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Dark Lord of Derkholm
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""Why have we got six soppy men in a green haze hanging about?""
Tolkien and Disney, coffee and cotton, children and chattel, colonialism and capitalism, satire and sitcoms and sentimentality and as many jokes as can possibly fit in a three hundred page book.
NB: This episode touches on prisoner abuse and sexual assualt.
Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1edDFMD9LbdsdrgTIflJCwfynukFnrTw5/view
This brings us to the end of our nineties season, but we're planning couple bonus episodes over the next few months, so please stay tuned, and send any questions for our Q&A to eightdaysofdiana@gmail.com!
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Transcript
Introduction and Mixed Feelings on Diana Wynne Jones
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to final episode of this season of 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm Rebecca Framow. And I'm Emily Tesh and today we are talking about Dark Lord of Durkholm.
00:00:34
Speaker
It is weird to be at the end of the 90s. This decade has felt like it's not, I don't know that it's her best decade, but it's certainly her most interesting decade, I think, in a lot of ways.
00:00:46
Speaker
I have found it increasingly hard to, I was just saying this to you, to talk coherently, to talk clearly about these books, to really get a grip on what it is I want to say about them and what I even think they are saying.
00:00:59
Speaker
Diana Wynne-Jones in the 1990s explodes into this new ambition and new thematic complexity and it does not always work but by god she is trying some interesting stuff.
00:01:13
Speaker
She really is It's like the books are you may have noticed that our episodes are getting longer. The books are bigger, there's more characters, there's more themes, there's more stuff all happening at once.
00:01:25
Speaker
And it's always really naughty and and challenging and and complex and interesting to
Dark Lord of Durkholm: Satire and Complexity
00:01:31
Speaker
unpick. And I think this book is maybe one of the biggest for that. It's certainly got the biggest cast that we've ever seen her do.
00:01:41
Speaker
Yes. So Dark Lord of Dirkholm sits, I think, very necessarily in conversation with a book we haven't done an episode on, but which I think is central to Jones's project in the 90s. And that is The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
00:01:58
Speaker
Now, The Tough Guide is not a novel, which is why we haven't done an episode on it yet, although I think we've got it on our list for bonus apps. It was the only Diana Wynne-Jones ever to pick up a Hugo nod in the best related work category. And The Tough Guide is a light little comedy handbook guide to 1990s epic fantasy.
00:02:20
Speaker
written from the point of view of someone who really does not like nineteen ninety s epic fantasy. And there is so much in it. I mean, these these are the fantasy books that I read as a kid in the early 2000s. If you wanted a 10 book series, what you did was you picked up the one that was published first in 1990 and then you kept going.
00:02:40
Speaker
And like there there's things I pick. I've just reread the tough guide in preparation for this episode. like I can tell you didn't like Terry Goodkind. We already knew that. But I can also tell you didn't like Robert Jordan. Weren't so hot and Mercedes Lackey. Had some real arguments to make with George RR Martin. Like there's a lot of it. Don't even mention Terry Brooks or David Eddings.
00:03:02
Speaker
You can really feel her frustration. And I think The Dark Lord of Darkholm is a book where all that frustration comes to the surface because Dark Lord of Darkholm really is a tough guide.
Character Analysis and Family Dynamics
00:03:16
Speaker
She uses a lot of the jokes from the tough guide. She uses the basic ah conceit of the tough guide, which is that a quest through fantasy land is a kind of tour that you're going on from another world um and you're paying quite a lot of money to have it be completely predictable. ah But it actually made me think of Uncle Ted's bicycle in Deep Secret. Yeah. Well, Uncle Ted, ah that very commercial writer, a representative, perhaps, of Fantasyland writers, although his world is horror, um Uncle Ted compares writing a book to a bicycle and he says the jokes are the oil that makes it all go smoothly. In Dirkholm, that is not true.
00:04:00
Speaker
The jokes are the frame of the bicycle. They are the thing in the centre. um The plot is the oil that's making it go. But the plot is really not, I think, the point because Dirkholm is satire.
00:04:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the really interesting things about the structure of this book, and one of the things that makes this book difficult and difficult to talk to, is that the frame, the structure of the book is comedy. It is satire. It's funny. We are always in sitcom mode. We are always in, you know, there's there's always some kind of background, ah absolute comedy chaos. Slapstick, screwball is happening all the time.
00:04:42
Speaker
But the thing that's actually powering the book is anger. She's so angry about all of this. Now, now, now, now, I would say that's exactly what satire is, though. And like, comedy is, I think, understudied, underanalyzed, because it's hard to do.
00:04:58
Speaker
You read something funny and taking it apart to go, how does it work? Spoils it a bit. But comedy has... Principles, logic, they're the ways people do things. Satire is angry comedy. And I think the comparison that you and I haven't mentioned at all in our pre-chat, but we should, ah is the other great 90s British fantasy satirist, which is Terry fucking Pratchett. No, we did talk about him a little bit. We talked about him in the context of competent old women, which is something that we're going to get to. There are many competent old women in this book.
00:05:32
Speaker
which also is interesting because this book is not about women. But it is about women. This book is Liz Estrada. the do um but right, satire is comedy powered by anger, by by really, really deep anger against the whole way that something works, that society works, and Pratchett's Discworld series satirizes the the contemporary world he knew constantly.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I think Dark Lord of Dirkholm is arguably doing the same thing. ah It's less silly than the Discworld. And I love i love the Discworld very much, but Pratchett shines in farce and in silliness. I think actually, you're right, the word is sitcom. the um The thing she's drawing on are the the warm family sitcom. There's always a character rushing in to deliver a one-liner and rushing out again in that chaotic sense yeah like it does feel a little bit like watching tv and here's our family in advance of this episode about so the center family at the core of this book has two parents seven children an infinite number of like
00:06:47
Speaker
Weird engineered comedy animals and we were talking at the beginning. We're like, why are there seven of the children? Because it really feels like only maybe five of them at most have actual plots or arcs and the answer is that you always need two extra children at least who aren't having a plot or an arc so they can rush in and have a comedy one-liner and rush out again. in order to give that kind of crowded chaotic feel that she wants to- I'll tell you what it makes me think of, this just hit me, Gerald Durrell, my family and other animals. Oh yeah, yeah absolutely, and the family is animals. Let's be clear, like the question of the family being animals is I think also thematically central to the book.
00:07:27
Speaker
So of the seven kids, five of them are griffin children who were magically genetically engineered by dirk who's one of our protagonists the wizard dirk who's just he's interested in making creatures this is his fun little hobby and he decided that the griffin creatures that he was going to make he wanted them to be people so he made them out of his own cells and his wife's cells and brought them up As children, essentially as children, but also as a mad scientist breeding experiment. Now, I think she's kind of been on the mad scientist breeding experiments for a while here. Think back to Mordian in in Hexwood and Raina One's...
00:08:10
Speaker
assassin breeding program but it's also it's it's a joke out of the tough guide as so much of this book is what do wizards even do and the answer appears to be get bored get annoyed start problems and do evil breeding programs and yes in the tough guide specifically monster breeding programs is an evil wizard thing And Dirk, our hero, the joke of the book is that he is being forced into the shape of an evil wizard, despite really not being like that at all. Despite being quite an ordinary little man, dumpy little man, who loves his children and has weird hobbies. His intro his intro description is A tall, faddish, mild-faced man dressed in the kind of clothes farmers wore. And I think that's really important, actually, because the question of farming, of animal husbandry, is, like, central to some of the thematic weirdness around the Griffins. Okay, but it's also, it's weird breeding programs have been a 90s consideration, right? But so is parenting.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. We got them kind of colliding here. And the question is, is being a parent basically the same as being a wizard mad scientist?
00:09:25
Speaker
Right. Or as being a farmer who is determining the futures of these creatures that he's responsible for in the way that's most interesting or best to make sense to him.
00:09:38
Speaker
So he hasn't actually, I mean, one of the central problems of the book is that Dirk actually hasn't thought much about the futures of his griffins. He loves his griffins. They're beautiful. he considers them his children. This despite the fact that when creating his two eldest griffins, he also casually tosses off that he'd hoped they'd make a breeding pair. dirt You can't be doing that. you can't create I wonder if he didn't realize at the time he was originally breeding gruffins that he was going to be creating his own children But that no, it it's silly. Like, Dirk?
00:10:06
Speaker
They're from your own cells and your wife's cells. They're already siblings. Dirk, mind you, he is a farmer. ah Presumably he has done fair bits of crossbreeding and inbreeding, given he has, to be clear, Dirk doesn't just have griffin children. He has a a whole valley full of magical farm experiments, invisible cats and carnivorous sheep and flying horses. And most of them...
00:10:30
Speaker
are to some degree or another sentient, which I think puts the problem of the book into question. I think we spend the most time with the flying horses, that he's been increasingly breeding for sentience and ability to communicate. So the horse that he spends all book riding around on named Beauty can mostly speak, and her child, Priti, who's a constant, like, nuisance troublemaker, always getting into problems, can speak perfectly and make his wishes known exactly. And there is like a little subplot in the middle of the book about Dirk sort of as as a horse breeder does, making an exchange of this beautiful horse for something else with someone else in the book. But it reads as much like an arranged marriage plot as like horse trade exchange.
00:11:12
Speaker
There's like a weird little elf romance between this elf that desperately wants this beautiful horse and pretty who can speak and choose to run away and spend time with this elf that his mother disapproves of. See, I think this is a Herald Mage joke.
00:11:25
Speaker
I think you're right. But it is also again like it puts into perspective like we've got this sort of scale of what what are the animals are are the other pigs are animals they're they're flying pigs, but they're pretty clearly farm animals, the friendly cows are farm animals.
00:11:43
Speaker
They eat the friendly cows, specifically. Like like Jones is ah unsentimental about what these animals are being raised for. Yes. Dirk has raised some extra friendly cows to make it a bit easier to kill and eat them. And then it's like, oh, now I feel bad. Now it's made it worse.
00:12:00
Speaker
But the Griffins do not feel bad. They are carnivorous. The geese, the hyper intelligent geese. Are they farm animals? They don't really want to be farm animals. They seem to have the intelligence and the magical abilities not to be farm animals. The horses, are they farm animals? They can speak and make their opinions known.
00:12:18
Speaker
The Griffins are not farm animals. They are children. The children are not farm animals. They are children. Except that when ah Mr. Chesney, our our evil villain of the book, first shows up, he has Dirk's daughter Shona as playing the violin beautifully in the background and Mr. Cheney says, well, someone silenced that slave girl.
00:12:38
Speaker
So, are children children? Are humans? Are all these things chattel? Are they all possessions? Things that you have and that you love, like you love your possessions. Aren't they pretty? Aren't they great? Aren't they cool? Have you considered these things as people?
00:12:56
Speaker
And we first meet Dirk in this book when he is visiting the Oracle in the desert, which has been set up, but we haven't even talked about Mr. Chesney. We'll come back to Mr. Chesney. He's visiting the Oracle in the desert to find out about his son Blade's the future.
00:13:13
Speaker
Blade is not Dirk's oldest son. He's Dirk's oldest human son. Yep. Only human son, in fact. And he wants to go to university. And Dirk does not want to send him because Dirk had a horrible time at university and thinks it's terrible.
