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Castle in the Air
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‘That djinn has taken liberties with a person's castle,’ Sophie said. 'Unless I'm entirely turned around, this used to be our bathroom.'
Richard Burton's Arabian Nights and Edward Said's Orientalism, fairy tale and retail, big dreams, big crimes, and Diana Wynne Jones' empire of the imagination.
Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s-yK-BV-i6hpFtn-kpxpMUCdZe3Gr3Nf/view?usp=sharing
And we'll be back in two weeks with Black Maria! (or Aunt Maria, depending on your location)
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Castle in the Air' and Inspirations
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to our second episode of the third season of Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm Freymouth. There's too many numbers in that introduction and I'm Emily Pischoff. And today today we're talking about Castle in the Air, the sequel to Howl's Moving Castle.
00:00:39
Speaker
Yeah, also I think in a strange way kind of a sequel to Lives of Christopher Champ. Yeah, I think so. I mean, um it seems really clear that there was one thing that Diana Wood Jones was thinking about in like around the turn of the decade between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. And that one thing was the Arabian Nights.
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah. And it's actually been really interesting tracking it.
Arabian Nights Influence on British Fantasy
00:01:08
Speaker
So first pops up in Carolinia's Hundredth Dream, which is the 1986 Crest to Mount Sinai Universe short story. In which Crestomancy, in his literary criticism of Caroline's dreams, says, well, some of your settings are terrible.
00:01:23
Speaker
For Arabian Nights one, I've actually got the quotation. Yes. Where is it? I like all those crowds, what your blurbs call your cast of thousands, but I must confess I don't find your settings very convincing. That Arabian setting in the 96th dream was awful, even making allowances for how young you are. This is ah the character of Crestomancy speaking to the character of Carol, Carol who represents the commercial successful writer trying to do something new.
00:01:55
Speaker
Crestomancy is saying, come on though, that was crap. So this is our first Arabian appearance. Yes. Then it shows up in Lives of Christopher Chant where it sort of does it. very We talked quite a lot about this on our last episode.
00:02:13
Speaker
But the idea of the Arabian Nights sort of representing fantasy, escape for Christopher in a way that it did clearly for Diana Wynne-Jones herself as a child, in a way that it did for a lot of British children. There's actually a whole article that I didn't manage to get my hands on because it's one of the ones that's academic law called Scheherazade and the Nursery about the generations of British children who grew up on versions of the Arabian Nights as representative of escapism and fantasy.
00:02:43
Speaker
um And Jones herself, who of course talked quite a lot about her book hunger in childhood, the way her father would ration out the books he gave his daughters, notes that um when I was nine, much pleading wrung a frivolous book from my parents, The Arabian Nights, bowdlerized.
00:03:01
Speaker
Shaharazad, I was delighted to find, was an elder sister. So even though she did nothing but tell stories, literally for dear life, maybe there was some hope. for heroism is is the end of that sentence. This is in her essay about female heroes.
00:03:17
Speaker
So this is book that matters a lot to Diana personally. Right. And then she goes on to write the sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. The title of this book is Castles in the Air. The theme of the book is escapism and daydreams.
00:03:31
Speaker
And the structure, aesthetic form of the book is is 100% Arabian Nights.
Richard Burton's Controversial Translation
00:03:39
Speaker
And not just any Arabian Nights. I think it's pretty clear from what she says about the Arabian Nights and Christopher Chant, where Christopher is really excited to find the unexpurgated Arabian Nights in the store. And then quite disappointed later on to find that when he gets to Crestomancy Council, they've given him the, you know, an Arabian Nights with all the dirty bits taken out.
00:04:00
Speaker
That this is Diana's childhood Arabian Nights. um which are the sort of children's version of the stories that she's given when she's nine. And it is also Richard Burton, Unexfurgated Arabian Nights.
00:04:12
Speaker
The quote unquote real Arabian Nights, which of course is anything but. We ended up down a bit of a rabbit hole for this one. Do not, do not go attempt go and attempt to read the whole of Richard Burton's Arabian Nights. One thing, it's extraordinarily long because it translates an extraordinarily long text. But translates is ah a word that's doing quite a lot of work there. So I did a lot of reading around for this one. I was like, Richard Burton, I know nothing about this man. I know quite a lot about Richard Burton. What a guy. Derogatory. Right. And yet, I rather enjoy him.
00:04:52
Speaker
Derogatory. Richard Burton. Sir Richard Francis Dirty Dick Burton. 19th century British adventurer is probably the best word.
00:05:03
Speaker
Edward Said, the Palestinian academic, writing about Burton as one of many characters he explores in um his... classic key work of scholarship, the 1978 book Orientalism, which is about Western academic experiences of Islam specifically, talks about Burton and says, as a traveller, Burton was a real adventurer. As a scholar, he could hold his own with any academic Orientalist in Europe. As a character, he was fully aware of the necessity of combat between himself and the uniformed teachers who ran Europe and European knowledge with such precise and anonymity and scientific firmness. Everything Burton wrote testifies to his combativeness, rarely with more candid contempt for his opponents than in the preface to his translation of the Arabian Nights.
00:05:52
Speaker
He seems to have taken a special sort of infantile pleasure in demonstrating that he knew more than any professional scholar, that he had acquired many more details than they had, and he could handle the material with more wit and tact and freshness than they. so yeah, he's a character.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah, I love that infantile pleasure. I think that really just says... Infantile pleasure describes quite a lot of what he's doing rather well. Yes. So Burton was, unusually, for an Englishman of the 19th century, fluent in Arabic and able to move fluently through what he called the Orient, the Arabic-speaking world.
00:06:30
Speaker
making friends, having a great time. And famously, at one point, he disguised himself as a Muslim doctor and then went to Mecca on Hajj and then wrote a book about it. And Said actually says quite a lot about this in Orientalism as like the Western scholar's sort of ability to disguise himself and then remove himself so be sort of sneakily in the east and then come out of the east again and tell all the west all about it ah like he's a ah scientist doing practical experiments uh oh no go for it keep going
00:07:04
Speaker
No, i'm I'm just having fun. I really enjoyed like reading about this really very unpleasant man. I'm not sure he was unpleasant, actually. He seems to have been enormously charming and friendly. Yes, he seems to have been very charming and friendly. And his knights... So I read the first volume or two of his knights, and then I switched to a different translation of the knights because I was curious how they compared, because what I'd heard is that Burton's version of the knights is much more sort of florid, which is true.
00:07:33
Speaker
And also really beefs up, let's say, both the sort of sexy bits in the nights. Because, again, Dirty Dick Burton was, he had a mission.
00:07:44
Speaker
and His mission was obscenity. Yes. He was for it. um So really, really lingers on every sort of sexual passage in the Arabian Nights. One of which, by the way, I just think this is really funny. In all the bits of the nights that I hit, the sexiest passage in Burton's Nights.
00:08:03
Speaker
is the bit right before there's bit in Christopher chant where Christopher starts complaining about a boring story about all the calendars. That is the sexiest bit of the nights. I think that must have been Diana having a little bit of a joke.
00:08:14
Speaker
But he also beefs up the racism in the nights. Yeah. there's he know that's like There's a story early on where Shazaman sees his brother's wife cheating on his brother in an orgy. And I sort of read this in two translations, the contemporary Penguin classics, which is a very solid and serious piece of work. And Richard Burton's.
00:08:37
Speaker
And in both versions, shock horror. the queen is having sex with a black slave among an orgy of all her other slaves. But only in Burton's version does the orgy include 10 white men in disguise who throw off their women's clothes and leap in to join the fun. And also the black slave leapt out of a tree. And you're like, so you've certainly added some things here. So that is some of that is in the the recent translation that I read as well, but described in in the the Yasmin Searle annotated European nights, which is the one I was looking at. It does include the leaping out of a tree.
00:09:12
Speaker
It does actually include the cross-dressing in that in that episode. But it's all described in much less lurid language. And there are a number of other incidents in Burton. there's There's a lot of affairs in the Arabian Nights. There's a lot of women who are having affairs with inappropriate people.
00:09:29
Speaker
There's a lot of sex. Inevitably, in Burton, that inappropriate person, the inappropriateness has something to do with skin color, which is usually not the case in most of the other stories and in the case of most of the other affairs.
00:09:41
Speaker
I mean, there's also because I read Burton on Project Gutenberg, which does have the footnotes. I sent you a footnote. and i went oh my God. So apparently this man was like toss tottering around North Africa and the Middle East with his racist Victorian tape measure measuring people's penises yeah to to include in his ethnographic suggestions about what sex is like.
00:10:06
Speaker
Yes. You're like, sir, sir. So anyway, this is the guy we're talking about. the and this but Burton's Arabian Nights is, I think, a fundamental text of British children's literature.
00:10:22
Speaker
This is carefully expigated and then given to children for a century. Like there isn't another complete English translation until the 21st century. Right.
00:10:36
Speaker
And this particular text. Yeah. It is, you know, in you know in kind of science point of Orientalism, it is really very much as much as Burton sort of likes to pride himself on being someone who has gone on this pilgrimage, who has been in disguise, who has like come to understand the mind that created the Arabian Nights. It is a text that is fully filtered through a British imagination and a British lens.
00:11:02
Speaker
yeah One thing I found myself thinking was, like oh, God, this is what C.S. Lewis was working off for The Horse and His Boy. my God. Yeah, absolutely. Once you see it, you're like, god this is everywhere. Everyone's read this. There are several bits, actually, as I was reading further in The Knights was like, oh, this is just this is another episode that Lewis just took, not just in Horse and His Boy, but like some a lot of the sort of little moral parables in The Knights crop up again and again and again in British literature.
00:11:25
Speaker
but I think that you can see some of Burton's preoccupations in Castle in the Air.
Abdullah's Fantasies and Reality
00:11:31
Speaker
Castle in the Air is a book about war, about conquest, about ah being in disguise as somebody else.
00:11:40
Speaker
Weirdly, none of those things are happening to our protagonist, pretty much. So our protagonist in Castle in the Air is Abdullah, who is a carpet merchant. This is Very Arabian Nights, actually. A lot of the protagonists in the Arabian Nights are merchants. It's a very, what's the word? Urban. Urban set of stories.
