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The Spellcoats
217 Plays6 days ago
"The story is largely self explanatory, but certain obscurities in the text have been amended to avoid confusing the reader."
The power of the land, the return of the king, and the magic of finding meaning in a text.
Transcript available here. Spellcoats was the last book of the season, so no reading for next week, but next week we'll be recording a look back at the seventies as a whole -- if you have questions or topics you'd like us to discuss, feel free to send them to us at eightdaysofdiana@gmail.com. Thanks again for listening along with us!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Spellcoats' Discussion
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to our final episode of the first season of 8 Days of Diana and Jones, in which we'll be talking about the spell coats. I'm Rebecca Framel.
Excitement About 'The Spellcoats'
00:00:10
Speaker
And I'm Emily Tesh, and I'm really looking forward to discussing the spell coats, which is in some ways a departure and in other ways feels like a culmination of all the work Jones was doing through the 70s.
Position and Importance in the Series
00:00:23
Speaker
And which is the third book of the Delmarq quartet. But that quartet actually is about to remain a trilogy for more than a decade. ah The fourth book will not come out until the 1990s.
Impact on Series Understanding
00:00:34
Speaker
So the spell codes is a stopping point. I'm interested to discuss what effect that has on our understanding of the series.
00:00:42
Speaker
yeah it's gonna be an interesting recording because i remember crown of dale mark pretty well i've read it a couple times and you don't uh and i've completely forgotten everything that happened in crown of dale mark i remember reading it night uh 2019 i last read it and i remember it blew my mind but i don't remember why yeah So we'll get there. I'm going to try not to spoil you. There may be stuff that comes up where I'm like, well, we'll see in Crown. We're not meant to look forward, are we?
Kingship and Thematic Connections
00:01:13
Speaker
I remember, I do remember, spoiling Drowned Ammit, that Mitt ends up as King of Dalemark. And I do think that's actually important for understanding spellcoats as well, because spellcoats to me
00:01:26
Speaker
is a book about a king. Yes, well it's a couple things as, as, ah well it's not a sequel really to Carton Quitter and Drone and Dammit, it's doing a different thing, but it is deeply in conversation with both of those texts because it's a book about a king and it's a book about a creative younger sibling with a deeply divided sense of self, and it's a book about bad marriages. It's a book about gods. I mean, it's doing the same thing Jones does throughout Delmark, which is rather than direct sequels, she does thematic sequels. ah But to me, like the the trilogy, if you like these three 1970s Delmark books is like thesis, antithesis,
00:02:13
Speaker
Fuck synthesis, we're going back.
Setting and Narration Style
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, Spellcoats is set in prehistoric Denmark. So, Carton Quidda and Drowned Amet are parallel books, they're happening more or less at the same time, with completely different sets of characters. Spellcoats is hundreds, possibly thousands of years earlier, ah in a pre-literate society, or at least a differently literate society.
00:02:37
Speaker
And the spellcoats of the title are, on the very last page, revealed to be ah archaeological artefacts that have been dug up and translated in modern Dale Mark. And Jones actually in, I think, what must be a later edition, the glossary, the fantasy glossary at the end, is like translated not always very accurately.
00:02:59
Speaker
Yes, throughout the book, I think this is one of the most interesting things about the book, because this is really we've talked about her point of view control. And we've talked about how much she's, you know, make sure that she's limited to what any given character knows and what any given character can understand and how they're seeing the world. But this is the first time that she's really playing with unreliable narration. And on multiple different levels she is constantly putting into question the narration that we are being given. In through this artifact so i don't have the glossary i have a map but not the glossary but i do have the final note archaeological note that also says you don't really know how to translate these artifacts.
00:03:40
Speaker
And also, I'm gonna come back to this final note, I think at some point we're probably just gonna have to read out the whole thing. um But it says, the story is largely self-explanatory, but certain obscurities in the text have been amended to avoid confusing the reader. So at the end, we're like, this is through a translation filter, but also in the middle, multiple times, we're given reasons to question what is being presented in the text.
00:04:02
Speaker
not because Tanaqui who is the protagonist is trying to lie to us, but just through the means of storytelling.
Magic, Identity, and Creative Storytelling
00:04:09
Speaker
I have to say I'm not sure I would define Tanaqui as a protagonist. She is the narrator. And I think one of the things the book does is ah draw your attention to whether or not those two are the same yeah thing. Tanaqui is the storyteller. She is the person she's the weaver, ah who has created these spell coats and a spell coat is literally it's a large coat that is woven on a loom, and it has within it words that are spelled out in the pattern of the weave. ah So this is the society's form of writing, you have to weave your writing. So that spell literally is in spelling words, but also spell as in magic. And of course, those two words are connected, magic, spell, spelling your words, those are the same thing, because a spell coat ultimately is a form of magic and tanukui,
00:04:59
Speaker
Although never quite explicitly for herself is sort of revealed over time as a powerful sorceress, a witch, and the spellcoats are her work on magic. She does come to understand that at the very end. I think in the final chapter is really when she starts talking about her spellcoats as magic and herself as a witch.
00:05:22
Speaker
But we know that she's coming to that understanding all throughout the course of making the text, because of the way in which the text the the text is written. So the actual story is broken up over the form of two of these coats. And they're woven at different times. Both of them are woven after the action is happening. So the first half of the book, the first coat, ah is Tanaqui and her siblings taking a journey up the river fleeing from their village where they're being discriminated against because they're under invasion and this family resembles the invaders which makes their village reject them and come to attack them and so they have to flee.
00:06:01
Speaker
And after, there's a whole long journey, there's a confrontation with an evil mage, there's a lot of growth and sort of understanding about the world. And at the end of all that journey, we get suddenly a drop into, okay, I'm weaving this from the future, but oh my god, everything's happening, I have to go. Then the second coat happens, and we get the rest of that journey down the river, at which point Tanukui gets set up.
00:06:25
Speaker
in a stable situation for a while weaves the first coat starts weaving the second coat much more happens she's weaving the second coat in media rays in a great hurry because at that point she's come to understand that she needs to finish weaving the coats because that is part of the spell that the narrative is weaving that will also defeat the evil necromancer who's coming to uh take over the land yeah i gotta say one thing i really enjoy about this book is that it is full high fantasy in a way jones has not done before and will not really do again no on
00:06:59
Speaker
ah because this is a book about how the kingdom is under attack by an evil wizard ah who does necromancy and the people must come together under the new king to defeat him. It couldn't be more high fantasy if it tried but it's doing it in an interesting way. yeah Going back to the point of view control I want to add as well and I think this is really important, this is our first first person novel, isn't it? It's our first first person novel. And it's our first novel narrated by a young woman. Right. First female protagonist, like Hildy, I think is a deuteragonist in Drowned Ammit. She's ah very much part of the story, she gets point of view sections, but it is not her story. Drowned Ammit is mid story.
00:07:44
Speaker
Tanaqui is the narrator, the the lens, the point of view character, all the way through spellcoats, and it is first person, we are right there in her head, in her voice, in her weaving. I mean, Jones's point of view control is so tight that even her third person feels a little bit like first in terms of like information control, and in how little you're allowed to see outside that specific character's head. um So that very, very tight third person point of view which actually is something I admire very much and is an influence on my own work, is what Jones specialises in. But this first person is, if you like, um taking off the mask of it, or revealing that this is the trick and always was the trick that you were in a specific ah very specific perspective. Yes.
00:08:33
Speaker
Uh, and there's even, um, I'm trying to find the quote early on in the book.
Personal Dynamics and Gender Themes
00:08:38
Speaker
When technically is talking about weaving, she talked about how they, she made up, like when she was learning how to weave, there are signs for a bunch of things that didn't exist. And so she had to make them up. And so she says, I don't even know if anyone will be able to read this properly or understand me properly because of all the different signs that I made up in movie that are just private language between me and my sister and my family.
