, in in how do you then get to the truth past the story.
01:09:29
Speaker
Yeah. Speaking of Arthuriana and of Legends, we do have, even though this isn't properly part of the 80s, we do have a couple of questions about Dalemark. oh I just love talking about Dalemark. This is fine. Yeah.
01:09:42
Speaker
So we have one from E.J. Russell, which is part of a really lovely long letter that we're running close to the end of time, so I'm not going to read all of it out. But thank you for the but the beautiful letter. ah The question is, I could swear that I read somewhere back near the Spellcoats publication date that Diana Wendons had planned five Delmar books, but I can't find the reference now.
01:10:00
Speaker
Crown feels like it might've been intended as two books originally. What do you think? We'll come back to this when we actually read Crown. I have opinions. Firstly, there is clearly masses of Delmark material that we don't have. Like I long to dig through Jones's archive.
01:10:17
Speaker
Delmark is bigger than the quartet. There is, for one thing, a short story, which is actually one of her earliest, written in the 60s, not published till the 90s. So we didn't do it in the short stories episode called The True State of Affairs. I'm so excited to read this one. I've never read it.
01:10:31
Speaker
Truth. It's the truth again. ah But that's a Delmark story or a Delmark adjacent story. I do think the quartet, though, must have been intended as a quartet because as a very intelligent listener whose name I have forgotten because I'm terrible at names, pointed out last season, it's the four quartets. It's T.S. Eliot, which is also what she does in Fire and Hemlock. ah And when Jones has a creative preoccupation, boy, does she have the creative preoccupation.
01:10:58
Speaker
yep um But I think... The Del Marquette Quartet must have been planned as a quartet from the beginning because it doesn't make sense otherwise alongside the T.S. Eliot poems. Yeah.
01:11:09
Speaker
But also I think she must have really run into a big question mark. How the hell do I fix this for the final book?
01:11:18
Speaker
And having left herself too much to do, as it were. Oh, we're going to get there very soon. we might have a whole separate bonus episode just on the ah the glossary material, because I think that a lot of what she wanted to do is there in the glossary material.
01:11:34
Speaker
The other note about Delmarc is interesting from shadow master Tumblr user shadow master 13. Interesting note with Diana's mix of myths and the parents that the Mabinojian has a story that resonates where Paul is betrothed to Rhiannon and promises a stranger, the betrothal, anything he asks, it turned out to be Gual who asked for Rhiannon and the myth. She marries Paul because they trick Gual into giving her backup, but I'm sorry. I'm mangling these names, but it struck me with the discussion of Delmarc as whales and how much Jones plays with myth to incorporate basically a version of the story as the background of the parents.
01:12:03
Speaker
I do think that if we had had time to read the Mabinojian along with Delmarc, it would have yielded some really rich stuff. I think it's definitely all there in the DNA. Yeah.
01:12:14
Speaker
You just, you get so much of a reading list with Jones. Yeah. I want to try and read the Arabian Nights for a Castle in the Air. We'll see if I have time, but. I'm still trying to figure out which translation would be right because I think Castle in the Air is not based on the Arabian Nights so much as like a specific 20th century English translation of.
01:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, if anyone has thoughts about which one we ought to read. yeah You do that and I will try and get my head around Saeed Orientalism because I think that's what we need. We need to read the Arabian Nights. Absolutely.
01:12:50
Speaker
100%. And then we have some questions about the short stories. Many of you wrote in with thoughts about the master. Thank you so much. Thank you. um Before we do that, though, we did get another comment about the rest of the short story.
01:13:02
Speaker
ah from Devin Barlow. um One, two things occurred to me while listening to the short story episode, one directly relevant and one about homeward bounders and both centering around which writers are reading which other writers, which I'm always fascinated by.
01:13:13
Speaker
One, in Carol O'Neill, one of Carol's dream cast is a blonde man named Francis. Is there any record of Diana that has been done at Lyman Chronicles and is this character perhaps being a reference to Francis of Lyman?
01:13:24
Speaker
If it is, before we go on, if it is a reference to Lyman, that's incredibly funny because it's so mean about Francis. So funny. la I don't know if she read Dunnett, but I've read Dunnett and this is the funniest thing I've ever heard. i mean, we do know that Jones read voraciously. She read a lot.
01:13:45
Speaker
Did she read Dunnett specifically?