00:12:00
Speaker
And there you know they often were kind of shared and told among people who were working in in the markets. from From an urban commercial background, yeah. Exactly. So Abdullah is a carpet merchant, much like Sophie in Howl's Moving Castle is a hat seller. I love that Abdullah and Sophie have in common their superpowers come about because they worked in retail. Yes, they're so good at well, I think Abdullah is quite a bit better than Sophie, actually, at talking to people.
00:12:28
Speaker
Sophie's very good at talking to things. Abdullah is very good at talking to people, and he sort of learns to apply those skills at talking to things. And he's quite a good carpet seller. He's working his way up. He's buying better and better carpets. Things are going well. But he enjoys a little daydream from time to time about, you know, wouldn't it be nice if he was really a prince and was going to be married to a princess? And perhaps he'd been lost as a baby and had this whole adventure and struggled through the desert. He fantasy life, which actually, to me, recalled Christopher's exciting fantasy life in Lives of Christopher Chant, in that this is a young man who, like, on the face of it, has things pretty good.
00:13:05
Speaker
Mm-hmm. You know, he's from he's well off, he's comfortable, things are going all right, but he's got this elaborate daydream palace, which is so much more interesting to him than his real life. yeah And in Christopher's case, we have a bit more sympathy because he is a child from a clearly neglectful and abusive household.
00:13:24
Speaker
Abdullah is an independently successful young businessman who just finds his life quite boring. Yes. And I think it's actually quite interesting that in crest a manton Christopher Chant, um Christopher has these fantasies. You know, we talked about how his escape from his terrible life is sort of this Arabian Nights episode of, you know, he goes to the temples and he goes to the markets and so forth. And when the time comes to bring Millie, who is living in an Arabian Nights fantasy, something to spur her escapism, he looks at the Arabian Nights and he's like, for her I think that would probably be kind of educational, I better bring her something about British schoolgirls. That would be escapist for her.
00:14:02
Speaker
But Abdullah's fantasies are, despite the fact that he's living in the city of Zanzib, clearly an Arabian Nights location. His fantasies are Arabian Nights fantasies. There's a description of later on. So one of the things that happens to Abdullah is that eventually all of his fantasies will come true. One of his really elaborate fantasies involves bandits. And I'm just going to read the description of the bandits.
00:14:28
Speaker
Abdullah blinked sand out of his eyes and thought he had seldom seen a more villainous crew of men. They all had scarred faces, shifty eyes, bad teeth, and unpleasant expressions. The man with the pistol was the most unpleasant of the lot.
00:14:40
Speaker
He wore a sort of earring through one side of his large hooked nose and a very bushy mustache. His headcloth was pinned up at one side with a flashy redstone and a gold brooch. This man really was the absolute image of the villainous bandit of his daydream.
00:14:54
Speaker
This image is really recognizably out of like an English illustration of the Arabian Nights. The thing is that I actually have the illustrated version of Castle in the Air and the illustrator has clearly taken their cue from the text and my god, some of the racist caricatures. Yeah. like My dear, this was published in 1990. Uh-huh.
00:15:17
Speaker
The term hooked nose comes up a couple times throughout this text. Abdullah, is who is handsome, we're told, has a hawk's nose. That's the same thing. It's just whether you're describing it as handsome or racist. No, in fact, no, it's it's it's sexy racist or dangerous racist. Right, exactly.
00:15:38
Speaker
Which ties into the... point made it by Saeed in Orientalism that one of the characteristics of the Orient in the Western ah ah imagination is that it's sexy is that it's where the porn happens thank you Richard Burton yes and in keeping with a lot of the adventures in the Arabian Nights ah the first thing that happens to Abdullah to kind of kick off his adventure is he buys a mysterious item from someone who walks into his store, a shabby old carpet with magical properties, and falls asleep and he wakes up.
00:16:12
Speaker
in a beautiful garden with a beautiful woman waiting for him. And this is, I think, the first place we see what the book is trying to do thematically. Jones is talking about daydream and reality. So Abdullah has been daydreaming about beautiful gardens. He doesn't know very much about gardens.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yes, hang on, I've got the quote. You got the quote. um Abdullah loved gardens, though he knew very little about them. Most of his experience had come from the public parks of Zanzib, where the Terp was somewhat trampled and the flowers few, in which he sometimes spent his lunch hour when he could afford to pay his next-door neighbor to watch his booth. Abdullah was well aware that this did not really qualify him to invent a proper garden, but since anything was better than thinking of the two wives chosen for him by his in-laws, ah he lost himself in waving fronds and scented walkways in the gardens of his princess. Right, and it's notable, firstly, that Abdullah's garden is very obliquely described, waving fronds and scented walkways. This is the language of you don't really know what you're looking at. yeah um There's a sense of movement and there's ah an implication of smell, but there's no actual, like,
00:17:22
Speaker
specifics in these gardens and then the text moves very strongly from in fact no i missed it the most important non-specific thing in adela's fantasy garden is the beautiful girl who's going to be waiting for him there right he describes as i think both gauzy and misty yes he he he knew that her face would be a perfect oval Right, he's got a shape.
00:17:45
Speaker
Right, he's got a shape and he's got misty eyes. Right, and then he moves from that to this garden he wakes up in after falling asleep on the magic carpet and this beautiful girl waiting for him. And in some ways it is the garden of his dreams, but it's specific, it's precise.
Gender Norms and Identity in the Story
00:18:01
Speaker
And he he walks through it and he touches the flowers and feels the waxy texture of the petals.
00:18:07
Speaker
And then he meets the girl and she is in no way misty. Yes. When she was near Abdullah, he saw that her face was not quite a perfect oval as the face of his dream princess should have been, nor were her huge dark eyes at all misty. In fact, they examined his face keenly with evident interest.
00:18:23
Speaker
Abdullah hastily adjusted his dream, for she was certainly very beautiful. but like On second thoughts, I prefer princesses who are paying attention and not sort of slightly stoned, I suppose. Right. She is wearing just sort of vaguely gauzy garments, though. I was paying a lot of attention to clothes, actually, throughout this book, because the first thing that the princess says to him is she assumes that he's a woman.
00:18:45
Speaker
And Abdullah says, I'm not a woman. And she says, are you sure you are wearing a dress? And Abdullah says, this is just my strange foreign garb. My two countries is far from here. I assure you that I am a man.
00:18:55
Speaker
um yeah he He's dreaming and starts telling his daydream backstory in which he's a long lost prince. Right. But there's a lot going on here just with the clothing sequence. So Abdul is wearing a nightgown.
00:19:07
Speaker
This woman who is, we sort we soon learn, lives five minutes away from him. She is the Sultan's daughter. She lives in the same city. It's like, you are in a nightgown. Clearly you are wearing a dress and that makes you a woman.
00:19:19
Speaker
As opposed to what Abdullah wears in the daytime, which is a tweed suit, obviously, as is proper for a gentleman. Right. And as opposed to what flower in the night wears, which is certainly never trousers, as is common in various locations.
00:19:35
Speaker
um And so I was looking all throughout these early chapters for any actual description of what anybody was wearing other than Abdullah's nightclothes. And much like Abdullah's imagination of his gardens, what you usually get is a color and a description. Flower in the night's clothes are gauzy.
00:19:50
Speaker
Abdullah's clothes are fancy. When he goes, you know, he dresses up fancy the next day. They're ah deeply embroidered. When Abdullah meets the two wives that his family has picked up for him, they are gauzy and pink and gauzy and yellow.
00:20:02
Speaker
But the actual garments are never specifically described. Now, this is a very Jonesian thing in general. Like you read through all her books. She she is anti-description and she even writes about it in her essays. If it's important, I'll describe it.
00:20:18
Speaker
But mostly it's not. Most things you don't actually notice. And and she's thinking ah specifically of a child audience. A child is going to lose patience with a lengthy description. But in Castle in the Air, I think it jars a bit because the book is so much about that unspecific daydream effect versus what is real.
00:20:38
Speaker
Right. And there are a lot of beautiful descriptions in Castle in the Air. In some ways, it's a book that's most full of beautiful descriptions. the Every time Abdullah enters a garden, it's gorgeously described.
00:20:49
Speaker
Every time Abdullah sees castle, beautifully described. Every time he looks at the sky... There is a long and gorgeous description of the clouds and the shapes that they make and how it looks sort of kind of like a castle. Fun fact, if you ah read the introduction to Burton's Arabian Nights, one of the things he spends paragraphs and paragraphs of purple prose on is the glories of the sky over the desert.
00:21:11
Speaker
um Yeah. like like like Like Jones is doing a thing. yes And we will come back to the beautiful sky and the clouds, I think, in a little bit. But for right now, Abdullah... Oh, the other thing I want to say, though, about the fact that Flower in the Night... The first thing that happens is Flower in the Night sees Abdullah and thinks that he's a woman.
00:21:29
Speaker
So this is our pretty much our introduction to Abdullah. And Abdullah asserts that he is a man. And then at various other points in the book, you know at the end of the book, in the climax, it's Abdullah shirtless in a big petticoat.
00:21:42
Speaker
And there is, i think, something going on here with... I think Saeed talks a bit... in Orientalism about the feminization often in a lot of descriptions of the East by the West as sort of part of the exoticism package.
00:22:00
Speaker
yeah And I think there is something going on here with Abdullah. Abdullah is a very nice young man. love him. I'm going to say that. like As a protagonist, I enjoy him very much. he is great. He doesn't do very much or or change very much, but he's really charming from the beginning. He's delightful. And all of his skill set involves, it's you know it sort of hammered in pointedly a couple of times in a way that I think is really significant and is trying to do it. like There's a lot that Diana Wendell is trying to do with Abdullah.
00:22:30
Speaker
um He's not a man of violence. He is a man of peace. He's a man who talks and lies his way out of situations heroically rather than fighting his way out of situations. if ah one One thing we thought about reading this one was was how much Abdullah echoes Sophie as a protagonist. These are talkers. Yes.
