Thread: Diana Wynne Jones' books Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.


To visit this thread, use this URL:
http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=70;t=028201

---

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
A place where you can enthuse about your favourites and discuss the books of this wonderfully creative writer.

Go for it!
 

---

Posted by Sandemaniac (# 12829) on :
 
Despite sharing a house with a fantasy/sci-fi addict I've never actually read any, but apparently her grandparents lived in my parent's village during WW2. Unfortunately I don't know their names, so I can't ask anyone who'd remember...

AG
 

---

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
I think she's brilliant. Her talents for working out arresting magical imagery and magical rules, and her ethical instincts are almost always spot on.
On the other hand, her ability to resolve plots in the space available, in such a way that one can follow what just happened, is somewhat more wavery.
 

---

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :
 
I got "Howl's Moving Castle" expecting it to be a bit babyish and was immediately captivated. "Enchanted Glass" is another of my favourites.

"Fire and Hemlock" is one I needed to read twice - an odd, disturbing sort of book. "Eight Days of Luke" is another that bears re-reading.

I've enjoyed almost everything of hers I've read, with the exception of "Charmed Life" as I didn't like Chrestomanci as a character so haven't read any more of the Chrestomanci series.
 

---

Posted by Sarasa (# 12271) on :
 
'Charmed Life' is one of my favourites, as is the whole of that series. I love the Dalemark ones too, specially the 'Crown of Dalemark' and "Drowned Ammet'. My favourite stand alone is 'Power of Three' and I have a signed copy of it.
I'm sure I've told the story here already, I booekd her for the school I worked in in the early eighties as the drama teachers and I were serious fans. The head of drama took her back to the station. His deputy and I not wanting to miss continuing our talk with her hitched a lift in the back of his decrepit van.
I agree, I love her imagination, but I think sometimes she literally loses the plot.
I don't think I've read everything by here, so I'm hoping this thread will find more I can read.
 

---

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
I think my favorite of her Chrestomanci books is The Lives of Christopher Chant. Of the Dalemark books surely the most wonderful is The Spellcoats. And in the very small category of fictional nonfiction what can be more delightful than The Tough Guide to Fantasyland? That's a book I recommend to young writers all the time.
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
I wondered, when I read that, how well it went down with the perpetrators of the sort of fantasies she was sending up. Disposable peasants, for example, a matter which used to annoy me in some writers.

The map took me a minute or two!

It was a book which bore reading snatches aloud to a friend very well, to mutual amusement.

[ 02. March 2015, 18:47: Message edited by: Penny S ]
 

---

Posted by Ferdzy (# 8702) on :
 
Oh, where to start!?

Archer's Goon is a favourite. It is one of the few books I have ever read where I didn't have any idea that a major plot twist was coming, even though when I read it again, she'd been dropping clues like mad. Well done!

The Time of the Ghost, and Witch Week, are also wonderful books. They both take place in boarding schools, and are kind of the anti-Hogwarts. One of the things I love about Witch Week in particular, is that none of the characters is perfect, indeed a few of the main ones are really not particularly nice, but she writes them with such sympathy that you can't help but emphathize with them too.

The Dalemark series were written early on, and I like them, but I like her middle period books the best; the combination of a world-almost-like-ours with ordinary people and lots of humour really appeals to me. I find her last half dozen books or so not quite as good as her best, but always quite readable.

A few times I have found the plot endings to be a bit odd or rushed, but my main complaint about her works is that I think she tended to be a bit arbitrary about what magic can and can't do, just to make it fit the plot.
 

---

Posted by Arabella Purity Winterbottom (# 3434) on :
 
Another fan from way back. My favorites would be Fire and Hemlock, The Outward Bounders, A Tale of Time City, and Conrad's Choice. I think The Outward Bounders was the first I read, some 20 years ago, and it grabbed me by the throat with its lost hero.

My only real gripe with her is that she seems to be very down on mothers. Conrad's Choice is a golden example, in which the mother is a caricature of feminism. Probably the worst example is Janine in Deep Secret - prepared to sacrifice children for power.

Fire and Hemlock is still one of the most haunting love stories I've ever read and my copy is falling to pieces (the mother in that is pretty awful, too).

No surprises that Neil Gaiman counts her as one of his major influences. Imagination, philosophy, folklore, a bit of creepiness, and here and there, love.
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
If you can get hold of her autobiography, the attitude to parents may be explained. I have read it on line.