00:13:27
Speaker
And there is quite a, I think, almost a charming conflict between Dirk, who clearly has been a weirdo all his life, being like school is really rubbish when you're a weirdo,
00:13:37
Speaker
I say that lovingly. School is not when you're weirdo. I should know I was one. And Blade is like, but I am normal kid and I would like to go to school and do normal kid stuff. Yeah, Blade's role in this book really is to be a normal kid who would like to do normal kid stuff, which makes him an interesting protagonist for this book. And we'll come back to that. I think, that yeah, there are two primary protagonists in this book and they are Blade and Dirk. Yes.
00:14:01
Speaker
There's a lot of secondary protagonists. Yes. And one of those secondary protagonists is Dirk's oldest son, the Griffin Kit, who again has not been brought to the Oracle to find out what he's going to do with his life ah because Dirk is hasn't really considered or thought about what a giant griffin is going to do with his life. Obviously, he's not going to go to university because the university considers these griffins that Dirk has made as chattel, as interesting experiments that could potentially be used to pay his annual tithe to the school about the stuff that he's been working on. So instead, the tithe to the school is paid in Dirk's wife's project, which are little universes that aren't sentient at all.
00:14:41
Speaker
And later in the book, Blade and Dirk are talking about this is two thirds of the way through the book. And Kit is trying to explain to Blade how one of their sisters feels about having her career path taken away from her.
00:14:55
Speaker
And kits Blade's like, I don't get it. And Kit says, you know how you felt it when dad said you couldn't go to university? And Blade said, yes, but I feel better now after the Oracle. And Kit said, thickhead, nobody took me to any Oracle, did they? I feel for her. I know what it's like not to have any future.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah. I think in many ways, Blade and Kit are a classic pair of Diana Wynne Jones reflections ah that we need to read them constantly against each other and in conversation with each other.
00:15:24
Speaker
I think Kit actually is the protagonist I would have chosen. maybe Maybe Diana knows more than me. But actually a lot of what I was thinking about as I read this book was the difference between reading a book which you think is not good and reading a book where the author has made intentional artistic choices that you disagree with. There's a lot in this book which...
00:15:50
Speaker
I wouldn't have done it that way. i disagree with the artistic choices she's making, but Jones is clearly making her choices on purpose to do a particular thing.
00:16:02
Speaker
And the reason I disagree is partly that I don't think she quite succeeds in doing what she's aiming at. There's a lot, I think, that's really, again, this is a difficult book in a lot of ways. And we're gonna talk about some of the ways in which it's difficult and some of the ways in which its themes and its anger sometimes feel so big, bigger than the framework of jokes that she's set up to contain it.
00:16:25
Speaker
And Kit is part of that because Kit is having these huge, big emotions. I think really clearly from the start of the book, the first really important thing we see Kit do on the page.
00:16:36
Speaker
And I think this is central again to the question of Griffin as Griffin's as beasts or as children is.
Exploitation and Colonial Themes in Fantasyland
00:16:42
Speaker
So now we do have to set up Mr. Chesney. ah Yeah, let's set up Mr. Chesney.
00:16:47
Speaker
First, let us remind you that ah we've referred a few times to what Diana Wynne-Jones called California fantasy. I think this is important because Mr. Chesney is Mr. Disney.
00:16:59
Speaker
It's not subtle. yeah Mr. Chesney is a little man from another world who, we're never told how, has come into possession of a demon that grants him control over fantasy land. He has has had the control of this demon for, we're told, 40 years. So for 40 years, Fantasyland has existed as a theme park for what Mr. Chesney wants it to do. And what he wants Fantasyland to do is make him money. And boy, does it make him money. So Mr. Chesney is an exploitative colonial overlord. This is the East India Company, again, extracting profit from Fantasyland by forcing the inhabitants of Fantasyland to perform for him in this fantasy theme park to which he sends tourists to have fantasy it adventures. And the adventure is always the same because it's
00:18:01
Speaker
a product, a consumer product the customer is always right so they always have the same adventure and the adventure is very clearly sub-Tolkien quest to defeat the Dark Lord and I do think Tolkien haunts this book in many ways but one of the reasons that the Lord of the Rings is haunting this book is that the the the work that Jones is satirising is itself so much in conversation with the Lord of the Rings Yes, but a kind of, you know, a very intentionally the whole plot of the book is setting up the hollowness of this conversation with Lord of the Rings. yeah The requirement to hit the particular plot beats, encounter the particular little side quests, and then make your way to the Dark Lord's Fortress. where you will defeat the Dark Lord and then triumphantly go home.
00:18:50
Speaker
Right. So the setup for ah the the inciting incident of the book is the ah High Chancellor of the University, Karida, who we'll talk about more indeed in more depth soon, has decided to finally find a way to put a stop to this. So she consults the Oracle as to what she should do. And the Oracle, there are in fact two Oracles. She consults them both.
00:19:10
Speaker
One is white and one is black. The color coding is very important in Fantasyland because that's how Mr. Chesney likes it. right So they're going to do what both oracles say, and the oracles tell her you must appoint the first person you see on leaving as this year's Dark Lord.
00:19:27
Speaker
Dark Lord is the worst job in fantasy land, because it means you have to run the bloody thing. Right, you're project manager for the entire quest. That's miserable.
00:19:38
Speaker
Right, and this is also a comment on this kind of quest fantasy, right? This kind quest fantasy is reactive, right? Our heroes, our merry band of companions, wander around the landscape, bumping into various minions of the Dark Lord who push them this way and that. They're attacked by leathery winged avians at this point. You're ambushed by bandits. You're attacked by avians. You go to the hidden secret city and discover the secret. you know right it's ah In fact, it's Dungeons and Dragons storytelling. The Dark Lord is the DM for the year. Yeah. Yes. For all 73 tourist parties. So you're your forever DM for 73 parties simultaneously and they can't even know you're doing it. They can't know you're doing it. They're all having the exact same experience. And I think this is really important.
00:20:28
Speaker
It's insistent that the death and destruction has to be real. We're given a number for the number of citizens of this world that die every year. for the Torm, the Torm, the tourist parties. The number is 200 and I think that has to be low from what we've seen of how much death and destruction is wreaked in the wake of these tourist parties because we have to stage battles for their enjoyment. We have to destroy villages for their enjoyment.
00:20:54
Speaker
We have to bring dangerous things and make it feel real and ensure that none of the tourists, except for the ones who have specifically been marked to have dangerous things happen to them, get into any trouble about it, which means that the the actual pain and suffering ah happens to the people who live in this world instead.
00:21:12
Speaker
Right. The devastation of the countryside is not optional. It has to happen every year and be reset in time for the tour to happen again the following year. Right. And it's been 40 years, so this is really having a detrimental ah effect on the crop cycle, for example. In fact, the only way Fantasyland now seems to be surviving is that Mr. Chesney pays them.
00:21:35
Speaker
Right. And it's very clear he is not paying them what this work is actually worth. but they are living on, you know, scraps. Yeah, one of the, you know, we get a very nice little, the first chapter is essentially just a nice little rundown of how bad these pilgrim parties are being. The evil king says, just his little pre-see of the problems that he's facing,
00:21:57
Speaker
I've been selected as evil king 15 times in the last 20 years, with but the result that I have a tour through there once a week, invading my court and trying to kill me or my courtiers. My wife has left me and taken the children with her for safety. The towns and countryside are being devastated.
00:22:10
Speaker
If the army of the Dark Lord doesn't march through and sack my city, then the forces of good do it next time. I admit, I'm being paid quite well for this, but the money I earn is so urgently needed to repair the capital for the next pilgrim party that there is almost none to spare for helping the farmers. They hardly grow anything these days.
00:22:26
Speaker
Right. The economy of Fantasyland is a wreck. The ecology of Fantasyland is a wreck. Again, these are all jokes from the tough guide, but they are jokes taken quite seriously.
00:22:37
Speaker
And in return, Fantasyland gets money. And it also gets, and I think it's quite specific what it gets. and It gets tomatoes, corn, coffee. It gets cotton, corn.
00:22:53
Speaker
It gets T-shirts. It gets little gadgets that you can play video games on. It gets all the cool stuff that you can get from the Americas. yeah And I think she is simultaneously drawing on the sort of colonial exchange, Colombian exchange, right?
00:23:11
Speaker
yeah But also on 20th century, leading into the 21st century, American soft power. Like yeah the projection of Mr. Chesney, Mr. No, not Disney. I don't want to get sued. ah Is a projection of, but look at all the money you're getting and look at all the nice t-shirts you're getting.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't think, you know, the... The history of colonialism, the question of colonialism and colonization is really at the heart of the genre of science fiction and fantasy, right? Science fiction, perhaps, especially. i was just listening to a podcast, the the podcast Dragons Made Me Do It about Pern.
00:23:55
Speaker
talking about the fantastic podcast, by the way, talking about the the colonization fantasy at the heart of so much science fiction that you can go somewhere and it's empty. Right. Imagine a real Terra Nullius. Imagine a place you can go it's fun. You have an adventure. It turns you into the heroic kind of person that you want to be.
00:24:17
Speaker
And this, again, I think is the satire that we're exploring. For the pilgrims, they go, they have an adventure. They come of age. They save the world from the Dark Lord. They save the world from the Dark Lord. And then they get to go home having grown as people. And isn't that wonderful?
00:24:35
Speaker
Meanwhile, the Dark Lord has to do it again because it's his job. Right. So the oracles say the next person you see is going to have to be Dark Lord this year. That's Dirk, who's been dodging the job for 20 years. And no one wants him to do it because no one thinks he's competent.
00:24:50
Speaker
The oracles also say the second person that you see is going to have to be the leader of the last pilgrim party. The wizard guide, specifically. like There are very strict rules about how you lead a pilgrim party. You do have to be Gandalf.
00:25:04
Speaker
Yes. wizard guide has to have a beard of a required length, which is going to be difficult for the second person they see because he's Dirk's adolescent son, Blaine, who certainly can't grow a beard He's 14.
00:25:16
Speaker
So this has been, you know, this has been decided and there's no way out of
Power Dynamics and Moral Struggles
00:25:21
Speaker
it. um In fact, when Dirk hears this mandate, he glares at, I've always pronounced it Querida, and the reason for that is I think it's a joke on Querilus, which is what old ladies are.
00:25:33
Speaker
oh But he glares at at her and says, no one should have that much power. And then he's like, i I was talking about Mr. Chesney, of course, not you, Chancellor of the University. But of course he is talking about her because in many ways she and Mr. Chesney are are the same.
00:25:48
Speaker
And she's been specifically appointed to be ruthless enough to fight Mr. Chesney. Anyway, the decision has been made. He sighs. He spends 48 hours moping about it while his entire family gets into gear around it to help him with it.
00:26:03
Speaker
And then he holds his first business meeting. Mr. Chesney and his team come to visit. And now to come back to Kit, Blade, in his own point of view, notices that during this business meeting, during this business meeting in which his sister Shona is playing the violin and Mr. Chesney calls her a slave girl, none of the Griffins are talking.
00:26:21
Speaker
All of them are acting like silent servitors, like beasts. And it is revealed at the end of this scene that Kit's plan, Kit who thinks he has no future, is to hide the fact that the Griffins are intelligent so that he can murder Mr. Chesney without any consequences being brought down on the family the way that consequences would be brought down if this was something a child did.