00:22:50
Speaker
Abdullah's way of getting someone to do what he wants is to flatter them. He'll he'll extensively pile on, ah you know, magnificent epithets until the person kind either gets tired and does what he wants ah or decides that he's actually quite a good friend and does what he wants.
00:23:08
Speaker
And there's a bit later on where Abdullah and Sophie are both in a situation and Sophie sort of bullying the objects around her and Abdullah's like, oh, she's just doing the same thing that I do, but ah with sort of the opposite. she's She talks to them derogatory and I talk to them affectionate.
00:23:24
Speaker
But he is... He is in some ways, i think he really is intended to echo Sophie in the first book. And I think he's intended to stand in contrast with a lot of the violent men ah that show up throughout this text.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah. And like one of the things we talked about, we were talking about early 90s. Why now for for an Arabian Nights book? You're like, oh, 1992 is Disney's Aladdin. Is there something in the water right there? And then we went it's the Gulf War. It's the Gulf War. and like Do we have time to go away and learn everything about the Gulf War, which happened when I was two?
00:23:59
Speaker
And the answer was no, we do not know everything about the Gulf War. But I do think Jones's decision to centre... a young man from this Arabian Nights world who is a man of non-violence, a man of peace, a man who's who's actively repelled the one time someone hands him a weapon, is...
00:24:18
Speaker
I think, meant to be speaking to current events. She often speaks to current events. Right. And she, in centering Abdullah in his POV, you know, there's a lot of stuff in these early chapters where Abdullah, as, um you know, a a merchant in in the bazaar meeting people, he's, you know, he's rubbing his hands slavishly together is is one term that she uses. um There's a lot of sort of description of these gestures that we would see on a bit character the a Western movie about the Arabian For example, you can watch the first five minutes of Disney's Aladdin in which this exact Arabian Nights merchant stock character, wildly racist caricature, appears and sings an absolute banger of a song if you don't listen to the lyrics. Right. He sticks his hands in his sleeves in a servile attitude. And then we're getting what's going on inside his head when he, you know, it's Abdullah seethed with such rage inside that he was forced to rub his hands together slavishly to hide it.
00:25:16
Speaker
This is a customer service phase. This is a particular form of customer service phase and there's a lot of interiority. In fact, Abdullah is mostly notable for his massive interiority. He daydreams so much that a djinn notices and is like, that's the guy whose life I want to mess with.
00:25:31
Speaker
Look at all that interiority he's got. There's so much going on inside that you are not going to see on the surface because what's on the surface is whatever lie or performance or retail voice is necessary. to control the situation. So yes, he's rubbing his hands together slavishly because he wants you to buy a carpet. Right. Because he's a slavish person in the least. And I do think there's something going on with the fact that both Howl's Moving Castle and Castle Mir are books about fairy stories, fairy tales. And I think there's a link between the fairy tale and retail. I see what you did there. ah The idea that when you're trying to get somebody to buy something, you're telling them a little story about this object and the change it's going to make in their life and how it's going to, you know, if you only had this object, you too can achieve a happy ending.
00:26:21
Speaker
And I do think that's something kind of a little bit in the the structure of these
Abdullah's Romantic and Familial Struggles
00:26:25
Speaker
books. This magic hat, this magic carpet, this magic suit, this genie in a bottle. If you only had this item, how it would change your life?
00:26:33
Speaker
But to get back to nice our nice young protagonist, Abdullah, I think the first thing that really tells us that Abdullah is in fact a nice young man, a guy we can really get behind, is that when he learns that Flower in the Night has mistaken him for a woman because she's never seen a man before, because she's been raised in absolute seclusion by her father. yeah she's cloistered, which you pointed out actually is something she has in common with Millie yeah and with Helen back all the way back in Homeward Bounders. This...
00:27:01
Speaker
woman who has never seen the outside world and yet is clearly full of interest and excitement to know more about it. Yes, and our protagonist has to come and teach her about it and give her give her texts from which she can learn and form her own judgments.
00:27:15
Speaker
So Abdullah's version of the text is he's like, oh my God, this is, this is horrible. Like she, obviously I need to to give her more information. So he comes home and he sells some of his stock so that he can go to an artist and hire him to paint a hundred portraits of men around the bazaar of Zanzim so that he can bring them all back to flower in the night.
00:27:35
Speaker
This gets around the town very quickly. Everyone is bringing him pictures of men. He's like, all right, yes, that one, no, that one's not a man. Yes, I'll take that one. That one's a horse. Go away. Um, And he ends of bringing Flower in the night like 200 portraits so that she is like, I would like them to be old, young, handsome, everything under the the boat. And the idea is that then Flower gets to make a fair decision when she looks at all these men and then looks to Abdullah because he has instantly fallen in love with her.
00:28:04
Speaker
And obviously he wants her to instantly fall in love with him. But he doesn't feel it's fair if she doesn't know there are options. Right. Exactly. And it's one of the most charming things about their like their little meet cute romance is like the driving force of the entire rest of the plot of the book.
00:28:21
Speaker
And it works precisely, I think, because of this impulse of Abdullah's that she has to have reasonable amounts of information before she makes a decision. It's sweet. Yes, it's very sweet. And it's understandable why Flower of the Night looks at all these pictures and it's like, no, actually, I prefer you, the man who gave me information about all of these men.
00:28:39
Speaker
Actually, I've fallen in love with you. are you in love with me and abdul is like yes actually i have fallen in love with you although i don't think that's really he he really sort of uh realizes that that's actually true until the next day when uh he's put into a position where he might have to marry someone else discovers that he really loves flower in the night through the power of misogyny about other women yeah which let's talk about this sequence because it I mean, it's awful, but it is actually also one of my favorites. And it is also the one time in the book where Abdullah actually behaves badly. right
00:29:14
Speaker
He's otherwise a nice, unproblematic boy, a cinnamon roll who has done nothing wrong in his entire life. And we love him for it. We do love him. he is um So Abdullah has an awful family. And this is, of course, a Diana Wynne Jones standard.
00:29:27
Speaker
You have your protagonist who is oppressed by their awful and difficult relatives. It doesn't hit the same way in Castle in the Air as it often hits with her other protagonists. And I submit is that this is because Abdullah is an independently wealthy young businessman.
00:29:43
Speaker
So the fact that he's got a nightmare aunt has no meaningful impact on his life whatsoever. It's just annoying. Right. This is Diana Wynne Jones's, I think it's notable that this is Diana Wynne Jones's first attempt at writing a book from the point of view of a young adult man. Really, her first attempt at writing the a book from the point of view of an independent adult at all. but I mean, you could you could argue that Sophie is, we talked a little bit about this, and we talked about House of Women Castle, but Sophie is still really on the cusp of adulthood. She's ready to go out and start an independent career, but she hasn't done it yet. When the book begins, she's still very much
00:30:17
Speaker
within and under the control of her family. I mean, the book is about that, isn't it It's about claiming the role of adulthood and being like, there's fucking rules, I'm never going back. Right. But Abdullah runs his own business and is doing pretty well at it. And he's annoyed by his relatives. And I think there's sort of an attempt to echo the Sophie arc of claiming your independence with Abdullah.
00:30:40
Speaker
But he's already pretty independent. So it doesn't really work. I think we're going to see her over the course of the 90s sort of figure out how to write an adult and do it for the whole course of a book and provide different kinds of tension. But Abdullah is kind of a transitional point.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah. It just suddenly occurred to me that I mentioned the name thing, and I do actually think this is this is part of Jones's joke here. May I mention the name thing? It's so stupid. So I mentioned that our villain of the day, ah well, our person of the day, ah Sir Richard Francis Burton, disguised himself as a Muslim and went to Mecca. His Arabic name was Abdullah. ahha joneses and it's it's on the title page of his unexplicated Arabian Nights I think Jones has named her protagonist after Burton I think she has too it's the kind of stupid joke she likes yeah and again it's funny because Abdullah is in some ways the least Burton-ish character in this text yeah but the moment that Abdullah is sort of most threatened by his family is when he's you know he's he's
00:31:47
Speaker
sold a bunch of his stock. He's getting ready to elope with flower in the night on his magic carpet. And he's gotten together enough money to keep her like a queen for three months. And then he's like, well, we'll figure it out afterwards, I guess.
00:31:59
Speaker
I mean, yeah, if you're wealthy enough that you can keep a princess in luxury for three months, you're fine. yeah You're doing okay. You're oppressed by your evil family. Right. But they do bring him to their big carpet emporium, which they run, and lock him inside it.
00:32:15
Speaker
and say, hey, we noticed that you've been acting a little weird, you're wearing your nice clothes. Have we ever told you about the prophecy of your birth, which says that you're going to be raised... Of all mothers in the land? Yeah.
00:32:27
Speaker
We heard about the prophecy of your birth. We'd like to be part of that. Here's some, like, second cousin nieces, and we'd like you to marry them so that you'll be tied to us for forever. Here's the priest.
00:32:39
Speaker
Here's the nieces. The door is locked. Right. Let's So this is like this is potentially a very scary moment. This is a forced marriage.
00:32:50
Speaker
If you had this, the the usual young woman protagonist, child protagonist, this would be horrifying. It's just not... ah Instead, it's kind of the person I feel people I feel worst for in this scene are the nieces who are always referred to in the text as the fat nieces. Right. They do not get names. I am going to read the description of Abdullah's reaction to the nieces.
00:33:18
Speaker
So Abdullah says, i don't want to marry these women. They start crying. Abdullah discovered that the sight of females crying, particularly such large ones who wobbled with it everywhere, made him feel terrible.
00:33:29
Speaker
He knew he was an oaf and beast. He was ashamed. The situation was not the girl's fault. They had been used by his relatives, just as Abdullah had been. But the chief reason he felt so beastly, and it made him truly ashamed, was that he just wanted them to stop, to shut up, and to stop wobbling.
00:33:44
Speaker
Otherwise, he did not care two hoots for their feelings. If he compared them to Flower and the Knight, he knew they revolted him. The idea of marrying them stuck in his craw. He felt sick. But just because they were whimpering and sniffing and flubbering in front of him, he found himself considering that three wives were perhaps not so many after all.