Two things, not parental, stick in my mind. That, as a child in the Lakes, she was responsible for erasing some Ruskin drawings, and had a run in with Beatrix Potter, who was not pleased with girls swinging on a gate.

The second stuck because the description of the aged Potter seemed related to that of Biddy Iremonger in "Wilkin's Tooth", which suggested to me a thread of resentment in DWJ. She isn't always very nice, and the idea that in some cases the nastier characters are based on real people to take revenge is unpleasant. As with the mothers.

There was a trace of that about "Tough Guide" as well, I thought.

[ 03. March 2015, 06:51: Message edited by: Penny S ]
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
While searching for the autobiography I found this reference to "Howl's Moving Castle".

Google doodle

And here is the life.
Autobiography
 

---

Posted by Sandemaniac (# 12829) on :
 
And funnily enough, someone has just made their first post on the ship in the name of the vicar that DWJ describes in that as a communist...

*Twilight Zone theme*

AG
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
That's going to be an interesting read. I didn't know about him. Or Holst being there.
 

---

Posted by Beethoven (# 114) on :
 
I loved Howl's Moving Castle from the very first time I read it - no idea how many times I had it from the library for re-reading. I finally bought my own copy a few years back in the hopes that Ops 1 & 2 might enjoy it. Op 1 tried it, decided chapter 3 looked boring so skipped it and wondered why nothing made sense...! She's since read it properly and is a convert, to the extent that she's bought a few other DWJ books with her own money I'm sure I read some of her other books in my youth, but have no idea which ones now - nothing else stands out in my memory, but I'm open to suggestions
 

---

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :
 
Hey, a whole thread on DWJ! Excellent!

Now, where to start...

My favourite (as I've already mentioned) is The House of Many Ways, but it's a difficult choice. I like it because the protagonist loves reading as much as I do... and because I like the idea of having a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside (just like the TARDIS)... and the bits about doing the washing up and the laundry were very funny. But most of all I like it because Sophie and Howl are in it. I quite like her way of introducing established characters into a story told from someone else's point of view; to my mind it's more interesting than the straightforward soap-opera-y type of sequel that just continues the story of the established characters from their viewpoint.

Ariel, you might want to try 'Magicians of Caprona' or 'The Lives of Christopher Chant' before giving up on Chrestomanci entirely. The other books in the Chrestomanci series are completely different in tone to 'Charmed Life', which was a very early book (first published in 1977).

Agree with what everyone else says about her portrayal of mothers, though I think the portrayal of Conrad's mother is redeemed by her behaviour at the party. I wonder whether the rushed endings are because she got bored with the characters towards the end of the story and wanted to wrap it up as fast as possible, or because she thought it was more dramatic that way, or because her publisher always set very strict deadlines?
 

---

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
Oh, the Magicians of Caprona is just about a perfect novel. The magical cats alone are worth it!

I am acquainted with DWJ's American editor, and was with her on a panel about DWJ at a science fiction convention. She says that DWJ was the quintessential pantser. (As you know, Bob, authors divide out into the planners, who lay out the entire book from beginning to end before writing the thing, and pantsers, who just sit down at a keyboard and fly into the unknown.) She never began knowing where the work would go. (A writer after my own heart! Because I am a pantser too.)

I was thrilled to learn this, because I could deduce it, simply from the works. For instance it is clear that DWJ never laid out a system of magic, Dungeons & Dragons style. Her wizards have no rules, no protocols, no textbooks, no standard spells to recite in faux Latin. The characters are all much, much more intuitive. And her improv plotting accounts for the oddness of some of the endings that we complain of.

Her editor also reports that she learned never, ever, to ask DWJ for details about the current book. She was so inspirational and intuitive a writer that asking for details about the work in progress immediately threw her writing off the rails and delayed the book for a month.
 

---

Posted by Sarasa (# 12271) on :
 
Thanks for that insight Brenda Clough. I'd always thought that was the way DWJ must work because the way so many of her stories seem to come a bit unstuck at the end. Maybe that's why I like 'Power of Three' so much, it seems pretty well plotted throughout.
I can't say I've noticed the horrible mothers, I guess I thought they were just what you'd expect in fantasy, all those wicked stepmothers. I did notice that many of her protagonists don't realise how magical they are at first, until they stop being put upon.
'The Homeward Bounders' was one of my early favorites, I always though Pullman nicked the ending for the ending of 'His Dark Materials'.
 