00:26:51
Speaker
A beast can run mad and savage somebody and it's just a terrible accident. Yeah, I think a lot of this book is about Kits in a darkness, in a rage, like in many ways. The question of who is the Dark Lord of Durkholm?
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah. Keeps coming back. One very obvious answer is that it's Mr. Chesney on the grounds that he's the evil tyrant who rules the world. ah But in terms of who's doing the job, who is running the war game that their world has become, the answer for most of this book is Kits.
00:27:27
Speaker
right And this Kit has in him this rage and power. ah he's He's a teenage boy. He's a Griffin teenage boy, but he's a teenage boy. And he's very clever and he's very gifted. And it becomes clear that he's magically gifted. And there's a lot that he could do, but he has no future. right Dirk has not taken Kit to the desert deceit to find out who's going to teach him magic. Dirk has not thought about Kit as a person who wants a future.
00:27:53
Speaker
yeah And then Kit takes for himself various different kinds of future. First he attempts and ultimately can't bring himself to become the animal that murdered Mr. Chesney.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah, and the reason he says that he can't do it, I think is really interesting. So he's talking to Dirk, and Dirk says whatrick says, you know, I'm glad you didn't do it. I think being a murderer is a vile state of mind.
00:28:20
Speaker
But then a little bit regretfully, because it would be so convenient for everyone if Mr. Chesney did just get murdered, he says, what stopped you? And Kit says, it was when I looked at his face. It was awful. He thinks he owns everything in this world. He thinks he's right. He wouldn't have understood.
00:28:35
Speaker
It was a pity. I could have killed him in seconds, even with that demon in his pocket, but he would have been just like food. He wouldn't have felt guilty and neither would i And I think that's really what scares Kit, is the idea that he could kill this person and feel nothing about it.
00:28:52
Speaker
which is going to rebound back on him, I think, in various ways over the course of this book. As a side note, I do also think this description of Mr. Chesney, he thinks he's right, he wouldn't have understood, is a reflection of the end of Aunt Mariah, right? You can't kill this person.
00:29:06
Speaker
They won't understand. The world still works that way in their head. Right. there There's no satisfying justice to be gained from like exacting vengeance on a person so totally selfish. And in fact, actually, now that I think about it, to jump way ahead for a second, Mr. Chesney does get the exact same ending as Aunt Mariah. He does. He does. I think a lot of this book is about the way that Mr. Chesney, in his endless repetitions of this
00:29:39
Speaker
commercialized for-profit version of fantasy land turns everything in the world into a copy of himself yeah which i think is a very sharp comment on commercial art yeah or or fantasy for profit can we do the next game of thrones every TV exec has been asking for years and years. Can we do it again?
00:30:04
Speaker
Can we do it exactly the same again and make even more money from it this time? But Mr. Chesney's self his solipsism, his self-involvement is not just this money-seeking transformation of the world into a a cardboard cutout of fantasy quests. It transforms the people of that world into little Mr. Chesney's.
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah. So Corrida certainly is a Chesney, although I think she would do it on her own if he didn't exist. But also, I love her. We've got to talk, bonus episode note, old women of the 1990s. There is a whole thread to pick up here. yeah um But also Kit, in Killing Mr. Chesney, would think he was right and feel nothing about it. And that scares him and it should because that would make him exactly the same as this monstrous man.
00:30:53
Speaker
There's ah a point that you made when we were talking about this i think is really sharp. So there's a scene pretty shortly after this where Dirk has been assigned one job, ah in several jobs in his role of Dark Lord, and one of them is summon a demon and make sure that it appears to scare all the pilgrim parties. Bad idea.
00:31:09
Speaker
Demons do not do what you want, but he he makes an attempt at doing it. And the demon appears and sort of does terrorize intermittently through the book for reasons of its own. But when the demon that has been summoned, this you know dark thing that has been sort of cavalierly brought up into the world on the orders of Mr. Chesney, appears to the kids, Blade asks Kit, have I still got my soul?
00:31:32
Speaker
And Kit says... Fool, of course you have, but Kit has also just been, you know, then we're saying Kit had got up at dawn and flown a circuit of the valley in order to convince himself he was fit. The opposite proved to be the case. So Kit is not a trustworthy narrator in this instance.
00:31:47
Speaker
And, you know, when I think the whole question of the book in many ways is when you're following this pattern set out for you by Mr. Chesney to be the dark lord that Mr. Chesney has drawn the outlines for you to be, have you still got your soul?
00:32:03
Speaker
Right. When you encounter evil, when you communicate with evil, when you take part in what evil wants you to do, can you hold on to your soul?
00:32:14
Speaker
And does it even matter if you have? And I think ah like there are so many ah mini Mr. Chesneys in this book. There are so many people whom he has convinced who go along with him, ah who grumble but still do it. I think an absolutely key figure is that of a character Blade thinks of for most of the book as his uncle, a loving family friend, Wizard Barnabas.
00:32:43
Speaker
who appoints himself Dirk's chief minion and then fucks up the job hugely in many ways is clearly an alcoholic. We feel a bit sorry for him.
00:32:54
Speaker
He's clearly having a terrible time, but also it becomes increasingly clear. He buys into the world on Mr. Chesney's terms.
00:33:04
Speaker
Yeah. And because of that, has he still got his soul? we begin to suspect no. In fact, no, by the end, he certainly doesn't. It gets certainly doesn't. But some of the stuff, like and again, i think it's really complex because a lot of the stuff that he's doing, his his sad little fuck-ups have massive consequences, violent consequences.
00:33:27
Speaker
But some of those, and it turns out that he's doing many of those sad little fuck-ups on purpose, but not all of them. Some of them are for Mr. Chesney as part of Mr. Chesney's broader evil plan. And some of them are for Carida as part of Carida's plans to fuck up the tours and make sure the tours end. And again, neither of those people are thinking about the damage that they're going to cause specifically to Dirk and his family in the process.
00:33:51
Speaker
Despite the fact that this family thinks of Barnabas as an uncle figure, as a beloved mentor and family friend. Right. A lot of what makes the plot of this book go is every character believing that Dirk cannot possibly do the Dark Lord job. and certainly can't do the secret extra dark lord job of somehow defeating Mr. Chesney at the same time. Right.
00:34:12
Speaker
And therefore, they're all going to have to do it behind his back for him. Right. And there are a number of people in this book who are competent and even have good intentions. And they're all working at cross purposes constantly. And none of them are communicating with each other. And half of them are off screen half the time being injured or refusing to do anything. And so the kids keep having to do everything. And it does feel contrived.
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah. And that's part of the sitcom feeling. Yeah. Oh no, we've got to do it, say this charming gaggle of teenagers. Yeah, should we quickly introduce the charming gaggle of teenagers?
00:34:48
Speaker
Go for There's seven of them. We've talked about Kit. So there there are sort of two eldest and two middle and then a crew of younger ones. The two eldest are Kit and Shona, who's the eldest human daughter, who is...
00:35:03
Speaker
for much of the book and walking eldest daughter joke. She's about to go off to bard to Bard College and become a Bard and she's so beautiful and talented and competent. But as soon as she hears about the Dark Lord business, she nobly says, I'll put off going to college and work.
00:35:18
Speaker
to to make sure that we can all support dad and then runs around, you know, rounding up all the younger ones and forcing them into labor to support dad. She's constantly giving you while you're at it little jobs to do and everybody dreads it.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yes. A little bit, you know, as we know, Diana perennial elder sister syndrome, a little bit of a self self-own, deliberate self-own on her part, I think, with Shona. Yeah, but also we are mostly in Blade's point of view and then the most annoying person to be, I think, is the next oldest sibling yeah stuck with this person. So the next oldest set of siblings are Blade and Colette. Blade, the human child ah who finds Shona the most annoying. Colette, the griffin child who finds Kit the most annoying. Right, these are mirrors.
00:36:01
Speaker
Colette has is an artist. ah She has this gift for creating gizmos. And the next Griffin child after that is Lydda, who has a dream of becoming an incredible chef. She spends the whole book making godlike snacks. And Don, I think that are they the same age? Yeah, Don and Lydda are twins, I think. Yeah.
00:36:19
Speaker
Colette and Lydda both neither of them really have the kit problem of I have no future because like Shona, they all have a gift and a dream and they're really interested in their own creative artistic pursuits. Don, seems to exist mostly just to be an extra comedy sibling. Dawn is like aggressively normal compared to Kit. yeah this is This is teenage boy before the angst kicks in, possibly. dawn is So Kit is black and Dawn is golden. And I don't think we had the archetype of like golden retriever boyfriend at the time that she was writing this book, but I do think there's something of that in Dawn.
00:36:54
Speaker
Dawn is sunny and he and Blit are... Blit. are always running off to like shirk their responsibilities together and just hang out where Shona and Kit can't find them.
00:37:05
Speaker
And then the absolute youngest is Elda, who is 10 and is soft and cuddly and it just basically exists at this point to be the baby of the family. i love sparkles. And love sparkles and glitter ah and all of that. And it's really too young to have any sort of existential angst about her own future yet. Wait for the sequel book, which is the elder book. Anyway, and we're missing a character from this family. And I think it's striking we managed to get this far into the podcast without mentioning her once. No, we have mentioned her once. She produces miniature universes.
00:37:37
Speaker
Dirk's wife, Mara. you'd think would be a bigger figure in this book than she is. But in fact, she is offstage quite a lot. she At the same time as Dirk is appointed Dark Lord, ah Mr. Chesney looks around the ah evil business meeting, spots Mara looking extraordinarily glamorous, in fact, magically glamorous. Dirk looks like, what's she even doing? And says, your wife will be this year's evil enchantress. and Mara's like yes always wanted to be an evil enchantress and immediately reworks her wardrobe into something much much sexier one of my favorite scenes actually is the scene where quite late in the book Blade turns up at the evil enchantress's lair sees what his mother is wearing is horrified and then Elder says oh and she put the one with a top bit on especially for you laughter
00:38:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's really funny. But it is, you know, so we were talking with our friend, former for guest of the show, Freya, about this book. And she said, I found this book really frustrating because I want to kill all the men that did on behalf of all the women. There's a lot of really interesting women in this book doing things just off screen. And the men are really upset about it because they don't understand what's going on.
00:38:51
Speaker
Mara, just off screen of this book, is organizing a women's rebellion. All throughout this book, The Blade and Kit are turning up at in dork are turning up at places just as all the women are about to walk out and be like, no, the Ymir shan't have any slave girls this year. ah No, there's not going to be a town left to sack because the Duchess and all the inhabitants have left. But they don't know what's happening because Mara hasn't told them what's happening because Mara has been...
00:39:20
Speaker
Dispelled into magical divorce. but Right. A lot of the tension underlying the the happy family heart of this book is that Dirk and Mara appear to be in the process of splitting up and Dirk can't figure out why and he's really sad about it. except that he has always sort of half expected it.
00:39:41
Speaker
Like the, as soon as 24 hours after Dirk gets the Dark Lord job and Mara seems stressed about it and is like, oh my God, all right, we got to get things into shape. And Dirk is already like, oh God, I think we're going to split up over this business. She seems really stressed. And this is before Mara has had her talk with Carida that is going to actually magically make her decide that she wants to leave Dirk.