00:34:00
Speaker
So I have to admit, this made me laugh as a fairly accurate description of a self-centered young man kind God, why won't these girls stop being fat and sad at me? Right. they're they're They're being depressed at me. Won't they stop?
00:34:16
Speaker
Unattractive women. How annoying of them to exist in my presence. I don't like it. Right. And then he thinks about them in comparison to Flower in the Night. And he realizes, he's somewhat amazed to discover that he did really and truly did love Flower in the Night just as ardently as he's been telling himself he did. Or more, because he now saw he respected her.
00:34:36
Speaker
Unlike these women who have the audacity, who have said two words to him, but have the audacity to be standing in front of him, ah not be appealing to his aesthetic tastes, and be upset. yeah So this is the moment when Abdullah does a misogyny and it confirms him in his love of flower in the night. So he becomes absolutely certain he must run away with her as soon as possible.
00:34:57
Speaker
He doesn't lie together the situation as he always does. he Yeah, he lies ah smoothly out of the situation. Again, Abdullah is a character who is constantly talking his way out of trouble, which yeah one of the things that is most charming about him. Yes.
00:35:10
Speaker
And he makes his way back to Flower in the Night. Unfortunately, just as soon as he hits Flower in the Night, she is abducted by djinn. The djinn, this is another hooked nose situation. um Yeah.
00:35:21
Speaker
There's a lot in the kidnapping of Flower in the Night, the the description of a small white figure against the huge blackness of the djinn, a mighty flying djinn dangling a tiny pale human girl in its arms.
00:35:36
Speaker
There's a lot going on there. Uh-huh.
Jinn Hazrael's Motivations and Backstory
00:35:39
Speaker
I mean, among other things, it's King Kong. Yeah. So the djinn, whose name will eventually be revealed to be Hasrael, is the main villain of the book, probably. And he's going around kidnapping princesses for reasons we have not yet discovered, but will eventually discover.
00:35:57
Speaker
It's not even really his fault. Yes, it is.
00:36:03
Speaker
What is it like when you have a younger sibling who always gets their own way? And is obsessed with beautiful girls? Isn't that a beautiful girl?
00:36:14
Speaker
Shall we drop Hasrael's backstory here because it's great? yeah I mean, I enjoyed Manjee. So eventually, Abdullah will manage to confront this djinn and find out what his deal is. Hasrael is one of the good djinn. You'll be glad to hear that djinn are either good or evil, no exceptions. So what this means, I mean, the djinn, just to interject a little bit here about djinn mythology in in the Arabian Nights and in other similar texts, good and evil here kind of stands in for...
00:36:43
Speaker
believes in is Muslim or not. Like that is the difference between good and evil jinn. Do they believe in, or have they, you know, been, i've i' I'm sorry, I should have this at my fingertips, they don't. oh But it is to do with their relationship to Muhammad.
00:36:57
Speaker
Which is in the world of Castle in the Air, we do have the Arabian Nights, but we have it somehow without Islam. Right. Which is right up there where magicians of Capron are doing Italy somehow without Catholicism.
00:37:11
Speaker
Right. god like angels and everything There's angels there. At one point, Abdullah conjures a djinn by the seven great seals, which is a specific thing. oh So it's it's there for aesthetics.
00:37:24
Speaker
it's But it's not there in a way. like its The religion is the magic. In fact, Magicians of Caprona is the right comparison. In that one we had... British comedy Italians. And in this one we have ah British exotic Arabians. Exactly.
00:37:42
Speaker
But yes, sorry, carry on Hazraëll's backstory. Right. Hazraëll's backstory. ah So Hazraëll's mother, another of the great good djinn, once allowed herself in a a fit of poor judgment to be ravished by one of the evil djinn.
00:37:58
Speaker
This was nobody's fault. It just happened. Mm-hmm. This was nobody's fault, it just happened, is how Hazrawell explains a lot of what's going on. It's meant to be clear from the start that it's bullshit. Right. um So Hazrawell therefore has a younger half-brother, ah Dazzle,
00:38:15
Speaker
whom his mother found repellent. So Hasrael brought him up. So Hasrael is, in fact, our Diana Wynne-Jones parentified older sibling. yeah Hasrael brought up Dalzel and loves him very, very, very much and wants him to be happy and have everything. Alas, he's evil.
00:38:32
Speaker
Nothing can be done. He's ah small and white and handsome, conventionally handsome and evil. And Hazruel is large and black and described in terms of racist caricatures, but is good. It's a good gent.
00:38:45
Speaker
That's all right then. Except ah Dazzle, ah on becoming an adult, ah stole Hazruel's life, so the core of his power, and now controls it and has hidden it. And therefore, Hazruel has to do everything he wants. In other words...
00:39:00
Speaker
ah It turns out, much like Christopher's life, actually. Yes. And what Dazel wants is to get married. But since no no no good djinn woman will have anything to do with him, on account of he is ah undersized and evil, ah he's decided to marry humans. And obviously, because he's a very ah important djinn, he can only marry high-status humans. So he's ordered Hazroel to kidnap every princess in the world to be his wife.
00:39:26
Speaker
So Hazroel is... dutifully going around kidnapping princesses, but don't worry, he's making sure that in every case, every princess is leaving behind some kind of disappointed lover who surely will come and rescue them.
00:39:39
Speaker
And it becomes pretty clear that Abdullah is actually quite low on Haisrael's list of potential rescuers, um and that Abdullah's mostly been set up with Lara in the Night by this djinn, who is also the guy who originally sold him the carpet. Right.
00:39:54
Speaker
a lot other things too. As a sort of elaborate joke because the djinn sensed the power of his daydreams and clearly thought they were funny. Right. Because Flower and the Knight, if Abdullah weren't around, wouldn't have a suitor to rescue her because she's been raised in strict seclusion. Because there's also a prophecy about her that she would marry the first man she sees who isn't her father. So the djinn looked at all of this and was like, what man shall I set up for this princess?
00:40:18
Speaker
that one this would be funny ah yes and he's right it is it is very funny the sultan doesn't think it's funny the sultan immediately finds abdullah and threatens to imprison him and abdullah has to escape no it's better than that the sultan um has acquired the only evidence he has of what's happened to flower in the night is a man's nightcap which is Abdullah's nightcap which he left to the garden the other night. um Hence why he was wearing a nightgown and nightcap it like, you know, the dad from ah
00:40:51
Speaker
Peter Pan. He was doing a real hog shoe. Ebenezer Scrooge. Which is the only clothes that ever gets specifically described in the entire book. right Anyway, Abdullah is arrested by the Sultan who says he's going to stick him on a 40 foot stake. And Abdullah very sadly reflects that this would indeed raise him above all others in the land. That is a problem up with prophecies. You have to be specific with your wordings.
00:41:18
Speaker
um And you have to pay attention to interpretations and meanings. And this is very, this is a very Jonesian theme. We've seen this before. You pay attention to the words, pay attention to the story, pay attention to the lies you're telling or the story you're making up. ah they The words have more meaning than you think they do. You need to be a critical interpreter and not just a passive receiver of great words that are given to you.
00:41:43
Speaker
Abdullah, very canny, this is Abdullah's great power. And, in fact, much like some other Diana Wynne Jones protagonist, because the djinn is paying attention to have his little jokes, pretty much every lie that Abdullah tells from this point on will come true.
00:41:58
Speaker
Right. Hence his encounter with the ah racist stereotype bandits bandits in the desert. They're straight out of his own daydreams. Yep. ah These are also, of course, the djinn and his angels who have come down to make sure that Abdullah has an encounter straight out of his own daydreams.
00:42:15
Speaker
But on his ah dramatic escape into the desert, with the help of the magic carpet, Abdullah encounters what will become one of the most important characters in the book, which is the genie in a bottle.
Genie's Role and Connections to 'Howl's Moving Castle'
00:42:26
Speaker
Specifically a genie. Yes. But those are the same thing. one is a mistranslation of the other. Right. This is, I think, our first clue that perhaps that the genie in the bottle is actually a white man in disguise.
00:42:40
Speaker
Which he is. oh The genie in the bottle will give um the the genie in the bottle's entrance, which is ah the bandits open up the bottle and the genie says, I swore to punish the first person who opened this bottle and immediately turns two of the bandits into toads. This is straight out of the Arabian Nights. This is a very specific story in the Arabian Nights, the story of the fisherman and the genie. Uh, and what happens in that one is the genie arrives and says, i swore to kill the first person who freed me after thousands of years of imprisonment. At first I was like, I'm going to reward him. And then I'd been imprisoned for so long that I just got mad at everything and said I would kill him instead.
00:43:16
Speaker
And the fisherman tells a story to get out of this as is always the way in the Arabian Nights. But the genie's rage at being imprisoned is I think a central theme here.
00:43:27
Speaker
Um, but there's one thing that Anna and Jones doesn't like. It's a prison. Um, I think if she has a consistent political opinion, broadly speaking, she thinks war is bad. She thinks prisons are bad.
00:43:38
Speaker
And so even though the genie is really unpleasant the entire time and explains pretty early on that he has not only sworn to punish the people who release him, but now that he has to give a wish every day to make every wish go as wrong as he possibly can, I think the text is quite sympathetic to this genie.
00:43:56
Speaker
And we have, I think, a little bit of a clue as to how the book feels. In the first description of the genie, the vapor was almost instantly thickened to a cloud that came rushing out of the bottle like a kettle-boiling bluish mauve steam. The steam shaped itself into a face, large and angry and blue, and arms in a wisp of a body connected to the bottle and went on rushing forth until it was easily ten feet tall. I read this description, I was like, oh, Calcifer is here.
00:44:23
Speaker
Calcifer is not here, but Calcifer is here. I mean, Calcifer is here, but he's not this don't echo Remember, this is a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, and this does echo the first introduction of Calcifer.
00:44:35
Speaker
And of course, one of the core relationships in Howl's Moving Castle is Sophie's developing affection and closeness with Calcifer, the bargain they strike, the way Sophie is able to talk to him, how Howl instantly recognizes her importance from her connection with Calcifer.
00:44:52
Speaker
who is sitting on his heart. So here we have Abdullah and the genie and we think, aha, it's a sort of Sophie and Calcifer situation. No, this genie can't stand him. yeah It's so irritating.
