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Season One Bonus Episode
305 Plays1 month ago
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master...
Dalemark conspiracy theories, double selves, and conversations with the past: a look back at DWJ in the seventies.
Transcript available here. We're going on hiatus for a few months as we record the next season, but expect to be returning around May of 2025, where we'll be picking up again with Magicians of Caprona!
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Transcript
Introduction and Overview of Diana Wynne Jones
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome to the Season 1 bonus episode of 8 Days of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm Emily Tesh. And I'm Rebecca Framo.
The Joy of Revisiting Books and Their Influence on Writing
00:00:09
Speaker
And today we're going to be answering both questions from you and questions from us to each other about how we felt about these first nine books in the Diana Wynne Jones body of work.
00:00:22
Speaker
I've just had such a good time this season. Like, can I just say there is so much pressure to read widely, but I think there's actually not a lot of pressure and not a lot of time for reading deeply, for going back to something you already know and reading it again and reading it better, getting really into the weeds and ah going off on ah on a tangent and then talking conspiracy theories for an hour, which we have done, although not usually live on recording. Buddy is so worthwhile.
00:00:52
Speaker
It is so worthwhile, it is so valuable. Certainly, we're approaching Diana Wynne Jones as people who are both professional writers ourselves, and I certainly have never felt more inspired than I do at the moment.
Purpose of Mythic Elements in Fantasy
00:01:06
Speaker
ah It's just, like I can see it in the stuff that I'm writing now. I'm like, oh god, she's good. I want to do that and that and that. I understand what she's doing because I thought about it for ages and I'm copying all of it. Yeah, and it's paying dividends. It really is.
00:01:21
Speaker
It's really good. It's really fun. It's been so much fun. um And it's like just thinking about the way plot and story and structure work, I think has been a huge part of this process. And obviously, you know, the way she does it is not the way everybody does it, but the way she does it is so interesting. And it's so layered. And even though, like all of these books sort of form have formed a part of my back brain since I was a child. I've never thought about them in the way I'm doing now and it's fantastic.
00:01:57
Speaker
it's it really is amazing. There is so much in them that is like, there's so much I'm finding that oh yeah, I do do that. I clearly subconsciously copied that years ago, all the stuff with mirroring and multiple selves and characters who are mirrors and echoes of each other. Yeah, I do that a lot. Yeah, this is where I got it from. Sorry, I'm ill. I'm always ill. I have
Reinterpretation and Complexity in Jones' Work
00:02:17
Speaker
small children. I am constantly ill with something.
00:02:20
Speaker
But yeah, also I think the thing that's striking me most is the way she uses myth. and Book after book, the way she turns it upside down, examines it the wrong way around, turns it inside out, brings it forward, sets it in story time, which is now, which is now and here. ah It is so interesting and so satisfying. This made me think a lot harder about what actually is the purpose of a fantasy elements in a fantasy book. Why is this book fantasy? Why is it? Why have you chosen against a realist mode? ah What purpose are the mythic elements serving in the story you want to tell?
00:03:00
Speaker
Absolutely. And the way to play with and incorporate different influences in a text, and the way to sort of layer them on each other and let them talk to each other, I think it really defies reductive readings that say, you know, this is a retelling of X, this is simply doing Y. It's much more than that. It's a very additive and complex process. And it's so interesting to watch and has made me think really hard about the ways in which we borrow from and work from other texts. Right. Diana wouldjos would never be so boring as to just do a retelling.
00:03:39
Speaker
not um ah You have been ah starting to read scholarship and I've really been enjoying like you sending me little snippets of essays. You've been really good. I completely disagree with this reading. This is oversimplification.
00:03:55
Speaker
I feel like that's what I end up saying 90%
Personal Favorites and Book Recommendations
00:03:58
Speaker
of the time. I'm so sorry to all the scholars and I'm like, I know that you only had 10 pages, ah but like it's more than that. It's just more than that. We'll do a scholarship episode at some point. I think I got my JSTOR access working for this. We are going to get we're going to dig deeper and deeper and deeper. We will never stop having opinions about Diana Windjones' work um or about other people's opinions about Diana Windjones' work.
00:04:23
Speaker
but yeah All day long, but in fact we only have a couple of hours today. Right, which is more time than we usually have for recording. I'm very excited. ah But here is a first question. It's a question from me to you. We have read nine books. Yeah. What's your favourite? What's your least favourite?
00:04:42
Speaker
Okay, so I came into this and this opinion hasn't really changed. My favorite, like just personal favorite in terms of what speaks most to me out of this whole set is still Drowned Ammit. I love Drowned Ammit. I love Met. He's horrible. He's dear near and dear to my heart. ah Our reading of it has made Beloved more in terms of the the various different layers of what's going on and the turning point that I think it kind of starts to mark in her work.
00:05:08
Speaker
I don't think that means that it's the best book of this set. That just means that it's the one that I love the most. Okay, that's interesting. Tell me the best then. Why why are those different? I think that in terms of artistry and in terms of just like what book I would give to somebody to be like, hey, this is what Diana wind Jones
Comparison with Contemporary Fantasy Series
00:05:27
Speaker
can do. This is sort of what you're going to be looking at and seeing in the rest of her work over the course of the next 40 years.
00:05:35
Speaker
I actually think the first one I might give somebody is Charmed Life. I think that that shows some of the range and some more of the specific interests of what she has as a writer in terms of playing with multiple worlds, multiple realities, um playing with genre, playing with written specifically in Britain's past, I think Dale Mark as a whole is probably stronger. But it's also less emblematic of her work as a writer in the future. It's doing something kind of distinctive that she doesn't as much do again. What do you think? I think if you if you only read Dale Mark, you'd have a very different picture of the kind of writer Jones was than
00:06:14
Speaker
the entire rest of the body of her work give you. But also one of the things I've really taken away from doing this season and doing the 70s is my god Delmark is good. It's so good. Like, okay, here's the thing. I feel like Delmark is necessarily a part of like, a sequence ah parallel. This is um late 60s, early 70s, this is the time of Earthsea. I think it's also Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising. um It's early Alan Garner, like there are a lot of famous children's fantasies ah from around this time that are doing some sort of numinous and beautiful stuff with death and transformation.
00:06:58
Speaker
I think Delmark deserves more attention among them. I think more people should be reading Delmark next to Earthsea in particular because they share the pattern of a sequence of early books, in Le Guin's case the late 60s, early 70s, but then a long break and then another book.
00:07:21
Speaker
much, yeah much later that complicates and changes the sequence as a whole. um I thought that's something I would love us to do if we have time at some point. Let's read them against each other. Oh my god, that would be so much fun. Please.
00:07:37
Speaker
um But they're also unlike Susan Cooper, unlike even Alan Garner. these and And like any of other dan of Diana Wynne Jones' later works, these are a full 100% secondary world. um One of the things that when I went in and ranted to you about scholarship, one of the things that got me most angry is when scholars talk about Crown, which we're going to try not to talk, I think, still too much about. We can talk a little bit about it in this episode.
00:08:00
Speaker
as having ties to modern Britain. It doesn't. Crown takes place fully in the secondary world fantasy and when it's modern, it's modern secondary world. yeah right it's modern del mar and this is in fact jones's point about it that a fantasy world can industrialized can modernize can have a railway eventually that I mean, the social change that's implied as required by the first two Dale Mark books is sort of fulfilled in Crown. I remember that much.
Cultural Influences and Mythological Elements
00:08:29
Speaker
The thing about Crown of Dale Mark is I haven't read it for a while. And I remember the broad outlines and not the details, but I don't want to spoil myself for the details. And I'm trying not to spoil you for the details as well. um But just broadly speaking, and I think we've already said about Dale Mark that like certain
00:08:44
Speaker
Excuse me. Certainly, it's inflected by and touched by British fantasy, the matter of Britain, like ah Susan Cooper is, there's Arthurian in there. Welsh fantasy. That's another thing that's coming out of reading Denmark again. it like oh This is much more Welsh than I remember. And we don't think of Jones as a Welsh writer. I mean, she's not. She's describe herself as English, she lived in England nearly all her life, but she is from a Welsh background, the Welsh father and grandfather. And I think it's more in her writing than I had really realized. Yes, absolutely. But I do also think that when she goes full secondary world, and allows herself to make up her own myths to make up her own theology and cosmology,
00:09:28
Speaker
um and rely on that rather than fully relying on an existing story that her characters already know, that that we the readers are also already expected to know to solve the plot. That does seem to me to sort of open up a mode in her writing that just lets her to go big and deep and inventive ah in a way that I think really serves her going forward. And in a way, I wish we'd seen more secondary world fantasy of her, because it would have been very cool.
00:09:57
Speaker
I think, I honestly wonder if there really could have been more full secondary world from Jones. Dale Mark feels so much of the heart. I wonder if she could have done another one, then that I think rather like Tolkien, who could never have done anything that wasn't Middle Earth. It all turned out to be Middle Earth even when he tried to make it not that. yeah I think What you said about the way she, her use of myth really changes over the decade. At the start of the decade, um there is almost a a system, a pattern in the way she plots her books, which is you get to the final few chapters and someone says, wait, I know this story. And then by knowing the story, by accessing that myth that they have ownership of through their connection to their culture, their childhood, their world,
00:10:42
Speaker
um they are able to solve the book. yeah Which story it is varies, in Wilkins tooth it's Puss in Boots, ah in the ogre downstairs is the dragon's teeth, in Eight Days of Luke, Siegfried and Brunhilde. In Power of Three we decided it was probably Christianity, which I thought was funny. ah the Power of Three is also the last time she does it.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yes. And it's the thing that she does in these early books. And that I think is almost it's it's kind of interesting to look at different
Cultural Context and Interpretations
00:11:11
Speaker
editions, right? Because ah in the US s edition of A Days of Luke, for example, in the book itself, she's like, Oh, everyone's gonna know everyone's read Norse myth in school, everyone's gonna know this, I don't need to put it on page for you. Everyone will be able to figure out what's going on here by the end of the book.