00:09:02
Speaker
So, again, with this, you know, she's she's an intensely personal story that she is telling in her own language that she's essentially invented, that someone else is coming along being like, well, we think this is what she meant here.
00:09:14
Speaker
But inherently, there's this the sense that we are never going to understand the truth of the story. And then she's very tonically, as a narrator, is very upfront about when things happen that she doesn't understand or that she experiences differently from someone else in her family. There will be sequences where she'll be like, well, I think this is what happened. But her and my brother, and I guess we should go through and introduce all the siblings in a minute, will say, this isn't what happened at all. This other thing happened.
00:09:39
Speaker
But I still think I'm right. Right. One thing that's very sort of consistent about Tana Queer, she thinks she's right.
00:09:46
Speaker
And I enjoy her very much as a narrator, actually, she is very clearly a person of great stubbornness. That's her flaw, stubbornness as sort of a narrow view. So she is the younger sister in this family of five siblings, yeah right? ah So the oldest is Gull, her oldest brother, then Robin, her sister, and Robin is presented as sort of mid to late teens. Yeah, I think at one point she says,
00:10:13
Speaker
like Robin, she considers Robin an adult or sort of an adult. Like she says there were three children and adult going down the river, but adult to Tanaqui is not necessarily adult. Yes. And then there is Hern and Tanaqui who seem to be quite close in age. Hern is a little bit older. They're one year apart, it says because at one point they're talking about Tanaqui has never seen Gulls before in her and Hern says, but I've seen Gulls, I remember Gulls and I'm only a year older than you. So how is it that you don't remember?
00:10:40
Speaker
Absolutely. and and then And then the youngest brother is Mallard, nicknamed Duck, yes ah which ends up being ah important for his magic. We have a proper Liguinian moment at one point where ah not knowing the true name of this boy gives him remarkable power.
00:10:58
Speaker
In fact, I will say in spell codes, I thought I could see a Le Guin influence, an Earthsea influence, or at least ah an overlap, especially thinking about how Jones at this point in her career is reading a lot of American science fiction. Yeah, I think there's a couple things she's doing that seem to me to be at least a little bit influenced by Le Guin and some in in is taking it a different ways. And I guess we'll talk about that a little bit later. Yeah.
00:11:25
Speaker
So you've got these five siblings, right? The three boys who were all named after water birds. Robin, who's a bird, but not a water bird. So we've got girl, hern, which is an old word for heron, and and mallard slash duck, and the girls Robin and Tanaqui. And they've lived a perfectly happy life next to the river. Their mother has died some time ago. ah Their father, Clostie the clam. Another great name.
00:11:51
Speaker
such a good name. I actually went to where she got that word from. And I went to looked up Clostie and I was like, Oh, this is derived from the same route as closed. Because ah he's a guy who who doesn't talk, much right, which ends up being a bit of a problem when it turns out that they do not have a lot of very important information. Because Their father never told them! And I'm gonna go ahead and and bring out a great reveal now just because I think it's very funny that we eventually learned that their mother was essentially a river goddess who fell in love with this man and, you know, gave up her immortality to marry him and have his children. This man is Closty the clam.
00:12:25
Speaker
Right. ah It is extremely funny. is elizabeth elizabeth One of the many, many forbidden romances that governs this book ah is the roman romance of the river goddess mother and they not and their human father, but she's gone now. Yes. And I'm going to add as well, this family has their family Undying. Yes. Who are gods? Yeah. Question mark? So I think I keep wanting to use the word I've just used the word god goddess like five times. And I know I don't have like that we have to yet and introduce the word undying yet. But I think we've got to use the word undying because towards the end, it becomes explicit that they are not gods. And in fact, one of it's one of the most important things that's technically thinks is one of the most important things that said in the book,
00:13:11
Speaker
is when one of the undying explains to her, you know, she says, what good are you, your gods? um And hang on, I think I've got the quote. Tanaemil fetched himself up onto one elbow and said, very earnestly, a very strange thing. I never called myself that, he said. Neither I nor any of the undying ever made that claim. It is a claim men made for us, and that is how we came to be bound.
00:13:40
Speaker
I told Tanamil I was sorry. I think this, he said, is one of the strongest threads of my weaving." Yes. So they're not gods, even though they are they function sort of as gods in the course of the book. they are they The treat them as gods. The humans make them into gods, yes.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, but that's not what they are, not how they want to be thought of, ah which will become important as we learn Tanigui and her family's relationship to them. Right. And this sort of direct introduction of these divine figures I think is interesting in a book that's following it as a sequel to Drowned Ammit, where we've had the gods of Holland at the end, Ammit and Libby are now sort of reframed as undying? Question mark? What does it mean to be the undying if it doesn't mean being gods?
00:14:28
Speaker
right? It does mean clearly having great power. But it's also like there's something so interesting in the way the Undying are presented throughout this book. And there's all these moments where Tanaqui interacts with them and very carefully the way in which they're depicted. It's a constant an assortment of natural features that Tanaqui looks at out of the corner of her eye. And it's someone she can speak to and someone she can talk to.
00:14:53
Speaker
and then she looks at it directly and it's a combination of shadows it's a rock and a tree and a mountain it's there there's something that's sort of really deeply of and about the world so that like the the real natural world about my figures Right, there there they are of the land and this land is not yet called Dale Mark, it's called the Riverlands and it doesn't look like Dale Mark either. ah Your copy of the book has the map, mine doesn't so you showed me the map and it is not the same as the map of Dale Mark that exists in the previous book books because it is dominated by a central river which is also the dominating theme of the story is a journey first down the river to the sea and then up the river to its source
00:15:39
Speaker
that's the journey that these five siblings have to take. And the people of the village worship the river as a god. And Tanaqui very confidently is like, they're absolutely wrong. That's so stupid. The river is not a god. Right. Tanaqui thinks the the undying of her family are the correct undying to worship and they are um three ah figures clay figures or carved figures that she keeps by the kept by the fire.
00:16:04
Speaker
and taken care of there, ah the one which it appears to be the figure of an older man, the younger one, yeah who is a figure of ah a younger man and the lady, which is the figure of a woman. And they're made out of different materials. The one is like cold, hard blistering is the word that Tanaqui uses, which I don't love as a word because it makes me think of blistering. ah But it means, you know, sort of like, I think it's sort of meant to indicate like metallic stone. um The young one is made out of kind of reddish clay and the lady is carved out of wood. And in fact, Tanaqui has a memory of her father carving the lady.
00:16:40
Speaker
right before her mother died. Right before her mother died. And it becomes clear over the course of the book that the lady and her mother, the river goddess, are one and the same. Which Duck, who's the youngest one, knows from the beginning, way before Tonic, we figures it out. Duck is always like, well, I'll carry the lady and anytime anyone else is like, well, we, yeah other people would like to sometimes carry our most friendly goddess. Duck is like, no, she is might. I am carrying her. I love mommy best.
00:17:08
Speaker
ah duck the baby of the family ah very much plays into the the baby of the family role, I think. Yes. And Tanaqui has like, it's again, it's interesting that we are getting this from Tanaqui's point of view, because she has very specific relationships to all of these siblings.
00:17:23
Speaker
she has and like by virtue of being in between her and duck, but not a boy, there's all this we get a lot of attention on, ah you know, kind of the relationship that her and duck have to each other as siblings, which is a kind of, you know, brother relationship that we've seen in Diana Jones before. And tonic, we kind of wanting to insert herself into that to like rough house and argue with them. But also being pulled away from that by her relationship with robin by robin as the oldest girl as the the parentified oldest girl the mother figure uh running around and being like oh i've got to do all the stuff why does nobody help me tonically please stop being a problem with the boys and come and help me
00:18:05
Speaker
do this and that make sure that we actually survive this experience. And which Tanaqui is, I think, quite resentful about. I would say Tanaqui is deeply resentful of anything that pulls her towards girlhood. And she has this really nasty attitude to Robin for most of the book. And she acknowledges it. She says, she says you know, I know I knew I was being unkind. I can't seem to make myself be nice to Robin. She annoys me when she goes all ladylike when she goes all helpless, she and you can see Tanaqui sort of has this deep ooh, there's a really like visceral reaction to Robin's femininity. right And there's also a sequence in the very opening pages of the book, ah the sort of underlying conflict of the book, right? ah Is that the Riverlands have been invaded by people whom the locals call the heathens who come from come across the water and look different. So the Riverlanders are pale skin with straight dark hair and the heathens have brown skin and curly fair hair.