Book Discussions and Genre Evolution
01:13:46
Speaker
don't know, but a lot of people did. Uh-huh. She might even have just heard about Dunnett. Even if she never read Dunnit. I've got to say, it can be quite difficult to avoid Dunnit. If, like me, you are a person who's like, yes, in theory, I'm in favour, all that sounds great, but I'm not reading that right now. Guys, stop telling me to read that.
01:14:07
Speaker
Yeah, you're hearing, if all your friends are reading Dunnit and you're hearing constantly about this perfect blonde man. The more you tell me about the blonde man, the more I wish to write a story in which he is quite annoying.
01:14:19
Speaker
um I want to believe. and don't know, but I want to believe. And then this actually isn't about the short stories, it's about Homeward Bounders. so Sherry has Tepper's debut, King's Blood 4, comes out in 83 and has some similar stuff going on with games.
01:14:33
Speaker
Do we know if Tepper read Diana or if there's some other similar point of inspiration, aside from games generally becoming more of a thing during the time? I also have read King's Blood 4. i don't know whether Tepper read Diana, but I do think that there was a lot going on in the early eighty s with D&D, with gaming, with the the scare, I'm blanking on the the term for the- It's a panic panic.
01:14:58
Speaker
Yes. um i I think that it's probably just kind of the general milieu of cultural conversation of people starting to think about games in narrative. There's other things I can think of as well.
01:15:10
Speaker
Very much the case that sometimes you will look back five years later and go, huh, everyone simultaneously decided to write a book about X. What's that about? but we And we leave it to the critics to decide what that was all about.
01:15:23
Speaker
Yeah. i had another reference that I was just going to look up to see when it came out. But A, it's not a good book and b we're running out of time. So I'll leave it for now. But I do think games were kind of in the water. Quite possible that Tepper did read Jones, though.
01:15:35
Speaker
Yeah. um I mean, Jones is certainly by the by the early 80s was, I think, starting to be a well-known name in in Hang on, Tepper's American though, isn't she? Tepper's American, so I don't know if she would have early 80s Jones, children's book Jones.
01:15:53
Speaker
Because Jones doesn't really start to gain status as like a figure of genre fiction until really the mid-90s with her one and only Hugo nomination, ah which was a face-related work.
01:16:05
Speaker
Exactly. I think if Tepper ever read Jones, the ones she'd had been the likeliest to read would be Tough Guide and Dark Lord of Dark Home. And that's not for another decade.
01:16:17
Speaker
But I could be, I could so easily be wrong. I mean, there are were also, as we know, many American readers and many Australian readers going, how do I get more of these books? Where do I get them from? yeah i will trade you for one.
01:16:29
Speaker
Yeah. that ah All right. Now we have the people who wrote in into us about the master. Thank you. Thank you. First is Farah. Thank you, Farah. As always, our guiding light.
01:16:43
Speaker
Farah says, the master, two thoughts. It's her Joan Aiken story and her Angela Carter story. Also take a look at Joan Grenfell's sketch, The Children's Writer. Grenfell was hugely popular in DWJ's parents' generation.
01:16:55
Speaker
Those of us who are fans, I'm a huge fan, tended to get it from our grandparents. She was incredibly perceptive and sharp. If you've never seen her work, also look on YouTube for First Flight. I used to use this with my MA students, challenge, tell me about the person sitting next to the protagonist.
01:17:08
Speaker
And finally, all her kids are grown up by this time and look up Colin Burrow for the long, thin face. I feel like at some point we should, as a podcast, apologize to Colin Burrow.
01:17:20
Speaker
Thank you, Dr. Burrow, for all your work discussing your mother's books. We would still like to know if you play D&D as a child. And if you did, would you like to come on the podcast and play D&D with us?
01:17:34
Speaker
Please. Oh, my God. All right.
Interpreting Stories and Community Dynamics
01:17:39
Speaker
Next is Penny Griffin. Penny Griffin writes, the master is mostly making the best sense Diana Wynne-Jones can out of a dream she had.
01:17:48
Speaker
And that is also displaced in time culturally by 20 years or so. It has worked great in the 60s anthology. It's like the prisoner or picnic at Hanging Rock. The more sense you try to make of it, the further you get from what it means.
01:17:59
Speaker
The narrator has a prophetic dream that neither we nor she has sufficient information to interpret. Possibly she will now go to a perfectly ordinary farmhouse and make a perfectly ordinary vet call, which nonetheless has the surrealistic atmosphere hanging over it.
