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The Magicians of Caprona
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"Tonino wondered how he could laugh like that at something so horrible until he remembered that he had stood himself a score of times and laughed himself sick at just the same thing."
Two households both alike in comedy, in fair Caprona where we lay our first episode for Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, Season Two: the Eighties.
Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Time of the Ghost!
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Transcript
Introduction to Season Two
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello everybody and welcome to season two of Eight Days of Diana Wynne-Jones. I'm Rebecca Framo.
00:00:20
Speaker
ready and welcome to season two of eight days of diana wynn jonesne and rebecca framo And I'm Emily Tesh, and we are very excited to begin taking you through Diana Wynne-Jones' work of the 1980s.
00:00:36
Speaker
To
Exploring the 1980s in Jones' Career
00:00:37
Speaker
me, this is the the the the decade, the floriap. The 70s leads up to this, and everything afterwards is a response to this, but in the 1980s, Diana Wynne-Jones releases nine books, actually, of which we'll be dealing with eight this season, and they are...
00:00:54
Speaker
A sequence of banners? Yeah. This whole decade is really, really good. Right. She just, she just incredibly good this but this whole time.
00:01:07
Speaker
So,
Favorite Books Discussion: 'Homeward Bounders' & 'Howl's Moving Castle'
00:01:08
Speaker
what are you looking forward to this decade, Becca? Oh my gosh. ah So, it's taken me a while to to come up with a consistent answer over the decades, over my own decades of life, when people ask me what my favourite Diana Wynne-Jones is.
00:01:21
Speaker
But these days I usually say Homeward Bounders. I'm very excited to do Homeward Bounders. Oh, I am so excited for Homeward Bounders. I'm excited to get to Howl's Moving Castle.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's about I am very, very excited to get to Fire and Hemlock, which Jones herself, I think, probably considered her best or one of her best novels, and which certainly is kind of the midpoint, the turning point around the whole, which the whole rest of her career seems to like rotate.
00:01:52
Speaker
We're going to go along on Fire and Hemlock, we can't not. Yeah, we are.
Introduction to 'The Magicians of Caprona'
00:01:57
Speaker
ah But this week we are looking at The Magicians of Caprona, which is the second novel in the Crestomancy series.
00:02:04
Speaker
I think this is interesting. Yeah. Imagine you've just written, right? Book three of your planned quartet. And we've decided it was definitely planned to be a quartet because it's organized around the four quartets.
00:02:17
Speaker
Thank you to the listener who pointed that out. You've written book three of your quartet. You know, there needs to be a book for you're not writing the book for you're writing magicians of Cabrona.
00:02:29
Speaker
which is a sequel to a book that you already wrote that in and of itself seems to stand perfectly well alone. Right. It's a sequel, but it's it's not a very Crestomancy-ish Crestomancy book.
00:02:41
Speaker
ah he's He's not that he's not there very much. and And his main purpose is to be one of the two Deus Ex Machina figures in this book. And we'll talk about
Jones' Endings: Downer or Happy?
00:02:51
Speaker
that a bit. Right. And I think the other thing that makes this really interesting and a very fun follow up, actually, too.
00:02:57
Speaker
So you guys are hearing this probably sometime in May. We're recording this two weeks after we recorded our Q&A session. And one of the questions that came up in that Q&A session was, wow, it seems like Diana Wynne-Jones does a lot of downer endings.
00:03:09
Speaker
And we thought about it and we said, yeah, seems like she does do a lot of downer endings. We wonder if she can and really do a proper happy ending. And then we looked at what we had up next. And we were like, let's solve this question, right?
00:03:21
Speaker
Right. And we were like, oh, wait, we're about to do Magicians of Caprona. Okay. And answer I'll say this feels really intentional to me because Magicians of Caprona, short version, is ah ah remix. Right.
00:03:33
Speaker
Right. It's two texts. Diana Wynne-Jones loves to take a text and do something with it. It's two texts stuck together, twisted up, twirled around and turned into a 1980s children's book.
00:03:44
Speaker
And the texts she's picked are Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. which is an Elizabethan tragedy, and John Webster's The White Devil, which is a slightly later Jacobean tragedy.
00:03:55
Speaker
I would argue that it is, in fact, at least three texts, though. Because
Setting & Themes in 'The Magicians of Caprona'
00:04:01
Speaker
I'm going to say that she's also thrown in there quite a bit of the classic, ah like, 1940s children's war story in there.
00:04:11
Speaker
You know I think you may well be right. Although I wonder if that's a text so much as Jones's own childhood. Remember, she was an evacuee ah She had the experience of being a child growing up in like a city where war is about to break out.
00:04:24
Speaker
That's true. I do think that she's, you know, there's a lot of jokes in there on, you know, the the most heroic boy in school genre, um which is is sort of ah a reference text in the story. She loves to make jokes about other children's books, which is one of the children's books.
00:04:41
Speaker
But yeah, what really struck me in this one is this is a book whose strong roots are in two tragedies, ah both of which end up with the stage covered in corpses. Sorry, one more text.
00:04:52
Speaker
Punch and Judy. We can't forget Punch and Judy. Punch and Judy, which also ends up with a stage covered in corpses, but is not a tragedy. And we'll come back to that. Uh-huh. So she's working with theatre.
00:05:05
Speaker
um like she's writing the book but she's very much drawing on like performance and theatrical performance as the route for this and
Balancing Comedy & Tragedy
00:05:13
Speaker
she's working with tragic and vengeance uh themed theater and it's a comedy it's possibly one of the lightest and fluffiest books that will have this decade uh it's a straightforward happy ending everything turns out fine it's it feels so intentional and to me and so self-conscious about yeah I can do comedy, ah not just as like I can write things that are funny, which we already knew, but I can do comedy as a genre.
00:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's really her first pure comedy since Wilkins Tooth and The Ochre Downstairs. And in a lot of ways, as we were reading it, we were like, this book has a weird amount in common with Wilkins Tooth.
00:05:57
Speaker
It does. It's another one that feels like a little bit like a rerun because it's got firstly this sort of large child cast. Yes, there are so many kids in this book. Not as many as in Wilkins Tooth.
00:06:09
Speaker
There maybe like five, six kids in this book that we care about. And I'm not kind of Rosa and Marco who are not kids because they're Romeo and Juliet. Yep. Although they are both very young um and they see they end up on like the kids side, the kids team in the ultimate conflict.
00:06:26
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. So the basic... Romeo and Juliet are kids also. So, okay, retracting that. We can put Rosa and Marco in the in the child bracket. Slightly older. um But yeah, the basic plot of Magicians of Caprona is easy and you already know it because it's the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet. Two households both alike in dignity and fair Caprona where we set our scene.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, it really does just stand perfectly. In fact, two rival houses of magicians, ah the Montanas and... Montana? Montana. And Petrocchi.
00:07:00
Speaker
My Italian is not good. I apologize for mispronunciations. um And these are rival magical families ah which hate each other and are constantly getting into street fights. And that this is this is act one scene, one of Romeo and Juliet. You don't need me to go through it.
00:07:16
Speaker
Yes. um Now, one thing I did think was really interesting, even from the very beginning of this book, is... So my my copy has a little note at the beginning saying, just so you know, children, this is set in Italy that is not unified.
00:07:31
Speaker
In your world, Italy is one country. In this world, it is not. This is not a little note that you need at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, because Romeo and Juliet is set in the 16th century. ah Magicians of Caprona begins in the present tense.
00:07:43
Speaker
um It starts out here in Italy, in the city of Caprona. ah We have this problem. we have These are some things that you might see if you go to Caprona. It's a little tourist guide to Caprona, which is also a prologue.
00:07:58
Speaker
Right. And then says, you know, in spite of the recent troubles, these are the things that are happening. So you what addition to and I went, no.
00:08:08
Speaker
So I was like, this can't be another troubles book. It can't be another troubles book. It's
Thematic Connections: 'Spellcoats' and 'Caprona'
00:08:12
Speaker
not very much, but it is. It's not a Troubles book. It's not not a Troubles book, but it is a modern book. It's, I think, even more so than... So this is a sequel to Charmed Life.