00:40:05
Speaker
So there is, I think one of the the maybe failure points of this book or the the sort of weak pillars of this book is the fact that Dirk and Mara's marriage problems are resolved entirely at the end with the reveal that at the very beginning of the book, Carita was like, hmm,
00:40:26
Speaker
I think that maybe this will all go better if I break up Dirk's marriage and bespells Mara into magically not caring about Dirk anymore so she can go off and be an evil enchantress and organize Lysistrata.
00:40:38
Speaker
And at the end, Mara comes back and is like, oh no, I was bespelled. I'm so sorry. Because there's been this real fridge horror throughout the book from the point of view of the children of every time something a horrible happens to Dirk, Mara turns up and is like,
00:40:53
Speaker
Ah, this is so inconvenient and then leaves again and shows no emotion about it at all, as much as she's trying to protect the kids. And there is something really scary when you're a child about my mother does not care at all about my father.
00:41:07
Speaker
And this is again, it's resolved. It was magic. where We're really mad at Mara throughout the book. But it was never her fault. And now that the book has ended, Dirk and Mara are back together and they're going to go to have another child and everything is fine. That's in fact the last note of the book as Dirk saying, hey Mara, what about if we had a winged baby? And Mara's like, oh well, why not? Sure, let's.
00:41:28
Speaker
but Okay, but I think that that is actually interesting though because Dirk on thinking about his, ah but every time he thinks about how unhappy he is and he's tremendously unhappy being the Dark Lord, he is doing his best and having a bad time. But his happy place is to daydream about his life.
00:41:45
Speaker
evil animal breeding program because you know it's his great passion in life is is breeding magical creatures and constantly when he's thinking about his his breakup with Mara or the the end of his marriage with Mara he's thinking but what if we had another baby Would that fix it?
00:42:03
Speaker
And he is longing to have more children with Mara to fix their marriage. Is this why you have seven? Is this why you have seven? Right, like one has to wonder. Like I do think that Dirk and Mara are a mirror of Quentin and Katrina in Archer's Goon.
00:42:23
Speaker
We have the, you know, silly, stressed out, little, ah very creative man and, the you know, the competent man also creative but much more practical minded and a little bit her you know her creative work is a little bit devalued because of that wife who sort of keeps the family going and they have lots of arguments and one of the things that we're told about Quentin and Katrina who again their family is a great family for Howard and Awful to go up in but we are told that having Howard saved their marriage that they were on the verge of divorcing before they had this child
00:42:59
Speaker
I think it's very possible that Dirk and Mara are just this writ seven times over A sitcom marriage, right? aren't the parents and Don't the parents in the sitcom always feel like they're like you just look and you're like, please just break up?
00:43:13
Speaker
Well, it's hard to actually know what Dirk and Mara's marriage is really like because she has been enchanted for most of the book. Right. But it also, ah it gives us ah very weird perspective on her because we are mostly seeing her through the eyes of child characters who are horrified by her behaviour, who are all on team dad and can't understand why mum might possibly not wish to live in a house with a man who keeps breeding more g griffins.
Rebellion and Resistance
00:43:39
Speaker
I personally would not marry Dirk. He seems like a very nice guy. But... I don't want five Griffin children. But one of the the big, I think, inciting incidents of that makes the plot go in the book, again, the the sort of contrived incidents that get all the kids involved, is a third of the way through the book, this...
00:44:01
Speaker
very angry, very sick dragon shows up and Crisps, you know says, first, I'm evil and I've come to serve the evil Dark Lord. Clearly furious about it.
00:44:12
Speaker
And then Crisps, Dirk, nearly to death. And then Mara shows up, efficiently gets Dirk a healer, and is like, oh no, this poor sick dragon. I'd better make sure that we get good medical care for this poor sick dragon.
00:44:24
Speaker
And obviously all the kids are horrified about this because when you've just seen your husband, get crisped to death, you probably ought to have some feelings about that. And in a real divorce, I mean, this is a, this picture of the fear that the divorce that Dirk is afraid of and that the kids are afraid of is a fantasy horror of divorce, right? Like in a real divorce, you'd have some feelings about that, even if you didn't want to stay married to this person. But because Dirk is in a healing coma about this for months, or weeks, it can't be months, the time on the book is that long. All the kids have to get in gear and do all his Dark Lord responsibilities. while he's laid out.
00:45:02
Speaker
And Mara, again, doesn't show that much concern about this because she's dispelled not to have concern about this. She's been forced to focus on the back half plot underlying this book that we're not seeing, where all the women are doing interesting things and not getting involved in Dirk shit.
00:45:23
Speaker
Right. Essentially, the Leicester to plot is that all the women of this world are going on strike until the until the tours stop. They've had enough. um And Corrida and Mara are masterminding this. And I really feel like if they told Durk, he would have been on board. No one tells Dirk anything. Yeah.
00:45:43
Speaker
Also, they can't tell him things for several weeks because he's in a coma. Right. And also Karina spends quite a lot that time in a coma. Like it is noticeable how many adults in this book are being forcibly taken out of the action and put to sleep for a while. Just so just to make the plot go. This is what I mean about contrived.
00:46:00
Speaker
But I think it's also notable how many women in this book are having their emotions taken away so that they can act in a way that makes the plot go.
00:46:10
Speaker
Yeah. So Mara has spends most of the book under a spell to make her not love her husband. Karida, as soon as she, you know, she has an accident with some magical farm animals early in the book and puts herself in a magical coma immediately so she doesn't have to deal with the pain.
00:46:26
Speaker
And now I think we have to talk about Shona. Yeah, and in order to talk about that, we also need to talk about what I think is like like the the dark centre of the book. Yeah.
00:46:37
Speaker
I can't say this shouldn't be in the book because I think it's absolutely vital to what the book is. I think it's the biggest cause of tone mismatch and there is some serious tone mismatch in this light-hearted family comedy that is also brutal satire that is just so dark and so angry. Yeah. And This is, how does Mr. Chesney get his evil Dark Lord army every year?
00:47:03
Speaker
Well, yeah, they are. So the evil. Hang on. I'm actually just going to read the description of the introduction of the evil Dark Lord army. This is from Blade's point of view.
00:47:15
Speaker
There was an enormous crowd of men just beyond the ruins of the village. Each man was dressed in shiny black and armed with a shiny black helmet and a long sword and a shiny black scabbard. Most of them were simply standing.
00:47:27
Speaker
Some were wandering in circles. A few others were sitting on the ground. And there was something very wrong with all of them. Beauty, who was carrying Shona, refused to go anywhere near. The other horses trembled and sweated.
00:47:39
Speaker
What's wrong with these people? Colette asked, peering into the nearest blank face. It's all right, Barnabas said reassuringly. They send them through debt through drugged. Why? said Colette. Er, well, you see, they're all convicted criminals, mostly for murder and assault and so on, Barnabas explained.
00:47:54
Speaker
The tours clear out the prisons once a year, I believe. Mr. Chesney has a contract with some of the government in his world and they pay him to take these convicts off their hands. It's a very neat arrangement.
00:48:04
Speaker
Most of them get killed over here, but they're all promised pardons and free land and so on. All we have to do at the moment is to get them to the camp I've made for them a couple of miles over there." Dirk's family looked at one another expressively and then back at the black shiny men.
00:48:19
Speaker
The sight was somehow even more unpleasant after this explanation. They were like cockroaches waiting to be squished. yeah so this is horrific right this is mr chesney is also operating a for-profit prison which will helpfully kill off your prisoners within the year yeah it's it's foul it's it's sick and it is plausible and i think it is very necessary that it be plausible that this is how how mr chesney is making his money he's he's Yes, he's running lovely fantasy tours of fantasy land, but also he is arranging assassinations. Some of the tourists are labelled expendable. They do get killed in battles. And he is quietly dealing with the governments of his own world to remove their undesirables, their criminals. And the closest you get to a point of view character acknowledging the horror is Blade thinking maybe even criminals don't deserve this.
00:49:18
Speaker
Yeah, but I think the whole middle, section what the whole middle section of the book essentially is doing as Blade and Kit and the other kids are desperately trying to figure out ways to get these criminals to go where they need them to go, is it turns them into the jailers in the Stanford prison experiment.
00:49:34
Speaker
They can't see these these people as human and these people hate them. The the miserable experience for Blade is feeling how much the prisoners hate him, but more hate Kit and hate Shona.
00:49:49
Speaker
Hate Kit because he's big and scary and shouts at them and sort of a visible embodiment of the Dark Lord. hate Shona because she's young and she's pretty and she's right out of their reach.
00:50:01
Speaker
And Shona is actually the one, I think, to get back to dehumanization and what's chattel, what's a person, what's an animal. She devises a way to move the prisoners and it's magic reigns. They put bridles on them to get them to go where they need them to go.
00:50:17
Speaker
I think one of the one of the ways that I think this book, that disagree with the artistic choices of this book is what I'll say, is I think that there are various subtle ways in which the situation of these prisoners is paralleled to other situations in the book that make it clear that what's happening here is wrong.
00:50:39
Speaker
But the prisoners themselves are never actually given any humanity. They're consistently just kind of a faceless, hating mass.
00:50:50
Speaker
And when they do escape, when they get out and they do actions in the book, they're universally horrific and brutal actions. And it's not that I don't believe that prisoners in this situation, upon escaping, would do horrific and brutal actions.
00:51:06
Speaker
But Diana Wendones is usually really good about... Recognizing the humanity of a prisoner, it seems to be one of her kind of abiding interests in previous books. We've had various situations where sympathetic characters go to jail and feel how being in jail turns them into something miserable that they don't want to be.
00:51:24
Speaker
We're told that these people are murderers, some of them murderers and assault and things like that. So yeah, not even all of them are murderers. Kit almost starts the book being a murderer and ends the book, we'll talk about this later, by straight up being a murderer.
00:51:41
Speaker
All of these kids are now slavers because they're moving these slaves across the landscape. But the link between... the humanity of these children who have been forced into this position who are doing these horrible things, and the humanity of the prisoners, the cockroaches waiting to be squished, is never explicitly drawn.
00:52:01
Speaker
And I do think that's a problem for the book. Yeah, I think I agree. I think in some ways the the warm and light sitcom family tone is working at cross purposes with the anger and truth of the satire that is the spine of the book.
00:52:18
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm not sure how I would have resolved it or even if I could resolve it. God knows Jones is at this point a writer at the peak of her powers. She's very, very good and there's much that she can do and she hasn't resolved it. Yeah. And perhaps it's an an irresol an irresolvable thing. Perhaps you're meant to sit there with it niggling at you, but it does niggle.
00:52:40
Speaker
ah yeah You're sitting there going, this is this is so not right. This is more not right than the book is giving it space for. This is What's the phrase? Fridge horror. yeah what The more you think about it, the worse it gets. yeah And a lot of it is is that is the Chesneyification or Fantasyland. In that, in being part of this process, the kids are behaving like little tall miniature Mr. Chesney's.
00:53:07
Speaker
They are part of his system of enslavement and mind control and devastating the countryside as they go because they are marching this army across the countryside. it is devastating. They are becoming the system that they hate.