01:18:10
Speaker
Possibly she disappears and this is all the police have to go on. We just don't know. I think that is a perfectly valid reading of the master as a surrealist. What a weird thing that happened, but was it all a dream story?
01:18:22
Speaker
I do like the next bit of analysis by hidden variable quite a bit, which looks forward to Hexwood. before I get in there, I also want to note, I'm sorry, Penny, I'm not going to read all of this out, but Penny does have a really cogent defense of A Plague of Peacocks, which we didn't like very much, as ah a story that reads as Penny reads it as a direct answer and practical refutation of a genre of science fiction that treats children as alien monsters, and specifically of the short story i She Hates Most of All Time, It's a Good Life by Jeremy Bixby, with which it shares a premise into this small community is born a child with omnipotent power.
01:18:56
Speaker
and sort of reads these communities in the Bixby story, the community in the Bixby story against the community in the Jones story in a way that I think is really interesting and a very reasonable defense of Plague of Peacocks.
01:19:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think we need to read the Bixby story ourselves. But Jones does do that. She writes against other writers, which we will see more and more in the coming decade.
01:19:18
Speaker
but She writes critically, she writes in conversation. And as she sort of I feel she's kind of working through her material. and By the late 80s, she's worked through a lot children's fiction.
01:19:33
Speaker
children's affection Yeah. The thing um the other thing I'll quote from this is Penny says that Daniel Emanuel's parents are counting on the village to help raise him and the village rises to the occasion.
01:19:44
Speaker
The people around him model cooperative behavior, deal making, negotiation, respect, and ultimately gratitude. And I do think that the thing that is strongest in Plague of Peacocks, and you talked about this a little bit as well, is this portrait of the village, the women of the village, the community of the village.
01:19:59
Speaker
um That has been disrupted by these awful interfering do-gooders who have arrived. And Daniel Emanuel is not an alien element in that village, but an integral part of the village.
01:20:10
Speaker
I think that sort of brings me back to Jones's general interest in writing children who are people, even when they are quite weird children. And Daniel Emanuel... is not our protagonist. He is ah always seen from the outside.
01:20:24
Speaker
We have to work with his siblings to try and get him to do anything. And there are various bits of deal making going on around him in the plague of peacock story where his siblings agree to this, that, and the other, and then discuss it with Daniel Emmanuel. But he's still part of an integrated into a family, a community, a place of belonging.
01:20:41
Speaker
Right. But to get back to the master now, I'm, We're just looking ahead. I'm sorry, because I think that Hidden Variable wrote has a great analysis of the master in line of Hexwood.
01:20:53
Speaker
um So Hidden Variable says, i think like so many of these other stories, it's a dry run of Hexwood. First of all, there's the wood and the way there's a well-defined boundary between the wood and the world outside, the sense of a crossing into the realm of myth and fairy tales.
01:21:05
Speaker
Then the sinister technology humming away beneath everything that also manifests itself in a way that looks like magic. The staff spell in particular is definitely something that shows up in Hexwood. So if it's Hexwood, then the experiment they're running is some kind of breeding program.
01:21:20
Speaker
Right, of course, for question mark werewolves, werewolves that can turn into humans, weird aliens that sometimes look like wolves, and our narrator, the vet, has been lured in to take the place of the murdered Petra as Egg's mate, hence why he was so excited when she brought up the idea of marriage and was giving hints like wed and bed.
01:21:38
Speaker
Egg is a proto-Mordian and the narrator is proto-Vieran maybe. He has many Mordian-esque characteristics. Tall, thin, kind of weird looking, clearly a prisoner under a spell, perhaps not fully able to access all of his knowledge or memories.
01:21:49
Speaker
Dinahwin Jones sexy man. And of course he turns into a creature with large scary teeth. Dinahwin Jones sexy man. Dinahwin Jones sexy man. I confess I don't fully get who or what the master is. When the narrator orders Eggs to get the master, he immediately turns into a wolf.
01:22:03
Speaker
So maybe Eggs himself in his wolf form is the master, so he's Morty and Reiner one together. Or, alternate theory, Eggs becoming a wolf immediately summons Annie into the scene, so maybe it's Annie who is the master.