00:45:04
Speaker
I think it's exceptionally funny that the thing that the genie is most annoyed about with regards Abdullah is how Abdullah keeps complimenting him and using flowery language. It's so polite to him. Right. ah Do we give it away?
00:45:18
Speaker
I think we just give away. This genie is Howl. And we get a lot of clues that this is Howl, I think. Not only is there a link to Calcifer, but Abdullah also, the genie is really annoyed that Abdullah keeps trying to do good with his wishes. In fact, at one point, Abdullah has a massive temper tantrum and is like, I'm going to stop trying to use my wishes to help myself because it always goes wrong and fate clearly has it in for me. And so now I'm only going to use my wishes henceforth to do abstract good for other people. Just because it will annoy you, the genie specifically. And the genie says, I prefer people to be selfish. Which is, of course, classic Howl.
00:45:56
Speaker
But Howl himself, in Howl's Moving Castle, is the flowery compliment giver. And it annoys Sophie no end. ah The one who talks his way elaborately out of problems. And he's so mad to meet this guy who is doing it, like, apparently sincerely. and With all evident intention of continuing to try and do good.
00:46:19
Speaker
Right. And in fact, all the ways in which the genie is clearly very magically powerful, but also really unhelpful is pure how the whole time. Yes, absolutely.
00:46:32
Speaker
Abila ends up in the desert. I think this is also a Sophie echo, actually, because there's quite a lot of, you know, he uses the genie to defeat the bandits and and escape. But then he is, trekking his way through the desert.
00:46:45
Speaker
He's hobbled, you know, there's a lot of description how he hobbles like an old man. ah He collects his food and wraps it in a napkin and takes a napkin to cover his head. He's still heading off into the mountains with a little bindle and his scarf wrapped over his head, feeling old in his own body.
00:47:01
Speaker
i think you're absolutely right. And then at the first opportunity, he makes a wish to the genie. to send him to the for the person who can help him to rescue Flower in the night. And at this point, we are transported instantly, magically, from Storybook Arabian Knight's Land to Storybook Fairytale England.
00:47:24
Speaker
Yes. Which is where we spend rest of the day. So we go to Ingrid, which is, of course, the setting of the first book. And here we meet, I would actually argue, I've just thought of this now, here we meet Richard Burton.
00:47:36
Speaker
Go on. Here we meet a and a soldier trekking through the land, cheating people out of money. He's telling elaborate stories about...
00:47:49
Speaker
things that happened in a war that he seems to have fought in, but certainly the war didn't go the way that he's describing it. um What the genie says about him is he appeals to me. He shines with dishonesty, which is of course another Howlism. I think Howl says ah shining with dishonesty about himself in Howl's Moving Castle.
00:48:07
Speaker
And Abdullah sees him, you know, the soldiers sitting at the table and flashing around gold coins and some people immediately decide to go rob him. And Abdullah's like, oh, no, the soldier's about to be robbed. He's a terrible boar, but he doesn't deserve this and goes pluckily off to help save the soldier. And then it turns out the soldier has been using the gold in order to lure people to come after him and rob him.
00:48:28
Speaker
And ah so he can then rob them back. which So he can rob them back. He beats them all up. Abdullah... makes one contribution. I think he hits one guy over the head with the genie bottle. um And the soldier tries to give Abdullah a knife, which is what Abdullah says. I am a man of peace. I will not be taking this knife.
00:48:47
Speaker
Thank you. Now, if we're spoiling the genie, we might as well also spoil the soldier. In fact, this humble, and and I think notably the soldier is dirty and tan when he washes ah his face is a different color.
00:49:02
Speaker
um That is part of my The Soldier is Richard Burton argument. Oh god, you're right. ah but I hate it. ah right Almost everyone in this book is in disguise in some way.
00:49:13
Speaker
Except for Abdullah and Flower in the Night. Right. Who are our only honest people. Right. Despite the fact that... Yes. So it turns out at the end of the book that the soldier is in... There's a soldier from Strangia, which is a country that Ingrid has just had a war with and handily defeated because Ingrid has been using wizards on the battlefield and Strangia has no wizards.
00:49:36
Speaker
It turns out that in fact, this soldier is Prince Justin, whom you may remember from Howl's Moving Castle, who spent all of that book under an enchantment. He's under an enchantment again. Once again, he doesn't know who he is. This time, Hazerwell has decided that it would be funny to make Prince Justin, who unfairly conquered a country and then was put into an arranged marriage with its princess, Princess Beatrice, turned him into a Strangian soldier.
00:50:03
Speaker
And make him feel what it feels like to be a penniless veteran from the other side. And what it feels like is he's been having a wonderful time. for Yeah, but also he's been causing great trouble for everyone else by robbing his way across the country. And by the time they arrive in the capital city of Kingsbury, it's clear that the soldier has a price on his head and people are talking about it in the pub. Have you heard about that guy who goes around robbing people? Yep.
00:50:30
Speaker
But essentially what this what the soldier is, is an educated upper-class British man posing as, in sort of a form of brownface, as a penniless wanderer who tells stories to get himself out of trouble. yeah The charming adventurer type. Yes, exactly. go to This is my argument for the soldier as Britain.
00:50:49
Speaker
Oh my god. ah Anyway, Abdullah and the soldier decide to start traveling together. Abdullah tells the soldier a lie that he's destined to marry a princess to get him to help him. Like all of Abdullah's lies, this will in fact come true.
00:51:02
Speaker
They also pick up, so now the the little band is Abdullah, the soldier, the genie. The carpet. The carpet. No, they don't have the carpet yet. They've lost the carpet.
00:51:14
Speaker
Abdullah loses the carpet for a while because the bandit king takes
Abdullah's Companions and Their Transformations
00:51:18
Speaker
the carpet. He has to wish to get the carpet back. You're right. So there's no carpet at this point. They do, however, have a couple of cats.
00:51:24
Speaker
that they pick up in the mountains right a mother cat and her kitten yeah whom the soldier names midnight and whippersnapper and instantly adores them and abdullah is not really a cat person no there is there is an animal abdullah like we haven't mentioned jamal oh my god we haven't mentioned jamal Jamal in some ways the best character in the book.
00:51:48
Speaker
Yeah. So Jamal is Abdullah's next door neighbor back home in Zanzib in the bazaar. He runs the fried food store next stall next door. And I've got to admit, every time I read the description, I thought I could really go for calamari.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah. He does fried squid. And he has a dog. Yes. And the dog hates everybody except for Jamal. And in the first couple of chapters, the dog kind of comes to tolerate Abdullah as well, because Abdullah is kind to him one morning.
00:52:13
Speaker
ah Gives him half his breakfast because he's so happy about having met Flower in the night. I do think it's really funny that both in this book and in Christopher Chant, Diana W. Jones has clearly leveled up in her writing of animals. She's like, I don't think I want to write cute animals anymore. I think I want to write animals who are horrible and hate everyone. And I love this for her and I love this for me. These animals who hate everybody are great. Right. So the cats don't like Abdullah very much. Or rather, Midnight, the mother cat, has has no is is not impressed with Abdullah and it's mutual. He doesn't like her either. Like everyone else in the book, the cat is also in disguise. Yeah.
00:52:51
Speaker
The cat, it turns out, is our good friend, Sophie Hatter. And it's after they meet the cats, they wish to get the carpet back. yeah At which point our party consists of Abdullah, Prince Justin, and Hal, Sophie, and Calcifer, because the carpet is Calcifer. right But none of them can of recognize each other because they've all been enchanted by the djinn Hazra'el.
00:53:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's possible. i was never actually entirely clear on whether I think the genie does know that the cats are Sophie and Morgan. I think he drops a line at the very end about taking the kitten or taking Morgan with him on his adventure that he wanted to keep an eye on him.
00:53:32
Speaker
So I think he knows and is not giving it away, but no one else can recognize each other, which I think is fascinating given that Diana and Joan's books, Diana and Joan's romances in particular, are always so about looking at each other and recognizing each other.
00:53:47
Speaker
I don't know what to make of it. I just think it's fascinating. Honestly, it's weird. The book goes weird in the back half. And I think part of what's weird about it is that Abdullah is just kind of there. Yeah.
00:53:58
Speaker
At this point, everybody around him starts doing protagonist arcs. And Abdullah is, you know, just looking for his princess. Right. He is sort of, he's he is Flower Knight is MacGuffin.
00:54:10
Speaker
And Abdullah is valiantly pursuing his MacGuffin and bringing all these other characters along with him. And along the way, these other characters are changing and becoming enchanted and unenchanted and figuring out what's been going on with them and all of them and and having plot arcs and learning and drawing things.
00:54:29
Speaker
growing things There's a sequence where, so they get to Kingsbury and Abdullah goes looking for the royal wizard to tell him the story about the djinn kidnapping princesses and what he knows. yeah And it can't be the royal wizard Hau because the royal wizard Hau has mysteriously vanished. Right. ah So he goes looking for Suleiman, who, if you've read the first book, you know, Howell's brother-in-law married to Sophie's sister. You don't know that he's Howell's brother-in-law at that time. The first book doesn't end with Suleiman and Letty getting married. It's strongly implied they're Gunner, though. sure But the point, the thing I want to say is I remember very clearly being a child and borrowing any Diana Wynne-Jones I could get hold of. my brother
00:55:07
Speaker
I read Castle in the Air. first and I gotta if you read Castle in the Air before Howe's Moving Castle your sympathies are very much with Abdullah who on the plot kicking off and everyone starting to turn back into beloved characters from the first book you go what who are all these people why do I care The person that Abdullah likes the most in the the Sophie transforming back sequence, the person that his sympathies are really strongly with is Wizard Sullivan, who's just very stressed about it and seems to be trying to act practically. And he looks at that man and is like, there's a practical man. I don't like any of the rest of these people, but you, you're all right. He looks at Midnight turned back into Sophie and is like,
00:55:57
Speaker
don't like her that's clearly and a very strong-minded woman uh love this eye this is what so i did read the books in the right order uh and it was actually really revelatory to me that you could have a protagonist in one book and then have a different protagonist in the next book and have them just mutually dislike each other for stupid reasons i think that's a really important lesson to learn and it delights me in this book that abdullah and sophie don't actually get on at all although i think they do they do eventually but i do think that some of that is outside point of view is that sophie's a nightmare person right you already knew from the first book that howl is a nightmare person because the book is indeed about that but right it's actually so perfectly matched because it's beautiful pain in the neck and so now abdullah is abdullah didn't like being saddled with the cat he also doesn't like being saddled with sophie
00:56:49
Speaker
But she's turned back into a person and obviously her first concern is for her kitten who is her baby because she's had the baby in cat shape and now wants to get him turned back into a human and the wizard goes oh no he might already have turned back into a human in which case the soldier has been left holding a baby and everyone is justly concerned about this so they all go rushing back to find the soldier. Real quick there's something I do want to say about cat Sophie which I think is really charming actually. is that Cat Sophie, like all cats, is perfectly convinced of her own self-worth.