00:19:02
Speaker
and our protagonist, this group of siblings, look more like the heathens, and this is part of how why their village eventually rejects them, and it's suggested that they actually resemble their mother, this goddess. Right, start of the book, ah the king of the Revolans has sent out his men to collect up, village men to join the army, and the children's father, Clostey, and the oldest brother, Gull, are taken off to be in the army, and Tanaqui, because she's a girl,
00:19:32
Speaker
can't go. And she is furious. She is very upset. Hern can't go either because he's too young. Right. So ty we probably couldn't go even if she were a boy because she's also too young being younger than her. But the thing that bother the thing that she prays to, or the praise to the undying to is to make her a boy so that she can go off and be a hero.
00:19:51
Speaker
Right, as like almost like the first thing we know about Tana Queer is that she wants to be a boy and she's very annoyed when the undying don't do it as a very bitter, I am still a girl. And I know I've been saying like all along, since eight days of Luke, I think, do you kind of feel like there is some transgender theme?
00:20:10
Speaker
I've seen Diana win shows early on, like, am I reading too much into this? This is interest in masculinity, this's this ah admiration and love for masculinity, this rejection of femininity. First female protagonist we've got, I wish I was a boy, I hate being a girl. yeah I'm really annoyed that I'm not a boy, I prayed, and it didn't change anything.
00:20:31
Speaker
yes And we've brought out that quote also, I think it was during the Eight Days of Luke episode, ah where she talks about Bruin Hilda and how ah Diana windows talks about Bruin Hilda and how this was the first character, the first figure that made her understand that a girl could be a hero because previous to that, she hadn't seen a model of heroism for for young women.
00:20:54
Speaker
And I think this like this call to be a hero is what Tanukui longs for. And in fact, it's like she has this fantasy that she is, and and she talks about it in the first quote. Let me find the quote.
00:21:09
Speaker
that she is going to be, uh, I found a way to comfort myself by pretending I was a very fierce and warlike person called Taniqui, the terror of the heathen. When the messengers came back to Schelling, I pretended they would peer of this person and send Zwit to fetch her to lead our land to war.
00:21:25
Speaker
I told it to our undying to make it seem more true. I wish now that I had not done that. Sometimes I think this is what but brought such troubles on us. You should not speak falsehoods to the undying." So her dream is to go off to war and and fight valiantly and be like this ah and you enter this heroic masculinity.
00:21:43
Speaker
yep um And this idea of the sort of the the masculine hero figure has just come back again and again and again in these books. And Tanaqui never gets to do that. The role she is in is a role of storyteller.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yes. She is the magician and the weaver in a way that puts her, I think, closer to Duck, the younger brother, than any of her other siblings. um So we were talking a little bit about this also as a sequel to Carton-Quitter and as a sequel to the myths of Delmark, where we see Morrill enter his power as the the magician the musician. musician That's eventually what Duck will become, the youngest brother. But it's also in fact, Duck, I think we can reveal this Duck will eventually take on the name Tana Morrill, right, which is martin he is the character Morrill is going to be named after the sort of legendary musician mage of Delmarque.
00:22:43
Speaker
Yes. ah And Tanaqui also, like Morrill, is a character who performs an art or creativity. And through the course of performing that creativity comes to understand herself and comes to understand the story she is telling and then learns how telling that truth can be used to actually change the world around her. Right, because truth is the fire that fetches thunder. I think that is almost the the the running heart of Dale Mark.
00:23:10
Speaker
ah is ah the truth of art and the power of that truth. and so And the smell coat certainly is about first, first you tell the story, then you find out what the truth you were telling was so that you understand the story, so you can tell it again, but with power. Right. And there's so there's a point in the story when they sort of start first start to come into their gifts. um And this is they've they've gone down the river, they fled from their village, because it's become very clear, they've learned from their uncle, who's the one person in the village who's kind to them, um and who has brought back
00:23:48
Speaker
their brother who at first seems to be suffering from PTSD and then it becomes clear is increasingly clear is not just ah extreme PTSD but also ah malign magical influence. Yeah, he's under an evil spell. Yes.
00:24:04
Speaker
um and they but they they start going up the river and when they're partway through they meet a mysterious young man uh who takes them all in for a night and teaches them things uh and it would you know eventually at first they think that this you know they beat this young man uh tanniqui it's it's they have kind of a hallucinatory sequence where they eat delicious food and hang out in what seems to be a great hall and he teaches them all sorts of things he teaches duck how to pipe He teaches hern something, Tanaqui isn't paying super attention. ah But she likes it when he's teaching hern how to wrestle. And she's like, Oh, me too, I i would like to learn how to wrestle as well.
Artistry and Storytelling Power
00:24:43
Speaker
What he teaches hern seems to involve like drawing diagrams and sketching in the dust, which suggests to me that it's probably military strategy for reasons that become clear later. Exactly. And definitely the other things he's teaching her and are about fighting. Yes. And he shows her about the fighting, but what he yeah like but that never really comes up. And Tana Quinever actually uses it. In fact, she says, I'm not sure I should use use this knowledge, having learned how to throw people to the ground. um But what he does show her is the right pattern for the... yeah She says, I told him that there were many words I did not know how to weave. He said, there was no harm in making your own patterns, provided you taught others what you met.
00:25:20
Speaker
But he said, you must use the right pattern for the river. That is important. And showed me moving with rushes. He also showed me a more expressive way of twisting yarn. He had me twist rushes until I could do it. He said, when you use yarn twisted this way, use it for the strongest parts of your story. Your meaning will leap from the cloth. ah So vitally he teaches her how to use italics in her spellcoats writing.
00:25:43
Speaker
Right, but he teaches her ah how to deepen the power that is her power, which is the power of storytelling. um And ah in the same way that Duck's power, he is going to be a musician mage. So he learns music from Tana Mill. And Hern has a future that is about war.
00:26:00
Speaker
um and leadership and he learns the skills he needs. ah We've missed a sibling. What about Robin? What does Robin get from Tanaemil? Robin and Tanaemil have a tremendous fight that Tanaquil doesn't understand at all. Right, I've got to say like, this is not a serious reading. This is a joke. Tanaquil is a trans ace icon. Tanaquil does not approve of gender and does not understand why everybody keeps falling in love with everyone else. Yeah, this is so far the of of the entire 70s. This is, I would say, the only book that's really concerned with romance. um That's not true. Eight Days of Luke is also profoundly concerned with romance in much the same way that Spellcoats is concerned with romance.
00:26:48
Speaker
The difference is that in Eight Days of Luke, David is having a heroic romance and doesn't really realize it. Whereas Tonic Lee is standing back, watching her siblings form these profound romantic connections that will change their lives and be like, oh god, why?
00:27:07
Speaker
You people are so embarrassing. And annoying. Please stop wringing your hands. Right, so Robin and Tanaemil, this mysterious wizard, um mysterious, sad, ah magically bound, sorceress being with musical powers, whose name begins with T, keep track of that because we are going to see more guys like this. Yes. i can think or already
00:27:38
Speaker
yep who is a mysterious wizard who meets a young woman with a much, much younger woman because he's an ancient immortal and she is 16. It's actually very funny that later on Tanaqui meets her mother and is like, oh god, I'm afraid he's our uncle and her brother's like, no, no, it's fine, he's not our uncle.