00:11:26
Speaker
U.S. publishers disagreed. They put a nice little recap of what, you know, the basics of Norse myth and who all these people were in Siegfried and Bernhilde at the back of the book because American children couldn't necessarily be expected to have had this in school.
00:11:39
Speaker
And I will say that like when I first read Eight Days of Luke, I certainly hadn't had that in school that perhaps Jones's understanding of what a normal child knows about, about Northern European mythology was tweaked by the fact that she had no children's books, only ancient books of mythology. I was suggesting that Diana when Jones's childhood might not have been normal.
00:12:01
Speaker
What would make you say that? But also, it's an interesting question about how far do you need to understand all the context of a book to appreciate that book? Like, do you need to know that Luke is Loki from the very beginning before you're told in order to enjoy eight days of Luke? Do you need to know what Loki means? Do you need to know anything about Siegfried and Bernhilde? So I'm not sure that you need to know all of that to enjoy the book.
Childhood vs. Adult Perspectives on Jones' Work
00:12:31
Speaker
I do think that maybe you do need to know at least some of it to ah get some of the valences of what she's trying to hit with the book. Yes, I'll give you that to understand the book or or to get a deeper understanding of the book. You need to Well, you definitely need to seek freedom for a daughter, which is that which is the one I did not have as a child. I was very confused by a lot of what was going on there. But also, things are confusing, even when you do know what's going on. Exactly. And I read many a Diana with Jones work as a child that I did not understand at all, but enjoyed very much. And some that I did not enjoy very much. Um, one of the questions that we've got, I think I'll I think this segues into it. So I'll read it. This is a question that comes in
00:13:13
Speaker
ah from Dan over email who says, you solicited questions for a season wrap up episode. I don't have any specific ones, but I am curious about your reading experiences as children versus as adults. You have distinct memories of reading any or all of the seasons books, or Diana would Jones generally as children.
00:13:29
Speaker
I'd love to hear what sort of things stood out then versus what seems significant now. Disclosure of this question is inspired by the Dragon Babies podcast, which was the podcast most likely to discuss Diana windows until you came on the scene. They do a great segment called new impressions, old impressions. So my old it's actually kind of funny because I have do have distinct memories of reading some of these books as a child. And the ones that I like best now are often the ones that I liked least as a child.
00:13:55
Speaker
of this list. ah Eight Days of Luke and the Dale Mark books are the ones that for the first time I read them when I was like eight or nine, they did not hit for me. ah They weren't as funny as I expected from later Diana Wynne Jones, both ah Cart and Quitter, Drowned Ammet, and Eight Days of Luke all focused on boys and I was primarily interested in reading books about girls. ah And for those reasons, I put them aside and then I came back to them maybe four years later and I was like, oh, these are good. I sort of understand them, but they're good. But it took that time for me to learn to appreciate them.
The Role of Humor in Storytelling
00:14:30
Speaker
And coming back to them as an adult, I appreciate them more. And I would say that those are probably my favorites of the 70s now.
00:14:37
Speaker
See, I agree that Delmark, I think, is the one I bounced off as a child and the one I was startled by. I have really strong memories of going to the local library and getting out every Diana Wynne Jones I could find over and over again, ah which is how I first encountered, got really clear memories of the ogre downstairs and dog's body yeah in the library in the library copies, slightly plasticky covers. Same and same. But I remember bouncing off Delmark really hard and feeling quite betrayed by it.
00:15:06
Speaker
And of course, I think it part of it is that Delmark isn't funny. Yes, it's not funny in the same way as the ogre downstairs is a chuckler page. Oh, absolutely. Not as good a book, but it's fun. It's fun the whole way through a lot of ah I have a lot of affection for ogre downstairs. I agree. It's not as good.
00:15:23
Speaker
But it's so fun and it's so funny and I loved it so much as a kid and some of those sequences still like live for me even now. Like whenever I think about a body swap sequence, I think about the body swap in Ogre downstairs like first and foremost. That's the one that I draw on. But Dale Mark is trying to do more and go deeper. And when it adult it has humor, but when it has humor, it's ah it's almost um it's it's questioning and looking at its own humor in the face of the situation it presents. When we know we talked a little bit about this previously, I've been really struck.
00:15:59
Speaker
Drowned Ammit by how she focuses on the way that Mitt uses jokes, uses humor, uses his own smile to fill up an emptiness in his life specifically. Right, and you told me this, and i would that just didn't strike me at all because he's just English. This is just what every person I know does all the time. And even even more so, in it comes up in spellcoats again when Tanaqui talks about how her uncle comes back from the war in which her father has died and her brother has been severely traumatized,
00:16:28
Speaker
And he sits down and he tells them a lot of things that he clearly thinks are jokes. Yeah, technically doesn't find funny and doesn't understand. And then the end her uncle laughs and says, Well, that's how we got through it. We saw the funny side.
00:16:41
Speaker
none of it was funny. right um um But again, you picked this up and said, isn't that like, he's just English. This is this is just this is just my dad.
00:16:54
Speaker
Which doesn't mean it's not worthy of analysis. I think you're absolutely right. And this is cultural blindness on my part. ah Right. Well, I think I think that is interesting that's different about Dale Mark from the other books. When there are jokes in the other book, when people are using humor to get through things, she's not calling attention to it. She's letting you laugh with them. It's funny. You're laughing. Yes. In Dale Mark, she tells you when people are laughing, but it's not funny. And it's not funny on purpose. She lets you see if you like the dark underside of this um I will say that Jones's humour is not always kind humour. It's a fairly sharp, ah it's a fairly pointed, it will it definitely picks victims. There are people who are the butts of jokes in her books.
00:17:40
Speaker
uh sometimes it's very cruel to its victims i think for example brenda in power of three is largely the butt of the joke for the book and the joke is that she's fat yes which is nasty it's nasty to read now but it's i think even in the 70s this is a pretty nasty way to treat a character for an entire book Yes. And it's even a character that you're quite sympathetic to. I think she is sympathetic to Brenda. But the the jokes at Brenda's expense, the fact that Brenda is a humor character, get in the way of that. Right. ah But again, this nastiness of the humor is, I think, perhaps a cultural element as well. It does read as quite English humor to me. We're all nasty to each other all the time. but never laugh
00:18:23
Speaker
Welcome to my beautiful country. I mean, it's, you know, there's a lot to say about Englishness and the Englishness and Britishness. I think both of those things, which I think I've in this case using that correctly. Yeah, occasionally I have said these are distinct, Becca. And occasionally it does really matter, especially in the books that pick up the Northern Ireland thing. Right. And I but I do think that she is aware of that and using that that distinction between Englishness and Britishness often throughout this decade. um I think maybe so this is something that you know, I want to tease out a bit a little bit. I think she's really quite, you know, there's a lot of layers to the way that she's doing that specifically. I think the way maybe the place where she fails sometimes is when she tries to
00:19:12
Speaker
apply those distinctions. And the way that she kind of understands herself as someone moving between worlds, moving between modes of Englishness and Britishness, between English and Welsh, two sort of broader racial issues. right yeah and i Yeah, she falls down on rice again and again.
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, um but we're gonna see that come up later. Oh, yeah, it gets worse. It's never not. It's never not well intentioned. It's always well intentioned. But that doesn't mean she's good at it. I think I think oh um certainly in the 70s, Power of Three, which ah explicitly is trying to talk about indigenous peoples and indigenous rights to the land, is facile in its analysis, is yeah childish and naive, ah in a way which is more striking because despite being children's books, Jones is very seldom naive yeah in the way she treats ah most things.
00:20:10
Speaker
And then ah you picked up in Drowne Ammit the very, very weird trope of ah we've come to mysterious islands full of brown people who worship white guys with your name and you're like,
00:20:22
Speaker
you were yep ye
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's, you know, we, we, we were running really short on that episode. So we kind of, we, we noted that and then we moved on. We but we were talking so fast in that episode and we could still talk about Drowned Ammit for the rest of our two hours now. Absolutely.
00:20:42
Speaker
but yeah there's There's some stuff that I think really is, well you can say a product of her time. Yes. This is a woman who was born in 1934 during, at that point there was still a fairly substantial British empire. Yes.
00:20:57
Speaker
And I think that some of what we're seeing, especially in, you know, in Dale Mark, and I think one of the things that we kind of pulled out when we were looking at the season as a whole is that in many ways, Spellcoats feels kind of like a rerun at Power of Three. There's a lot of the same elements there. Again, there's a big flood, there's a set of magical siblings, there's a war, there's complex racial dynamics.
00:21:19
Speaker
And in spellcoats, I think it feels less facile because it is just more complicated and Tanaqui doesn't try to really solve it. But there's still stuff in spellcoats that it's, you know, it's a relatively kind of small part of the whole of what the book is doing is easy to miss and kind of the numinous myth.
00:21:37
Speaker
ah But it's as you know there there are bits of that you know as far as the ah the invasion and the racial dynamics of spoilcoats that I think are just as unwilling to think deeply about land and invasion and indigeneity or uninterested in thinking deeply.
00:21:55
Speaker
Well it's interesting because what spellcoats does essentially sort of mythologizes the core wound in Delmarque right? Yes. But right through books one and two of the quartet we've had Delmarque is a divided country, it has a north and a south and there is a fundamental anger, misery, bitterness between the two despite them being one country in some mysterious way under one king and then in spellcoats you have the reveal of this cool wound, is the wound, if you like, of the south's treachery against the north. ah That's how it's presented, that Khazadun comes to a meeting with the king of the riverlands, so the future the future northerners, the future southerners,
00:22:36
Speaker
ah They come to meet together, Kars Aydon comes in good faith, and the king is treacherous, and as a result of this both of them die. And Hern ends up king, but Hern's sympathies are fully with Kars Aydon and with the northerners. He is himself a man from the south, but he does not love the south, right doesn't treat doesn't regard them as honourable, worthy, he is drawn always to the values and the behaviours of the North. So that is the wound, if you like, yeah that the South had this moment of of treachery. And then that is actually replayed, or preplayed, because we're doing this very out of chronological order, because Jones is having fun. But Carton Quiddo starts with a treacherous, or rather ends with a treacherous attack on the North by the South, an unfair and unjust military attack against these brave and heroic Northerners. Yes.