00:57:18
Speaker
There's a bit where, you know, the soldier is constantly going up to ends and being like, and I must have chicken and fish and cream and a beautiful feather bed for my beautiful, perfect baby cats, ah which is relatable. I do relate to this. Abdullah does not relate to this. Abdullah says, I hope you think you're worth all this trouble to the cats. and Midnight turned and gave him a round-eyed, scornful look. Of course she was worth it before she went back to the serious business of washing her ears.
00:57:42
Speaker
Sophia Bookland would never think of course I'm worth it. She's grown! She's grown into a horrible cat. Exactly. We love that for her. Exactly, it's wonderful.
00:57:55
Speaker
But they go rushing back to the inn and it turns out that the soldier, ah who has suddenly, instead of an adorable kitten, has been presented with a large screaming baby. has vanished along with the genie and the carpet.
00:58:10
Speaker
And Abdullah's like, this is the most dishonest person I've ever met. Why did I leave him with the genie and the carpet? thinking It was a bad plan. So, and this is actually the first moment that Abdullah starts to appreciate. So, because they're standing in the room panicking. No, he hasn't taken the carpet. Sorry, he's taken the genie. No, he's taken the carpet. they No, he say you're right. He's taken the genie and not the carpet.
00:58:32
Speaker
But they're ah the the soldiers are rushing in. And Abdullah is quite grateful. He's like, oh, this is clearly time for a strong minded woman to take charge. Thankfully, I've got one. Really, I've got two because Leti is also there. Leti is also pregnant. Abdullah deeply embarrassed by this. The whole experience of this book. Abdullah is a very good young man, except that every time he meets a woman who's not flower in the light in the night, he's like, don't know about that.
00:58:57
Speaker
That's it exactly. It's weird for a book which is in theory a romance I would argue this book is mostly about Abdullah's relationships with other men.
00:59:08
Speaker
Yes. It is about his relationship with the genie and with the soldier. And with Jamal his best friend. Yes and with Jamal his best friend. ah Diana Wynne Jones also again writing a new kind of relationship here I think like what you know Adult men with jobs have co-workers and neighbours? This is a new thing. This is a new kind of dynamic, which is just some guys who like hanging out.
00:59:33
Speaker
At one point in when we were doing our sort of pre-reading chat for this, I was just like, vibe check, how old are Jones' sons at this point? ah hu And the answer is...
00:59:44
Speaker
late twenty s Which seems about right. Yeah. What do adult men do? Hang out with a guy? eat fried food? Judge women's shapes? Yeah, secretly and feel bad about it. Secretly and feel bad about it.
01:00:00
Speaker
um Anyway, so Sophie and Abdullah end up going on the carpet up to the castle in the air, which is, of course, which Abdullah has been seeing, these beautiful cloud castles all through his journeys. The beautiful Cloud Castle is, in fact, House Castle.
01:00:18
Speaker
It's House Moving Castle. Did you miss it? House Rowell has stolen it in order to store all these princesses in it. But you remember, you may remember from House Moving Castle that the castle is quite famously smaller on the inside. Yep. I've just realized as it is has to be an intentional Doctor Who joke. Uh-huh.
01:00:40
Speaker
Houseweaving Castle is smaller on the inside, so Hasril has expanded it dramatically and given it some beautiful gardens. And Abdullah encounters the beautiful gardens and is deeply embarrassed, for they are the gardens of his daydreams and he now thinks they're crap.
01:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just going to read out this whole passage because I think it's really important. So there, Sophie and Abdullah are progressing towards the castle. They've sort of unfolded their backstories to each other. In the way of the Arabian Nights, they have passed the terrifying time on the carpet telling tales, except the tales are mostly punctuated by Sophie grabbing Abdullah's arm and screaming. She's terrified heights and yelling, talk!
01:01:16
Speaker
so Again, nightmare person. I love her so much. But they've entered these beautiful gardens. the hedges became artistic banks of pale pink flowers and the fountain which they could see clearly in the distance all the time now appeared to be crystal or more possibly chrysolite a few steps more and everything was in jewelled pots and frondi with creepers trailed up lacquered pillars Sophie's snorts became louder.
01:01:39
Speaker
The fountain, as they could tell, was of silver, inset with sapphires. That djinn has taken liberties with a person's castle, Sophie said. Unless I'm entirely turned around, this used to be our bathroom.
01:01:50
Speaker
Abdullah felt his face heat up. Sophie's bathroom or not, these were the gardens out of his daydreams. Hazerol was mocking him as he had mocked Abdullah all along. When the fountain ahead turned to gold, glinting wine-dark with rubies, Abdullah became as annoyed as Sophie was. "'This is not the way a garden should be, even if we disregard the confusing changes,' he said angrily. "'A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.' "'Quick right,' said Sophie. "'Look at that fountain now. What a way to treat a bathroom!' The fountain was platinum, with emeralds. "'Ridiculously flashy,' said Abdullah. "'When I design my garden!' of Um...
01:02:23
Speaker
This is notable for a couple of different things. I'm going to start the most obvious, which is the bluebells. The bluebells, yeah. that So Abdullah, in his journey from Zanzib to Ingury, has fallen in love with the landscape of Ingury. And the many sort of of the descriptions of this movement from daydream to specific is a specific English countryside that Abdullah has come to admire. with hatched roofs and roses roses growing over the doors and bluebell woods. Abdullah loves this beautiful place yeah um and has left behind his entire world of the Arabian
Critique of Orientalist Fantasies
01:03:05
Speaker
Nights. For one, he likes better and he thinks it's more tasteful. yeah So we have... I think they speak for themselves here. Yeah, yeah.
01:03:14
Speaker
I just think it is fascinating to me that the whole metaphor of this book, the title of the book is Castles in the Air. The metaphor of this book is about daydreams. It's about the imagination. It's about the imagination of sort of this ah orientalist landscape specifically.
01:03:29
Speaker
And when they actually reach the emblem of this imagination, it's someone's normal British little house. It's a bathroom that's transformed. That's been blown up to huge preposterous size and then decorated in a tasteless way.
01:03:45
Speaker
Yeah. Which now say that she's... she's that that is more intentional than I was giving her credit for, isn't it? She's saying your Orientalist daydream is in fact a British daydream, blown up preposterous size and decorated in a thoughtless way. But she's putting it in Abdullah's mouth.
01:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's weird. Like, I think she knows to a certain extent what she's doing. And I think to a certain extent she knows she shouldn't be doing it But she's having a wonderful time.
01:04:16
Speaker
And this too is part of the theme of the book. You're doing a thing you shouldn't be doing. But oh, you're really, really enjoying yourself. Yeah.
01:04:27
Speaker
And that kind of brings us to the denouement. So this is a classic Diana Wynne-Jones ending where a lot of nonsense happens very quickly. So I've learned Sophie reached the palace and they encountered 100 kidnapped princesses. I think there's actually about 36 of them. Hasrael hasn't finished. There's 30 of them exactly. 30 exactly. Thank you for the correction. yeah Including Princess Valeria, who's just been kidnapped from Ingury and is four years old.
01:04:51
Speaker
And loves to scream. And including a princess introduced to them as the Jarin of Jam. i went Diana! And then on the next page it's revealed that that's actually the soldier in disguise! Yep! Now and in double disguise, in fact.
01:05:05
Speaker
And Princess Beatrice of Strangia says, this is one of my old soldiers who's come to rescue me, I suppose. Princess Beatrice of Strangia is also there. Princess Beatrice is very clearly a British royal. Yeah, this is this is a horsey middle aged lady. I'm like, hello, Princess Anne. Right. It's very funny because Ingury and Strangia seem to be more or less the same country. It's really unclear why Ingury and Strangia were at war. I did look up.
01:05:32
Speaker
I went back to Hell's Moving Castle to see if I could find any information about why they were at war. There's one line. in Howl's Women Castle, which says, Strangely Iron High Norland look like they want to make war on us.
01:05:42
Speaker
In fact, quite a lot of um the whole instance of Sophie blackening Howl's name to the king in the first book is about how Hal doesn't want anything to do with Ingrid's wars. Right.
01:05:54
Speaker
Which is interesting in light of revelations in this book. Right. So the they meet Princess Beatrice, they meet all the rest of the princesses, they sort of have a little confab, and...
01:06:07
Speaker
Sophie, or Sophie, Abdullah. They are kind of the same guy. They are kind of the same guy reunites with Flower in the Night. Flower in the Night doesn't seem to want to talk to him, despite the fact that he is the only suitor who has successfully made his way to the castle. Right, this is a very, very silly third act misunderstanding. Yeah. And it's like, Flower is upset.
01:06:30
Speaker
Abdullah finally manages to talk to her. She says, why didn't you try to kiss me? He I've never kissed anyone. I didn't want to do it wrong. They make out, everything's fine again. You're like, this is, this is what? And I think it's a fairly desperate attempt to give Flower in the Night any interest or meaning at all. Because in fact, most of this book has simply not been about her. Right. Very charming little romance meet cue in the first few chapters.
01:06:54
Speaker
And then she's just off screen for nearly the whole thing. Right. And what I think is fascinating, actually, is Flower in the Night has been doing quite a lot off screen. As soon as Abdullah gets there, all the other princesses are like, wow, Flower in the Night.