00:08:25
Speaker
Charmed Life, when it begins, drops you into what seems like a kind of Edwardian England. And it's not really until Janet arrives. Janet, who was in a parallel world in the nineteen seventy s that you realize that that time period in Charmed Life is meant to be sort of equivalent to our own time period here.
00:08:45
Speaker
But Magicians of Caprona is a modern book. It starts out in the present tense. You as a reader are like, oh, this is happening now. This is the kind of thing that could happen now, despite the fact that we are in an alternate Italy and the events that are happening are mostly drawn from sixteenth century tragedies.
00:09:01
Speaker
which I think is kind of an interesting choice. And then, you know, they've got cars, they've got telephones, they've got when the war comes, because the war does come, they've got guns and shells. We've not got, it's not sabers and knights. It's, it's all the technology is recognizable.
00:09:19
Speaker
Right. I will say it feels more, certainly more 40s than say 80s to me in that like we have cars sure but they're still a bit unusual and you have uh the great sequence where the montana family visits the ducal palace in caprona and they take their magic coach and horses uh which are actually made of cardboard and only animated by magic um but and it starts to rain on the way home and the coach is all apart And this is what finally sends the head of the family to go, right, I'm writing a letter to Ferrari and a letter to Rolls Royce. We're getting a car. Right. A kind of a point of technological change, technological cusp. So there is like more of a historical feeling than totally contemporary.
00:10:04
Speaker
But you're right. It does feel more modern than Charmed Life by some way. And that might be just by virtue of the fact that it's, well, by virtue of the fact that it's a follow-up. And so she knows that it's contemporaneous to the seventies in some way, if you match them up and she's feeling bit more confident mixing and matching historical and modern.
00:10:22
Speaker
um But I do think the right of of story time is always now and here. Exactly. And I do think we're entering a decade that does a lot with time and that does a lot with sort of where the history being present, the you know the past being now.
00:10:36
Speaker
And it's fun to think of Caprona in a little bit of a way as being in conversation with that, though it's not doing very much with that, as certainly not as much with that as we're going to see later on. Because it's fluff. It's not just fluff, but Caprona is so frothy. It's like eating a meringue.
00:10:54
Speaker
ah's not I mean, there's lots in Caprona that's dark and even very dark. But the tone is intentionally light the whole way through, I think. It does feel almost like a little bit like a relief after Delmarg. We've had a couple of very, you know, difficult and dense books back to back.
00:11:10
Speaker
And then Caprona is charming. Yes. And this is actually one of the things that I think we teased this a little bit in our Q&A episode. But I think one of the theories that you came up with is that there you know, you often get these pairs of books in Diana Wynne-Jones where it seems like, you know, some of the themes of one that's being written at one time that are kind of ah one maybe more serious and weighty book kind of come up again refracted in ah in the next book or in the book right before ah that's a little bit lighter and a little bit fluffier and a little bit more fun. And there are some matching themes between Spellcoats and Magicians of Caprona.
Family Dynamics: Typical vs. Functional
00:11:45
Speaker
This is something my wife actually pointed out when I was talking about these books, ah that both of these, much more than the vast majority of other Diana Wynne-Jones books, are actually set in a functional family.
00:11:58
Speaker
They're about a family unit that is threatened not by forces internal to the family, as is often, as as is usually happening in Diana Wynne-Jones, but by an external war that is happening that threatens to break the family apart. But the family in and of itself is is a unit. They work together well. They love each other. That's never in question.
00:12:19
Speaker
Right. This is almost unheard of in Diana Wynne-Jones, a genuinely happy family, which you're right, they're the happy and like secure sibling relationships, which are a source of strength and encouragement for the characters. This is not something we've seen before, apart from in spellcoats,
00:12:35
Speaker
And it's very seldom. I'm not sure I can think of an instance where we see it again. Possibly Durkholm. But Durkholm is also of threatened internally, but by... Well, Durkholm is complicated and we'll get there. But largely speaking, Durkholm is a happy family and we're meant to see it as a dirt as a happy family.
00:12:53
Speaker
But we know that this is a happy family because it has the hallmark of what we've seen as good parentage in previous, you know, kind of stand in Diana Wynne-Jones' good parents. When you're unhappy, they come.
00:13:05
Speaker
One of the things that's ah really notable about, so their family of spellcasters are protagonists, Tinino and Paolo. I think Tinino is the primary protagonist, but we get, we kind of slide in between the heads of these two sort of you know, 10 and 11 year old, I would guess, 11 and 12 year old.
00:13:21
Speaker
I forget if it says exactly how old they are. Boys within this family who are the grandsons of the head of the family. And Paolo, who's the slightly older, is clever.
00:13:32
Speaker
ah Notably, he's, you know, he's very quick to pick things up. He's very, you know, sort of fits perfectly within the family. Tanino, who is slightly younger, ah is ah sad, a little bit more sad, and a little bit more stressed because he's slow. He can't seem to pick up spells.
00:13:48
Speaker
But no one ever makes him feel bad for this. Everyone is very, very concerned that he should feel at home and loved. And one of the first scenes we get is Tanino is sad because he's you know feeling insecure because he can't pick up spells.
00:14:02
Speaker
And the entire her family immediately picks up on this. And they're all like, oh, you know, they all come out into the yard and the courtyard to like talk to each other about and be like, how, what are we going to do about Tonino? He's gone off somewhere to be sad.
00:14:14
Speaker
This is, this is Crestomancy, actually. Crestomancy, the good father comes when he's called, when you call his name. ah This Ammon Libby. They come when you call them.
00:14:25
Speaker
And the entire Montana family, as soon as someone needs them, they are there. They are going to try and solve your problem. In fact, this turns out to be one of the ways in which... um the villain of this book is able to use this against them, right?
00:14:40
Speaker
By putting Tonino in danger, ah she's then able to wind up the Montana family. And they do come when they're cool, but they don't always do the right or most useful thing. They're very easy to just sort of like point in a direction. and that direction is often the wrong direction.
00:14:56
Speaker
But they do it fully. i so I think I may be projecting a little because when I work on a book, I do often have like ah a second secret book in my back pocket, which is just for jokes to make me laugh. But it does feel like Joan sometimes does the same set of themes twice, once as tragedy, once as farce.
00:15:12
Speaker
And this one is definitely the farce. But the other thing, the other theme that Jones picks up is this idea of the doubled self. And we talked about this quite a lot at the end of season one, the idea of the multiple self in Jones's work, right?
00:15:25
Speaker
ah The idea that a person will see themselves in someone else and either love or hate them. But in doing so, they can come to understand themselves better and become greater. Right.
00:15:36
Speaker
And we talked about how Jones in her essays goes into like almost the the Jungian idea of the sort of the inner self, the shadow self, the animus or anima. ah The theme or the thesis of Magicians of Caprona is that inside every comedy Italian aunt, there is a secret second hidden girl self who is also a comedy Italian aunt.
00:16:02
Speaker
Yes, 100%. And
Character Interactions & Broader Themes
00:16:04
Speaker
That's it. That's the book. So every we learn a lot about Tonino's family. Right. We learn about a lot about Tonino Montana, who I think is the primary protagonist.
00:16:14
Speaker
And he has around him brothers, sisters, siblings, cousins, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and academic great uncle at the university. Like we get lots and lots and lots and lots of detail about who exactly is who in the Montana family.
00:16:29
Speaker
And then we meet their enemies, their rivals, the the bad guys, in Tonino's opinion for the first half of the book, the Petrochies. And they're exactly the same. but It's when Paolo goes to the Petrochi house for the first time later on in the book.
00:16:46
Speaker
And the Petrolchis are doing the exact same Montana thing of all coming when they're needed because they're all trying to stop Renata Petrolchi from going on with Paola Montana, even though he don't they don't know that he's Paola Montana yet. And he goes, an obvious uncle was leaning over the gallery, an obvious aunt shot out of the kitchen. Like he recognizes exactly who all these people are because they match up perfectly.
00:17:08
Speaker
And of course, the fundamental doubled self in Caprona is Tonino and Paolo have exact equivalent opposites who are also protagonists, who are the two daughters of the Petrochi family.