00:23:26
Speaker
But what Cardin Quidda doesn't analyze is the North's self-perception as these warrior heroes. You have morals singing the song that we are the men of the North and I'll tell you how much we're worth. One man is as good as 10 southern men and each of us marches as 10. This is a soldier's song, right? No two ways about it.
00:23:43
Speaker
ah doesn't analyze why the North has this soldiers song, specifically targeting the South, um why the Southerners might perhaps have reasons yep to fear, to hate, to distrust the Northerners. um And in Drowned Ammit it's picked up on very briefly and then put down again with that moment where, ah you know, Mitt is going to these meetings and saying, ah you know, we are the Free Southerners and the North will come in and rescue us and I believe it's a conversation with Hoban who we'll talk about how a guy who is presented as the most intelligent the most realistic of the revolutionaries right he's not even a revolutionary he's just the only one who would be good at it right um but he says you don't want the north to invade you would find your sympathies on the side of the south without realizing it if the north invaded even if the north invaded at your call and it's this quick moment again it's blinking you miss it but it ties in to some of this other stuff about the north as invading force
00:24:41
Speaker
the danger of which is never looked at up close. So the wound in Delmark is always presented as the treachery of the South, but not as the South is treacherous because the North are invaders. um And this is one of the reasons that I think that, you know, it's it's fascinating to look at the quartet as a whole at Crown as written 15 years later, because Crown is where we're going to pick up a little bit on that stuff without which I think the quartet really feels incomplete. It feels like there's this this portent that's never coming to pass, this thing that we're not looking at, that's sort of hanging over it with the fact that the North. Yeah, God, I have so much to say about Delmark. la Did I talk about the heroic masculinity thing now? Do we want to pick up another question? Let's go ahead and do heroic masculinity now. and this because it's in my head now yes Because we were talking about this, we were talking about
00:25:33
Speaker
what does the North represent? And I think represent is the right word we took because Jones loves her symbolism and also we hardly ever see the actual North. yes And that in all three Dale Mark books we've read, we have Morrill, who comes from both worlds but is in the South through the action of the book.
00:25:49
Speaker
ah We have Mitt who has never been north in his life and in fact doesn't go north at any time in the book. yep And then finally we have Tamaki and her family and they are from the riverlands, the future south, and in fact the north doesn't exist yet because the the whole place in modern Dale Martin doesn't exist yet and also they've only just invaded. yes They haven't settled yet.
00:26:11
Speaker
But in all three books, these southern characters, these protagonists from ah this southern world, which is presented as this world of coldness, of treachery, of mutual betrayals um and unhappiness, they all yearn towards the north, the free north.
00:26:29
Speaker
But the North is the North that is a heroic world, a mythic world, a fantastic world, and a man's world. And I do think the North is presented as a heroically masculine place. Actually, we don't see any Northern women throughout these three books at all. No single one.
00:26:50
Speaker
but that there are a few heathen girls yeah mentioned in spell codes that don't get any names or real screen time. upon And the point is specifically made actually that the North is a more gendered society. I think Tanukui talks about how the heathen girls wear dresses and are shy and don't, don't go to war to fight like the Southern girls do when the time comes for, you know, the the Southern girls are tougher. They're more like men, they're more, you know, able to be sort of incorporated into an army at the end.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yeah, and in fact that's part of what makes me think that this whole North and South Delmarque picture is in some ways a ah ah gendered metaphor. Tamoqui as the voice of the female South is also I don't know, a Lanina, a Melda. We do have a lot of Southern women and Taniqui is ah heroic. Lanina is complicated. Melda is distinctly unsympathetic. We even have Southern goddesses in the form of Libby Beer. um We've also got Hildy. Hildy, Hildy, how can I miss Hildy? This horrible little girl and she's a nightmare child. um But she's with the stars and she's warlike. she's And she's a person. And she's a person.
00:28:05
Speaker
Right. She's a person, not a thing. But all this yearning towards the North is also, I think, questioned from very early on. Morrell's dream of the North that he tries to play on his quitter and it goes fuzzy. It goes weird because he hasn't got it right. He's not telling the truth. He is dreaming of something that doesn't really exist. um The moment when the Northern ship in Drowned Ammon comes into the harbour,
00:28:31
Speaker
admits reaction to is simultaneously like pity for the the ship's plight and anger that the northerners are daring to come into his harbour. Yes and disappointment that he's expecting these northerners to look mysteriously more free than the southerners but they're prisoners. They look like prisoners. They're just some guys yeah they're just them guys who've been captured by the the the the prison system of his of Holland and it's just as awful as it is for everyone else. right Which is also I think part of something that we see throughout Dale Mark and in Dog's Body too, this sort of interest that she has in ah the universal dehumanization of imprisonment, um of of being caught up in a system of that nature.
00:29:12
Speaker
yeah and sort of erases distinctions between people in a way where ever no one no one escapes that you know that feeling of sort of deheroization ah by yeah by being placed into a prison system. Right, it turns everyone into the same kind of person which is a prisoner. I want to finish my thought. yeah um i'm Sorry, it's a really, really, really long thought. I've used on this for most of the season. um So We've got this North Delmark set up as this fantasy world of heroic masculinity which may or may not really exist, right? And then I thought let's read it against something else in the 70s. I took myself back to eight days of Luke and I think this is the right place to go because the other thing the Northerners
00:29:59
Speaker
are or are drawn from or represent these invading blondies from the sea yep who are warlike but have come to settle um who are going to join with the southerners to eventually become one indistinguishable people These are Vikings. These are Vikings, like not even subtly. And the country they come from is in fact Halligland, ah which is a distinctly ah Norse flavor as a name, but does in fact just mean Holy Land again. Yes. There are so many Holy Lands in Denmark, around Denmark.
00:30:38
Speaker
um But imagining the Northerners as these Viking figures, as these figures of heroic masculinity, um whose historical connection is then to a world of Norse myths specifically, then took me back to David in Eight Days of the arm Luke, and his longing for, his huge longing for a place to belong in Valhalla. Because that is what really strikes you about David's enter entering into the world of myth. He goes to across the rainbow bridge ah with Wotan and he has the best time of his life. And he loves being with Wotan with Woden. um And he longs for his approval and admiration. And then he enters Valhalla, this boys club, ah where he he can't take Luke with him, he can't take Astrid with him, these real connections he's made over the course of the book.
00:31:30
Speaker
these, if you like, queer, feminine, wicked, immoral connections. yes Yeah, you can't have that in order to to go to Valhalla. It's a boys club and you've got to be good. And then you'll get the approval of Woden of the North Gods that you could enter into this heroically masculine world by discarding any part of yourself that doesn't fit. Yes.
00:31:49
Speaker
And instead, what he has to bring is Uncle Ronnie, who is a masculine role model, but a distinctly flawed one who has none of the actual virtues that David has learned to appreciate, and in fact fails the masculine test that he set in Valhalla, and his new friend who is fine and stupid. And appropriate masculine sidekick.
00:32:13
Speaker
yeah none of the complications, none of the connection that he's felt with Luke, ah and indeed with Astrid, who I think is the other sort of part of David's story. yeah these two These two connections with people who are like him. He has to discard them, he has to leave them behind. And then he can enter Valhalla. And there he meets Siegfried, and he sees the relationship that Siegfried has with Woden. yeah And he wants it. yes He wants Woden to look at him the way that Woden looks at Siegfried.
00:32:39
Speaker
Except it's clear to us from the climax of the book where we meet Brunhilde that what Siegfried has done is abandon any part of him that didn't fit in Valhalla, which is to say he's abandoned Brunhilde. He's given up that love, ah that possibility. Brunhilde, who is the woman, but also the thief, the person responsible for stealing Thor's hammer, the immoral, the feminine, ah the unheroic,
00:33:05
Speaker
there's more to her story, I'm not gonna go into the Norse myth as well. But even just within the world of eight days of Luke, David wants very much Siegfried's destiny, but Siegfried seems deeply unhappy. Right. And it's, you know, this question of what you give up in order to gain happiness versus sort of your ever your your ending, your appropriate ending you're ever after is a major question in eight days of Luke. The the question of whether whether you you seek extreme happiness, incredible happiness, which is paralleled to David and Luke's relationship in the book, in order to do is it miserable ever after? Because is it worth it to be happy for a little while and miserable ever after? Yes.
00:33:49
Speaker
Um, and in the end, we know it's, it's brought up explicitly. Ragnarok is going to happen. Wotan is going to be on one side and Loki is going to be on the other. And David is going to have to choose. And I do think that you're absolutely right that this kind of, this is a divided self that prefigures the divided selves that we see all throughout Delmark in white all throughout the seventies, but very, very explicitly in Delmark and in a lot of the rest of her work going forward. Yes. And I think actually one thing we need to come back to here is.
00:34:19
Speaker
Charmed Life, and the concept she comes up with there of the nine-lifed enchanter who has extraordinary power because they contain in one person all the selves they might have been. As opposed to the contrasting selves that we see in Gwendolyn and Janet, the evil, but ah but having a great time. Extremely feminine, power-hungry, wicked little girl, versus the masculine, tomboy, kind, older-brotherly little girl who is her alternate self. right And what happens to Gwendolyn in the end right is she goes to a different world and seals herself in there and so cuts off any possibility of being any other self apart from that one, yes where
00:35:03
Speaker
So Gwendolyn becomes flattened into being just one self forever and then Janet chooses to be multiple selves. Janet chooses to stay with Kat taking Gwendolyn's place and so contains within herself both the Janet she originally was and Gwendolyn's role in this new world ah becoming both ah the lonely little girl who tells stories and has no siblings and the loving older sister to this very unhappy boy. yes And in becoming a double self, Janet becomes greater. It's a heroic choice on her part. Lae- We're going to see so many more. like This is a theme I really want to keep on as we get through the 80s because I think this is just something she's going to go deeper and deeper into is this idea of
00:35:46
Speaker
multiple selves of looking at the different versions of someone you could be. I think so many of her protagonists, and again, we see this in Delmark, look at the antagonist of their book and see that as somebody they could be. And yes, like all all of the increasingly throughout the back half of the 70s. I think all of the antagonists are explicit and deliberate reflections of the heroes. I think Jones is more and more doing it on purpose. She is finding out what she wants to do and doing it very precisely on purpose, but certainly by drowned amit where the antagonist is Mitt's own father doing the exact things that Mitt has been doing all along. It's exactly a mirrored self situation. They even have the same name. yeah and You have to look at that and recognize it
00:36:34
Speaker
in order to move forward. I think that's something that all of her protagonists have to do is look at the ways, understand the ways in which their antagonist is a version of them, and then make a deliberate and understood choice in knowing that the things that they that they dislike that they've been fighting against are also a part of them that they have to sort of incorporate and move past in order to move forward.