00:28:00
Speaker
which A, when you consider that ah first in this book, we know that Tanaqui's parents were related, that in some way Tanaqui, because her her they're both descended from the one who is the the sort of the main, the river undying. ah Her mother is his daughter and her father is a distant descendant. Right. And this pattern will occur again in Crown of Town Park.
00:28:28
Speaker
I'll have to take a word for it, I do not remember that at all, but it's very funny to me. And it's also one that we've seen before in Charmed Life, where we have close cousins who marry and have very powerful children. But this time it's fine, Robert and Tanaemal are not really in it. Despite the fact that Tanaemal's name means younger brother, and he's a contributory river of the Great River, but don't worry about it.
00:28:52
Speaker
Don't think about it too hard. So Robin and Tana Mill fall in love, ah but Robin rejects him ah out of ah care for her siblings, out of a feeling of responsibility that she has to help them and go with them. And Tana Mill says, you know, you're in danger. You're not as powerful as they are. ah You're going to get hurt. It's all going to go wrong. And Robin said, well, should I just give up because I'm weak? Which actually I think is one of the moments in the book where you can kind of see that Tanaqui's nastiness towards Robin is an unjustified resentment of what is actually quite a heroic character that Robin is the parentified eldest daughter, and her form of heroism is it's it's actually what Jones brought up in reflections when she was talking about sort of feminine mythic heroes, the patient, the enduring, the long suffering, the Penelope, if you like. Yes. um Robin is patient and enduring and suffering and self sacrificing.
00:29:49
Speaker
because she feels responsible for her younger siblings, and with the three younger ones, she does go on down the river, and it does end up, in a complicated way, nearly killing her. Niamh Yes. Robin actually reminds me of all the figures we've seen before. Robin reminds me most of most of Kathleen. um yes she's very she's She's very good.
00:30:09
Speaker
um she's She sort of embodies all these virtues, but she's also, and it's really fun to see this figure from the point of view of, you know, this sort of heroic feminine figure from the point of view of a younger sister who's just really annoyed by her all the time. Whereas we, the reader, are like, oh no, Robin is like is is a hero in this in the traditional sense, in the degenerate traditional sense, but in the traditional sense.
00:30:31
Speaker
And she, you know, she's patient, but she will stand up for herself. She will argue and and ah kind of stand strong when she needs to. And like Kathleen, ah she is in a dangerous ah romance with a powerful yet powerless, magical, older divine figure who is obsessed with her. Right. Because all these undying or specifically, the one and Tanamil,
00:30:59
Speaker
who is the same person as the the younger one in the Undying, these Undying are bound. There is some kind of prison or limit or control on their power which prevents them from something and specifically is preventing them from fighting back against the magical invasion of the Riverlands by these heathens. Right. And so then, speaking of the heathens, shortly after, oh, um we forgot a sibling as well, even after we've talked about Robin. Tanimal also has a significant interaction with Gull, who for the first several chapters of this book, has been in the boat
00:31:34
Speaker
It's really, it's like you can see it's really distressing to Tanaqui, and as it's often with the things that are really distressing to her, she doesn't talk about it much. There's a section much, much later on, where she talks about Gul coming home and learning that her father's died. And she says, I had to unpick the long lament of my father, she wove it in, and then she took it out again.
00:31:51
Speaker
So there's this way and so it's explicitly like there are things that are missing from this story because Tana Kui has chosen not to tell us. Right. They are too personal. She doesn't want to talk about it. Gull coming back as the sort of shell of himself is something that is really, really distressing for all the siblings. And, you know, they get in the boat, they have to feed him, they have to dress him. All he says is we have to get on, we have to get out in the river, we have to get to the sea. um His name is Gull. He is a seabird. But ah when they meet Tana Mul, Tana Mul is like, oh, well, okay, it's almost too late, but we can fix this. And with magical piping turns go into another clay figure, like the rest of their undying. And this is the first sort of real visible magic in the book is the siblings watching as their brother sort of fades away and shrinks and disappears and becomes
00:32:42
Speaker
this undying figure. Right. And it's part of, I think, why Taniqui is deeply suspicious of Tanamil, that and she doesn't understand his argument with Robin and she has a bad feeling about it. And, you know, Tanamil does do the sort of, ah you've entered a magical kingdom thing of, we don't know how long we were there, we don't know what was happening, I can't remember any of it clearly. And Taniqui, the storyteller,
00:33:07
Speaker
clearly feels it's very important that she should be able to remember and order things clearly in her mind in order to sort of gain the understanding, the control over events that she needs. Right. And Herne is also deeply offended by this. We haven't yet talked about Herne and his main personality trait, which is so funny in this book specifically.
Character Journeys and Rationality
00:33:25
Speaker
Herne is my favourite character in this book. And I'm like resisting talking about him because like it's gonna be too obvious he's my favourite. Right.
00:33:35
Speaker
right for okay so so her the middle brother uh his lead straight is he is an atheist which in a fantasy book where people are constantly being gods or doing magic is extremely funny. He's an atheist who doesn't believe in magic. And there are sequences where they're like, magic is literally happening right now. We can see it happening. And I was like, well, that doesn't make it reasonable. And you know what? He was right, it's not. Herd is on rationalist Tumblr. Herd is like, this makes me so mad that I can't explain any of this. I just want to get it right in my mind and it doesn't make any fucking sense.
00:34:12
Speaker
But also, I think it is Hern's idea. ah sort of At the midpoint of the book, they go and confront the evil wizard who is trying to conquer the country. And Hern's like, yeah, if he's an evil wizard, then the thing to do is to go and stand in front of him and not believe in him doing magic, and that will stop him. And Jack, who is the magician sibling, is like, well, I think the thing that's going to stop him is more magic, actually.
00:34:37
Speaker
I love her. And I would actually say I spoke earlier about how Tanaqui is the narrator, but not necessarily the protagonist of this book. And I think that Hern is probably the protagonist of this book. Yes. um And that, you know, almost it's like, I forget where Jones wrote about this. It's in Reflections somewhere. She wrote about how ah she saw people as having an inner self that was of the opposite sex.
00:35:04
Speaker
so And she was talking in terms of, I think, ah Christopher and Millie yeah in Christopher Charm, which we'll come to next season, or possibly a season after. But Hearn and Tanaqui seem to me like two sides of a coin. ah her And Hearn almost gets to have the life that Tanaqui wants, her prayer to be a boy, to be the terror of the heathen, to take active take an active role in shaping her country. And Tanaqui is the one who tells Hearn's story. And in fact, in in that sort of final archaeological note, it is Hearn who is the focus of the like the archaeologist's interpretation of Tanaqui's spell code. So we know who this character is. This is this historical figure right from Dale Mark.
00:35:54
Speaker
yes And Hern is about to get his, you know, right after they meet Tanamo, Hern gets his own central romance. They're at this book when they meet, ah they actually meet the heathen for the first time, and they meet Kars Adon, who is the leader of the the small band of heathen that has been running around Dalmar terrorizing everybody.
00:36:16
Speaker
Right. So I'm kind of torn because like, obviously, I do think it's a romance in that I personally would request this as a yuletide thing. I'm not sure Jones necessarily thinks of it as a romance, but it is ah certainly ah a moment of intense meeting and connection between these two young men about the same age from very different cultures who in that one moment that they only meet once,
00:36:45
Speaker
twice, kind of, but the second time they meet, Karzedon dies, so it's it's not much of a reunion. ah But this single meeting transforms them both, changes their lives, ah sets them on the path for the people they're going to become. Right. And it is very, very much like the meetings that we've seen in Power of Three between young men who recognize each other. Like that is the key thing between Kars Aydav and Hearn is they look at each other and they see that they're very much alike. And at first it starts out with ah that interest that we can become friendship or hatred at the drop of a pin. Like there's just like some, some essential recognition that becoming, you know, embracing this other, this person who is like in Power of Three, your enemy of a different
00:37:34
Speaker
race on a different side and recognizing that essential similarity means accepting and recognizing a part of yourself and rejecting that means the opposite. Right. ah So sort of seeing yourself in someone else and so starting to understand yourself. So the essential story of Hernan Kazeidon is boy attempts to conquer boy's homeland. Right.