00:53:23
Speaker
Like the point is very clear. But there there could be, I'm not sure how, but there's there's a humanity missing. There's a humanity missing. And it is, as regards to the prisoners, it is consistently missing. When Dirk eventually gets to the prison camp, you know, the kids are are desperate. They're just like, they're they're these big scary men.
00:53:42
Speaker
And we have to get the scary men from point A to point B. And we have no other way to do it. Again, Stanford a prison experiment other than to be brutal ourselves. But Dirk gets there. He takes one look at the men.
00:53:54
Speaker
And he says, you know, and and Barnabas says, I would like to put some battle spells on these men. Bad idea. Don't trust Barnabas to do anything. um Barnabas says, I'd like to do it. He says, you'll never get them to behave like real soldiers without. Look in that dome. They're just lying about or beating one another up. And Dirk says, I know I'd hope to appeal to their reason, but I'm not sure they've got any.
00:54:13
Speaker
All right. Activate those spells then. Of course, these people have reason. These people have just as much reason as Kit would have had had he gone ahead and murdered Mr. Chesney. In fact, they are quite reasonably resisting the only way they can by refusing to be the army they're supposed to be. Right.
00:54:29
Speaker
but They're constantly going on strike. But there's no sympathy for that, even though I think subtextually the book is demanding sympathy for that. Yeah. And in fact, the position that Kit and Blade eventually end up in is imprisoned and forced to fight in a way that's very clearly an echo of what's been done to the prisoners uh who they were stamford prisoned stamford experimenting earlier right but it's also i think the book makes it deliberately hard to feel sympathy for them and to feel that echo because of what happens to shona yeah back to shona So at one point, the drama is that they, eventually these four kids ah lose control of the army, which is not surprising. They've been on the edge of it the entire time they've been trying to do this. and the army turns on them as you'd expect and they try to kill Kit, they try to kill Don. ah Blade is, I think, ignored as er useless. ah yeah
00:55:28
Speaker
Quite consistently, Blade is the person having the least bad time in this book, yeah which I guess makes him in some ways an easier protagonist for a warm, happy family comedy.
00:55:39
Speaker
But most importantly, the prisoners turn on Shona in what is quite clearly an aggressive and violent sexual assault as a group. And this is stopped in the middle by the arrival of the dragon, now going by the name Scales, who's like, sorry about setting your father on fire. I now understand the situation a bit better, feel a bit bad about it. And he rescues the children and he takes over herding the prisoners across the countryside.
00:56:08
Speaker
Yes. But before he does that, so Shona, understandably traumatized, deeply traumatized. You know, they they they have to... I think it's really... It's never said in so many words as a sexual assault, but I think it's really clear. She's at the center of a mass... At the mass of men.
00:56:23
Speaker
They have to... throw them off her a clothes are torn her clothes are torn i think that she says in every way that she possibly can without saying it that this was a sexual assault and when they all come near her shona screams don't touch me and scales looks at her and says sit up look at me And then, after a moment or so, her body straightened and seemed to relax at the same time. "'Oh, that's better,' she said. "'Everything seems a long time ago somehow.' "'Best I could do,' Scales rumbled. He sounded slightly apologetic. "'Try to keep it long ago.' "'I will,' Shona said devoutly. "'Blade, can you fetch me my spare clothes?'
00:57:00
Speaker
"'I'm so bruised.' "'No, I'm not. How did that happen?' "'I'll get my clothes. You lot go and round up the animals.' Blade found himself beaming with relief. Shona was back to normal and her old bossy self. At least as far as Blade has to deal with it, she is...
00:57:16
Speaker
And I think it's important we don't see this from inside Shona's point of view. I think it would feel very different from inside Shona's point of view. We will never, this sexual assault will never be brought up again because Blade doesn't want to think about it. And what I think is really striking, Dirk and Maren never find out about it.
00:57:32
Speaker
Dirk never knows that this is one of the consequences of the fact that he was in a coma for weeks and his kids had to go take care of the Dark Lord problem. Because I think that Dirk would be thinking about it in a way that Blade... isn't Yeah. But to come back to what you were saying earlier, this is a consistent pattern in this book of women not having feelings. And I thought about this quite a lot because I do think this is intentional.
00:57:58
Speaker
This is an intentional choice that Jones is making. And what it made me think of, and I don't know if this is merely personal anecdata, is older women of my own family and the whole conversation I once had with my mother who told me I was brought up not to give in to my feelings.
00:58:18
Speaker
Some things are not worth dwelling on. That is the most emotional conversation we've ever had. Yeah. But this... consistent sense in the book that some things, although very clearly horrific, are not to be dwelled on, will not be looked at in more than the most glancing of ways, made me think of other moments in Diana Wynne-Jones where we've had that same refusal to dwell and especially it took me all the way back to the tannequy in the spellcoats in her first person narration telling us that the text we've got then the narrative she's created is not what she originally wrote wove composed she has gone back and taken out her lament for her dead father This idea of self-censorship regarding emotion.
00:59:09
Speaker
There are some things we do not dwell on, we do not express. And Tanaquay, I think, importantly, is Jones's first, second, depends how you read Wilkins' Tooth, female female narrator.
00:59:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's not Hildy, but nonetheless, I do think that there's a significant difference between Tanakui. When we see this in Tanakui's point of view, it works. It hits. It's powerful.
00:59:38
Speaker
It's powerful when she does this from within her female character's point of views, when you see the way that the writing is glancing around the pain. Once from Blade's point of view, it feels dismissive. yeah It's just so convenient for Blade that Shona has no feelings about this awful thing that's happened to her. It's a huge relief for him that he's not going to have to deal with that, which is true, actually. It is very convenient for the people around you when you squash down all your bad feelings and don't make any problems out of them.
01:00:06
Speaker
yeah This is possibly part of the reason why many women have done it. But I do wonder if there's a little bit of that respectable English lady whom Diana Wynne-Jones so often seems to hate, the the the the thorn lady, the Aunt Maria saying, control yourself.
01:00:23
Speaker
yeah A little bit of that rising up through the book. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe this is too much of my own damage showing. No, but I think you're right that there is a really... clear I think, again, you can't read it as anything but deliberate, a really clear argument being made about when you throw the fit, when you let the emotion show.
01:00:42
Speaker
Because three chapters later, another terrible thing happens to Shona. She is, she's, you know, the Dirk has come back and Blade is, you know, organizing, you know, so there are a whole bunch of people have turned up to talk to him. And one of those people is a very supercilious bard.
01:00:58
Speaker
And he hands Dirk a letter that says, The president of Bardic College hereby informs ex-student Shona that she has broken our express commands not to assist in any way with pilgrim parties or pilgrims. Had the ex-student condescended to attend our college, she would have learned that all bards are now forbidden to have any dealings with these tours.
01:01:17
Speaker
She is accordingly hereby expelled from our college and forbidden to perform as a bard in any manner henceforth. And Shona screams, I didn't know, no one said, what shall I do? i don't have a career any longer and I can't live without music.
01:01:30
Speaker
And then she lies there and cries. And Blade says he'd never seen her or anyone else so horribly unhappy. It stunned him, he could not think what to do. And Shona then spends the next two or three chapters of this book in horrible despair.
01:01:45
Speaker
White face, not talking to anybody, her future is gone and she's devastated about it. This is the emotion that she's not allowed to show about her assault. She's glad not to show about the assault. um I do wonder if if we are meant to read it as this is also her emotions about the assault finally getting expressed in a way that is allowed.
Art, Emotion, and Self-Expression
01:02:07
Speaker
But also this too is consistent in Jones's work that what you need, what you must have is your art. method of self-expression. If you are Nan Pilgrim, you have to be able to describe the food. You cannot stop describing the food. if you are ah If you are Mig, you need to be able to do a silly dance when everyone's trying to force you to be a little skipping fairy. You have to dance big and wild.
01:02:33
Speaker
Your art, your magic, your music must come out of you. And without that, you have nothing. And I keep thinking, actually, that we've had before this the trauma of the body and the trauma of the soul.
01:02:48
Speaker
Yeah. Jones consistently prioritizes the the the need of the soul over what's become of the body. I'm thinking of Mordian, especially. Mordian, who we do get to see and dwell on his trauma in Hexwood, but only after he has spent the whole book trying to avoid it. And then it's the most fantasy thing that happens in the book. He gets turned into a dragon in order to get impaled on various magical spikes of man pain.
01:03:16
Speaker
That's so unfair of me. i don't think I think it's a funny phrase. In fact, no, it's a very powerful sequence. It is beautiful sequence. It's just also magical spikes of man pain, but it is a beautiful, and sometimes you have to be impaled on the powerful spike of man pain in order to force you to actually talk about the things you need to talk about. Right, that's the only way you're ever going to talk about your bad feelings but the point is that what happens to mordian's body in that sequence is also traumatic like he's in an agonizing pain the whole time he's a dragon and when he figures out how to turn himself back into a human he's still in pain yeah he's like oh i'm just going to be like that forever now that's how it is but it's fine because at least he can
01:03:52
Speaker
express himself he can laugh at the rainers and that is what matters um and it's I wonder if it's the same logic of the trauma of the body is a thing that happens and it exists forever forever and you transcend it and you turn yourself back into mortal shape it might expand you might become as huge as a dragon and all full of pain so you pull it back down into normal person shape and you go on with your life but as long as you can laugh Yes. As long as you have your music, as long as you have your future, your career, there's something for you.
01:04:27
Speaker
When that's taken away, you have nothing. That's when you have to scream and break down and fight about it. And I want to talk about sentimentality. Going all the way back to Fire and Hemlock, which I think was the book that addressed this most directly, but I do think it's a consistent theme in Jones's work. Because she values truth in storytelling, truth in fiction, she's consistent about what is and is not true.
01:04:56
Speaker
And the villainy of Laurel in Fire and Hemlock is that she is sentimental, which Jones defines as someone who mixes fact and fiction impartially for her own ends. Someone who uses fiction to make you feel big feelings that aren't true.
01:05:13
Speaker
And it is necessary for truthfulness to reject sentimental rubbish, as Tom calls it, to reject the big feeling. and to see clearly past it. And I think what we might have in Dirk Holm as well is perhaps the failure state of an unsentimental approach to storytelling. yeah Jones is so determined to avoid ah the embarrassing outpouring of unsuitable emotion that it's locked down even when you feel like, i actually, I think somebody maybe should have a feeling here.
01:05:50
Speaker
Yeah. Just a little one? No one's really allowed to have a feeling until the end when it all explodes after Kit quote-unquote dies.
01:06:01
Speaker
And we'll we'll get there because I do think that explosion of feeling does work. Yes. Yeah, i agree. And it anchor the book. But we have to have a little comedy novella first. Because just as all this horrible stuff is happening, the you know they've been losing their souls and marching these people across the countryside.
01:06:20
Speaker
And Kit is... going more and more and more into the role of Dark Lord. He's enjoying planning battles and sending people off to die because people do really die in these battles. Tell you who Kit makes me think of and that's um Adam, Homeward Bounders, the war gamer. Kit is a born war gamer. um I remember when we had Adrian on the podcast and said if Adam had been invited to the table ah he would have gone straight over to the it's the other side and I thought, you know, a Kit ah finds himself invited to the table of the Dark Lord and he's like, actually...