00:36:55
Speaker
And in Tanaqui's case, for example, in the spellcoats, it's done in multiple ways. So she meets the evil necromancer Cancredin, who is the great weaver and magical weaver controlling the whip the river through his ah power of making a coat.
00:37:10
Speaker
And that's her, yeah that's who she is meant to be. But also she discovers the myth of her ancestor, the witch Kenblith, who through, weight again, through magical weaving, managed to bind the one, her her grandfather, her divine ancestor, ah to take control of and shape the kingdom and what the kingdom is going to become. Yes. And tanically in unbinding the one,
00:37:35
Speaker
arguably does actually repeat Ken Blith's actions in binding Dale Mark into a new shape. yes There was a question about that. There was a question about Tanaqui's binding. Niamh Yes. Let me see. ah Right. So Jo says, read the spell codes. I thought that what you said about Tanaqui coming into her power by accepting its existence and using it to unbind her parent figure is actually very literally also echoed in Charmed Life where Kat has to accept his power to literally unchain Crestomancy at the end.
00:38:04
Speaker
another you're absolutely right sorry that's i just have to stop you there that's brilliant uh nice one joe yes that's correct um and i think also you know picks up on another one of these themes that we're seeing again and again and we will continue to see in future of when she's trying to figure out how to write about children and parents in a way that's not just here's your evil mom right here's your evil mom here's your evil dad um and i think one of the things that she comes back to in trying to figure out how to write healthy and interesting parent quote unquote healthy, definitely interesting parent-child relationships ah in these children's books is all right, so you're the child and you have to unbind your father figure. Your father figure is is trapped. Sometimes it's your potential husband figure is trapped. Yeah, those might be sick. He's trapped by an evil older woman. Yes, who may or may not be your mother. Yep.
00:38:56
Speaker
or his wife, yep or possibly his mother. There's something going on here. And you have to free him. And that is the, the you know, you you come into your own by rescuing your parent who is helpless and needs you, or your husband, or whichever.
00:39:16
Speaker
Yes, and helpless and mean to you because of the horrible old woman, let's not forget. Yeah, what which again, is is echoed in Tanaqui's story. That's what what Kemblith is they this long dead sorceress who bound the one is this woman with the power of, again, it is even though the story told very briefly, it's explicitly a sexual power that she has over the once fair, this is not, you know, Diana and Jones obviously didn't come up with this pattern, this goes back, this is a power fantasy that goes back to Jane Eyre. The idea that, you know, like it's it's, you know, deeply tied up in the idea of the Gothic that you go to a place you meet someone who seems powerful, but is in fact bound and powerless and you can return to that person and come into your own when they need you to rescue them. Yes, yes, this is a power fantasy.
00:40:01
Speaker
But oh my god. But let's get to the related thought, right? yeah um So this is a show again. Tanaqui's coats tell the story of the river and Sassan bind the one. They also tell the story of Herne. Do they in some sense bind him into his kingship or leadership role? Or does the fact that he's not himself undying mean he's not subject to that sort of thing?
00:40:23
Speaker
This is such a good question. Thank you, Jo. It's a good question because one of the things that that we picked up was we were still thinking about Hern, who is our favourite character in the spell code, sorry, Tannequil. Hern possibly is undying? Based on, right, the siblings meet Tanamil, the undying wizard, who sort of looks at them and tells Robin specifically, you're not like the others, you're weaker. We know that Robin is not undying. Right. She doesn't become part of myth, she doesn't go into legend.
00:40:53
Speaker
So Robin then ah becomes very ill, doesn't take part actively in quite a lot of the rest of the plot, ah but Tanaqui and Duck and Hern sail down the river, out of the river, through a net that the evil Cancredin has set up and out to sea where they see the souls of the dead flying out or struggling in the net. And this is presented as the moment of passing through death which makes you immortal and explicitly In the case of Cancredin, we're told this is how you become a wizard. You pass through death, you become immortal, that makes you a mage. And this is what they did. Tanaqui and Duck are both, from that point on, very clearly, wizards. Hern did it too!
00:41:38
Speaker
in two I'm trying not to say too much about Hearn's brief appearance in Crown, both because I don't want to spoil you and because I don't remember the exact details of what he says about his situation there. I don't want to say anything about it until I've actually reread it. I think there's some interesting stuff in there that plays into this.
00:41:57
Speaker
However, I will also say that one of the things that we picked up on when we were reading spell codes is how much Tanaqui sort of intentionally complicates Hern's claim to the land. and like She carefully records in her spell code all the ways in which Hern is not the legal king, despite the fact that she is also carefully recording everything that went into making him king.
00:42:19
Speaker
And I think that if you read this on a metatextual level, which Spellcoats is asking you to do, she's giving him an out. She's unbinding him as she binds him. You know, in the same way that when she tells the story of the kankreden's binding of the one and she tells it in gaps, because she's only seeing it on the coat in gaps, and Tana Mill says, great, because you've woven those gaps into the coat, because it's a broken spell, there's room to unbind the one there. I think that she's she's both simultaneously weaving and unweaving her and into the kingship at the same time. She is giving him an out.
00:42:52
Speaker
I think you're right, and I do think is definitely binding her into the kingship, because in the course of creating the spellcoach, she's also creating the physical land, the shape of modern Delmarque is created by the magic she's doing here, and the creation of modern Delmarque is not just the creation of a landscape, it's also the creation of the peoples of that landscape, so turning the invaders and the riverlanders into one people.
00:43:20
Speaker
And Hern, as the figure of the king, who was king of both, ah becomes, if you like, the the the centerpiece. yeah um but This is the keystone of the arch, if you like. I've i've switched metaphors. We're not moving now. we're buildinging a house but but But the point is that she has, in fact, bound Hern very tightly into the creation of Dale Mark. And we know that he is the only figure who, when people read these spell codes in future Dale Mark, they go, oh, we know who that guy is.
00:43:48
Speaker
That's Kern Adon, who is the legendary founder of Dale Mark. One thing I found really striking is that actually, Hearn's name gets combined with the name of Kars Adon.
00:44:00
Speaker
So Kars Aydon, Hern, Kern Aydon, and then there's one guy. I'm jumping to another question real quick from a friend of the show, Sarah. Hern and Kars Aydon should kiss, discuss. Can we come back to that one? Because if you put me into fandom mode now, I will not be able to get out of fandom mode again. yes I mean, yeah, they should kiss. ah Arguably, they got married and Dale Mark is their baby. Yes. But also, OK, let's talk a little bit about queer readings.
00:44:30
Speaker
We've been doing them a lot. yes And some of this is that both of us are queer. yeah And I think certainly to me, it means a lot to be able to do a queer reading of a book I love. yes But also I think that Jones's work does lend itself to being read through a queer lens, especially, I did find it funny to finally hit like chapter one of Spellcoats and go, here is Tana Quee explicitly praying to trans her gender. God lover.
00:44:59
Speaker
And I think that that queer, that it's so, it's fruitful to look at Diana Wynne Jones through a queer lens is that if you look at her entire body of work, I think there is a profound discomfort with gender. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And however you want to read that, I think there's a lot of different ways to read that. Either way, it is ah it's it's there it's a problem in her books that she is problematizing it.
00:45:22
Speaker
Right, which to me comes back to that sort of question mark around the world of heroic masculinity and is it real and can I have it and how do we ever get there? And what price do you have to pay to get it? Yes, like what price Valhalla um is is all part and parcel of this sort of discomfort with gender, with perhaps with with suddenly the the existence, the experience of existing as a little girl is I think straightforwardly horrible yes in Jones's work, yes which is an experience that many people, cis and trans, have had of having to exist as little girls. yes But I think also, I've forgotten what I'm talking about.
00:46:07
Speaker
so whereas well meds a lost like you got there What I was going to say is that I think that there's, and this is something that that you brought up when we were talking about this question, something we see in her writings about writing, about trying to write myths and trying to write for children.
00:46:21
Speaker
is this yearning after the heroic ideal. The idea that you know how to reconcile being a little girl, being in the body of a little girl, um a body that yes is discomfortable, that's not a word, a body that you feel discomfort in, a body that doesn't match what you're seeing represented as heroism in the world. and can A body that locks you out of a whole kind of heroism and the kind that you are most attracted to. right But Also, is it even real? But this, ah this is what I was going for. It's the revolutionary girl utina reading of Diana Jones. I don't want to be a boy. I want to be a prince. Yes, I want to be a hero. I want to be done in the story. I want to be tanukui terror of the healer, a very dangerous person. Right, because you look at the myths and you look at what's being written and what are your choices. Your choices are, as in in the utina reading, your choices are prince.
00:47:17
Speaker
Princess, which is unappealing. ah It's, you know, that feminine mode of heroism that Tanaqui looks at Robin and sees Robin doing and is so uncomfortable with. Right. The suffering, patient, enduring, the love story, which Tanaqui clearly finds boring, um the slow dying in a heroic way. Right. Or, which, which is where Tanaqui eventually ends up, as an echo of the witch Senblith, that's how she's described, who bound the one who is in some ways the villain of Delmarq's origin story, and whose power Tonic-wee has to come into, has to take over in order to change the narrative of Delmarq.