00:17:23
Speaker
Angelica and Renata. And just like Paolo and Tonito, Renata is a very functional Petrachi. We don't, you know, sort of learn as much about her, her how she fits into the family as we do with Paolo, but we can assume because we see her being very protective of her younger sister, Angelica, who is notorious for getting spells wrong and having once turned her father green.
00:17:44
Speaker
Right. And I was talking to you about this and we came up with, in a way, Crestomancy is kind of the childhood neurodivergence series. Jones wouldn't necessarily have put it that way herself, certainly not in the early 80s.
00:17:58
Speaker
ah But she did write about Cat, that she saw that character as autistic. And indeed, a lot of the problem of Charmed Life is about failed failed communication and Cat's difficulty understanding what other people think or want or experience.
00:18:14
Speaker
aim to achieve through him. Yes. And then Magicians of Caprona is even more straightforwardly a kind of disability parable story in which Tonino and Angelica both have a problem that makes them feel outcast or weird in their family of amazing magicians. They're not particularly good at magic.
00:18:35
Speaker
Tonino's not good at magic because he he calls himself slow. Yes. ah He can't focus on school stuff. He doesn't find it interesting. He can't remember things. Honestly, putting on my teacher hat from another life, if I had a kid who behaved like Tonino in a class of mine, I'd be like, can we get this child assessed for ADD?
00:18:52
Speaker
Meanwhile, on Angelica's side, she has a very straightforward, very clear magic dyslexia, where she does spells back to front and inside out. And she is also in a world where in a book where spells are based on being able to sing them correctly. She is tone deaf. Yeah, what they say to each other when they meet, um which is in distressed circumstances that we'll get into later.
00:19:14
Speaker
But he says, I hardly know any spells. I'm slow. He had expected Angelica to laugh, and she did. But he thought she'd need not have laughed in such a mean, exultant way, nor keep saying, oh, that's good like that.
00:19:26
Speaker
What's so
Challenges of Tonino and Angelica
00:19:27
Speaker
funny, he said. You can laugh. I know all about you turning your father green. You're no better than me. Want to bet, said Angelica, still laughing. No, said Tonino, just make the spell.
00:19:37
Speaker
I can't, said Angelica. It was Tonino's turn to stare and Angelica's turn to blush. A thin, bright pink spread right up to the bulge of her forehead and she put her chin up defiantly. I'm hopeless spells, she said.
00:19:49
Speaker
I've never got a spell right in my life. Seeing Tonino still staring, she said, it's a pity you didn't bet. I'm much worse than you are. Right, so ah exact parallel between the two. Everyone has their equal opposite other self.
00:20:03
Speaker
um And Tonino finds himself again in Angelica in that they both struggle with this core requirement of how to be who they are within their families they can't do magic right. And again, I think it's really notable that like Diana Wynne-Jones is making a really explicit point of saying that the problem is not the kids' families. You know, when we first learn about Tonino's slowness, says Tonino was sometimes quite depressed about his slowness.
00:20:26
Speaker
Nobody else minded in the least. And when we find out about Angelica, ah He says, doesn't your family mind? And she says, not much. They don't mind it half as much as I do. Everyone has a good laugh every time I make a new mistake.
00:20:37
Speaker
The family is actually being as supportive as they can be on both sides. But this doesn't stop the kids from feeling inadequate and like they are not living up. to the expectations set for them as members of these illustrious spell families.
00:20:50
Speaker
Something else I think is interesting actually about the family is that Tonino's parents are part of this story, but they're as much part of the story as kind of any other Montana. But
Family Expectations: Tonino's Parents
00:21:01
Speaker
one of the first things that we hear about Tonino's parents is that they also are a bit different.
00:21:07
Speaker
um They're sort of outsiders within that family. ah The description we get of them is that Antonio was a thin, worried person who laughed less often than the other Montanas. He was different.
00:21:17
Speaker
One of the differences was that instead of letting old Niccolo carefully choose a wife for him from a spell house in Italy, Antonio had gone on a visit to England and come back married to Elizabeth. So their father is anxious and doesn't kind of fit into this.
00:21:32
Speaker
jolly background of all the loud, talkative, enthusiastic Montanans. And their mother is from England, is from a different country, which lets her bring in a lot of English elements, but otherwise she might not be able to, which I think she doesn't feel quite comfortable with that.
00:21:45
Speaker
But also, you know, their mother is an outsider in this family. And i I'm curious what you make of the fact that that's true. Well, I think it's honestly, I think it's really funny that Elizabeth, like structurally, Elizabeth is there to justify Crestomancy turning Because it doesn't make much sense for Crestomancy to be there, except that he and Elizabeth are old friends. And in fact, this whole book, you're like, why is this a Crestomancy book?
00:22:10
Speaker
You just kind of feel you had to after the last one won awards. But I mean, that's not quite true, because Crestomancy is great fun as a character. He sidles onto the page and starts making jokes. Right.
Crestomancy's Comedic Role
00:22:21
Speaker
And unlike Cat, Tonino recognizes that Chris Devancy is making jokes. He's allowed to be funny from early on ah because he's not the dark gothic stranger in Tonino's story. He's just a guy who turns up.
00:22:33
Speaker
Right. In fact, he almost fulfills the role of clown. Not even that. No, in fact, he's the opposite. That he's a straight man because he turns up and immediately the the whole Casa Montana ah erupts in various alarms and excursions trying to entertain this important guest.
00:22:51
Speaker
while Crestomancy stands there and makes jokes about it. So he's yeah he's an enabler of comedy. Yes. say you And he's also the one who points out, you know, they're they're all running around having drama around him. And he goes, what a very Italian scene.
00:23:03
Speaker
So he's queuing us up into how we're supposed to look sometimes at some of this drama, which is, ah you know, you've all seen ah you've all seen movies like this. You've all seen stories like this where everyone runs around and has high Italian drama and Crestomancy.
00:23:19
Speaker
An English person is here to watch it and go, huh, this is kind of funny. Right. in fact, I would say this is, this is, uh, Crestomancy is almost the reader character, reader insert, right? Going, hmm, this is kind of funny. I do enjoy a comedy and Italian. inity yeah you They not set so much in Italy as in story world Italy from England, which is this also true of Romeo and Juliet.
00:23:42
Speaker
And also speaking of Romeo and Juliet. So I might also argue that it is in fact, uh, Rosa's, we're kind of cued that so that Tonino and Paolo have an older sister, Rosa, as we said, Rosa is Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. She, although we don't find this out till the very end of the book, ah she has a boyfriend called Marco.
00:24:01
Speaker
ah Rosa and Marco are coming in and out of the story all throughout the book. And at the very end, we discover that Marco is in fact, Marco Petrachi. He and Rosa have been constructing an elaborate, really elaborate. They're already married.
00:24:16
Speaker
That's my favorite part. So the Montanos have been like slowly considering could this Marco boy be good enough for our Rosa? Shall we plan the wedding? Meanwhile, Rosa actually married him months ago and Angelica was a bridesmaid. Which, to be fair, just like Romeo and Julia, they also get married right in Act 2 or 3.
00:24:36
Speaker
um and then spent you know the rest of the play. it But they've sorted themselves right out. They have constructed an elaborate web of lies. ah Rosa has herself a fake English sister.
00:24:47
Speaker
Everyone thinks she's Rosa Smith. pat tro where Marco has himself a fake brother. Everyone thinks he's Mario Andretti. The fake relatives have turned up at the Petrarchian Montana houses and like introduced themselves. You're right, there's a whole enormously complicated cahoots plot going on in the background.
00:25:06
Speaker
Which we only get to see light the edges of, which I think is part of the the the comedy feel of the whole book, right? There's a whole
Romeo and Juliet in Marco and Rosa's Story
00:25:13
Speaker
lot of silliness happening where you just get minor characters dash on, do a comedy bit and dash off again.
00:25:18
Speaker
ah That's how you know that Marco and Rosa are going to last because they've been in the cahoots from, you know, they were like the easy part was falling in love and wanting to get married. The hard part was setting Which is not surprising because we have seen when you meet your other self, your mirror, your double self, you instantly fall in love.