01:07:08
Speaker
The princess Beatrice says that girl, Flower in the Night, is a real marvel. She came here knowing nothing unless she'd read it out of a book, and she learns all the time. Took her two days to get the measure of Dalzl, wretched Djinn scared stiff of her now.
01:07:19
Speaker
Before she arrived, all I'd managed was to make it clear to the creature that we weren't going to be his wives, but she thinks big, had her mind on escaping right from the start. And then Abdullah looks around her and he see notices that her clothes are now crushed and a little tattered. Abdullah had no doubt that every crease, every three cornered tear and every hanging thread meant some new thing that Flower in the Night had learned.
01:07:40
Speaker
Flower in the Night has been going through a character arc. completely off screen. We're told about it, we see the effects of it, we see that she's been the protagonist of this little kidnapped princesses part of the book, but we don't see it.
01:07:54
Speaker
Which I think is weird, because it's not like Diana Wynne Jones is incapable of writing a split perspectives narrative, we've seen her do it before. And I think it's weird in the context of an Arabian Nights book. You know, one of the things that I said to you after starting to read the Arabian Nights and starting to read about the Arabian Nights was the the central figure of the Arabian Nights really the the is Scheherazade, the storytelling girl. educated woman who gets everything out of a book that's the point of her how she's described when she's first introduced um the the vizier's daughter is a very very cultivated woman who knows a lot of stories yeah and who uses the power of words to change her fate heroically change her fate and the fate of every everyone else in her kingdom by telling stories Tynowyn Jones loves a storytelling girl where is she in the Arabian Nights book?
01:08:52
Speaker
We are too busy wandering around the countryside with Abdullah enjoying the Bluebell Woods and keeping company with two white guys, both of whom somehow have more of a plot arc than he does. Right.
01:09:05
Speaker
It's, I don't know, it's, it's again, to go back to sort of the trappings of the Arabian Nights coming out of the British imagination. There's a real way in which this book uses a lot of the visuals and and aesthetics of the Arabian Nights without really particularly engaging in the themes of the Arabian Nights, despite the fact that they are very Jonesian themes.
01:09:32
Speaker
Yeah. Like you you read some of the Arabian Nights and like, first of all, wow, this slaps. And second, no, I can see why Diana Wynne-Jones was obsessed with it. um It's so much a text that is about stories upon stories upon stories and the power of stories.
01:09:47
Speaker
Right. But that's not what this book is about. I mean, it's about daydreams, which are not stories. Abdullah is not a storyteller, which makes it kind of weird also when we sort of get the resolution And Dalzell, or Hazruel, starts explaining that he gave everyone in the book, when he's you know running around having his little jokes magically transforming people, the fate that he thought they most deserved.
01:10:12
Speaker
So Hal has been turned into a genie and Prince Justin has been turned into a broke old soldier because of their role in unfairly conquering a neighboring country with magic.
Consequences and Character Growth
01:10:23
Speaker
ah Right. This is the other reason why if you read Castle in the Air first, Howl's Moving Castle does not quite hit the same way. Because you're like, oh, this guy, the war criminal guy. Right. if it And it's sort of tossed off in a weirdly offhand way.
01:10:39
Speaker
um Hang on, let me find the passage. Hazrel said, had you been a blameless man when I came to steal your castle, I would simply have transported you to the island where my brother is now. But I knew you had been using your wizardry to conquer a neighboring country.
01:10:52
Speaker
That's not fair, said Howell. The king ordered me. ah He sounded for a moment just like the other evil gen, and he must have realized that he did. He stopped. He thought. Then he said ruefully, I dare say I could have redirected his majesty's mind if it had occurred to me You're right.
01:11:07
Speaker
So he's been doing a war crime, and as a punishment, he's been put in a bottle. Prince Justin has been doing a ward crime. As a punishment, he's been turned into ah a penniless wanderer. Abdullah's crime is he had some daydreams. This is not on the same level. It really isn't. And in fact, I feel like... Okay, here's a theory, and I'm thinking out loud.
01:11:31
Speaker
ah The castle in the air is Howl's moving castle, right? yeah That's the point. The castle in the air that is the central image of the book is, in fact, the literal castle...
01:11:42
Speaker
that Hal created in the first book as his escape into a fantasy world to avoid the horrors and suffering of being a graduate student in Wales. Correct. So this is Hal's castle in the air.
01:11:55
Speaker
And and the like the reveal of what Hal's been up to to deserve punishment as a prisoner is very much you treated a fantasy world as a world where you had no responsibility. Right.
01:12:07
Speaker
Yeah. And so much of the the joke of the book, of of what happens to Abdullah, is that he's being forced to see things for what they really are and not just what his fun daydreams made them. He's made to walk lost in the desert as he daydreamed. He's made to encounter terrifying bandits.
01:12:27
Speaker
He's made to lose and to suffer and to experience the bad parts of his daydreams, basically. Right. And the real parts of his daydreams. It's weird because it all kind of feels like it actually ought to be a punishment for Howe. Right. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Howe is the person who's been treating a fantasy land as not a real place where he, so what he does does not matter, which does echo, tell you what it echoes, it's Christopher Chant in Lives of Christopher Chant. It does echo Christopher Chant. Doing an extractive colonialism on the worlds of his imagination. Right.
01:13:00
Speaker
But, And so like that's part of, I think, why the book doesn't quite feel like it holds together. One of the things that does always make a Diana Wynne-Jones book feel like it holds together is the way in which the hero and the villain and the side characters all kind of echo each other.
01:13:15
Speaker
And there is a sort of reflective triangle in the bound djinn of Hazer-El, the genie, that is Howl, and Prince Justin,
01:13:27
Speaker
who, you know, the reflection between Hazer-El and Prince Justin is... All three of these are trapped. Yes. And all three of them are doing bad things and have done bad things, and all three of them have a lesson to learn.
01:13:39
Speaker
Yes. And then there's Abdullah, and I think that there's an effort to make it... She's trying to bring Abdullah into parallel with these three figures. But he's not, because fundamentally Abdullah has not actually done anything wrong. The closest thing Abdullah gets to being to doing anything wrong is being slightly nasty in his head about his about the fat nieces he doesn't want to marry. Right. and i don't think I mean, it's it's ah it's a very egregious bit of misogyny, but I will say it's no worse than many young men I have known who occasionally think themselves in the privacy of their hearts. And I don't even know, to borrow a term from a friend of ours, ah If Diana Wynne-Jose is putting that in the problem bucket per se. I don't think she really is. I think she's just having fun. Exactly.
01:14:25
Speaker
Abdullah does eventually ah give the nieces a happy ending, but not in a way that indicates he's learned anything. Although it is right funny quite funny. is quite funny. Hazruel and Dalzl, so they rescue, they get Hazruel's ring back in this comedy sequence that involves Abdullah in a big petticoat and all the children screaming and the dog jumping everywhere. It's ring in Hazruel's nose. Because it was right under his nose. It was right under his nose. And you're like, oh, Diana, that's such a you.
01:14:54
Speaker
yep yeah i could just did a visible badum tush you guys don't have the benefit of the video but that's what happened yes so they get the ring back they you know hasrael morosely it's like all right i guess i now have to fix everything that went wrong i guess i have to exile my evil brother to an island i don't really want to but i guess i have to and Dalzl is... who Again, Dalzl also hasn't done very much that's evil, except on screen, all Dalzl does is throw temper tantrums. He doesn't do very much.
01:15:29
Speaker
But he starts to you know throw a temper tantrum about this. And Hazrul's like, hey, Abdullah, remember those two women that you refused to marry? They're languishing in jail because they're the only ones of your relatives that the Sultan could get hold of after you fled. And Adul's like, whoops.
01:15:44
Speaker
Well... ah And then he He says, so he asks Hazarul to bring the women here. And he says, Dalzil, beauteous Dalzil, poacher of princesses, be peaceful a moment and look upon the gift I have given you to take with you into exile.
01:16:02
Speaker
It's all of two brides, young and succulent and sorely in need of a bridegroom. Jones is going full Burton here. He's going full Burton here. Dalzil wiped luminous tears from his cheeks and surveyed the nieces in much the same way that Abdullah's cannier customers used to inspect his carpets.
01:16:19
Speaker
ah They're not uncommodified. A matching pair, he said, and wonderfully fat. Where's the catch? Are they perhaps not yours to give away? No catch, Shining Gin, said Abdullah. It seemed to him that now the girl's other relatives had deserted him. They were surely his to dispose of. But to be on the safe side, he said, they are yours for the stealing mighty Dalgal.
01:16:39
Speaker
So don't ask him about this. He's just like, I think that this is... They'd probably rather to have an evil gin for a husband than be in prison. And luckily he's right. Yes. Although, presumably by coincidence, since he has never spoken two words to these women and has no idea what they want out of life. Right. It turns out what they want is a monster boyfriend. They say he's ever so handsome.
01:17:07
Speaker
ah what did you say they run out of east ender suddenly yeah i know it's just so funny he's ever so handsome said the pink one i like them with wings different fangs are rather sexy i'm gonna use the pink one with my claws provided he's careful with them on the carpet so i'm like careful with them on the carpet ah like Suddenly these women are straight out of like stereotypical working class lunder in hell proud about their fancy fitted carpet. Like what?
01:17:39
Speaker
Happy for them, but what? ah so
01:17:44
Speaker
but i I'm very happy that they're into their monster boyfriend that they get no choice about. Right, yeah, it's like you know it's a happy ending for them. It doesn't reflect anything that Jolette has learned about how to treat them. No, it's a joke. It's a it's a joke. It's a punchline. I do feel like Jones is aware the initial fat niece's scene is rather mean.
01:18:04
Speaker
This is a slightly less mean ending for them. They're going to live on an enchanted island happily ever after. See, the fatphobia doesn't mean she hates them. Right.
01:18:16
Speaker
Dalzell likes fat ladies. When Abdullah goes up to him says, oh, fullest moons of Zanzib. And Dalzell looks at Hazor and says, I like them better than princesses. Why didn't I collect fat ladies instead?