00:48:00
Speaker
yes um And that sort of coming into witchy-ness is also Gwendolyn's destiny. In her case, it's a villainous destiny, and she's enjoying herself hugely. yes ah But it I think that question of how to be a female hero, or is it even possible? Or how to be a hero if you're not being a man in the right way, as in the David in Eight Days of Luke with his immorally long hair.
00:48:31
Speaker
sort of does run through the whole decade and indeed the whole body of work. yes And then picking up on queer readings again, another thing that Jones is constantly doing throughout this decade is the doubled self, the reflected self, right, you meet yourself in someone else, you see someone else, and you understand yourself better by seeing them. So that's David and Luke, but it also in power of three, they do it three ways. yeahp And yes, he's both Gerald and half the and sees himself in this intense, private, sad individual and they oh, that's me. And because I see you, I see me, right? And I'm drawn to that it allows me
00:49:09
Speaker
to I'm i in you know in in this is I think where you're going and I'm sorry to jump your gun ah in in spell codes Hearns looks at cars aid on and tonic we says it's that moment that you recognize yourself and have a choice to even you're gonna feel strongly about them either you're going to hate them or you're going to love them right exactly and it is that moment of self recognition and um instant attraction yes to your other self and i really hard not to read it as romantic
00:49:41
Speaker
and I don't know if Jones intended it as romantic, but I do think it reads that way. And I will say that when in the 80s, Jones starts to pretty consistently do this with boy girl pairs. Yes. And then it's always romantic. Yes. Polly and Tom, Hal and Sophie, um Christopher and Millie, my God, is almost very precisely I see you and you're me. Yes. And um that she writes about, I think she says somewhere in reflections, I forget exactly the essay, I think most people have
00:50:12
Speaker
a version of a self, an animus or an anima. This is a little bit Jungian. I don't know enough about Jung to talk about it in depth yet. Yeah, um we sort of been looking at the kind of scholarship we need to read, like, do we need to read yoga? Who's throwing themselves on the call of Jungrenade, right? um But then everyone has ah an alternate self who's the opposite gender, um who represents some different aspects of themselves that they can see and recognize. And as you say, this happens a lot in the 80s. She starts to put more romance in her books. And her when she writes,
00:50:41
Speaker
proto romances, they look like this. Yes. And in fact, then, as you get into the 90s, she starts to switch it round. And it's in the 80s, it's largely sad and lonely women finding their free masculine selves in the 90s, kind of the other way around. Which is something to look forward to something I'm going to very much enjoy. I can't wait to get to Rupert and Marie. Oh my god. But I do think that there's this recognition of the self in the other. When she's doing it in the 70s, she's doing it through, and this gets back I think a little bit again into how she thinks about race and her failures in thinking about race. But this is how she's doing it across racial boundaries. That's what happens in Power of Three.
00:51:21
Speaker
that's what happens in spellcoats. What's one of the ways in which they actually do, spellcoats does feel like a second run at what she wanted to do in Power of Three. yes like And actually I will say that looking forward Fire and Hemlock feels like another run at spellcoats. yeah oh we're going to have I think Fire and Hemlock is going to be an episode that we're also going to have to make extra long just because there is so much in there. Thinking of like, um before we go on, ah This is one of the things I respect about Jones as ah as a a matter of craft, right? yeah As a writer, she's not afraid to look at look at a finished book, um go, hmm, going to run at that one again, yes going to rethink it. yeah ah In fact, she's very clear that you can't tell the story right, just telling it once. You've got to consider every angle, you've got to come back again and rethink it. In Spellcoats, Tanaqui Weaves,
00:52:17
Speaker
the same picture, the same pattern four times, yes it comes out through the, ah as she's weaving, she thinks she's woven sort of four different sides back and front the two coats, and it comes out to be four different portraits of her grandfather. Merle Yep, made out of different materials, different elements, ah different thematic underpinnings.
00:52:36
Speaker
but ultimately all telling the same story in a perfectly coherent way. And I ah i really appreciate in Jones' body of work being able to come back and back to the same ideas. She does it a lot in Crestomancy as well. Yeah, I think it's really fun specifically that, you know, she starts with this idea in Spellcoats that the underlying, it's, you know, it's almost taking apart the idea of the one.
00:53:00
Speaker
the one the one god, the one singular story. And then she's like, well, first of all, this one is multiple. ah I realized that there's there's a bit of Christianity in there. um But no, you're right. It's specifically not a trinity. Yes. It's a tetra key. No, the tetralogy. No, that there isn't a tetra.
00:53:24
Speaker
The one tettra is definitely the root you want. Yes. and The one is multiple. We have to tell the story four ways. Just telling the story once, looking at the story once, thinking about the one as a singular entity is not the right way to think about it. It's it's too simplistic. It's not layered enough.
00:53:40
Speaker
All right, can we pause timeout? Yes, yes. And then I will come back and we are going to talk about telling a story four different ways. Yes, we have four quartets. Exactly. Right. So ah the thing I wanted to say is about telling the same story four times. Yes. And Delmarque, the quartet, the Delmarque quartet. Actually, this is a question to me, was it always a quartet? Was it always marketed as a quartet? She must have always known, certainly, that there had to be one more book. Because Mitt's story isn't done at the end of Drowned Amet." Yes, so this is a question that we got twice. ah Well, we got once directly from Jo. One question my partner and I ended up wondering about at the end of this Bill Coates episode is why did it take so long to get to Crown afterwards? It seems clear that the story of Drowned Amet is not complete, so I assume a final book was always planned.
00:54:30
Speaker
And then we have one of my favorite questions that we got, or favorite comments that we got from Ariana. Yeah, this is genius. I saw it like, oh, this person is so smart. Yes. So Ariana says, so a while ago I was rereading the spell codes, which is always my favorite Dale Mark book as a kid, but which I hadn't read since. And as I was reading a line from the four quartets by T.S. Eliot popped into my head, I think that the river is a strong brown god.
00:54:59
Speaker
Yeah! That was followed by a slew of other thoughts, the fact that the line is from a third of the quartets, and the way that poem has always stood out to me is different from the other three, with its strange dark mood and its focus on water, in much the same way that slowcoats stands apart from the rest of the series. The fact that Jones used the quartets as an underlying framework in Fire and Hemlock, per the Heroic Odyssey essay,
00:55:20
Speaker
The fact that Delmark is a quartet when literary fashion runs to trilogies in series. So obviously I did a full reread of Delmark to try and determine if she used the poem as a framework again, and there's no way to say definitively, but I would bet. I would put some money on it. There's the line from the first quartet. Go, go, go, said the bird. Humankind cannot bear very much reality. And all the birds in the first book, especially Dagner's song and the cuckoo that sings after Clennan dies, the focus in the second quartet on life cycles,
00:55:48
Speaker
death and fertility and change exemplified by a man and woman joined in matrimony all the river and sea gods in the third i've got plenty more the third quartet probably has the most obvious links but you guys can definitely decide for yourselves thank you ariana uh we did decide for ourselves in yeah we thought you were a genius uh no this is absolutely i i went in and reread the quartets once once i saw that question oh yeah Yeah, oh my god. The second one also is absolutely full of corn. um Cycles of nature ah with the central central fit feeling of corn. ah And you're like, oh, yeah, well, that's Drownamut. There it is. Yeah. And the first one is full of music. Words move, music moves only in time, but that which is only living can only die. ah It's it's the the music, the the link between the the metaphor of music and the metaphor of writing.
00:56:38
Speaker
ah as a way to grapple with time and reality is right there in the first book and that's what Carton Quitter is doing. Absolutely. And then the second quarter as well, the the ending um for a further union, a deeper communion through the dark cold and the empty desolation, the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters of the petrol and the porpoise in my end is my beginning. That's Mitt's story, right? That is coming through death to find in the Holy Islands, this beginning, this magical land he imagined as a child.
00:57:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, this is just this is just what she did. This is just what's there. So ah top top writing tip with Jo is just take a very complicated poem and write a book about it. Yeah, I get some images that really speak to you from it and then pull them out and and put them and transform them and put them in a whole new way. But there's something else that this poem is doing that I think again, this is where I need to talk a little bit of background, which is the whole poem and especially the fourth quartet is really concerned With the role of history in modernity in the present the past in the present how they are ah they're the same and not the same but you can't. they They speak to each other they are in conversation with each other they are pushing and pulling at each other all the time um there's a bit in the fourth quartet that i pulled out when i was reading them last night.
00:57:57
Speaker
It says, history may be servitude, history may be freedom. See now they vanish, the faces and places with the self, which as it could love them, to become renewed, transfigured in another pattern.
00:58:09
Speaker
and I think this really talks to what the quartet is doing as a whole, in the way it moves through the time and history of Dale Mark, in the way that these patterns are repeated. In the spellcoats, we are looking at a pattern that will then get picked up again in Crown, explicitly when Tanaqui and her show up again in Crown to talk about how they're remaking the present.
00:58:32
Speaker
the pattern for the present day of moral admit that is then history for me when this is why may one has to come from the future to interact with history in the past it's because it is all one, it's all linked together, the things that happened in the past affect the things that happened in the future. And by the time of Crown, we are into the 90s and Jones is very explicit interest in time as a mechanism for story, um which sort of develops more and more through the 80s. So we're going to be talking quite a lot about that in season two, culminating in a tale of time city, of course. Oh, yes, I think time
00:59:09
Speaker
is already a concern of hers in Dale Mark, especially that leap back in time in the third book. God, I love the way the book works as a series, the rejection of serialization, if you like, yeah the abandonment of consistency between books between characters.
00:59:28
Speaker
ah the focus on those thematic links and thematic connections. But I think Ariana is absolutely right, the the spine of it is actually T.S. Eliot and the Four Quartets. One bit I wanted to pick up in the Fourth Quartet, not specifically in reference to Crown, but as a broader Jonesian note, um is the moment of the narrator's meeting.
00:59:52
Speaker
ah with a stranger. yeah So over the asphalt where no other sound was, between three districts whence the smoke arose, I met one walking, loitering and hurried as if blown towards me like the metal leaves before the urban dawn wind unresisting. And as I fixed upon the downturned face that pointed scrutiny with which we challenged, the first met stranger in the waning dusk.