00:25:36
Speaker
and this is the book where Jones goes what if I made that heterosexual yeah she's never done that before and she's like I could do it in the blink of an eye here's Marco and Rosa you love them aren't they charming they've been in cahoots for a hundred pages and look at the elaborate cahoots plot they've spun and you're like oh wow Yeah, okay.
00:25:54
Speaker
I do believe that these kids are- It is totally persuasive. I'm roasting for them. I want a 26 episode talk about Marco and Rosa and their elaborate web of lies. ah One of the things that I think is funniest is that Rosa's fake sister is in fact the the English girl that one of her cousins is crushing on. And this is the cousin who is Tybalt in the Romeo and Juliet story. So they've got that whole thing going on around the edges.
00:26:18
Speaker
Right. So Rosa has this this handsome, talented, ah brilliant magician cousin ah who is slowly revealed over the course of the book as vain and shallow and cowardly. And we'll talk a bit more about Ronaldo and this figure of the sort of failed masculine role model. Yes.
00:26:34
Speaker
But I do think we're... You're right, he's Tickle, because he's the prince of cats. oh But Rosa, I think that we are set up to think that part of the reason that this is a successful comedy Romeo and Juliet and not a tragic Romeo and Juliet is that Rosa is half English.
00:26:51
Speaker
ah Rosa has an independent attitude. We're told that Elizabeth certainly encouraged Rosa in her independent attitude, and Benvenuto, who is the family cat, informed Tinnito that it was the English way. Cats liked English people, he added.
00:27:04
Speaker
So because Rosa is independent-minded in English, ah instead of ah falling on her own sword and dying about her tragic romance, she rolls up her sleeves and is like, let's come down with a sensible web of lies so she can have everything she wants. This is a B-plot, right? We're into Rosa and Marka because they're extremely funny, but they're not actually the point of the book because the point of the book is...
00:27:29
Speaker
that there is something terribly wrong in Caprona. And it is not clear to Tonino what it is. It is not clear to most the children what it is. And a lot of what's dark in this book is the slow-growing sense of war in the
War, Childhood, and Author's Experiences
00:27:45
Speaker
background. yeah The children are not not just ignorant of her but being largely sheltered from, I think, by their worried and anxious elders.
00:27:53
Speaker
Tonino in particular seems to be protected by his family from really understanding a lot of what's going on. But Caprona is presented as a a fairly weak state, which is only kept supported by the efforts of its spellhouses, the Montanas and the Petrochies.
00:28:08
Speaker
And the Montanas and Petrochies hate each other so much that they are weakening the whole country. And in the course of that, Caprona's political enemies, who are, by the way, Florence, Pisa and Siena, so you can look on a map and see exactly where Caprona is supposed to be.
00:28:24
Speaker
Or threatening to invade. Yes. And Crestomancy turns up quite early on. You know, I remembered him just kind of coming in at the end, but he's actually, he's popping in and out all through. ah He comes in and says, well, I'm an employee of the British government, so there's really only so much I'm supposed to interfere in this Italian war, but I can try and go to Rome and see if there's some other Italian states that might help you.
00:28:46
Speaker
And then... In the background, you know, there's this sort of slowly growing ominous threat that is mostly manifested Tonino and Paolo, our point of view characters, as adult adults getting increasingly worried at home, pulling up, you know, old spells and documents and looking at their uniforms and going, oh, my God, moths have got into them.
00:29:05
Speaker
And at school, you know, teachers are getting called up to be reservists. ah Suddenly, you know, their their classroom curriculum is sort of different. Everything just feels the world is going strange.
00:29:17
Speaker
in ways that feel increasingly ominous. And that reminded me quite a lot of the ways that Diana Wynne-Jones talks about her own childhood in World War two Right, what she said that when I was a child, the world went mad.
00:29:29
Speaker
And ah and and that that does seem to be the the feeling that Tonino gets. that The world is going mad around him. Yes. And I do think, so the fact that this is both a war book and a little bit of a troubles book, I think those things kind of get, kind of marry to each other in interesting ways.
00:29:45
Speaker
ah do think that you feel... This is a war book in a very different way than Spellcoats is a war book, right? Because Spellcoats is a war book in that the war has happened. And as we progress through the book, we sort of see its aftermath.
00:29:58
Speaker
Gull, the oldest sibling, comes back and he's got magic PTSD along with other ailments. ah The father dies. Horrible things. they They're floating down the river. They see bodies. Whereas in Spellcoats, the war itself doesn't happen until more or less the last chapter or two.
00:30:16
Speaker
What we're getting is mostly just kind of the ominous buildup, the feeling of the world slowly going mad. And what we're actually seeing on page, meanwhile, is the battles between the Montanas and the Petrokes and how those are disrupting the city, how they're making people afraid to go out when the Montanas and Petrokes are fighting in the middle of the square.
00:30:35
Speaker
They blast each other. The main square gets completely torn apart. And then it gets put back again because of magic. But like, you know, oh oh, no, these two sides are going to clash.
00:30:45
Speaker
everyone get into... Oh, hang on. I'm actually going to read the passage out. Every ordinary citizen, as soon as they saw the entire Casa Montana advancing on the entire Casa Petrochi, made haste to get off the street.
00:30:58
Speaker
People knocked on the doors of perfect strangers and were let in without question. The manager of Grossi's, the biggest shop in Caprona, threw open his plate glass doors and sent his assistants out to fetch in every everyone nearby, after which he clapped the door shut and locked the steel grill down in front of them.
00:31:13
Speaker
From between the bars, white faces stared out at the oncoming spellmakers. And a troop of reservists, newly called up in sloppily marching and crumpled new uniforms, were horrified to find themselves caught between the two parties.
00:31:25
Speaker
They broke and ran as one crumpled reservist and sought frantic shelter in the arsenal. So this is a a civil war. This is a disruption of the blitz. Yes, that's true, actually. This is the siren went off. Everybody get inside.
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, 100 percent. um And it's sort of like married and mixed together with this idea of civil discourse, of of civil civil blood making civil hands unclean, as it were.
00:31:49
Speaker
But if you are writing in the 80s and your childhood is in the 40s, then perhaps you just can't help pulling in a little bit of the troubles in here and you can't help pulling in a little bit of the blitz.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, i think I think those both are sort of underpinning this. To be clear, the magical jewel between the Montanas and the Petrogues is still fun. Oh, yes, absolutely. This is a comedy book.
00:32:11
Speaker
So it's all, you know. turning each other into weird things there's a whole sequence with an elephant and a mouse uh there's a giant tomato there's there's ah a lot of uh flying cow pats at one point there is a lot of what you might call scatological humor and there there's a lot of shit in this this is this is uh it's funny but it's specifically uh funny to in a children's book way it's stuff that makes kids yes um But it's also, you know, there could not have been more mess if Caprona had been invaded by the armies of Florence, Pisa, and Siena. We see
Comedic Juxtaposition with War Themes
00:32:43
Speaker
very little of the actual war.
00:32:45
Speaker
This stuff is standing in for the actual war because you're right it is, in fact, the real problem in Caprona is not the menacing armies out on the hills, although people are dying about the menacing armies out on the hills, but the divide between these two spell families who are, in fact, perfect mirrors of each other.
00:33:03
Speaker
and have hated each other reflexively sight for decades. ah Centuries, in fact. We're we're told the end has been, i think, two or three centuries since the original argument.
00:33:14
Speaker
And interestingly, ah what we hear about the original argument, first we're told the story through Tonino hearing it from older siblings and cousins. And they say, listen, what happened was ah the ah ancient head of the Petrachi family insulted ah the head of our family So ah they invited him to dinner and turned all his all his insulting words into spaghetti and made him eat it.
00:33:40
Speaker
And he got very sick because everyone hates having to eat their words. Which is an extremely funny story. What Tonino then discovers, ah later in the book Tonino is kidnapped.
00:33:51
Speaker
There is a mysterious force at work which is egging on all this conflict and encouraging the menace of the external armies. And encouraging the division between the Montanans and Petrarchi's. And Tonino is kidnapped by this force, along with Angelica Petrarchi.