01:18:29
Speaker
so you see you see women, jinn love you.
01:18:35
Speaker
You could be kidnapped by a jinn. Wouldn't that be nice? But Hasril at this point confesses that he's very depressed because he loved his brother and he loved being evil. He was having so much fun.
01:18:48
Speaker
And this is reflected in Prince Justin, who's been having much more fun as a cast down soldier than he was as a prince. I don't think Prince, I don't Prince Hal. I don't think Hal was actually having fun either on the war front or as a genie. But I also think was taking the story. he did some fun coming up with particularly nasty ways for wishes to go wrong. Like that was really a sort of enjoyment of bitterness there.
01:19:12
Speaker
But yes. When he's transformed back, his main emotion is he's still angry. Angry about being a prisoner. And he and Kalsifer take it out on each other for a bit because they're both mad about having been prisoners. And Kalsifer's like, I like Abdullah best. He's the only person who's ever been nice to me.
01:19:28
Speaker
But it all works out. It all works out fine. It works out brilliantly. Flower and the Knight and Abdullah get a happy ending. There's going to be no more war because Ingeri is instead going for diplomacy. Right. Oh, and we have to talk about Prince Justin and Beatrice. Oh, yes.
01:19:45
Speaker
So luckily, ah prince Princess Beatrice does in fact want to marry Justin. So that I guess that resolves the whole war of conquest issue.
Cultural Critique and Conclusion
01:19:52
Speaker
Right. So what happens actually, this is during while they're making their plan about how to escape.
01:19:57
Speaker
Um, the The women are all like, well, we have we have these men who've arrived who can help us in our plan. ah And all of the men turn out to want something in exchange for their help. What the old Prince Justin, who at this point still believes he's the old soldier, says is, I would like to marry a princess.
01:20:13
Speaker
Can I pick a princess to marry? And Flower in the Night sigh. All the other princesses are like, absolutely not. Flower in the Night sigh and says, we're not going to escape without him. So fine. Pick one of us who is unmarried and you can marry us.
01:20:25
Speaker
And Absaldeh Stresses out because to his eyes, Flower in the Night is clearly the most beautiful and best and perfect woman in this room. And so obviously the soldier is going to want to marry Flower in the Night. But instead, the soldier turns to Princess Beatrice and says, I've always fancied a nice, downright useful princess who can darn socks. How about you? um And Princess Beatrice is thrilled. It's actually it's it's quite a nice scene.
01:20:50
Speaker
She says, you don't mean it. I'm not good looking or any of those things. And he says, that suits me down to the ground. What would I do with a flimsy, pretty little princess? And they stand there and hold each other's hands and gaze into each other's eyes. What they actually get is the Howl and Sophie scene from the end of Howl's Moving Castle. is They stand there and gaze into each other's eyes and everyone looks unapprovingly.
01:21:09
Speaker
Whereas what Abdullah and Flower in the Night get is a long silence behind a curtain. ah In Abdullah's own POV, which as you pointed out is quite weird. But because they've had this moment of the strength the soldier not knowing that he's Prince Justin and Beatrice not knowing that he's Prince Justin, and they look at each other and recognize immediately a kindred spirit.
01:21:27
Speaker
Now they're going to get married and the war is going to be over and the countries will be united and it's fine. Well, that's all right then. That's all right then. Meanwhile, ah Abdullah and Flower in the Night are going to join the Foreign Office and project British influence around the world. Right. They can't go home because Flower and the Knight's father has said that he's got a 50 foot stake ready for Abdullah if they ever go home.
01:21:49
Speaker
But that's fine because, again, as you said, they're going to join the foreign office and they're going to be British diplomats. And when they go home, there's a beautiful English thatched roof and an English. Sorry, I'm actually just going to read out the ending paragraph.
01:22:03
Speaker
Sophie and Howl were living, somewhat quarrelsomely it must be confessed, although they were said to be happiest that way, in the moving castle again. One of its aspects was a fine mansion in the Chipping Valley. When Abdullah and Flower and the Knight returned, the king gave them land in the Chipping Valley too, and permission to build a palace there.
01:22:18
Speaker
The house they had built was quite modest. It even had a thatched roof. but their gardens soon became one of the wonders of the land. It was said that Abdullah had help in their design from at least one of the royal wizards, for how else could even an ambassador have a bluebell wood that grew bluebells all the year round?
01:22:35
Speaker
Hmm. Well, I'm happy for him. Yes, I'm glad that he fell in love. I'll tell you what this echoes, actually. It does. i keep coming back to Christopher Chant, but it is...
01:22:49
Speaker
Takroy is the only nice one because he has been influenced in who he is by cricket, by something fundamentally British, and it has changed his soul to make it a fundamentally British soul. And in the same way Abdullah has has the the bluebell wood is such a symbol of the English countryside and the ancient English countryside as well. I mean, they are gorgeous. I recommend visiting a bluebell wood if you get the chance, but it's also...
01:23:16
Speaker
Like, it's a symbol of ah a straightforwardly racist. Here is how to improve this brown man. Make him British. Yeah, I think it's really notable that in fact, none of the characters from Zanzib, and there are several characters from Zanzib who are all involved in the climax of the book.
01:23:34
Speaker
None of them go back to Zanzib. Yeah. Abdullah and Flower in the Night end up on the Foreign Service. Jamal and his dog, we forgot to mention, to Jamal and his dog are there in the palace. Abdullah has been trying to rescue them, and he tells the genie to take them to be cooks in the nearest safe palace, which ends up being the gym's palace, because the genie's trying to make wishes go wrong.
01:23:53
Speaker
But they can't go back to Zanzib because they've helped Abdullah. And one of the princesses is like, well, you can be our cook. We can't pay very well, but you'll be safe. And they're like, fine, that's great. We're going to go cook for this. I think the princess of High Norland, which appears to be fantasy Scotland, possibly. Possibly, yeah. They mostly are librarians, it seems like. That's the characterization that they get.
01:24:14
Speaker
But it's a ah small country. And ah opening a Middle East restaurant. Right. so Great. Happy for him. He's not going home. The nieces are going off to an enchanted island with Dalzil, who's also going off to an enchanted island that only appears once every hundred years or something like that.
01:24:32
Speaker
Hazruel, who has decided that he enjoyed being bad too much to rejoin the ranks of the good djinn, is going to another world. Hal was like, you could just do that. You could just go to a different world. And Hazruel's like, oh, great. Sure, I'll do that.
01:24:46
Speaker
And he goes to another world. No one's going back to Zanzith. No one wants to go back to Zanzib. Our first site of Kingsbury, the capital of Ingury, is Abdullah noticing how much... Hang on, actually, I'm going to find the description of Kingsbury because I do think it's a bit important.
01:25:06
Speaker
It's a city, a wide cluster of towels and towers inside high walls that was easily three times the size of Zanzib, if not larger. Every house seemed to Abdullah like a palace. He saw towers, domes, rich carvings, golden cupolas, and marble courts the Sultan of Zanzib would have been glad to call his own.
01:25:22
Speaker
The poorer houses, if you could call such richness poor, were decorated with painted patterns quite exquisitely. As for the shops, the wealth and quantity of the wares they had for sale made Abdullah realize that the bazaar Zanzib was really shabby and second-rate.
01:25:35
Speaker
No wonder the Sultan had been so anxious for an alliance with the Prince of Ingury. It's just better in Ingury. Why would you ever want to go back to Zanzib? Yeah...
01:25:46
Speaker
That's certainly a set of choices, isn't it? Yeah. That's the point. This is a set of authorial choices contrasting these two worlds, one of storybook delights but not real and one that's real.
01:26:00
Speaker
Yep. Worth staying in. Yep. And the real one is beautiful England. Yep. Beautiful Imperial England with the war crime wizards.
01:26:11
Speaker
Yeah. but I just can't get over Hal the war crime wizard. I think you pointed out that the the Miyazaki adaptation of Hal's Moving Castle takes what is throwaway plotline in the sequel and makes it much more central to Hal's story. yeah i well I think that is a wise and interesting adaptation choice. We've got to do an episode at some point. We do have to do an episode on the movie.
01:26:33
Speaker
But yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, I think it's an experiment. I think that, as I've said, I think she knows what she's doing to a certain extent. And think she knows she shouldn't be doing it to a certain extent.
01:26:45
Speaker
And there's a lot of charming things about this book. There's a lot of really charming. This is the thing. the book The book is like eating a cream puff. Yes. It's always a thing I go to. I guess I really like eating cream puffs, but yes think it's it's there's lots of cute bits. There's lots of funny bits. There's lots of ah it has a similar thing, actually, to the House Moving Castle, where it sort of ah slips from funny scene to funny scene without a yeah lot of structure along the way.
01:27:09
Speaker
The problem is the fundamentals are racist and the reason the fundamentals are racist is is that Burton's Arabian Nights is racist. Yep. and and And also, I think this is like necessary to say racist and also central to the imagination of generations of children.
01:27:29
Speaker
yeah And beautiful and important and and powerful in the imaginations of Generation Children. Those those things can be true at the same time. What's that quote that you have where Diana Wynne Jones was asked about pulling in myths and fairy tales from other cultures? I was looking for that earlier. It was it was in the interview that she does with Catherine Butler in Reflections somewhere.
01:27:52
Speaker
No, I can't find it. All right, I will summarize it. um Basically, as I remember, it's her saying no I don't want to do that because they're not mine they're not sort of you know that I want to use the stories that I feel like I know well that I have a sort of a claim on and broadly speaking she does that but it seems pretty clear that in Dinah and Jones's mind the Arabian Nights falls into a set of stories that is hers that she has sort of ah
01:28:25
Speaker
that are are part of her empire of the imagination, let's say. That's a good way to put it. Good phrase. We leave you with Diana Wynne Jones's Imperial Imagination.
01:28:37
Speaker
And we will see you next time for, I believe it's Black Maria. i believe it is. I'm real excited for that one. Also a very messy book.
01:28:48
Speaker
A lot of interesting ones. love the 1990s. There is lots to get our teeth into here. So, see you next time. See you next time. Have a good one.