01:06:52
Speaker
I'm having a great time. I'm brilliant at this. Kit is the teenage nerd to to tech CEO pipeline. And it's finally something that he can do.
01:07:02
Speaker
Yes. He's having, you know, he's brilliant. He's valued for, his father values him hugely for it in a way that Dirk has never needed Kit before. I do think also, again, speaking of women not having feelings, Kit, kit I think one of the problems of the book is Kit having this joyous, you know, this this satisfaction at participating in the war where both Dawn and Blade find it makes them feel really weird and uncomfortable and they don't want to be part of it.
01:07:27
Speaker
Kit and Colette are having a wonderful time. It's not a problem for Colette. Colette and Lydda are both having these sort of self-actualization journeys along the course of the book that again are happening entirely in the background and Colette is self-actualizing as someone who absolutely can and will kill people.
01:07:46
Speaker
And Lydda- disappears for the entire middle section of the book. I feel like where's Lydda? I hope she's okay. And Lydda's been camping in the wilderness and is like, I love being alone. I've been hunting my own dinner. You know, I tell you what, if I was the middlest child of seven and I suddenly discovered that camping in the wilderness was an option, I might see i might see the appeal.
01:08:08
Speaker
Right. um But it's not, you know, Kit, the fact that Colette enjoys the battles is not a problem. The fact that Kit enjoys the battles is a problem. But just as all this is coming to a crescendo, Blade, our point of view character for this entire sequence, has to go leave and be the the wizard guide for a pilgrim party.
01:08:26
Speaker
Yep. Blade's got to go to work and be the guide for the last of a pilgrim party, which means he has to learn all the rules that he was supposed to be learning this whole time, but he's been busy helping do the Dark Lord job. And the first thing he discovers is he needs a beard.
01:08:40
Speaker
And then what we have is, i think it does feel like a separate light comedy novella. yes these These are two books stuck together.
01:08:50
Speaker
And Shona, I think one of the things that makes it feel like a separate novella is again, Shona, who's been having the most, the worst time, unarguably in the middle of this book, decides that she needs this change of scenery and she goes with Blade and she immediately has a light fantasy romance plot. And that's, you know, and it's jokes about, oh, my sister's fallen in love and it's so embarrassing. And that's Shona for the rest of the book.
01:09:12
Speaker
What she does is she's the the the romance, one of several romance B-plots, funny romance B-plots that are happening in order to make Blade's life more annoying. Right. A lot of funny nonsense now happens to Blade. And to be fair, it's extremely funny. It's incredibly funny. it's interesting, actually because we have moved from satire comedy to something that feels much lighter. Yes. like this is I am really feeling my lack of language to talk about comedy. We need a specialist. um Because like there's there's a difference between the the raging...
01:09:49
Speaker
dark comedy of the first half of the book and the the running about hilarity of the back half. Yeah. Well, until it comes back to the satire. So there's the the section that's actually this sort of funny, I'm guiding the pilgrim party and I'm 14 and this hot girl keeps trying to attach herself to me and I have to get her ah linked up with somebody else and there's several adult men who are actually much better at what I'm doing than I'm doing. This is very funny, but it only lasts for a couple of chapters before sort of the real plot collides with Blade and with Kit again. Let's talk about people in the Pilgrim Party, because there are a few I want to talk about. Yes. So firstly, we get sort of a picture of the kind of people who paid to come on these tours. Most of them will remain nameless. We are told there are lots of serious looking young men and lots of women with long straight hair.
01:10:39
Speaker
Remember, it's the nineties I pictured all of these interchangeably as Jennifer Aniston. um But we are given some specific ah names for a few characters. There's an older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Poole, who insist on being called mother and dad, and they are very annoying. And we discover they had to sell their house in order to afford to come on the tour and to pay the insurance that you have to pay in order to go and you don't get that money back. Even if you get killed on the tour, no one gets that money back.
01:11:12
Speaker
Right. What exactly have you been insured for? Yes. So... Blade finds these two very tiresome. But also, you know, they are clearly not even his parents' generation, his grandparents' generation. He's meant to be ordering them around. He feels silly. Then there is Miss Ledbury and Professor and professor Ledbury. Miss Ledbury is a very sensible older woman in Twinset and Pearls. She is, i think, I can see her fitting right in in Black Maria. She belongs to the category of impressive old battle axe. Yes.
01:11:46
Speaker
And Miss Lebury ah has come to Fantasyland of the opinion that she is not here to have a terrible time and she will not be giving up her thermos flask, a nice sleeping bag and her waterproof tent for whatever crap you can buy at the fantasy market. ah So she's breaking all the fantasy rules and Blade can't find a way to stop her.
01:12:05
Speaker
And she's brought her brother and her brother is a very, very vague and sad old man who is the only person who seems to be really enjoying himself, just tramping interminably about the fantasy landscape. yeah And then he gets a sword and he becomes really quite worrying. yes The professor, it's I think clear from the jump, is a Tolkien joke.
01:12:29
Speaker
Do you want to have your elf moment now? Yeah. Yes, but let me finish going through the party first. You've got to have a fantasy quest. You've got to know who's in the party. You do, you do, you do. So we also have a pair of siblings, Jeffrey and Suki Chisholm. Jeffrey is Shona's B-plot romance. He's very nice.
01:12:49
Speaker
Good for Shona, he's nice. ah Except tragically, Blade looks at his list and goes, oh shit, he's down as expendable. He's meant to die on the tour. Well, that's bad. Another terrible thing slated to happen to Shona what you're saying.
01:13:04
Speaker
For some reason, he doesn't tell Shona about this. I would tell Shona. This isn't gorgeous hear her up at all. And then Suki is Geoffrey's little sister.
01:13:15
Speaker
And she is a character type I think we have seen before because I think she is a slightly older version of Cousin Vivian from Time City in that she is very clearly evil.
01:13:26
Speaker
You can tell she's evil because she's so girly. She has big blonde curls, very clearly artificial, and red nails. And Blade is repelled by her. And she clearly instantly decides that she... deserves a fantasy romance of her own and starts coming on to him presumably fooled by the beard because he's 14 this girl is in her 20s at least and there is something really interesting that uh so blade eventually gets rid of Suki by turning to the last member of the party who i I assume you were about to introduce yeah who says you don't want Suki
01:13:59
Speaker
But the wizards always get the most beautiful girls! That's part of the routine, is the wizard guy to hook up with the hottest pilgrim girl. Right, which reveals a whole world of like separate Fridge horror going on in the whole... Yes!
01:14:12
Speaker
Anyway, sorry, get get to the last... Yeah, the last party member ah claims to have been a last minute sign up and Blade is struck by him being the only person who doesn't wear his clothes as if he's wearing a costume.
01:14:24
Speaker
Eventually it becomes clear that he's not a pilgrim from another world at all. He is in fact the head of the Thieves Guild in this world. The Thieves Guild is a really consistent joke from Tough Guy to Fantasyland, which points out that there is no organisation and no industry and no economy at all in Fantasyland except for the Thieves Guild, because the only organised activity in fantasy is crime. Yes, and they're the only ones, in fact, it's made very clear, who are making money at this point in the tours. It said at the beginning, Carina turns to the head of the youth guild and says, you people are probably don't want the tours to stop. You're having a great time with this. They're like, well, but we haven't been allowed to steal from the pilgrims. She's like, oh why not?
01:15:03
Speaker
Steal from the pilgrims, by all means. So in fact, he was this character, Revel, ah was there stealing everybody's wristwatches. So he walks down the stairs wearing a string of Rolexes, presumably.
01:15:16
Speaker
I love him. It's very funny. Anyway, he's into Suki and it's clear they're a perfect match because they're both totally amoral. they're They're really romantic, actually. i love them. I'm big fan of Revel and Suki. And later on, ah you know, the description of Suki when Blade suddenly... Blade spends the first three you know three chapters of this happening, like, eventually this is going to end. I like Revel so much and Suki's so awful. And then eventually it occurs to him that they are, in fact, completely in love with her. They're a great match. he Right. so Awful people fall in love too.
01:15:46
Speaker
Suki looked and was a girlish sort of girl, yet she had hardly turned a hair at being kidnapped, and now she was as cool and collected as Revel, and far cooler than Blade was at the idea of sneaking into a mine full of illegal robbers with whips.
01:15:58
Speaker
So, respect to Suki. The other tough guy joke in this section, which I find really funny, is early on in the tough guy, you read it through, it's alphabetical guide, you get to the section on ambushes. now there are three kinds of ambush that you can have in fantasy land one the initial caravan with a merchant that you join will be ambushed by bandits of course and in fact the merchant whose caravan blade leads his party to join is like I have been doing this for weeks I'm really tired of traveling from nowhere to nowhere I have some actual merchant ready to get on with as soon as this one's over so can we get on with it and have the ambush please ambush number one ambush number two
01:16:37
Speaker
is your first encounter with the forces of the Dark Lord. ah You will be ah swooped by leathery winged avians in the night. At least presumably they are leathery winged avians. You can't actually see them because it's dark. In fact, what's been happening for most of the book is that this is Dirk's geese yeah masquerading as avians, occasionally accompanied by one or two of Dirk's flying pigs.
01:16:59
Speaker
They're evil geese. They hate everything. I love the geese. The geese are so sarcastic. The geese are actually, early in the book, Kerida looks at the geese. Kerida looks at Dark's whole farm and is like, wow, he's breeding monsters and they all love him. Weird. And then she looks at the geese approvingly and is like, well, maybe they don't all love him.
01:17:19
Speaker
Shout-outs to the geese. Right. But ambush number three, noted in the a tough guide, is that at some point you will be desperately hoping to come across someone who will help you and you've been planning this meeting for a long time and you finally get to the meeting place and you find their ambushed corpses and this always happens so blade leading his party is like okay we've got to have our bandit ambush of the caravan and then we can do the next bit and the next bit but where's the bandit ambush where's the bandit ambush this is going on a really long time I desperately need to meet the bandit ambush I'm depending on these people to come and ambush us and then he crosses ah i think he's off the road crossing into a camp and he finds the ambushed bodies of his bandit ambushers and was like this is so neat a perfect circle yes sometimes I just like a joke
01:18:11
Speaker
jokes are good did you know this book is so full of jokes and the jokes are good yeah the jokes in this book are really very good oh I was gonna have an elf moment yeah wanna have your elf moment now or you want to save it till the end?
01:18:24
Speaker
Save it. I'll build up to it. I mean, it's dangerous getting me started on elves. Let's go.
Betrayal, Exploitation, and Survival
01:18:30
Speaker
All right. So we have this comedy interlude for a little bit. And then the actual plot and themes of the book come crashing back in.
01:18:38
Speaker
there's i think there's a type of ambush that Diana Wyn Jones missed in Tough Guy at a Fantasyland, which is ah ambush by treachery by the person you trusted. So Suki gets kidnapped by some escaped soldiers from the soldier plot.
01:18:52
Speaker
Blade and Revel go chasing off after her, and they all end up in a mine clearly being run by prisoners, by slaves. Again, this is more slave labor. Here it's sort of given the... These people are humans and it's given sort of the additional horror and weight, especially because it turns out that the person running the mine is the wizard Barnabas, Blade's fail uncle, who's been, you know, this sort of sad sack that he's consistently a little bit disappointed by throughout the course of the book, but not so disappointed.