00:34:05
Speaker
And he's stuck with her in a prison, effectively, ah which we eventually find is a cardboard box. They've been shrunk and put in the box. And he says, and Angelica starts telling him the story.
00:34:18
Speaker
of how her ancestor turned the old Montana's insult into spaghetti and made him eat them. And you're like, wait a minute. And it's clear that actually both families know the same story of eating your words told the other way around.
00:34:32
Speaker
And it must be a lie. yep Yep. It's the same lie on both sides, which means that two centuries ago, these two guys carefully worked out identical lies to tell their families about what they're arguing about.
00:34:46
Speaker
And ever since then, But that is part of the point of the the feud in Romeo and Juliet, right? So you never know how or why it started because there can be no justification good enough.
00:34:57
Speaker
It doesn't matter how or why it started because it's stupid no matter And this Wilkins' tooth again. An eye for an eye ah is, you know, is no way to go about your life. And the Montanas and Petrochies have been an eye for an eyeing it for 200 years.
00:35:11
Speaker
Right. And, you know, Ronaldo, the the dashing masculine Tybalt, in fact, ah awful cousin, you know, early in the book comes comes home because he's got a cut on his head because he got in a fight with some Petrarchis in the street. Clearly they were biting their thumbs at each other or whatever.
00:35:28
Speaker
And then he he harps on that through the whole book. ah You know, when Rosa and Marco's secret comes out, he's like, this scum knocked me down, and knocked my head open and you marry it. Oh, you're thinking, Ronaldo, what were you doing at the time, exactly? Absolutely not get over it.
00:35:43
Speaker
But when we talk about Ronaldo, I want to talk a little bit about the idea that eating your words, because I do think that this is another way in which this book is a comedy mirror of spell codes, is the importance of the magic of words.
The Power of Words and Magic
00:35:55
Speaker
You know, we're told that in Caprona, you know, it's the spells are words and music, but... What we actually hear vary on, but Paolo Antonino and Montana were told over and over again, a spell is the right words delivered in the right way.
00:36:10
Speaker
This is a spell code. This is... Yeah, you're right. It is. Interestingly, it's not at all how magic worked in Charm Blower. not at all. And although there is music at play, ah music is largely irrelevant to the story because they know the tune of the spell that they want. there They want the spell to the words of the Angel of Caprona.
00:36:30
Speaker
And they know that you. So the um underlying problem that everyone is trying to solve is that they've been told there's this evil enchanter at work in Caprona who can only be defeated by finding an ancient magical spell, which Crestamazzi tells us is divine in origin.
00:36:48
Speaker
It was given to the ah city of Caprona by an angel. And they know the tune because they sing the tune every day, but they don't know the right words. And if you know the right words to this divine spell, this, if you like, God spell or gospel, that's what that is.
00:37:07
Speaker
Once you know the right words and can deliver them in the right way, that will defeat the evil at work in Caprona and everything will be fine. Yep. Yeah, that's spell codes. Yeah.
00:37:18
Speaker
That's how magic works there. And here it's, well, here it is specifically a a spell that has been handed down to them from an angel. ah yeah then The theology of this book is bonkers.
00:37:33
Speaker
Like, to be clear, for the purposes of magicians of Caprona, Catholicism is completely and 100% factual. yeah We are confirmed angels and demons in the Crestomancy universe.
00:37:45
Speaker
They've never appeared before and will never appear again. But Crestomancy himself is the one confirming it, so presumably it must be true. Yeah. And the there's two deus ex machina figures, right? There's Crestomancy, who represents the loving, benevolent, lightly corrupt arm of the British government, which has no right to interfere, but will be interfering anyway. Because they're friends.
00:38:07
Speaker
It feels like a very 20th century British children's fiction thing. It's fine. He's here. It's fine. He's not acting in his official capacity. He is immensely powerful, though.
00:38:18
Speaker
Don't worry about it Yeah. And then there's even ah a sequence, have you got the quote? There's a sequence where ah they say, we're not asking you to do anything corrupt. And he's like, oh, please ask me to be corrupt. Oh, I don't think I have the quote, unfortunately. funny bit I might try and dig it out in a second.
00:38:33
Speaker
But right, so that's one deus ex machinus, Crestomancy himself, representing the benevolent power of British british imperialism, presumably. And the other deus ex-Mansina is literally the angel who comes down from on high.
00:38:45
Speaker
And by on high, we mean on top of the cathedral where the Archbishop of Caprona has been blessing people this whole time. But you do find yourself wondering, so when Crestamancey went to Rome, was he going to see the Pope?
00:38:57
Speaker
You're a punk in this universe! But it's not like it's interesting that even though we've got the angel and we've got divine origin, none of it is treated with like religious reference reverence or anything like that.
00:39:10
Speaker
Religion is specifically a form of magic. It's the right words in the right and the first word, so that the spell to the angel of Caprona is in Latin, that the proper spell, the proper words. And the first word you actually get of it is Carmen, which means song or chant in Italian, and is the origin of the root word for charm.
00:39:28
Speaker
what When we first hear about the angel of Caprona, Uncle Umberto, the Montana learned university uncle, says the angel of Caprona is a spell like any other spell and without the proper words any spell is only at half force even if it is of divine origin what religion is is just slightly better magic it's nothing to do with divinity you know the the Montanas all go to church at one point and they all sing the hymn the angel of Caprona and everybody gets this sort of vague look on their face because they're all stressing about trying to find the right words
00:40:03
Speaker
Right, but there is in fact a divine war between good and evil at at work in this book because the ultimate conflict is about an angel and a devil.
Character Parallels & Thematic Depth
00:40:12
Speaker
Remember how they said was Romeo and Juliet and the White Devil?
00:40:15
Speaker
Yes. The White Devil is, ah I think, slightly less famous, although still quite famous, ah tragedy of the 17th century, early 17th century. yeah ah John Webster was a younger contemporary of Shakespeare's.
00:40:29
Speaker
ah The White Devil is a play, which I read it ah this month and I went he thought of a really good title first yeah yeah there's not much white devil in it kind of feels to me like Jones ah read the white devil and it's like needs more devil yes And accordingly, in Caprona, there is a literal white devil at work in the city.
00:40:52
Speaker
And the ultimate comeuppance she will face, and it is a she because it's a horrible older woman. course. Of course. ah She is, in fact, going to get turned into a rat and eaten by cats.
00:41:04
Speaker
Stop me if you've heard this one. It is the climax of... Wilkins Tooth. Which is climax of ah what appears to be Jones's favorite fairy tale, Puss in Boots. It's also the failed climax of Spellcoats. Yes! It also has an evil enchanter that is putting war in the city and and causing all the problems for fun.
00:41:24
Speaker
um and And they they meet Ken Creedon in Spellcoats and they're like, could you maybe turn yourself into a rat for us? He's like, no, I'm not that stupid. But in Magicians of Caprona, because this is a comedy, in some ways a farce, she is that stupid. She gets, well, I guess it's not really her fault. ah No, no, she's completely turned back into a rat, which is revealed to be her true form by Crestomancy. That's the other reason he's here, is to is to turn the villain into a rat.
00:41:51
Speaker
And then eaten by her other self. Can we talk about the cats? Okay. Yes. Let's talk about the cats. So in, in terms of having ah parallel ah alternate selves, ah this is even true down to the family pets.
00:42:06
Speaker
So each of the Casas, the Casa Montana, Casa Petrochi has an army of cats and cats are magical. We'll come back to magical cats in the Crestomancy sort of series actually.
00:42:17
Speaker
We've actually already had one, but he was much less of a presence than... So yeah Cat had his cat Fiddle, who was one of his lives. So so like the cat theme is running through, but the magical cats of Caprona, the boss cat of Casa Montana is Benvenuto. And Benvenuto is fully a character, and in quite fact, quite an important character in Magicians of Caprona.
00:42:40
Speaker
He's Canino's male role model and masculine guidance through life. Yes. I think Greg Benito is really explicitly mirrored to Ronaldo, who is Paolo's male role model, who is, of course, the older dashing cousin who always has the right words to Oh, hang on. Actually, i'm going to find a description of Ronaldo because I think it's great.