00:38:00
Speaker
then boy meets boy, and boy says, you're a bitch, you failed, conquer my homeland harder if you're gonna, this was shit, you should be embarrassed. Which is so inspiring. Yeah, I wanna be clear, Hern and meet, and Carzadon has failed, right? There are essentially two ongoing conquests.
00:38:27
Speaker
of the Riverlands happening. There's the evil wizard who's having a great time and succeeding in everything he does, and who is poisoning the soul of the land, who has turned the river foul so that it brings sickness, um and who is gathering up the souls of the dead to use in his dark necronancy. So that's one conqueror and then the other conqueror is Kars Aydon who is presented as honestly a heroic conqueror. He's come with a band of his people because he's been exiled from his homeland, he's come to settle, he says he has plenty of room for all of us, he's going to found a city, he's going to gather in the scattered bands of his people who already live here.
Moral Perspectives and Cultural Identity
00:39:08
Speaker
And he's willing to make treaties and treat the natives fairly, ah if they'll listen to him. And if not, he'll do it by violence instead. And he's not ashamed of that. Yeah, there's a really interesting, like it is it is so interesting, I find it a little uncomfortable, but very interesting how uninterested this book is in the moral valence of Carr's Aidan's conquest. The book is very unsympathetic,
00:39:33
Speaker
to the the original people of the Riverlands being like, well, well, you came here and tried to conquer us, why should we listen to you? There's it has no interest in that point of view. the The eventual resolution between these peoples has to be that they listen to each other and become one. I will note that I don't think the the the natives, Tanaqui's people are in fact the original people of the Riverlands because the whole backstory of like their national story involves ah the binding of the one ah by the witch an ancestor of Taniqui when they first came to this country. So the idea that they they are also in some way conquerors or the descendants of conquerors. conquerors
00:40:15
Speaker
Yes, that is true. And there's, you know, a lot of sort of destabilization of who has a right to the land, because I think the power of three again, power three again it's a question that she is fundamentally uninterested in. She does not care about the justice of who should be here. What she cares about is, are we going to be able to live together? There's, there's room for all of us. And therefore, we all should be able to live here, as long as we do it in normal fine ways of conquering and not evil, soul stealing, river poisoning ways of conquering.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah, I will say that it's clearly pretend there's like two different kinds of conquest. One tries to steal the soul of the land, and is therefore evil. The other just wants to live in the land and is fine. Yes. So it's Cancredin who is evil because of his desire to take the whole soul of the Riverlands. Yes. Anyway, where was I? I was telling you all about my favourites. Yes, where's Avan? Boy meets boy, boy calls boy a little bitch.
00:41:12
Speaker
Right. But what's great is that after this, Hern and his siblings leave. but This is the point where they kind of turn around like we've come to the sea. We met a bad wizard. Everything's gone wrong. Let's turn around and go the other way and see if that's any better. So they're heading up for the source of the river now. And they're not going to see Carzadon again until nearly the end of the book, nearly the end of the second spell code.
00:41:34
Speaker
sir we kind of leave him off stage. But it's clear to Tanaqui that Hern keeps thinking about him. He's wanting him to succeed. yes There's a great boy from this other culture who has come to conquer his homeland and Hern said, well, you failed at it and you're shit. Then Hern actually is rooting for him, wants him to to to do better.
00:41:55
Speaker
Yes. There's a bit where she she talks about, um you know, how it's a good thing that they haven't fought that, you know, that the the king, when they eventually meet the king of their own people, keeps running from Kars Aedon and not fighting him. Because if they, if it came to a battle, Hern would be on both sides at once.
00:42:11
Speaker
So there's this sort of divided, both her and Antonically, I think, have this kind of divided soul, divided self that we have seen in Cart and Quitter, where, you know, they're they're on two sides. And like, what in the description of these people, we we will recognize, you know, having read Cart and Quitter and Drowned Ammit,
00:42:29
Speaker
that the descriptions of the invaders is very like the Northerners. The description of the ah the people that are already there is very like the Southerners. ah These are sort of the the the types of people that live in Dale Mark now and that are still at odds, but in a different way. um And Morrill is both of the North and South. And Herne and Tonically, having been looking like the people of the North, raised by the people of the South, ah having these significant encounters again with the people of the North that you know sort of make them feel very sympathetic towards them.
00:42:58
Speaker
end up in this divided position in between both sides. Right. And then, ah while the second half of the book is happening, Carl's Adon, so inspired by a Hernd insults, goes off and does it? Yeah. Just starts conquering Denmark for real this time or conquering the Riverlands for real this time and does a good job but also sort of nobly makes treaties and is very honourable about it. And we know he does this, because when he meets Tanaqui again, the first thing he does is tell her and it's like, do you think Hernd will be impressed? Right, and Tanaquia has been spending this whole book thinking that Hern is one-sidedly obsessed with Carus Aedon, and it's like, okay. And then she meets Carus Aedon, and it's like, oh, no, it was a mutual obsession. Who knew? Right, they are mutually very weird about each other. ah You know, you you you bump into your crush's sister again for the first time since you conquered his crush. Do you think he'll like it? Right. Do you think, would he describe his eyes as more green or hazel? And Tanaquia's like, what?
00:43:55
Speaker
But not genuinely. His eyes aren't even green or hazel, they're chalky, white and scary. We know this about her. We do know this about her. um But Tanaqui actually um is interesting because her her reaction to cause aid on sort of ah idealistic And I think it is presented as an idealistic conquest, yeah a conquest where he's aiming to do do it right, to do the right thing, treat people well. It talks about how he's been like taking in Riverlands refugees in his camp of ah heathen, right future northerners, and looking after them.
00:44:29
Speaker
And Tanika walks into the camp and sees, you know, young Riverlands men and women flirting with young heathen men and women. It's the one time that she talks, ah ah you know, ah with, with, um like, but that she approves of romance going on in the book. And she's like, well, that's all right, that is, you know, young people are flirting with each other from opposite sides and making it. That's fine, as long as it's not me and I don't have to hear about it. Right.
00:44:53
Speaker
Right, but there is this sense that the cause aid on sort of ah vision of Hearn's ideals is kind of a projection. yeah he's he's He's actually, he's thought of all this himself. He thinks of it as something he's doing for Hearn, but actually, what eventually transpires is there is finally a meeting, a conflict between the Riverlanders and the invaders.
00:45:15
Speaker
in which both the King of the Riverlands and Khazadon are killed. Lae-Sae Yes, because of the treachery of the King of the Riverlands. right Again, this sort of lack of the this profound lack of sympathy. It's not a total lack of sympathy. I think one of the things that I want to talk about is the complexity of these various adult figures, especially in the Riverlands, because we're getting Tanaquil's very unsympathetic Portrails of them, but then sometimes that will be overturned or tonic we will like somebody and someone else will be like no I don't like him at all um So we get you know this none none of these perspectives are unquestioned about you know tonic whose opinions of people but fundamentally the thing that happens is they make a treaty and The king breaks it and tries to kill cars adon and in the course of that both cars adon and the king are killed and
00:46:01
Speaker
Right. And then by a complicated set of coincidences, ah first the king has just married Robin that morning, in an attempt to get control of the one, the Undying, which rob where he sees Robin as the guardian of the Undying, which is the soul of the river the soul of the revenants which the king knows and understands because as king he is also again this these sort of relationship marriages he's also a descendant of the one as the king both the king and cars adon are descendants of the one he seems to have massive that like zeus he seems to have had massive amounts of children
00:46:36
Speaker
But if you run dying, you've got lots of time. You've got lots of time. ah So they're both descended from the one. And so they both have, you know, in in talking to both these figures, Tanukui is able to come to a better understanding herself of what it means that they are also descendants of the one. Right.