01:00:14
Speaker
I caught the sudden look of some dead master, whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled, both one and many. In the brown-baked features, the eyes of a familiar compound ghost, both intimate and unidentifiable. So I assumed a double part, and cried, and heard another's voice cry, what, are you here? Although we were not. I was still the same, knowing myself, yet being some one other.
01:00:42
Speaker
That's it, right? yes That's the double self that we've been talking about all the way through. That is moral encountering the divided parts of himself. um That is, mit unfortunately, meeting his double self in his father, but also meeting a self, a suffering and unhappy self in Little Girl Hildy. That is overwhelmingly, incontrovertibly, the meeting of Hern and Kars Adon, where they instantly know each other.
01:01:11
Speaker
Uh, what are you here? Is it you? Yeah. And that's in Crown, uh, you know, I'll give you one small, uh, thematically relevant, although not plot relevant spoiler. That's Meywen looking at mid and moral back through time. The eyes of some long dead master. There's a moment in Crown where Meywen looks at a portrait of a young singer and feels a sense of connection to this unknown face.
01:01:38
Speaker
and What are you here? Goes back and meets that face and then comes forward in time again and is like, oh, I recognize this now. I recognize that the past is present as well. Yes. And of course, because, ah oh, it's you is also, oh, it's me. I'm here. Yeah, I see, I see myself in seeing you. But I want to draw back as well from like the within the world of the book and say, well, when Eliot writes this, he is writing about his own encounters with the past masters of poetry ah with Yates and yeah Swift.
01:02:08
Speaker
And then when Jones is writing about encountering the self in the past in conversation with Eliot, I think she is setting herself in a poetic and artistic conversation. She said, yeah, and me here, here in Brane, the artist speaking to the past and the present going back, going forward, using the myths of the past for my work that is very, very firmly present.
01:02:32
Speaker
Jones claiming an artistic place for herself as part of, if you like, that conversation. Niamh Jones- I'm going to pull on another one of our questions here from Sarah because I think it ties in, ah which talks about the mortification of being a teenager. Diana Jones is writing centering on embarrassment, shame, being overly passionate about things and being female, Seed, Janet and Julia Horst girls, as well as Fire and Hemlock's in-text derision for Polly's attempt to write sexy fiction.
01:02:58
Speaker
And the way that Jones writes about being a writer later on, we will get there. But over and over again, we see her sort of grappling with embarrassment, picking, you know, writing these girls who are trying to write and looking at their past works with shame. We see this with Tanaqui looking at her.
01:03:15
Speaker
badly woven skirt and how embarrassed she is at this little nursery rhyme. And then moving past this, moving past the embarrassment of looking at your early work and saying, this isn't worthy of being in conversation with artistry, with the great masters. ah Some of that cruel humor even, I think we do see direct in that.
01:03:33
Speaker
Polly and her sexy fiction. She gets it in the neck for you know wanting to write sexy stuff. Exactly. but and and so you know there is i think it's I think that this is something that she is really grappling with in herself. I write children's books, I write fantasy fiction. I am setting myself up in conversation with T.S. Eliot in conversation with the authors of the Mabinogian and conversation with Shakespeare, in conversation with all of these things, what right have I got to do that? I'm asserting my right to do that. Absolutely. And I think it is perpetually a struggle to assert yourself, or to to maybe to especially as a woman, to assert yourself in this conversation with the masters you met and saw yourself in. Yeah.
01:04:16
Speaker
And even sometimes to say, as Tanik, we're looking at Kankredan, well, this might be a master, but my weaving is right. not just not just to convert It's not just a hum a humble admiration for the great work of the past. It's like, I can use this and I can do something with it that you did not do. um I can reuse, I can rethink. And that's one of the things I mean when I say Jones would never be boring enough to do a retelling. She doesn't retell stories, she reuses them, she twists them up, she she turns them inside out.
01:04:45
Speaker
She claims mastery in her own right. She weaves them into a new shape. Yes. Through the 70s to me in terms of craft feel in many ways like a journeyman decade. You can see her learning. You can see her improving. Wilkins Tooth is not a great book. Her early work is flawed in a lot of ways. um I'd say that Dog's Body has notable weirdness in it, especially around yeah or things that don't seem to be quite thought through. There's also stuff that like structurally is rushed or confusing. Power of Three also is a very ambitious book that does not, yeah, that is kind of... well yeah i can i can see I can absolutely see why she decided to run run at Power of Three again, ah because she hadn't hit it the first time. So give it another go, do it again.
01:05:32
Speaker
um But yeah, this is what I mean, a journeyman decade. There's never a point in which Jones is a bad writer, right? Like, she's always like fundamentally strong. ah She can put a good sentence together from the very beginning. But even like, right, even Wilkins tooth is intensely readable. It's fun to read. ah But her earlier work is much simpler. Like eight days of Luke, I think is great. But it's really simple. ah It's great. It's great because it's simple. It's it's it's doesn't get tangled in complexity the way spellcoats does.
01:06:01
Speaker
ah first book was published 1973, spellcoats is 1979. So that's what six years, seven years, imagine coming that far in under a decade. but When I say journeyman decade, I do think it is a journey in which she successfully journeys to mastery. And I do think Delmark and especially the spellcoats, when we hit masterpiece, in the old sense, not of but not masterpiece just as in this is something very good, but masterpieces in this is proof of mastery. I am up there with the rest of you masters. And I deserve to be accounted a great artist and the rest of my work is at this level. Absolutely. But I do wonder still if to go back to that question of why crown is so much later, why crown is 15 years later, if having written, I would say
01:06:52
Speaker
at least two masterworks in Drowned Amadine's Bell Codes in particular. I think Carton Quitter is is, again, a simpler book, a good book, yeah simpler book. But having done that level of work, having identified these things that she wants to say with Dale Mark, and put the seeds of that into these three texts, if it did just take her 15 years to figure out how to write the ending that she wanted, how to pull that out and put it together. Right. I think I would be scared to go back after spellcoats after having written spellcoats. I would too. And I think especially if you look at sort of where Crown is positioned in the canon of her work, it's like it's right next to Hexwood. It's when she's at her very height of like complex, asynchronous out of time plotting.
01:07:34
Speaker
like, maybe she was wise enough to let it sit and let it grow. I think it was a wise decision. Yeah. I you know, well, we'll see when we get there how we think but that the the time in between affected it and maybe affected what she wants to say.
01:07:50
Speaker
One of the other questions we got, this came in from Chestnut Pod, was what is Diana Winjone saying about the divine rate of kings of the Delmar Quartet? What is Diana Winjone saying about the divine rate of kings? ah Great question. And I think that she's giving us a lot of different answers in these first three books. And when we get to Crown, I think she's going to have some different answers again. And my guess is that some of the things that she's saying, you know I think that you know you you had a really, really good argument when we were reading Spellcoats.
01:08:19
Speaker
about the king as protagonist of the land and about spell codes as prefiguring the need in contemporary Delmarque to Mitten Morrill to have that protagonist again. What that looks like and how that's going to be shaped I think is something that you have to look at the intervening 15 years that she's living through to answer. Yeah, I think we can't say it for Dale Mark without Crown and I am not really reading Crown till we get there because it's been so rich reading in order. You get so much from kind of contrasting what was she writing at or around the same time. But I will say for the first three books,
01:09:00
Speaker
What is Jones saying about the divine right of kings? I would say in spellcoats, we do have to accept the divine right of kings for the book to work. For the purposes of spellcoats, the divine right of kings is real. But it comes not from a Christian God, it comes from the Undying. But they are not gods, explicitly. And it comes from your sister weaving you into really a narrative in which you have the divine right. So perhaps the divine right of kings then is the magic of the story.
01:09:28
Speaker
Right. It's the power of authorship that creates a king, that crafts a king. Tanaqui, the Merlin figure who made a king and said, well, here you go. Enjoy. I don't think Hun enjoyed that much.
01:09:41
Speaker
oh um and the you know And again, going back to Drowned Emmett, the power of story, the power of naming your child after God and sending him into the world to follow in that path, to follow along the wind's road.
01:09:57
Speaker
and seeing where the narrative sweeps him up. Have a storyteller, per se, in Drowned Am, at the way that Tanaqui is storyteller in Spelke. Or indeed, the way that Morale is singer, performer.
01:10:08
Speaker
Right. Okay, here's a here's a ah thought, moral as, well, he is, he's literally tanner moral, which is duck's name. Yeah, moral as duck to mitts hern. Oh,
01:10:21
Speaker
ah well, yeah, we'll see in Crown, but this idea of the the the repeating of mythic figures And that you need the meeting of the storyteller and the protagonist in order to create the story of a king. I can't wait to get to Crown, oh my god! yeah We said we'd do a bonus episode, we we are in fact just talking about Dale Mark, but in our defense, Dale Mark is great and more people should talk about it.
01:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, ah it's it's so good. we We haven't even talked about like half the things we want to talk about yet. Okay, this is not a segue. I just really want to talk about it. Can we do the hope and conspiracy theory while we're here talking about Delmarc? Let's do the hope and conspiracy. The hope and conspiracy theory is based on something that was added into the Delmarc Quartet in the 90s with the publication of Crown. That's when it got the fantasy glossary, which is then back put into other editions.
01:11:19
Speaker
right And I think when we get there, we're going to have to do like a whole half an episode just on the glossary because there is a lot in the glossary. But all right, one specific note from the glossary, which I picked up this time round because my 70s Dale Mark books do have the 90s glossary in them. Hobin comes up in Drowd amit as Mitzwai's insensible stepfather, the best gunsmith in South Dale Mark.