00:43:02
Speaker
Ronaldo is Everything came easily to Ronaldo. Girls fell in love with him. Spells dripped from his pen. Paolo admired Ronaldo desperately. He told Tonino that Ronaldo was a true Montana.
00:43:15
Speaker
Tonino agreed because he was more than a year younger than Paolo and balot palos valued Paolo's opinions. But it always seemed to him that it was Paolo who was the true Montana. And then later we find out that because Ronaldo is trying to impress this English girl, he's taken to wearing black with a red scarf at his neck like a bandit.
00:43:32
Speaker
He was said to be considering growing a bandit mustache too. So Ronaldo roves all around town, being dashing, getting into fights, getting into fights with the Petrokes. He is, as we've said, Tybalt, the king of cats.
00:43:43
Speaker
And so does Benvenuto. Benvenuto is scarred. Benvenuto is literally the king of cats. He's scarred all over from fights that he's had all over town. He's seduced every lady cat in the neighborhood.
00:43:55
Speaker
ah But unlike Ronaldo, Benvenuto is true and loyal and loves to know best of anybody in the world. Whereas we know that Ronaldo is, in fact, ah evil, a fraud.
00:44:05
Speaker
He's not evil, but he is a fraud. Because he doesn't appreciate it. He's cowardly, he's vain, he's self-absorbed, which is a character type we'll come back Yes, it's a character type.
00:44:18
Speaker
Yes. It is a character type we'll come back to. It's also a character type, though, that we've had before. I think it's very funny that Ronaldo is just the Italian form of the name Ronald. We've had a cousin. There's this ah shitty older cousin ah who initially seems like a great role model, but the more you get to know about him, the more he's a shallow facade and not much else. the Ronald to Ronaldo pipeline is what if Cousin Ronald, what if we knew he was hot?
00:44:43
Speaker
And then... Well, we'll talk about the Ronaldo to other characters pipeline later. But the fact, the reason that we know that Ronaldo is no good, first of all, what what causes Paolo to realize that he's no good is that he doesn't appreciate Tonino.
00:44:56
Speaker
Tonino is not vain or selfish or cowardly like Ronaldo. Tonino has all of these qualities. And Benvenuto, the boss cat, recognizes these qualities in Tonino and picks Tonino as his favorite person. And Benvenuto also has, of course, an exact parallel in the Petrochi household, which who is the the Angelica's pet cat, the queen cat of the Petrochies, who is Vittoria.
00:45:18
Speaker
So yes, we're even doing cat heterosexuality this time. They do eventually have kittens. And Vittoria is the name of the... heroine villain of the White Devil, the titular White Devil, who is the the courtesan... A powerful and dangerous female sexuality. She's not a courtesan. She's in fact a noble woman, but she ensnares the Duke and thus causes this string of murders that happens in the White Devil. ah You know, revenge murders resonating on down. but in So we've we've actually split the figure of the White Devil in Webster into two halves.
00:45:52
Speaker
We've got the evil Duchess and... the beautiful white feminine cat named Vittoria, who eats the white Duchess at the end of the play. Which leaves me like, what are we supposed I don't want to... I don't want to analyse this. What does this mean? But I do think that there is something... So we've seen the split or the parallel, the matching between evil, white-coated, dangerous, older woman figure before
00:46:24
Speaker
ah who is doted on by the the clueless, you know, head of state or whatever. Oh, you're right. the companion and tipples. It's companion and tipples. ah And so, you know, looking at Vittoria and Benvenuto, there's something here where it's like too much gender is a bit suspicious in a human.
00:46:40
Speaker
But it's fine if you're a cat. Cats are supposed to have that much gender in them. What was I thinking about? I was thinking about the Duchess, I think is A fascinating character.
00:46:51
Speaker
She is a very much a person. like She's not just like a faceless force of evil. From her first appearance in the book, she does dominate any scene she's in. She's actually she's really fun to read, I think. yeah Tonino describes her as this powerful figure, this figure who's in control, ah who's very patient and kind with her husband, the Duke, who is presented as an idiot from the beginning.
00:47:14
Speaker
But Tonino notices she's letting us know how patient she is. And you're always aware of that Duchess's like carefully managed masks or appearances in which she is behaving exactly the way she should. And she's letting you know that that's what she's doing.
00:47:31
Speaker
And in doing so, ah drawing attention to everyone else's shortcomings. Yes, Tanina was not sure the Duchess was really like a saint. Her eyebrows were set in a strong, sarcastic arch and her mouth was tight with what looked like impatience.
00:47:46
Speaker
For a second, T'Nino thought he felt that impatience and a number of other unsaintly feelings, pouring into the room from behind the Duchess's waxy mask like a strong, rank smell. Yeah.
00:47:57
Speaker
So there's this image of the waxen mask, the Duchess's face, as opposed to her true self, which is a giant rat. Right. And instead she's put on this mask, much like Gwendolyn, of perfect saintly femininity yeah and being so, so kind to her sort of frustrating male counterpart.
00:48:18
Speaker
Right. And the thing that's the most frustrating about the Duke is that he is childish. Yes. And the way his childishness manifests is he is obsessed with Punch and Judy shows, which are comedy for children.
00:48:32
Speaker
Yes. And so there's something really interesting with the use of Punch and Judy in this book, I think. I think the scene that kind of has the most weight, the most heft in the whole book is when, so Tanino and Angelica have been kidnapped and They've woken up, they've found themselves in a strange place.
00:48:51
Speaker
Everything in this place seems a little bit unreal. It seems shoddy. You know, the that everything is painted to look like wood or like marble, but close to it's all she blobs of varnish and huge splinters.
00:49:06
Speaker
Everything's a little bit fake. And then... They realize that they have in fact been made small. They are in a stage set and they are being made to act out the play of Punch and Judy.
00:49:19
Speaker
Tenino's seen a Punch and Judy show earlier in the book and he laughed very hard and thought it was funny. This is in fact when he first meets the Duke because the Duke has also wandered in to see this Punch and Judy show. And now he's being made to live through it.
00:49:32
Speaker
Punch and Judy a comedy? Question mark? I mean, Punch and Judy is traditional children's entertainment with puppets ah in which the puppets carry out... violent horrors on each other and like there's a long tradition of children being entertained by violent horrors because children love violence uh like this is tom and jerry stuff right and in punch and judy that the plot is very traditional it's almost always a variation the same the dog steals the sausages punch gets in trouble punch is arrested uh punch beats up various people punch kills the baby ah punch kills his wife punch goes goes to get hanged for his crimes and punch hangs the hangman yeah
00:50:10
Speaker
ah And when Tonino is being forced to act out this Punch and Judy show, ah the first person he saw was the Duke of Caprona.
Punch and Judy: Exploring Themes
00:50:18
Speaker
He was sitting on a gilded chair and a glitter of buttons laughing gigantically.
00:50:22
Speaker
Tonino wondered how he could laugh like that at something so horrible until he remembered that he had stood himself a score of times and laughed himself sick at just the same thing. But those had been only puppets.
00:50:34
Speaker
Then it dawned on Tonino that the Duke thought they were puppets. He was laughing at the skill of the showman. There is, and think there's something so interesting in putting Punch and Judy, a comedy that, as you said, litters the body the stage with bodies, up against Romeo and Juliet and the White Devil.
00:50:52
Speaker
These classic tragedies that are often very, very funny in parts and that also litter the stage with bodies. Here is, um this is not an original insight. I think I got it from A.K. Larkwood.
00:51:05
Speaker
ah Comedy and tragedy function the same way, especially in theatre, ah which is that they both run on tension and fulfilled.
00:51:16
Speaker
So but if you see the play Oedipus Rex and Oedipus comes on at the start of the stage and says, hello, everyone, I'm here to find out who killed the old man with the previous king. Aha. The energy the tension is exactly the same as if you watch a clown walk onto the stage with a very tall pile of plates yes you know what's going to happen you know it's just waiting for the crash yeah um and this is the way in which comedy and tragedy function the same way and i think jones is interested this is why i was interested in like the comedy tragedy choices of this book
00:51:56
Speaker
Jones is interested in comedy and in children's comedy, but not just as ah like, can I write this? It's Why is it funny? Yeah.