Kingship and National Change
00:46:50
Speaker
If I'll add as well, another descendant of the one is Cancredin, the evil wizard. Yes. ah he is He's also got a part of like this, um this divine blood, if you like. So in the like the Jonesian schema of what is a hero,
00:47:05
Speaker
which I think Delmarque sort of examines from many, many angles. This book does go in for the hero is of a special family of a divinely chosen one from but from of demigod blood. Yeah, and it has such an interesting, again, sort of destabilizing relationship to that, right? Because it does turn out to be true that they are special, they are of demigod blood. um But also, there's a couple points in the book where their uncle comes to this like,
00:47:33
Speaker
Well, you know, the reason that everybody in the village hated you is because you thought you were so special and you went around acting like you were so special and Tana gets very mad and then it's like, well, that's true. We did. And even though it turns out that we are special, we had no cause to act like we were special. We didn't know we were special then. So, you know, there is something about having you can be special ah that gives you a destiny, but you shouldn't go around giving yourself heirs because of it.
00:47:59
Speaker
Right. So where was I? Series of coincidences. Right. So ah the Riverlands King married Robin this morning and has no other living family. So his heir is now Robin's oldest male relative who surprises her. Right. That's not true. Gull is still around somewhere. And at the end of the book, Tanaqui meets Gull briefly running around doing you know, having been rescued from this evil magic that's on him, but he has to be somewhere else. He could never because he's like, if I came back, I want to mess everything up for He has to change his name even. So that's like on the one hand, Hern is now very, very tenuously King of the Revolans. And on the other hand, it turns out that among Khazadon's people, you can just name your heir and everyone has to listen. So Khazadon dying in Hern's arms is like, I choose this guy. Right. Again, I met once and he called me a bitch.
00:48:53
Speaker
I would say, you know, again, this is why I say it is it's a romance in parallel, because it is a symbolic marriage, right? It's right the King marries Robin, and that makes her and his her oldest male relative, ah the heir, and cars a dog marries her and and his dying breath is like, this is my heir.
00:49:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's a fair reading. What it ultimately means is that Hearn stands up and finds himself king of both peoples. He looks like ah an invader, he was raised in the riverlands, ah so he's got this divided, this double self, he's been chosen by both peoples, but it's clear that it's really, really tenuous and everyone is looking at him like,
00:49:32
Speaker
It's also, we then, afterwards, we then, again, this destabilization that she's doing at all points at all levels on this story, including Hern's mythic right to be king. um Because then, Tanaqui goes, she wasn't there for the wedding of Robin and the king. They've been trying to put off the wedding of Robin and the king because, of course, Robin is in love with Tanamel and is deeply depressed about the prospect of marrying the king and all that seems terrible. But it happens while she's gone. They can't put it off. ah But it happens with Duck.
00:50:03
Speaker
Because Ta-Nehisi has taken the coat that she's been making that was, you know, that's a garment that you're supposed to wear during the wedding. And so Duck, who's been learning magic, enchants just like a basket, I think, to look like the coat to put on the king for his and and i can so marriage. It wasn't legal.
00:50:21
Speaker
was a completely illegal marriage and Decker's like, you can't tell anybody about that, because if so, we're gonna blow up her spot and you won't be king. Okay, okay, I think this is really important though, this destabilization, because I think what Jones is actually doing in Delmark is a king narrative. um I'm gonna talk about what I mean by that. So books one and two of of of the Delmark series, right?
00:50:44
Speaker
are books about a time of revolution imminent which is really clear from carton quidders to drowned amid that something has got to give that social change is coming social change is already here in the form of guns and new military technology and new conflict between the north and south the political change is coming with it that someday there is going to be a revolution a transformation in dale mark right? And then instead of book three being, and here's the revolution, book three is, here we are several thousand years back in time to talk about the first king of Delmarque, because that's what Hern is. He becomes in legend, in story, in history, Kern Adon, the legendary first king of help of Delmarque. And ultimately, we do know this,
00:51:33
Speaker
book four of Denmark is about the coming of a king. In fact it is, you could say, the return of the king. It's intentional, it's on purpose because the king is the protagonist of the nation in ah on a mythic scale, on a narrative level. ah If you are telling the story of change in a a country you are telling within this universe, you are telling the story of change in a king. like The figure of the king is the country embodied, if you like. that's That's what the narrative is doing. That's what what makes the king a hero. He has to be divinely chosen, he has to be special, ah he has to be in his in his own body, everything that the country is and everything it's going to be. Hern's story as someone who becomes the first king of this double people, the first king of Delmarque, is a mythic becoming, which is actually the story of where did Delmarque come from. Where did Delmarque come from? Where did Hern come from? These are the same question. So then the question of the return of the king of of what is Delmarque going to be becomes also a mythic question of what is the new king or who is the new king going to be.
00:52:43
Speaker
Right. And if you read, if you're thinking about this sort of this element of being chosen by the gods or powers, what we are told over and over again in this book, both by the way that they appear and by what Tenamil says about them at the end, that the Undying are not gods, they are the land. So if the king is the protagonist of the land, very literally,
00:53:02
Speaker
You know, these these figures that we are seeing as as forming this relationship with the spirits of the land, with the Undying, are being chosen by the country in order to lead. And it is not but it's not about blood, and it's not about birthright, and it's not about legitimacy. It's about the narrative of this country choosing a person.
00:53:23
Speaker
Right, ah which includes the people of the country choosing a person because Hearn explicitly stands up to all the people of both sides and says, listen, give me three days so we can beat Cancredin, the evil wizard. And then you can decide if you still want me to be a king. But right now we've got a crisis. Let's solve it.
00:53:41
Speaker
Right. ah And we don't know how it turns out except for the afterwards. Like, we're not, you know, Hern says three days later after we've beaten the wizard, then then we'll build the country if you still want me to do it. And then the book ends on the moment when Tanekui is like, I think I figured out how to beat the wizard. We're going to see how it goes. And postscript. So we think that Hern is current Adon who was this legendary. Thank you.
00:54:06
Speaker
Right? And in fact, I do think that ending is more than just Tanaqui, I think it's Tanaqui speaks as a prophet. Yeah, in in the last ah last few paragraphs of the spell codes, Tanaqui stops writing a description of the past and writes a description of the future. Right. And it is clear that ah through her power to tell the story that's true, to understand the past, she has come to a true understanding where she can weave the future. And what she weaves is what will come to pass. And what she weaves is the unbinding of the river, of the one, so the releasing of this figure in his full power, and therefore the destruction of the river so that the country itself will be utterly changed.
00:54:52
Speaker
And we know from the change of maps that pre-historic Dale Mark and contemporary Dale Mark do not look the same. There is no giant river in contemporary Dale Mark. Right. And I do think I want to draw a distinction a little bit. this is This is going to sound flatly contradictory. um Go on.
Narrative Crafting and Destiny
00:55:08
Speaker
But ah between the protagonist of Tanaqui's story that she is writing, and the protagonist of the book The Spellcoats,
00:55:16
Speaker
Like I mean i think Hern is the protagonist of Tanaqui's story. What we are seeing throughout the this book is the invention of the writer as protagonist and central figure of a Diana Wynne Jones book. The person who has the power to craft the narrative by which the protagonist of that narrative, in this case being Hern, is able to come into his destiny and become in this case the king of the land.
00:55:40
Speaker
Right. the ah like The ultimate defeat of the wizard Cancredin is brought about by Tanaqui, who could only do it because Hern and his armies of the two peoples are holding off the bad guys. Right. um But you're right, it's it's a um on a meta level.