01:22:14
Speaker
She certainly seems more in charge and clear about what's going on than anyone else. Also, I don't know who eon Harrison Ovett, Harry Sanovett, on the phone call is, although the name did make me think of Harrison Scudamore from Hexwood, some incompetent local employee.
01:22:27
Speaker
I do think the ending has a little bit of hope to it. The time of the call being 5.55 instead of 5.50 means that the time loop has ratcheted forward a notch. And the narrator has learned some things from the last round, like how to communicate with eggs and the fact that he responds to commands, but not questions.
01:22:42
Speaker
So maybe this time or some future iteration shall make it out of the woods. The idea of going through the same scenario multiple times until you get it right is very Hexwood. Also, another side note that just occurred to me, the story about the gold, silver and lead boxes made me think of the four caskets in Tale of Time City.
01:22:57
Speaker
So that's another time travel time loop reference. I think this is it. I think it's got to be a time loop story. i think it's- Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And also the the breeding experiment stuff.
01:23:10
Speaker
ah That's something that she's going to be playing with in Hexwood. I do think that has to be what's going on here. Yeah. Which, does that mean the two kid wolves are in fact her children?
01:23:22
Speaker
Maybe. ah one of them's Annie's child and one of them's her child? What's going on? I still, this explains it way better than anything that I've thought of. There are still many, many questions that I have about the master.
01:23:37
Speaker
it does It does feel like one of many stories where she's taking a dry run at elements of Hexwood. um God, Hexwood's a good book. There's a lot in it.
01:23:49
Speaker
And I can see why you would have to take dry runs at it and come at it in a few different directions in order to get into something that complicated. Right, like Anne does.
01:24:01
Speaker
ah She's speaking of the the author as sort of the villain that has to be taken down. She's doing it to herself. So that is the end of all of our questions, I think.
01:24:12
Speaker
ah Did we have other things we wanted to talk about? The one other thing that I want to make sure to mention, I was wasn't sure whether it was going to come up in response to any of these questions or not. But the other thing that I discovered while re-listening to old episodes, and we spend a lot of time in some of you know in some of the ones where we talk about queer readings, go, well,
01:24:31
Speaker
Did Diana Wynne Jones know
Queer Representation and Season Wrap-Up
01:24:32
Speaker
about gay people? She must have known. She did know. We have definitive evidence that she knew her sister, Ursula Jones, ah had been in a lesbian relationship since 1961. 63, I think.
01:24:44
Speaker
According to Wikipedia, I think it was 61. I just looked at her before this. Oh, right. Pre-Stonewell, either way. Pre-Stonewell, throughout the entirety of Diana Wynne Jones' writing career,
01:24:56
Speaker
So, yeah, she knew. no, I read up about this. I have to say in any other family, Ursula would have been the famous one. yeah She was on Coronation Street.
01:25:08
Speaker
but su She was in Sense8. which is like Speaking of things that don't seem like they ought to be connected. both But yeah, yeah. So Ursula Jones, a writer and actress, ah was in a relationship with her daughter.
01:25:22
Speaker
Girlfriend, partner, and as soon as it was legal, wife for 60 years um until her partner's death in 2021, I think. ah Which I read it and I got a little bit emotional. 60 years? Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. And they were they were known to ah known to their friends as Puck and Ursy, which is really cute.
01:25:42
Speaker
She's really cute and I think really fun to think of. Ursula Jones, I think, shows up really clearly quite often in a lot of the canon. ah She's vanilla. She's awful.
01:25:53
Speaker
Yes. She's always the indomitable youngest sibling that you aim as a weapon at other people. and And I love to know this about Ursula Jones herself. It makes really happy.
01:26:04
Speaker
Yeah. Anything else you wanted to say, Anne, before we call it? No, I think we hit on everything. I think we talked about everything. And, oh, I can't wait for season three. I've been saying this for so long now, but I really can't wait for season three.
01:26:18
Speaker
Yeah. So I think we're going to start recording the next season in October. ah Hopefully we'll pre-record the first couple of episodes and then get into the swing of it. So yeah hopefully you, our listeners, time you, our listeners, will hopefully get the first episode of season three sometime in November.
01:26:34
Speaker
Yeah, probably November. Yeah. So thank you all so much again for listening to us, for writing in, for all the wonderful letters. We super appreciate each and every one.
01:26:45
Speaker
And we'll see you guys soon. Bye. Bye.