00:52:07
Speaker
Why is this funny? Or why isn't this tragic? yeah And it's really striking that, you know, the the tragic element, the Romeo and Juliet in Caprona is funny. It is is a comedy B-plot the whole way through.
00:52:18
Speaker
But the comedy element, the Punch and Judy show, is horrible. It's awful. It's really the nastiest part of the book is Tonino finding himself forced to play Punch,
00:52:30
Speaker
And a sequence where he has to beat Angelica as Judy to death. And he's afraid he's really done it. He's afraid he's killed her. yes i love you they Even like with the minor characters, even the like the puppets, he's still very upset by it. The part where he has to quick the puppet baby off the stage and the Duchess, who is the the magical power, enchanting all the puppets to behave like they're alive.
00:52:51
Speaker
She goes out of her way to make the baby very realistic, to make it more horrible, but to also to entertain the audience more. And there are two kinds of entertainment happening in that audience. There's the Duke who doesn't know and who is laughing like a child and being impressed by the skill.
00:53:07
Speaker
And there's the Duchess and her followers. They know. And they're laughing because they know. And it's a cruelty. And it's the cruelty of comedy.
00:53:17
Speaker
Yes. And I do also think that there's a little bit of metatextuality in this scene as well. I think in addition to the power of words, we also have the the the power of a script, the power of being put into a stock part and forced to play that stock part.
00:53:35
Speaker
When we see Tonino railing against being a puppet, against being forced into these actions that he doesn't want to do. And the way that he gets out of this scene is he realizes ah that when the Duchess is running this show,
00:53:50
Speaker
She says the Duchess was the policeman in a sort of way. She was putting some of herself into all the puppets to make them work. And so he's able to cause her to collapse basically by getting to the punch for part of the punch and Judy show where punch hangs the policeman because the policeman is,
00:54:07
Speaker
the Duchess. But this is also, like in so many of her books, a bit of a description of how you write a story. You put a little bit of yourself into some of all, a little bit of yourself into all your puppets in order to make them go.
00:54:21
Speaker
And that's what's happening here is I think that, you know, as much as the Duchess is the villain of the story, which means she's probably in some way Diana Wynne-Jones's mother, I think she's also a little bit Diana Wynne-Jones. I think she's having a little bit of a comment, a joke on herself and a comment on herself.
00:54:37
Speaker
Right, because this figure of the powerful female sorceress who puts herself into her work and whose work shapes the world, that was Tanakui, right? Yeah, absolutely it was.
00:54:49
Speaker
And now she's putting the characters through their paces of this comedy or this tragedy. What makes it a comedy? What makes it a tragedy? The puppeteer, ah the author decides.
00:55:02
Speaker
And in the end, you know, all of the Montanas and the Petrochies who are these stock parts ah in, you know, they're the comedy Italian aunt, the comedy Italian uncle.
Resolution and Comedic Elements
00:55:12
Speaker
You know, that I think the individual characters, you know, the the characters that we focus on are very well realized, but all the background characters, you know, here's my aunt, here's my uncle, here's my cousin.
00:55:20
Speaker
And they all turn up at the palace to try and rescue Angelica Antonino, all of them except the the kids. And they all get turned into Punch and Judys. They all get turned into stock types. They get turned into puppets.
00:55:33
Speaker
It couldn't possibly be more literal that ultimately the white devil is puppeteering everything that happens in the city. Right. And they're all these stock types that there was no way of telling which puppet was who. They were punches, Judy's, hangman, sausage men, policemen and the odd devil or so over and over again. They're Tibbolts and comedy aunts and and university uncles over and over again, all just lying in a heap together.
00:55:56
Speaker
And, you know, it's a comedy because when they turn back, ah when they are turned back at the end, all the puppets have been shoved into a cardboard box. in a cart um and then they turn back into people and all of them- It's the Duke's coach, right? So it's like one coach and they turn back into people and this is like, you know, several dozen people and it's one very small coach. Right, and it's just a clown car sequence. It's a literal clown car.
00:56:20
Speaker
Erupting from the coach. Exactly. more than we could actually have fitted it in the first place. Right. So it's like, where's the turn, right? Like you can sort of see, I think, through the book, her looking at the beats of comedy and tragedy and being like, it is in my power.
00:56:34
Speaker
I can write a happy ending. I can write a comedy. It is in my power to make this story that I've built up out of several funny tragedies and a horrifying comedy into a comedy.
00:56:45
Speaker
Where am I going to do it? And there's a couple of beats, I think, in this book that in any book of the seventies would have turned this to ah tragedy. There's a moment towards the end where Benvenuto has come to rescue tiny puppet-sized Angelica and Tonino and they give him a note to take away and he goes running away again.
00:57:03
Speaker
And then there's the sound of guns and Tonino thinks Benvenuto has been shot. This is Cart and Quitter. My horse has been shot. that My beloved horse has been shot. This is Dog's body. My beloved dog I'm never going to see again.
00:57:16
Speaker
And it's not until you hesitate to kill your pets. Exactly. But in this book... No, wait. Benvenuto's a cat. Benvenuto's a cat. It's all lives! And so we see him, you know, two chapters later, he delivers the note to Paolo and the text says it takes more than that to kill Benvenuto.
00:57:33
Speaker
You can just decide not to kill the pet. Actually, we just decide for everything to be fine. You can have your deus ex machina come down at the end and say, well, you found the right words. They were here.
00:57:44
Speaker
You can now sing the right spell. And the war is over, actually. The war is over. It's not a problem. Don't worry about that. It turns out that Pisa, Florence and Siena are all fine, actually, and everything's going to be all right.
00:57:57
Speaker
because it But what actually has defeated ah evil and allowed them to find the words was the fact that Angelica and Tonino and then Paolo and Renata ah Marco and Rosa all worked together and overcame the differences and embraced their other selves in some cases, typically marrying them.
00:58:18
Speaker
but um And in so doing, ah reunited Caprona as one complete city of weird wizards. Right. Everyone with an equally matched weird wizard across the way. At the end, they're all going to have a party at the Petroquis. The Petroquis have invited the Montanas to have a party at their house.
00:58:37
Speaker
The two comedy great uncles have turned up together to hang out with. old niccolo who is the head of the montanas and stop him from going to the party because he's too ill everybody everybody is is aligned and matched up personally i actually think that the two comedy great uncles have maybe been having a secret affair on the side all along who could say perfectly plausible because everybody is in love with their secret double right like Obviously, Rosa and Marco get married, but I feel fairly sure that Paolo and Renata are eventually going to get married, or at least that we're meant to be able to read it that way.
00:59:08
Speaker
Tonino and Angelica, not so much, but Tonino and Angelica do find this like really strong friendship based in how different they are to the rest of their families. Yes, and they're different in a matched way, like they're in a way that complements each other when they're trying to get out.
00:59:22
Speaker
You know, but what they discover is that Angelica has the ability to come up with, to to basically creatively make new spells because she can't get any the existing spells right. And Tonino, who can't work a spell on his own, has the ability to massively enhance anybody else's spell.
00:59:37
Speaker
So when they're working magic to try and get out of their imprisonment, it's Angelica working really weird spells and Tonino giving her the power to make those really what weird spells really strong. And that's that's what helps them escape.
00:59:50
Speaker
There's there's there this sort of like this sense that you need to to partner up with your matched self to become the most powerful version of you. Although I do think also that Tonino and Paolo are also a matched set.
01:00:02
Speaker
that over And Angelica and Renata are. Yeah. ah They're also each other's other selves that sort of need to be together to be whole. Yeah. What else? Was there anything else you wanted to talk about for this one?
01:00:13
Speaker
We talked the war. we We talked the double self. We talked... Yes, ah we talked about heterosexuality and how she has sort of discovered the power. I do want to say, I think it is fun and interesting that in the 70s, when we have these masculine matched selves, they all look at each other right away and choose, you know, it's the choice between hatred and love. They choose love right away. They are obsessed with each other in kind of a positive, compelled way.