00:55:57
Speaker
the hero is Tanaqui, the storyteller, telling the story of her the the the ah Once of Future King. yes And throughout the previous book, she's like flirted with the power of words. I think we see it come up the most directly in Power of Three, which has word magic as one of its sort of central three strands of magic.
00:56:16
Speaker
But here's like, we haven't talked at all about the mages. Tanaqui, in the middle of the book, they have their first fight with the mages, which is when Tanaqui starts to realize that mages wear these coats, and the coats have spells woven into them. And they say things that the mages are by the act of weaving those coats, becoming true. So they say things like, I brought the hidden death and, and I tortured the beast, I tortured the beast. And Tanaqui was like, Oh, eventually realizes that oh, by weaving, I brought the hidden death. That's what brings the hidden death.
00:56:46
Speaker
And then she realizes that she, i think this is again, this comes back to to gender and to craft in a really interesting way, although she is a child, and when she meets the other mages, they laugh at her because they look at her weaving, what she has, her her siblings are wearing, what she's, or she and her siblings are wearing, what she's woven, and it's bad, it's child's work, it's, you know, Duck is wearing a shirt that says Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck Duck, and all the bands around his cuffs.
00:57:12
Speaker
And tonically is wearing her worst skirt ever. She spends like significant page space in the book talking about how embarrassed she is by this terrible skirt that she's made. Right. And then right so the the the shirt with duck written round it though ends up being a valuable ah misdirect because it makes the mages think that her brother's name is duck. Yes, she's not so when they try to control him by calling his name, they're calling the wrong name and that gives duck the space to escape.
00:57:40
Speaker
uh from their power right and then the uh the skirt I love how much time she spends on the skirt because the story of the skirt is ta ify goes so annoying I've only written little bits of it here and there and you're like but what is that thing that you've kind of half written? And it's the story of their parents. Yes. And she says it's a nursery rhyme, which sort of which has all these interesting implications that never get unpacked about how much the story of her parents was prophesied was fated to begin with. And you do get this into this, like, ah one of the things about the story of their parents is that her mother after marrying her father, the one cut her off, they had this terrible fight. And then Tanaqui meets the one and is sort of like, Oh, you set that up.
00:58:23
Speaker
there's a lot A lot of the story actually is technically going, wait, you set that up. Yeah, so then there's a coherence, there's there's ah a structure underneath what seemed to seemed at first to me to be a random set of bad happenings. Actually, this is a story.
00:58:38
Speaker
Right. Makes sense. This is all the long game on the part of the one to unbind himself, to unbind the river and allow him to take back his power and free the land. But in the course of, you know, after after this encounter, what Tanaqui realizes is that she is in fact a better weaver than any of the other mages. Like the enemy mages have loose, bad weaving. They are weaving for the spell, but they're not weaving for the craft. They don't understand the craft of weaving. And Tanaqui is a really, really, really good weaver. And she can, in fact, weave 276 pages of text into two coats, which is a very tiny weaving.
00:59:20
Speaker
Right, she's really judgy about the weaving that these mages do and then it is revealed later that they ah their literally the spellcoats of the mages are their bodies. um All these mages are said to have passed through death ah in order to gain their power and to have therefore become necromancers and therefore they don't have bodies anymore and only their coats give them bodies right and make them and make them immortal. And then once Tanaqui realizes that she's actually tells Hern and his army like cut up the coats it'll kill the mages. And Hern meanwhile with his power of rationality has been like well the reason that when I went to go visit an evil mage my soul didn't get sucked out ah by evil mages like my brothers did
01:00:04
Speaker
is because I just told myself that they couldn't do it. So, you know, say good, everybody else. Everyone else, skill issue, be an atheist harder, it'll work. Right, ripped to my brother, but I'm different.
01:00:19
Speaker
I love her so much. um and the but and I to talk about, before we go on, yes ah pass through death to get power, yes which is what you do. you can a Death by water brings you power, as in the death of Clennan, which gives moral his power to Clennan, who died by the lake, as in the death at sea of Mit and Innan and Hildy, which brings Mit to his moment of power when he's given the names of the gods in the islands.
01:00:46
Speaker
death by water to gain power. yeah And Tanaqui goes all the way down the river to the sea and passes through the net of souls which the evil mage was woven to control the dead. She passes through death, death by water.
01:01:00
Speaker
and she begins to come into her power as a mage. And the one is the power of this land. is all all All of these powers, these undying, are associated with waters, with rivers. ah The one Antanamil, who's the theses the younger the tributary rock river, the younger river, the younger brother,
01:01:20
Speaker
And it's it's made it very, very explicit all throughout the course of this text that the power of water is what makes, gives the land its power and what gives the narrative its power. So what's the water? Death. but Right.
01:01:39
Speaker
And in fact we've been told this from almost the beginning, the moment Gull comes back from war, he talks about his dreams of rushing figures and running along and running down to the sea. But even before that, before he ever goes away, when Tanaqui first sees the army off to war, her father and Gull among them,
01:01:59
Speaker
She says they but they've become like water, they've become like a river as they go off as they go off to die. The crowd of people do as he says, not willingly, not fast, so that the army flows off like the river, brown and sluggish and all one piece, as if people could become like water, all one thing. We could hardly distinguish father or girl, though we looked hard, they had become all one with the rest.
01:02:20
Speaker
uh and it's it's just that you know and i think we haven't talked very much about how this book is a war book and because it's not front of mind it's primarily a mythic book but the the horrors of war are kind of and the horrors of death and the fear of death are ah a background you know texture of this tapestry that tonically is weaving all throughout you know going up and down there where they see the bodies floating in the river yeah well or when they see really it's the striking sequence where the river has flooded as a consequence of the struggles between Cancredin and the one and they they sort of ah row over what was once a city in the palace of the of their king and see it all drowned underwater.
01:03:01
Speaker
yeah and all throughout you know again you get this feeling that tonic we can't talk about it too much because she feels it too much she is she like there are a couple times she'll be like i don't want to weave about this or then she unpicks the length the meant of her father like they are living through a terrifying time they're seeing death all around them And like moral, Tanhui is losing her sibling her family one after another. She loses her father. ah She loses. gull Gull, like Dagner, is not dead, but has gone, you know, has been- He's imprisoned. He's imprisoned. He's found.
01:03:33
Speaker
uh she loses she starts to lose robin first by so robin spends the entire second half of this book very very ill and eventually we learn that she's willing herself to die because she thinks that is the best thing that she can do to get them all out of the situation that they're in with the king who wants to marry her um and so she's watching robin waste away and sad and furious about it and right uh so basically bit by bit losing the responsible figures Yeah, the adults in the story.
Autonomy and Adult Figures
01:04:02
Speaker
And this ah sort of hard on the heels of a couple of books where like you've had the parents heroically show up at the end or the parental figures like like Ammit and Libby or like Crestomancy. There's no parents here. Tanaqui eventually has to just do it herself. She is, it is through her prophecy, her true weaving that the one will be unbound, her grandfather
01:04:25
Speaker
ah who Carl Zadon calls the grandfather, so ah the sort of the father of all the people yeah of the of of this divided country. but he can't save him Neither he nor Tannemann can do very much because of the ways in which they're bound. so and They can't save themselves.
01:04:42
Speaker
So it's not like, I mean, and again, you know, this does and doesn't echo with Ammon and Libby Beer with mid. Ammon and Libby Beer can and do turn up to help them, but, and and like we talked about them as parent figures, but the ways in which they help them are predicated on them getting up and helping themselves and on them making the choices that they need that can't be made for them.
01:05:02
Speaker
Um, but here it's, you know, it takes it one step further. These figures, Tenamil and the One, need Tonic. We need the children to save them, to allow them to unleash their power. Um, there's, you know, they, they cannot save the kids. The kids, it's reversed. The kids have to save the, the great figures of the land.