01:19:23
Speaker
As when it turns out that Barnabas looks at Blade turning up in the middle of his illegal mining operations that are mining magic out of fantasy land and sending them back to our world in order to run cheap machinery, run cheap fuel.
01:19:37
Speaker
And sees an inconvenience and has Blade sent off as a prisoner in the same cages that he's just seen these mine slaves being sent into the mine with to go fight in the gladiator ring and die there.
01:19:51
Speaker
He is, and there's a couple important things happening. You know, Blade has looked at Jeffrey and been like, oh Rip, he's marked down as expendable. And Barnabas specifically tells the people who take Blade off, this one's expendable.
01:20:03
Speaker
Blade has seen the slaves and prisoners that he's been marching off with all throughout the book. Been like, this feels bad. Now he is the slave and the prisoner being sent off to a miserable fate.
01:20:17
Speaker
But what happens, I think, when he gets to the gladiator ring is more important because it turns out that the other person who's there is Kit.
01:20:27
Speaker
We haven't talked about Kit's death. Yeah. All right. We need talk about Kit's death before we talk about this dramatic reveal that Kit is alive. We kind of need to point out he was dead for a bit there. Yeah. So Kit, back in the sort of A plot, the front half plot of the book, Kit eventually climaxed into fully being the Dark Lord, like literally in the battles that he was running, one every week in order to arrange for, and this is where a lot of the expendable tourists are getting killed and when the forces of good and the forces of evil clash. And Kit is having a really fantastic intellectual problem solving time because, of course, the forces of good are always outnumbered.
01:21:06
Speaker
So how do you make them win convincingly? And Kit is wargame nerd, having a brilliant time being like, now you need to be here behind this this river and you need to be hiding in these trees and they that are there and the forces will advance there and there and there. And in order to control the battle, he is spending every actual battle day flying in the sky above the army of evil. So he has this bird's eye view.
01:21:31
Speaker
with an illusion on him disguising him as if like a huge monster being ridden by the Dark Lord. Kit is the Dark Lord. And both armies can look up and see him and think, that's the Dark Lord. And it's an illusion.
01:21:44
Speaker
But they're right. Kit is the person who is making this battle happen in the way it's happening. Kit is responsible, arguably, for all the deaths in these weekly battles. yeah And it's a game to him. And he's having the time of his life.
01:21:59
Speaker
And it gets to what in the event is the final battle not that this was meant to be the final battle just that this is the last one that happens because the spells the soldier spells that barnabas placed on the convicts break and in fact barnabas deliberately deliberately and the convicts who we have been told all through the book hate kit look at him and see the representation of everything that's been done to them and they are right They are completely right.
01:22:29
Speaker
Kit is a willing collaborator in this monstrous thing that's been done to them and they hate him and they look up at him and they've they've all got weapons. They've got arrows. They kill the Dark Lord.
01:22:41
Speaker
Kit is struck by several arrows and crash lands into a lake and as far as we know he's dead. Dirk sees this happen and this point Dirk gives up. Dirk breaks. He is done being dark lord he is done having anything to do with this he goes home he locks down the dark lord citadel so nobody can get in and bother him and he mourns in in despair for the death of his son whom he was using he was absolutely using kit to do this battle work for him and kit was yeah the fact that kit was having a wonderful time is neither here nor there duck as a father has failed
01:23:23
Speaker
Right. And at this point, you know, it's been to set this up at this point, he hears that Blade has disappeared because his pilgrim party has got lost. Mara, his wife, has apparently left him. Lidda has been off on vacation for weeks and they don't know where she is.
01:23:37
Speaker
And Blade has this monologue of despair at this point. Blade was gone. Mara was gone. Lidda was gone. Kit would not be coming back. It was wrong to have him let Kit have charge of battles. Kit had been too young, just like Blade and Lydda, and the soldiers had hated Kit, and I knew they hated him, Dirk thought, and I still let him fly up there where they could take a shot at him, merely because I was finding it all so difficult being the Dark Lord.
01:24:01
Speaker
It should have been me they shot. And it's a really effective moment of all of these comedy side plots of all the kids getting themselves into various shenanigans. suddenly piling up on their father, who should have been responsible for them and wasn't.
01:24:17
Speaker
And he goes and he locks himself up and he lies among the pigs and wallows. And again, so Colette is doing the same thing. Colette and Don, who are the two Griffin children left, go home with him and also have breakdowns.
01:24:31
Speaker
And Dirk, I think, realistically and plausibly, it takes him a while to realize that Colette and Don are also having breakdowns because he's having such a breakdown. And it really, it's painful. It's painful to watch.
01:24:44
Speaker
It's hard to see him, you know, sort of failing his children again in his own grief, but it really lands that all of this pain that's been building up under the family sitcom chaos comes crashing inwards. Yeah.
01:25:01
Speaker
It's it's It's the final outpouring of feeling that has been missing for the whole book. And maybe that is part of the artistic goal of the the underplay of feeling everywhere else ah is to make this moment hit harder.
01:25:16
Speaker
It does hit. yeah And therefore the the miraculous discovery that Kit is alive is also... great for the reader although less great for Blade like like it would work better if Blade had thought Kit was dead but Blade actually wasn't there for that bit didn't know what Blade is just like what the hell again the problem of Blade as POV character so we get to the the the gladiator things and it becomes immediately very clear that Kit has killed several people in this gladiator ring and feels miserable about it. The thing he says to Blade is, I was going to get let the next person kill me.
01:25:55
Speaker
And when he tells how he came to be there, he explains that he was rescued from where he was, you know, drowning in the lake. He was rescued by the evil geese. Shoutouts once again to the evil geese MVPs.
01:26:07
Speaker
And then a god appears to him. We haven't really talked yet about the gods in this book, but it's clear that gods are real. They are numinous. they are They are, I think, much more akin to Dalemark gods than anything else we've seen elsewhere in the canon.
01:26:23
Speaker
They appear and they tell you something that's true. They cannot be commanded. They cannot be compelled. And that's, in fact, a significant subplot of the book is Mr. Chesney has ordered that the gods should appear to the parties. Everyone's like, you can't do that. That's not how gods work. That's not what gods are.
01:26:37
Speaker
A god appears to Kit. The man pulled me out of the river by my beak. Then he told me that he was very sorry, but he thought I really had to learn that killing people wasn't a game.
01:26:48
Speaker
And he went away with the geese and left me lying there. So it has been foreordained as the end of Kit's arc that he needs to learn this lesson and sort of come to this final point and be put in the position that he's been putting other people in.
01:27:03
Speaker
He has to become a murderer and he has to become a prisoner and has to become someone whose final fate is death. I think Kit is the protagonist of this book. Yeah.
01:27:14
Speaker
But also if it was in Kit's point of view, it would be a much harder and heavier read because because his story is grim. Blade is... So Blade has been part of everything that's happening throughout this book, but he hasn't been leading it.
01:27:30
Speaker
He's felt sort of bad about it the entire time. There's never really a question about whether Blade is going to become a monster. Blade is a nice normal boy. But I do think Blade is standing in for Kit when we're in Blade's point of view as sort of a ah lesser reflection of what's happening with Kit.
01:27:51
Speaker
And he needs to be the V.O.B. character because Kit can't also be the funny narrator of the funny little pilgrim party section that we're going to get before this. And she has a lot of jokes to fit in for the funny little pilgrim party section. think actually that is a big part of it is that you couldn't get nearly as many jokes into Kit's point of view. And the jokes are so important. The jokes are load-bearing in this book. Yeah. So you have to sort of use Blade as this mirror for Kit and for what's actually happening to Kit.
01:28:18
Speaker
And then they're both rescued. the dragon Scales the dragon comes and scoops them both up. and As so often happens in this book, whenever the plot stalls, Scales turns up yeah and fixes it and we move on to the next thing that happens.
01:28:32
Speaker
Scales, it turns out, is in fact the long-lost king of the dragons and all the dragons, when this is revealed, shout, hurrah, the king is back, which makes this, by my count, the fourth iteration of Don't You Love It When The Glorious Return of the King Comes and Fixes Everything.
01:28:47
Speaker
The
Beauty, Ownership, and Capitalism Critique
01:28:48
Speaker
entire back half of the ninety s is actually, if we just had King Arthur in charge, things would be better. Oh, God, it is. You're right. Even Hexwood is like, and now King Arthur is in charge. King Arthur's like, what? No.
01:29:05
Speaker
Yeah. so Scales basically dumps Kit and Blade into the conclusion of the narrative. where a bunch of things happen at once and everything turns out to be fine. Everyone's sort of gathered there. the The pilgrim party turns up there.
01:29:20
Speaker
All the griffins are there. Carida turns up, sees how to depressed Dirk is lying among the pigs and his two children also just kind of wasting away. and it's like, oh, we haven't even talked about for old Fran and old George. There are also two actual stick figures wandering around taking care of Dirk Dirk. Key to Carida actually as well is Colette. And we haven't talked about Carida and Colette.
01:29:42
Speaker
I think that is the the turning point for her is that Colette is not beautiful anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of the Griffins as as as things that you own versus things that you love as your children, when Carada turns up at the beginning of the book, she sees Colette, who is the eldest female Griffin, and this beautiful, not as striking as Dawn or Elda, who are golden Griffins. Colette is this beautiful brown and gray.
01:30:09
Speaker
Colette and Lydda actually spend a significant chunk of this book having sort of body image issues in the background that eventually get resolved. Which is really, like Lydda gets the fat girl arc. Yes, which is so weird.
01:30:21
Speaker
She's like Griffin. but But everyone thinks she's an overweight griffin, and then Dirk's like, no, I bred you to be a long-distance flyer. And Lydda's like, oh, okay, I guess I'm going to spend the next three months flying long-distance and realizing that love it. I've discovered my love of hiking! Problem solved. Yes, that's Lydda.
01:30:39
Speaker
Colette shows up running errands for Mara. Colette shows up and Karida is like, wonderful, my beautiful griffin, and I shall keep her for the university. I have a... Actually, I'm going to find... the quote.
01:30:51
Speaker
Colette comes in and Carida says, one of Wizard Dirk's g griffins. My griffin. The big female. And they have a little conversation that describes Colette's beauty in great detail.
01:31:03
Speaker
And Carida looks at her sitting like a great tall cat with her tufted tail wrapped across the pouch between her shapely taloned feet and her barred wings neatly folded. And Carida longed, yearned, lusted for ownership of Colette.
01:31:20
Speaker
There's some stuff going on with Kerida.
01:31:25
Speaker
Kerida also eventually reveals her motivation for ah enchanting Mara to leave Dirk was that Mara is the daughter of Kerida's ex. And Kerida's like, Dirk's not good enough for the daughter of a man like that.
01:31:38
Speaker
And you're just like, Kerida, what is going on with you? Karida, you're having a lot of feelings about the younger women in this book and how they should be with you and working with you and not with their largely male families. What's going on with that?
01:31:57
Speaker
So in the course of this conversation, Colette does manage to kind of evade Karida's longing ownership clutches. Karida is all ready to place a spell on her like she placed on Mara, but Colette sort of outwits her about it.