01:11:43
Speaker
intelligent enough not to get involved with revolutionary societies, remarks that he probably would be a better revolutionary than any of them, but also it's not time yet, he doesn't think so. the nice He's a nice guy, right? Unusually a remarkably good father figure. Objectively he saves Mitt's life by giving him good advice on how to get out after his bad assassination attempt,
01:12:07
Speaker
That doesn't save Mitch's life, that makes Mitch's life worse. Because the gun gets stolen by Al. ah But Hobin's intentions will go there. Right, so Hobin, this nice guy from Drowned Ammit. As is usual in Denmark, the actual character doesn't come back. ah But he is mentioned in the glossary, and we find out his future. yeah me I'm going to grab the book, I'm going to read this entry out, because what the hell? So this is my copy of Carson Quidder.
01:12:35
Speaker
I cannot believe they put that in your copy. It's so confusing. But it does mean that we can talk about this now instead of waiting until after crack. Hoban, known as Bloody Hoban, the elder of two brothers devoted in different ways to freedom fighting. He was born in Wayworld in South Delmark of a family which seems to have been secret hereditary guardians of the Kingstone.
01:12:58
Speaker
things to come, and he became a brilliant home and innovative gunsmith, highly respected by his guild, and much in favour with the earls of Holland, Waywald and Dermath. He then moved to Holland where he married Melda, Mitt's mother, and bided his time building up a hidden stock of weapons, and an organisation of sober revolutionaries like himself So far, so kind of in line with what we saw in Drowdamn. Right. We know he has the stock of weapons, that's that we've been told as can. Until word came from the north that Amal the Great had seized the crown. Hobin sensed the time was ripe and at once led a massive revolt in Holland which spread to Dermath and Weywald and rapidly became a bloodbath. Hobin killed so many people, many of them innocent, that Amal himself was forced to intervene. It was said that Hobin shot himself rather than submit to a king.
01:13:41
Speaker
This may be true, but the story that he shot his wife and daughters at the same time is probably a fabrication.
01:13:49
Speaker
Oh, what? Diane Lee Jones. Diane Lee Jones. However, however, okay, so unpick all of that. There is a lot to unpack. But if we look just at Drowned Ammit, there are some things about the story that Hoban tells Mitt about how he came to marry Mildon that don't 100%, well, there are some omissions there that you can put together if you put that alongside what Mitt's father, Al, says about Hoban.
01:14:18
Speaker
when they're on the boat together because Al knows whom and they know each other. We know each other socially, they go drinking together. Hobin is the best gunsmith in South-Dalemark and Al is the best shot in South-Dalemark and the first thing Al says when he sees the gun Mitz got is, oh that's one of Hobin's specials. He knows not just about like Hobin gunsmithing generally but also the secret stuff he's hiding in his stockpile of weapons that are apparently for the revolution.
01:14:46
Speaker
And Hoban knows that Al is Mitt's father because he almost let slip when he's talking to Mitt. He says, is it because of your father? Have you ever thought about what kind of man just leaves you and Milda? So he knows about Al. He knows that he is a big mess when he marries Milda. Hoban knows that Al is alive and has abandoned Milda and Mitt. So he goes to find Milda and Mitt and marries Milda.
01:15:13
Speaker
whose husband he knows is alive because they go drinking together, is alive and buying guns, and survived the failed revolution that killed Hope and the younger brother. Right! So if this is the other thing, Al is the guy responsible for Hope and his brother's death, but they go drinking together.
01:15:35
Speaker
right yeah no we once we picked this up we were like what is we're all in this man's head so actually yeah this man is capable of mysterious secret things but is he then the the the then the ascension to and he became bloody homing leader of the bloodbath who had to be defeated by amil the great which is mit which is mit to be clear yeah um And probably he didn't shoot his wife and daughters. That's Mitt's mother and Mitt's half-sisters. What the hell happened there? I can just see Jones putting this in the glossary and giggling to herself. We never get the full story of this clearly insane turn of events.
01:16:20
Speaker
ah My personal conspiracy theory and is that it's all a cover-up. What Mitt actually did was pay for Hoban, Milder and the girls to emigrate to fantasy America because otherwise Milder would have been the Queen Mother.
01:16:32
Speaker
uh no one would have bankrupted Delmarque immediately.
Mythologizing Historical Figures and Personal Identity
01:16:37
Speaker
Yes, I think that's really really plausible and I also think that by putting this note in the glossary, and again well we have to talk about the whole glossary at some point, ah this project that she has in spellcoats and then in Crown of problematizing history and the way we think about history and the way we think about people's reputations, by giving us this look at Hoban in Drowned Ammit and then putting this note in the end of Crown that seems completely at odds with everything we know like not everything some of that stuff I think is probably true leading a you know having a secret revolutionary plan sure having a stockpile of guns he did that maybe coming entirely down to uh mary mit and milda because he was investigating his brother's death and looking for revenge on al who could say i'm playing some kind of long game certainly
01:17:23
Speaker
shooting himself and his entire family to avoid having a confrontation with his stepson who he clearly felt quite fondly towards? Probably not. um But the whole the bloody Hoban reputation is so like it feels to me really clearly like a reference or a joke or a comment on the way that revolutionaries' reputations get tarnished or get changed, ah mythologized throughout history when revolution is no longer in fashion. yeah um And also, I think it sort of draws our attention to the difference between the king as protagonist of history versus the person behind the protagonist. The difference, if you like, between Amal the Great and Mit, Hoban's stepson, which also might be the difference between a hern and a kernadon. The shaping of history as narrative turns the people into it, into the figures of narrative, which then
01:18:21
Speaker
parts us or divides us from the truth, but the power is in the truth. Yes. Uh, I kind of want to segue from here to one of the other questions we
Complexity of Endings and Character Development
01:18:31
Speaker
got. This comes in from Kate. Uh, why do you think Diana when Jones does downer ending so often? It is often, right? My time, place expectations aren't miscounted. It's often, often, uh, I think it's especially often in the seventies, but it's, uh, it's gonna continue on. And even when there's this sort of veneer of a happy ending, if you look too closely at it, it is in fact a downer. And I do think that there is something
01:18:57
Speaker
about this concept of truth, of telling the truth, not leaning on the muzzy fantasy of the North, but thinking about realistically, and maybe realistic is the wrong word, but I think that she she does feel that there is something true in that being a child and being a child who feels things strongly, you're going to lose some parts of yourself in coming through that. Or rather, I think it's the opposite. You're going to gain more selves. If you come to come through successfully, you gain multiple selves. And in doing so, you lose something? Certainty, perhaps. Simplicity. Yes.
01:19:46
Speaker
you accept that there inevitably the choices that you make are going to the the selves that you have I think you're right it's gaining it's it's gaining a complicated sense of yourself as multiple and of the choices that you make that are going to lead you to paths that will involve pain inevitably yes because there's there's no way there's no way to satisfy every self and the the more of you there is the more of you there is to suffer if you like but also to refuse to to develop, to become more, is then to become, if you like, Gwendolyn, perpetually the nasty little girl stuck in her the the world of her own fantasy.
01:20:26
Speaker
never. Right, but she's happy. presum that Gwendolyn gets her happy ending. But it sucks. But the outsider sucks. And Preston, as he points out that, you know, it's a lie. She thinks she's got a happy ending. They're only pretending to obey her. She's not really the queen of that world. And I think that Diana, when Jones thinks that an, un to I think an uncomplicatedly happy ending to her is a lie, because that is locking you out of the the sort of richness of multiplicity of accepting the various different versions of yourself. Because to be uncomplicatedly happy is to ignore all the other things that could have been and done. Yes.
01:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's what it comes down to, isn't it? Well, even things like we talked a lot in the Charmed Life episode when I had the bad mic, so I don't know if anyone could hear it. um But we talked about um the tragedy of Charmed Life and it is a very sad book. It's full of deaths and losses and a cat dies again and again.
01:21:25
Speaker
and he loses his parents, he loses his sister, ah but also Janet's loneliness, Janet who never had a brother, because of course that's one of the selves that had to die for Kat to exist. Kat sort of exists on a pile of dead and lost selves, people who couldn't be so that he might have a chance to exist or have a chance to be someone. and even Even when there's, you know, both ah moral and turn in order to come into who they are, ah they specifically, I think, you know, they lose lose parents, but I think most explicitly lose older brothers who might have stood in for them in the place that they eventually have to take. Dagner just, you know, has to get arrested halfway through Cart and Quitter so that moral can be the one who makes decisions for the group.
01:22:13
Speaker
Gull tells Hern that he has to be gone and stay gone so that Hern can stay king. um If Gull is there, Hern can't become who he's going to become. He's in a way becoming his older brother as well as himself. He's taking on that There's a moment which I think we picked out in our notes but didn't get to in the episode where Gull shrieks at his younger siblings, I'm the head of the family, you have to do what I say.
01:22:36
Speaker
And it's funny, but it's also really sad. This is a teenage boy who every other, is his father is dead, his older brother might as well be dead. um His mother is long gone, his older sister is sick. um This is, this is, Hearn's like 15 and ah obviously his younger siblings aren't listening to him because who listens to their 15 year old older brother?
01:22:59
Speaker
No one year later than you like maybe my mom would do that. But also, Hern trying to step into this place that the this role as head of the family is one of the selves he feels he's got to be. And it's a self he doesn't actually get to be, really, because the family is kind of broken up by the end of the book. Yeah, and that's the same in Cart and Quitter, you know, Moro ends up leaving his family behind and going on a different journey.
01:23:26
Speaker
um in Drowned Ammit, Mitt recognizes all the people who would like to, who are his family and friends, who he cares about too late. It's only when he's on that boat sailing away from the serial and diddial and the free hollanders and sailing away from Hoban. He's like, I had all these father figures all along and they were a lot better than this one. Exactly, and I walked away from them and now I have to be, you know, in the end I'm going, he doesn't know this yet, in the end I'm going to have to come back to Hoban, my father figure, as father of religion. There's a question mark, and he may or may not shoot himself about it. Right. ah And so it's this, you know, you have to, there there is this kind of sense that you can only recognize the people that you can be by losing some of the people who already, who already filled those rules. Yeah. And you step into them one by one. And it forces you into growth. But God, it hurts. Yes. Um,
01:24:24
Speaker
But also refusing the multiple self is, is it is it a hollow happiness? is it but that I'm thinking again of David's longing for Valhalla, where Astrid and Luke can't go. I do think Astrid and Luke are David's other selves. I don't know how explicitly she was thinking about it that early on in the decade, but they are both mirrors of David's imprisonment, his mistreatment, yeah um and they are the people he would have to leave behind to enter the world of pure heroic masculinity.