01:05:20
Speaker
And in doing so, step into their own mythic roles, which it is suggested they will not be stepping out again, like Tanaqui will remain the the the the the sorceress, the witch, the weaver that she becomes, hern will be the king.
01:05:35
Speaker
um this is This one feels ah much more coming of age to me than a lot of other. Although interestingly, ah Drowned Amet also had that sort of coming of age moment, that stepping into adulthood, that adult choice. Right. But in Drowned Amet at the very end, you know, they are they do get to be children again. Yes, a dad turns up. A dad turns up and no dad is turning up in spell codes. It's a book, as you said, very absent in parents, no bad parents, just absent parents, parents who are gone. There's a bad answer, like but we we we can't get away with that one of us. There's still a horrible older woman in the background because you can't you can't have a Diana Wynne Jones book in which a horrible older woman does not exist. Even she gets complicated, like a little bit at the end when we learn, you know, there's the great big army going on and
01:06:23
Speaker
the women of the Riverlands, led by horrible Aunt Zara, are going out and tackling mages. And Tanaqui says, Aunt Zara, I think you're wonderful, and means it in the moment, even though she knows that they're her aunt is going to be horrible again the next day. But sometimes if you can lose your horrible aunt at somebody else and set her to murdering mages, that's a good outlet for her energies. She just needed enrichment. She needed some mages to murder.
01:06:51
Speaker
Right, but you're right. there there's no There's no parents who are ever trying to save the day or even to pick you up and dust you off after you've already saved the day yourself. ah you In fact, ah they they do encounter their mother again, right? All three of their undying figures they will meet in in the flesh in person, their mother um turns out their mother is the river, far more so than the grandfather who is, if you like, the soul behind the river, the creator of the river. Their mother is the river itself, which means that at the end of the book, when the river is destroyed and modern Delmarque's landscape is created,
01:07:28
Speaker
by Tanaqui's prophecy. Yeah, she just killed her mother. Yeah, yeah. and and and And in fact, her mother says I'm ready. I want to go down the down to the sea to be with my husband. yeah So she is choosing in fact, the ultimate fate of anyone who has a forbidden romance across across divine and mortal lines is death because the ultimate fate of those who love is death. Yep. ah And that I'm dying. Yeah.
01:07:55
Speaker
Yeah, there's no happy ending for these romances. ah there's There's, you know, oh, we think Robin does marry Tanamil and they seem all right. That's true. But it's not, you know, what we what we see in the book is Robin is dying for love of Tanamil, then Robin has to marry the king and ends up married to the king for a day.
01:08:15
Speaker
um And then at the end, we're told that ah Robin never shows up in the stories, but may have something to do with the fact that you can ask a Robin for help in times of trouble. She doesn't become a mythic figure. she she's She's an ordinary person. She becomes an ordinary person. She escapes. She escapes, yeah. That's probably for the best.
01:08:37
Speaker
And in fact, I think death is also presented as a kind of escape, if you like, from this world of mythic permanence. The Undying are stuck being the myth forever. ah But those who go down the river to the sea, there's that very moving moment when Taniqui sees the souls ah fighting free of the net that the evil Cancredin has put across the river. And she sees them flying out to the ocean. And Cancredin's spell talks about keeping souls from their long home.
01:09:03
Speaker
Yes, so there is there is a sense that death, death is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's it's a frightening thing. And it's a powerful thing. But I do think um their mother's eventual freedom to go to be with their father is not presented as tragic.
01:09:18
Speaker
right it's the same i mean i think both both their mother and robin i think are like robin is following in their mother's footsteps she's marrying someone she's marrying someone inappropriate uh she mother even says i'm afraid it's in the family yes grandfather did this too this was how he got bound he married uh he fell in love with a human witch uh who's said to be the ancestress of the the riverlands people uh and she bound him yes um and there's this really the passage that i've been looking for is when tonically meets her grandfather for the first time and all throughout the book this this figure of the one of it like the the kids fight over who gets to hold the different undying but no one wants to hold the one he's cold he pulls away he's he's he's a frightening figure even though he's a powerful figure
01:10:06
Speaker
And ah she's technically is confronting him about his treatment of her mother. And she says, Clostie, my father wasn't in the least like Slendleth, the witch who bound you, you might have forgiven her. And he paused again before answering sadly and hesitantly, I am very devious granddaughter, you you would not be here now if I had. So he's been, ah you know,
01:10:26
Speaker
he he played a little bit on his anger. And then Tanaqui says, it came to me that my grandfather was not only bound and sad and waited with shame and loneliness, but even uncertain how to talk to an ordinary person like me. I had not thought it was possible to love him until then. So it's only when she sees him as a flawed figure who can't save her, who who needs her help, that they actually are able to form this connection. Yeah, it's He's a very like, for a character who like explicitly appears very seldom in the book, he's actually a very powerful figure all the way through. And it turns out that every time Tanaqui finishes a spell coach, she looks at it and there is the outline of her grandfather. The shadow of her grandfather is in the pattern. But the story is ultimately about him. Yeah. In some way.
01:11:20
Speaker
And it's such an incredible metaphor for the act of creativity that you write and you write, put all of your, and specifically I think for the way that Diana Wynne Jones writes books, which is you you put everything that you're thinking about, you know, this whole jumble of assorted details, of small details that form this narrative and form these characters and this characterization, and then you take it out and you look at it.
Artistic Process and Open Interpretations
01:11:43
Speaker
And you see the shadow of the thing that you really wanted to write about just kind of strung through all these little details of like word by word and sentence by sentence. Yeah, no, it's exactly I mean, it feels very true to me in terms of how I work and and and what it feels like to me to write a book. Yeah. um Yeah, I think this is the first book where she is and again, I don't want to, you know, tonically is a character as moral as a character, but I think she's uses both of them as ways to talk about what creativity feels like. And it's part of what makes these books. So interesting is that it feels she's writing as tonically and moral or she's writing something true. She's telling something that is true about what it's like to tell a story.
01:12:25
Speaker
because it must be true to have power to be the fire that fetches thunder. Yes, even if you're born there. I want to say one last thing. Go on. ah Just about the end of this book, which is people will find it years later and won't believe it or won't understand it. Like I think there's the final element of this book is about interpretation. And then you put your truth into the world. And then no one is going to understand exactly what you meant by it.
01:12:53
Speaker
you It is full of like hidden codes, words words and phrases and things that mean something to you and to nobody else. But people can find and make meaning out of it. And that is what we are being presented in this book is an object that has had meaning made but made out of it through various layers ah that we are we are trying to talk through these layers to the person who's telling the story.
01:13:15
Speaker
Which is, I think, what we've been trying to do this whole season with 8 Days of Diana Win Jones.
Season Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:13:21
Speaker
So thank you to Diana for having this be the last book of the 70s, because I think that's a really good note to end the season on. Right. And thank you all very much for listening to our little passion project here. I hope you've enjoyed 8 Days Diana Win Jones, 8 Days, 9 Books.
01:13:37
Speaker
Season two when we come to it is the 1980s, which is a hell of a time in Diana Wynne Jones creative output. Yeah, a lot of favorite books in there. So yeah, really excited. Thank you everybody for listening. And there is a we've been talking about maybe doing a bonus recap episode for the end of the season. ah So pay attention to if you follow us on on any of our social medias, we'll probably be putting out a call for questions or things you want us to talk about.
01:14:06
Speaker
ah So I mean, I mean, I just want to argue with you about rankings. Yeah. Some of these books are a lot better than others. and i want I want to complain about which ones are the best. Yes, I want to argue about ratings. And I want to put forward conspiracy theories about Hopin. Yeah, no, we say bonus episode. Actually, we're just going to talk about Drowned Ammit for another hour. Yeah. ah to So easily do that. All right. Thanks, everybody. And ah that's it. Bye. Thank you very much. Bye.