01:00:37
Speaker
I think one of the things that she's discovering in this book is that heterosexuality runs on initially looking at your other self and going, yeah. but This is especially true for Tonino and Angelica, right? The ins instant repulsion they have for each other. They really don't like each other to start with.
01:00:54
Speaker
And in learning that they're the same, that they they they get that that enormous strength that eventually lets them defeat the white devil. Right. And we're going to see that, I think, deployed to good effect and some heterosexual couples later now that she's unlocked that skill set.
01:01:09
Speaker
The only other thing I wanted to mention is just real quick, I think there's another match set in this book, actually. i think there's an echo between old Niccolo, who's the head of the Montana family, and the Duke, which I think is interesting contrast to the sort of faux masculinity of Ronaldo.
Role of Adults in the Story
01:01:26
Speaker
The thing about old Niccolo is that he is, he looks like a baby. Every time we see old Niccolo, he's got the eyes of a ah sad, anxious baby and the round face of a baby. um He's childlike, much like the Duke.
01:01:40
Speaker
And, you know, the I think the Duke is explicitly, just you know, compared to him at one point, ah having this huge childlike face. And I do think, again, it's sort of interesting to watch Diana Wynne-Jones try and figure out how to incorporate functional adults into a plot.
01:01:56
Speaker
Again, the family is not the problem for Tonino and Paolo or for Angelica and Renata. When Paolo, I think, you know, one of the ways in which we know the Petrochies and the Montanas are matched is Paolo walks, it very early in the book, Paolo walks into the ah the Montana yard and feels sort of the warmth and love coming from around him and is like, oh, I don't think the horrible Petroki household can be anything like this this, this warmth and love that I feel.
01:02:23
Speaker
And then, of course, he walks into the Petroki household later and is like, oh, it's exactly like this. It's warmth and love. But the family is the problem for the city. These two very powerful enchanter families are literally at the root of the whole trouble.
01:02:37
Speaker
And there's this sort of interesting tension, I think, between the adults as problem that the kids need to solve directed inwards or directed outwards. The adults in this book are loving, but again, they're a bit childlike.
01:02:50
Speaker
They need children to become the adults and to overcome. Grownups, yeah. To be the grownups. But by the end of the book, it is literally Rosa and Marco who are the only ones who haven't been turned into puppets.
01:03:01
Speaker
are trying to solve pretty much everything. And it's not just their like comedy cahoots plot. It's revealed how they've been trying to solve things all along. Like there's a whole sequence of like open war in the streets between the Montanus and Petrarchies, which only stops when a mysterious fog comes up and Rosa Marco go, that was us.
01:03:19
Speaker
That was us. Putting a stop to the war, single-handed, double-handed as as a pair. but And you do get a sense that people would have... That's why I said that they are kind of presented as part of the children as well as being adults, because they're kind of both at once.
01:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, and like people would have died during that battle if Rosa and Marco hadn't brought down the fog that stopped them fighting. yeah and So it's very clear that the stakes are life and death in that battle.
01:03:46
Speaker
But she still can't quite figure out, I think. So I do think the ending of this book works. You know, we were asking at the Q&A, can Diana Wynne-Jones write a happy ending that works? I think this one works. I think it lands. It feels justified.
01:03:59
Speaker
But it does need a deus ex machina to happen. Twice. Twice. Two deus ex machina. It needs Crestomancy to come in and it needs to find the right words to unlock the bit of the plot that's the angel coming down.
01:04:13
Speaker
And then not just that, but the angel, you know, after the first problem has been solved, you know, that the war is over and the ah adults are no longer puppets. Marco and Rosa are revealed as Romeo and Juliet.
01:04:25
Speaker
And it starts again, right? starts again, immediately. They all start erupting and getting prepared to fight again. And Crestomancy is like, I guess I'll get you two out of here. yeah And it's it's there there's a sort of an indrawn breath where you think, are they just going to do the whole stupid plot again?
01:04:41
Speaker
Right. Can you fix Romeo and Juliet? Can you turn it into a comedy? You can if
Conclusion: Angel's Intervention
01:04:47
Speaker
an angel comes down and says, really, you guys need to chill out. And that is literally the ending. The angel descends and looks them all and says, keep our covenant.
01:04:57
Speaker
Yes. What that means is chill out, you guys. Yes. Have a party, embrace your other self. So yeah, I think, you know, she's, she's playing with how to do it. And I think she does do it. And you know, in a children's book, you can have the deus ex machina come down and fix things.
01:05:12
Speaker
But it is interesting to see her kind of work out the mechanisms of it. Yeah, it really is. And it's interesting. I think the next Crestomancy book is Witch Week.
01:05:23
Speaker
yeah this is a like it's a a weird sequence of books right as a series especially like you compare it to delmark which is thematically coherent even though it's a very strange series the crestomancy series is kind of all over the place in different ways you can see the different things she's thinking about uh but there are these these running threads of multiple selves and yeah and the thread of of childhood difference of being the weird child.
01:05:57
Speaker
ah Yeah. I'm going to ask you one last question before we wrap. Why do you think this is a Crestomancy book? Gosh. I mean, honestly, I think she likes writing him. That's really clear.
01:06:08
Speaker
He's fun. He's fun to write. He turns up ah and it's an excuse for a whole series of jokes about steak, you know. which ties into a whole series of jokes about the cooking, which ties into there's a horrible curse on the kitchen because somebody sang a song using the Angel of Caprona trying to do the washing up, and that was a mistake.
01:06:26
Speaker
Oh, you know what else, actually? This has just occurred to me now. When we're talking about parallels, which everyone always has a parallel in Diana Wynne-Jones, the parallels of Crestomancy in this book is actually the White Duchess.
01:06:37
Speaker
They are both... Powerful enchanters, foreign powers, ah interfering. And distinguished by their private jokes and how sarcastic they are. They come in and they're making little bit, you know, you have to sort of recognize their secret humor, which Tonino does immediately, is tied to the fact that they're enchanters. Tonino recognizes them first both as enchanters and recognizes them as secretly having a sense of humor that's not necessarily obvious to other people. Having great time at everyone else's expense.
01:07:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. So Crestomancy chuckling up his sleeve about what an Italian scene is perhaps equivalent to the Duchess ah quietly smiling to herself, knowing that her puppets aren't just puppets.
01:07:21
Speaker
Yeah. That's interesting. So because the multiple self, the parallel self in the multiple universes to me is the the hallmark of the Crestomancy series. And it isn't explicitly touched on at all in Magician's Hero.
01:07:36
Speaker
I think it's the only one where it's not touched on at all. there is There is a reading of Magicians of Caprona. we We've been talking about this as literal Catholicism. And the Montanas and the Petrochies think of it as literal Catholicism.
01:07:50
Speaker
I think there is a reading of Magicians of Caprona where the White Devil and the Angel are just powerful magic that's come in from another world somewhere. And it has nothing to do with religion at all. Yep, arguably, because we will see other treatments of religion elsewhere. well there There'll be more gods and goddesses in later Crestomancy books, ah which are treated more or less that way.
01:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, but it is still, it's still a theologically bizarre book.
Closing Remarks on 'The Magicians of Caprona'
01:08:12
Speaker
Deeply, 100%.
01:08:15
Speaker
Bizarre book, bizarre follow-up to Charmed Life. So much fun. Really, really fun. Extremely good fun. Yeah. Like eating a meringue. I said it and I meant it. Yes, and absolutely. Shall we call it there?
01:08:27
Speaker
Let's call it there. So what's our next one? Great question. Actually, I meant to look this up and I forgot. Oh my gosh. It's time of the ghost. Oh my God.
01:08:37
Speaker
Okay. Time of the ghost is a follow up to magicians of Caprona is a hell of a swerve. I'm very excited. and ah Yeah. Your favorite ghost is probably mine. Certainly my favorite of this decade.
01:08:52
Speaker
ah So yes, I cannot wait. This is pretty good. This is going to be very exciting. Thank you guys so much for tuning in with us for season two. ah we'll be We'll be back in one week or two weeks, depending on how we decide to pace this season yet. We haven't fully made our decision.
01:09:08
Speaker
All right. Well, see you in one week or two weeks. Thanks very much, Becca. Thank you, Em.
01:09:24
Speaker
you