01:24:53
Speaker
And I do think that her one sort of uncomplicatedly happy ending in this decade, Power of Three, so it doesn't work. hello Because Gare doesn't, in order, Gare gets his his multiple selves. You know, he recognises the self through the other by meeting these other kids, and he doesn't have to lose anything. And none of them even die. It gets pretty close, like like Gerald is nearly gonna die, but then he doesn't, it's fine.
01:25:22
Speaker
Right. And it's not that I think that the only way to write a good book is to write it down or ending. I obviously don't think that. I wonder if Jones did. you only Yeah, I do wonder if Jones did. I do because she, I do think that Diana and Jones, at least at this point, could not convincingly write that form of ah overall sort of synthesis without a little bit of loss. Yeah.
01:25:47
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. We always agree with each other. we should like yeah We should get a friend on the podcast who disagrees with us both. That would be interesting. baby Yes, teaser for next season for us. But yeah, I do think that that is something I'm not um interested in looking at too, actually, as we get to later books, is whether she can write an uncomplicatedly happy ending that works. I don't think Jones can be uncomplicated, but we'll see how we go.
01:26:16
Speaker
We'll see how we go. I think she does try. ah But honestly, I think her simplest books are in the 70s. And she has a very successful simple books. I think eight days of Luke and Carter and Quiddah are both beautifully simple. um Yes, but neither of them is an uncomplicatedly happy ending quite the opposite.
01:26:35
Speaker
No, both of those are about accepting division. And the ending is you're gonna be divided and that is where you're gonna have to draw your power from if you have any. All right, let's see what other questions we have to to wrap up this Q and&A episode. We've talked so much about Dale Mark and could keep talking about Dale Mark forever, but we do actually have ah some questions about Crestomancy.
Crestomancy Series and Themes
01:27:05
Speaker
We have a question that says, this is from Joe again. Do you think she always intended to go back to Crestomancy when she wrote Charmed Life or did the characters just stick in her head? Which is not something that we've thought too much about previously. I actually have thought about this previously, but it's just on my own time for fun.
01:27:20
Speaker
up um So Jones that eventually writes a Crestomancy series, which is five books, six books of which I think three. of Yes, it six at the end. No, and then short story. There are a number of short stories too. And I think for me, there are three really good Crestomancy books and some which are fine. John's life is really good. um Yes. But one thing that really jumps out at me looking at the Crestomancy series is actually Jones does do the thing we talked about with Power of Three and Spellcoats, which is take the same idea and run at it again from a different angle.
01:27:55
Speaker
um yeah So Charmed Life 1977 tells the story of a little boy who goes to a magical castle and discovers some important facts about himself. ah The Lives of Christopher Chan 1988 tells the story of a little boy who goes to a magical castle or discovers some important facts about himself but in this one he's the monster little girl at the same time.
01:28:19
Speaker
yeah um So that one reruns ah Charmed Life with I think the Gwendolyn figure, the horrible child as the protagonist. I don't yeah think that at the time she wrote Charmed Life, Jones was had that book in mind already, because I think if she had, she would have just written that one first. That one yeah feels very much like I went back and reread this book, and I have some new things to say about it.
01:28:44
Speaker
Yes. And I actually just had a conversation with somebody who could not keep Charmed Life and ah Nine Lives because we're chanced straight. I'm like, I understand why. Because fundamentally, the plot is there are many incidents that could be transposed between one and the other without stressing the the fabric of the book at all. Right. But what but really delights me is she does it again in Conrad's fate, which is in the early 2000s. And this time is a story of a boy who goes to a magical castle and discovers some valuable things about himself. But in this one, magical castles are bad praxis.
01:29:20
Speaker
yeah which is brilliant because Conrad's fate explicitly rejects the magical castle as method of little boy self-discovery entirely and in fact that feels that magical castles should fall into ruin everywhere ah because, did you know, aristocracy is a fraud.
01:29:37
Speaker
Now, I do think that Conrad's fate is the best of her late dates, and I think it's part of the reason why. Yeah, i agree but I think Conrad's fate does very much have to be read as a conversation and a comment on this Little Boy Goes to Magical Castle books. Not coincidentally, it did come out in the early 2000s, which was the age of Harry Potter. And certainly looking at late Jones, you can sort of see the zeitgeist around um children British children's fantasy and how much she hates it.
Welsh Mythology in 70s Children's Fantasy
01:30:06
Speaker
Yeah I think it's going to be looking at the at at the atmosphere and environment in which she's writing these texts is also going to be really interesting I think because you can see I think in Dale Mark in the books of the 70s you can see the milieu you can see the Susan Cooper you can see the Ursula Le Guin ah You can see other things that are less expected. I still think that you're reading of ah of of the Janets. I'm just right. I'm just right. Which is delightful because like you go to to Joanna Ross and you're like, this is a book with an explicit lesbian sexy and and a number of jokes about dildos. And I know that Diana Wynne Jones enjoyed it as much as I did.
01:30:46
Speaker
um But speaking of pulling from the Milga and other texts, I do want to jump back to a question from Sarah about favorite adaptations of a text that draw heavily on the map and Nausean. Because that's also in talking about Welsh fantasy, that's in the mix that's in the Milga in the 70s. And it ties back to this conversation about how to use underlying texts. One of the books that I ended up reading just by you know synchronicity while we were doing this was Alan Garner's Owl Service, which is another book that very explicitly is it's based on a myth from the Mabinogian. In order to make sure that you understand that it's based on a myth from the Mabinogian, pages from the Mabinogian go flying all over the place and they have to stop and read it. Which is also something that happens in Dog's Body where Kathleen actually reads out to Sirius a sequence from the Mabinogian
01:31:33
Speaker
I think it's a hard G in Welsh. I think it's a hard G. I think you're probably right. Anytime that i'm anytime we pronounce something differently, I think that you're probably right. hey This is the language nerd corner. um And this is the the every time it's off and I have to put on my clueless American hat. You are not a clueless American. You are so smart. You just are not ridiculous about words like me.
01:31:56
Speaker
um But, ah you know, this is part of the conversation, I think, in children's literature in the 70s, is about adaptation, it's about using myth, it's about when and how you use myth. um One of the the books that I ended up reading while we were doing this, Catherine Butler's Four British Fantasists, quotes pretty extensively from Alan Garner in thinking about how he used the Mabinogian ah in writing owl service and how dissatisfied he was with sort of the bluntness of it with but having to put the text in the text in order to unlock the text for readers. And then he goes on to write increasingly increasingly obscure books until you can't tell what he's putting in there and eventually never does it again. um I don't think Diana when Jones goes that far in rejecting the idea of I put this text in the text, but I do think that she gets more and more complex in how she's thinking about using these texts.
01:32:45
Speaker
and in in ensuring that it's not just sort of a key in a lock situation like it is in these early books. And one of the things in rereading and refiguring her own work and putting other texts into, you know, feeding other texts back into her own work and making something new out of it, I think, is again how she gets these additional layers of complexity. yeah I think just going back to the the the direct request from Sarah, I will also say that if you want to read sort of contemporary fantasy that's drawing on Welsh roots, you should be reading Nicola Griffith, especially I read Spear recently, I went, Ooh, that's good. That's a very good book.
01:33:26
Speaker
um ah Look, an actual book recommendation. and not in butation platform um This is another one. More complicated book recommendation. ah But the other one that I think of ah that is drawing deeply on the Mabinogian and many other texts is Guy Gabrielle K's Fionavar tapestry, which is much more in the throw a bunch of things into the blender and see what comes out.
01:33:50
Speaker
It's a very chicken soup or stone soup or whatever kitchen sink sort of method of world building, but I have a great time with it. But I also think it's really interesting to read that method of just kind of chuck things in and fish out, you know, the apple of the Mabinagi and then something else later on and that kind of stick them together against the the sort of the weaving the tapestry weaving that Diana when Jones does when she puts a bunch of elements together. Yeah, eventually, if we ever get to season four, we will be talking about the novella The Game, which is possibly the most explicit description of her own method that Jones ever does.
01:34:26
Speaker
which is very much about the deep dive through strands and mythology to find an apple. Yes. I'm excited to get to reread that one because I haven't in a decade at least. So, shall we wrap that? We are a little bit tight for time now. We've we've run quite long. Yes. I think, yeah, I think we have a couple more questions, but I think some of those we can save for later on ah or for next season.
01:34:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, let's call it there. ah Thank you everyone very, very much for listening to the first season of 8 Days of Diana when Jones and for joining us for this very long and enthusiastic bonus episode where as threatened, we did mostly just talk about Dale Marks and more.
01:35:10
Speaker
oh Yeah, there's just so much so much to say. We've had such a wonderful time. ah If you are reading along with Eight Days of Diana, ah the first book of the 1980s is a Christomancy book, The Magicians of Caprona.
01:35:26
Speaker
which I think also reads against the spell codes in some interesting ways, and I think maybe leads up into, I'm gonna spoiler a theory that you've got about ah but the books that she writes, you know, she's writing two books at once, once, you know, once is tragedy and once is farce. So I think, I think and that's absolutely got to be it. There's so many books coming out so close together, she's got to be writing them almost simultaneously. And some of them really do seem to be the same book twice, but one time is funnier.
01:35:54
Speaker
Uh, yes. Uh, charm life, charm life and drown dammit do this. But yeah. Uh, and Magicians of Caprona is a very funny book. Um, but you've got some time. It'll probably be ending a couple months before we're ready for season two, cause we're going to try and do some pre-recording and line up some other, you know, features of like perhaps an intro theme and perhaps some guests. Uh, so look forward to that. All right. Thank you all very much. And thank you, Becca.
01:36:21
Speaker
Yes, and thank you. And this has been like my favourite thing of 2024. Absolutely fantastic. And a good way to start 2025. Happy New Year, everyone. Absolutely. Happy New Year.