01:32:10
Speaker
But Karida does tell Colette that she's beautiful and Colette's like, huh, Beautiful. I never considered that. And then she spends the rest of the book while everyone else is having this terrible time flying into various sequences being like,
01:32:22
Speaker
do you think I'm beautiful and then the Emperor Titus and the horse lady of the entire world are like yes you're so beautiful and she's like huh wonderful and then she kills a couple people and then she makes art honestly out of all the characters in this book to be I think I would most like to be Colette yeah Colette's having a great time until Kit dies when You know, there's some really interesting character stuff going on with Colette. While Dirk is wallowing with the pigs, eventually, you know, he's sort of shaken out of his daze by looking at Colette and realizing that she is also starving.
01:32:57
Speaker
And Colette explains that she doesn't feel bad that Kits died. Remember, he's her least favorite sibling. And so she's locked herself in her room until she does feel bad. Because she knows that not feeling bad is wrong.
01:33:11
Speaker
And so by the time Karida appears, Colette has been in her room. She's still got blood on her claws from murdering the soldiers who killed Kit, by the way. This is something that Colette did. it's not a problem This is not in the book's problem bucket. Fine for Colette to murder those guys.
01:33:24
Speaker
But she's haggard. She hasn't been eating. It's a problem. She's still a growing griffin. And Karida's like, whoopsies, maybe I'd better get these kids' mother back in the picture.
01:33:37
Speaker
And pops off to dispel Mara. Thanks, Gerida. It took you long enough. So I would describe the actual ah resolution of this book as a literal deus ex machina.
01:33:49
Speaker
Yes. The gods come down from heaven and are like, Mr. Chesney, no more. And they put him in a little snow globe. Yeah. Along the way, they really, so it turns out the demon that's been kind of haunting this book, showing up and being creepy and not really doing much. It turns out that Kerida's demon was its mate.
01:34:08
Speaker
And the gods are like, yes, you can have your mate back, go on. Which means that the the literal evil demons get a better resolution than the prisoners who've been marching across this book for the entirety of the plot. They also, bythe by the by, dispel Professor Eldredge.
01:34:24
Speaker
I think you've got to have your elf moment now. Okay, I've got to have my elf moment. So in terms of things haunting the narrative, there are many, but one of the things haunting the narrative is the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, which Jones had read and loved and had written some pretty sharp ah literary criticism on, and she was also famously taught by Tolkien at Oxford, and he found her very tiresome because she wouldn't leave so he could go home and write Lord of the Rings. Yes.
01:34:51
Speaker
So quite early on in this book, we get an elf prince turns up to swear fealty to Dirk as captain of the Dark Elves. And the Dark Elves are just some elves who are working for the Dark Lord. And it's clearly an insult. We're told it's an insult to ah a high ranking elf to have to do this awful job. And our elf prince Talithan has been sent to do it because he said something silly to his father. He made a prophecy. He said, my brother, who was kidnapped by Mr. Chesney and is presumably imprisoned in the other world some or somewhere, my brother will come home when pigs fly.
01:35:31
Speaker
So then he turns up at Dirkholm with his elf captains, and ah immediately encounters Dirk's collection of flying pigs. And they all have sort of a collective comical nervous breakdown in which they're all laughing hysterically and everyone's a bit worried because elves don't usually behave like this. But my favourite part of this whole sequence is the elves then, so we will be your most faithful and loyal servants, whatever, and they depart. in a kind of green haze and there every time elves leave the book there is an after effect, it seems to be a magical effect, where you look at the world and it's dreary and sad and miserable and something beautiful has gone out of it. And that's just how elves feel. It's just how it feels when the elves go away consistently.
01:36:14
Speaker
And then Colette comes in and Colette says, why have we got six s soppy men in a green haze hanging about? Which I love because it punctures so neatly and comically the sentimental nostalgia that is the primary affect, affect not effect, of the elves.
01:36:38
Speaker
I think we have here Jones doing some Tolkien commentary because sentimental nostalgia is absolutely the aesthetic point and power of...
01:36:49
Speaker
elf characters throughout Tolkien's work. And although in Lord of the Rings he's quite restrained with it, we have the um the appearance of Gildor early on, we have most strongly in the Lothlorien sequence in Fellowship, you get this sense of something beautiful and wonderful passing out of the world. And it's very moving.
01:37:10
Speaker
And it's very sad. And it's very soppy. Yeah. And in doing this, ah this puncture, I think Jones is talking to that sentimentality and arguing with it because we've seen actually pretty consistently in the 1990s books, especially ah why should fantasy reject the modern world? Why shouldn't Delmark industrialize? It's a lot better to live in modern Delmark than it is to live in the historical version. In modern Delmark, you can be a divorcee artist. In historical Delmark, you die in a mine.
01:37:46
Speaker
But similarly, even in Fantasyland, which is obviously having a horrible time, you're like, yeah, but the coffee. Coffee. Can we get their coffee beans here, please? We want coffee, cotton, oranges, calculators that you can also play a little video game on. We want the conveniences and the the delights of the modern world.
01:38:09
Speaker
To hell with that sentimental fantasy nostalgia for the beautiful and ancient things that are past. Have you seen what we've got? Right? So we've already got, I think, this ah this commentary set up. And then the revelation at the end of the book is that several of Blade's fantasy companions' party were not who they said they were.
01:38:32
Speaker
who have all seemed so silly and so annoying. Firstly, Mr. and Mrs. Poole turn out to be representatives of the government specifically referring to tax and fraud investigations. right They're still calling themselves mother and dad pool, by the way. Yeah, they're still human beings. They're just human beings who are experts on ah all the various financial crimes Mr. Chesney is committing. And it's pretty clear this is how they're going to get him. Mr. Chesney is guilty of an awful lot, but it looks like it's the money that will bring him down. yeah And then also, Miss Ledbury...
01:39:04
Speaker
comedy, Twinset and Pearls, who refuses to listen to the rules, ah reveals herself to be a high-ranking investigator of the Missing Persons Bureau and she's there to to investigate the assassinations. um um But she has brought with her Professor Ledbury, who is not really her brother. He's a mystery that she's been investigating for some time. He turns out to be the long-lost Prince of the Elves.
01:39:28
Speaker
And this is honestly a glorious moment where Prince Talithan encounters his brother Eldred. Eldreth is his elf name. He's like, can it be you?
01:39:39
Speaker
Because without the magic of Fantasyland, this elf prince has dwindled into a sad and rather lost old man who lights up when he sees a beautiful landscape or gets to hold a fantasy sword.
01:39:54
Speaker
This is a picture of... What's left after the magic has gone out of the world right is this rather pitiable, certainly lovable old man who's lost everything.
01:40:11
Speaker
And I do think this is a continuation of the Tolkien joke, the Tolkien comment. Was the professor not, in his own way, an elf prince?
01:40:23
Speaker
yeah Yeah. With nothing else left to him. And I do think furthermore, you know, as you've said, the argument of Delmarc, the argument of, or of Crown of Delmarc, the argument of Deep Secret is that it's an essentially optimistic argument.
01:40:40
Speaker
The future is going to come to fantasy land and that will make, and the the combination of of magic and technology of the future of magic will bring us more I words, will make us better, will make us happier.
01:40:53
Speaker
That's not the argument of, dark lord of Durkholm in any way and as much as she's critiquing the sentimentality of the elves the soppiness of the elves that is i think profoundly counterbalanced by the argument that she's making that is also a continuation of a deep secret argument about what happens when you look at fantasy and you take all the magic out of it when you make it flat and stale and empty profitable and profitable flat stale and profitable critical that this is a a critique of capitalism Yeah.
01:41:27
Speaker
And one of the things that really struck me very early on when Blade is watching Mr. Chesney and his crew of business people stride up Dirk's garden,
01:41:38
Speaker
They walk up the lane, they look neither left nor right, busy expressions on their faces, and Blade suddenly and unexpectedly found he was hurt and quite angry that they did not bother even to glance at the garden, which his father had worked so hard on last night, Dirk had got it looking marvelous. They were not bothering to notice Dawn and Lidda either, and they were looking quite as marvelous. These people come to fantasy land,
01:42:01
Speaker
Literal Fantasyland. They know it's magic. They know it's fantasy. And they're still not bothering to see the beauty that's in it. Which feels to me like a continuation of the critique of Uncle Ted not looking not seeing the magic in his windows.
01:42:13
Speaker
Yes. you can come You can bring the horse to Fantasyland all you like, but you can't make it drink. You can't make it see. You can't make people... bring the magic into themselves unless they're willing to do that. And in fact, instead, if they don't do that, they're going to take the magic out of it. Yeah. And that brings me back actually to the role that the gods play in this book.
01:42:38
Speaker
which is a role of the true numinous power of the fantastic and uncontrollable, ah the but the wild magic, if you like, the magic that that cannot be commanded and cannot be harnessed for profit no matter what Mr. Chesney says.
01:42:55
Speaker
the The closest they can come to forcing a god to manifest for the party is creating a fake in the village outside the Dark Lord Citadel because the real numinous power is actually outside Mr Chesney's grasp in a way he can't understand. And I think a character we haven't talked about, one of the minor characters, is the evil priest, a High Priest Umru. I love him. And of course in Fantasyland there must be an evil priest who says, quite honestly, I've done wonderfully out of the tours. I've made so much money and we are shown around his beautiful temple that he has built in honour of his god. And this is when Dirk is hoping still that he maybe get Umru to get the god to up appear.
01:43:36
Speaker
And he discovers that although Umru is quite honestly and openly fantastically corrupt, this is his line. This is the thing he won't do. Yeah. And what Umru says, Umru tells the story of the first time he met Ancher, his god, a moment of true faith.
01:43:51
Speaker
And he explains that his entire career in the priesthood has been, he says, I think that was presumptuous. I tried to command Ancher to appear to me again, and that was wrong. He will not come to me again now. I am too proud, too old, too fat. No, he will not come.
01:44:06
Speaker
And I spent some time trying to think what this line resonated with me against. And I eventually realized that it was Molly Grew in The Last Unicorn exclaiming about the the appearance of the unicorn, her anger at the appearance of this numinousness into her ordinary life.
01:44:22
Speaker
You come to me now when I am this. And I do think that that maybe is something that she's drawing on, but it's certainly linked to the themes of this book, where you find the magic, where you find the numinousness.
01:44:36
Speaker
Right. There's this sense that Umruh is a character who has been been fantastically successful. You could see in him maybe an Uncle Ted. um He's done really well and he's done everything for this extraordinary numinous power he encountered once, but he can't get it back.
01:44:55
Speaker
You can't command it. You can't control it. ah The magic of Fantasyland is not to be owned in the way you think you own it. Yeah.
01:45:07
Speaker
Shall we call it there? Let's call it there. Thank you all for coming with us on this journey through the 90s. We will have a couple bonus episodes over the next couple months.
01:45:18
Speaker
We'll report on those when we've got them. And we will be doing a Q&A again. So please feel free to send questions to our email address. We'll try and get to as many we can. We already have quite a few. do. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for asking questions. Thank so much for listening. I feel like this season has been harder than the 70s and 80s because the books are harder. Thank you for coming with us on this journey.
01:45:40
Speaker
We are learning so much. Absolutely. All right. See you guys next time. Bye.
01:45:56
Speaker
you