---

Posted by Lola (# 627) on :
 
I was only able to read the DWJs books at the local library when I was small and I read them over and over. I only found out relatively recently that there were a whole load more and was so happy!

I think I liked the Spellcoats and The Magicians of Caprona then but now I think I love Howl's Moving Castle the best (Howl looks like David Bowie in my imagination). Lovely to hear the insights from Brenda Clough.

I have been slowly trying to entice my niece and nephew into her world via Earwig and the Witch (very big hit especially with my sister who I think is pretty fed up with books about Rainbow Faries and ponies) and Witch Week respectively (which has been steadfastly avoided so far - I will win in the end though - the same thing happened with Tintin which was resisted for some time and then became an all consuming passion - I might try Archer's Goon instead).

On mothers, the mother in Wilkins Tooth is the catalyst for the final fight back against Biddy. I do like how we have some proper wicked witches in DWJ.

I have had vivid dreams of flying ever since I read The Ogre Downstairs.
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
What I particularly liked about Witch Week was the part, near the beginning, about not being able to climb the rope in the gym. It very much spoke to my condition. (I told a particularly helpful PE Advisor about it.) Years after school, and coping with the mocking, a colleague who had attended a PE teacher training college released me from the ghastly memory. Girls, she told me, do not usually have the arm muscles to swarm up ropes - those who do are the exceptions. (And if they have to haul up peasant legs, she did not add, politely, they really aren't going to do well.) I suspect DWJ of writing from experience. It's such an intense description.

I really can't see Howl as Bowie - a rugby player?

[ 03. March 2015, 19:50: Message edited by: Penny S ]
 

---

Posted by Arabella Purity Winterbottom (# 3434) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Penny S:
Autobiography

---

Wow, I see what you mean. Her mother would definitely qualify for the Difficult Relatives thread. I'd be interested to know if she ever extended this, as it was written around the time of A Tale of Time City which was 1987.

The opening description of her paternal grandparents can only be the genesis of Grandfather Gwyn in The Merlin Conspiracy, from the countryside to the preaching. Wonderfully vivid.
 

---

Posted by Garasu (# 17152) on :
 
I don't know... at Fly half he'd probably fit right in
 

---

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
Another favorite, that I always send young writers to, is Dark Lord of Derkholm. (It is this book that the Tough Guide to Fantasyland refers to.) You can never read quest fantasy again in quite the same way!

She is one of those writers whose death was a calamity. She should have lived forever, and written a book a year! There is one last one, that she left unfinished. Her sister completed it, and it is recently out.
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
Garasu

quote:

---

I don't know... at Fly half he'd probably fit right in

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sandemaniac:
Despite sharing a house with a fantasy/sci-fi addict I've never actually read any

---

*makes note to find books and put them on Sandemaniac's reading stack*

I found 'Eight Days of Luke' and 'Archer's Goon' in the school library when I was 9 or 10. Hooked from chapter 1. Think my favourite of her works is probably 'The Spellcoats'; despite being in the Dalemark set it has a very different feel to the other two stories, and somehow I can read it by itself whilst 'Drowned Ammett' and 'Cart and Cwidder' have to go together.

Hmmm... I'd been wondering what to read when I finish the 3-book set I've just started. Will have to put some reservations in at the library.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Another favorite, that I always send young writers to, is Dark Lord of Derkholm. (It is this book that the Tough Guide to Fantasyland refers to.) You can never read quest fantasy again in quite the same way!

---

Those 2 just set me off in fits of giggles. Especially considering I already had the bad habit of picking out archetypes and mythological lifts from that sort of book before I started leafing through the Tough Guide (I do that even on the stories I enjoy. With the last of Pullman's Spyglass books, that was how I got to the end of it... ), I suspect that just made me worse.
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
When I got some of them for the classroom library, it was irritating to find that they were only available in American format. Howl and Archer's Goon were particularly bad. I had to go through with Tippex and a fine pen, as I didn't feel it right to have the alternative spelling in a UK classroom. AG was the worst, because, although the setting was clearly over here, it wasn't just spelling that was not UK. The cars had tires and fenders and trunks, and the roads had sidewalks. (I think there were other things as well, but can't remember.)
I did once get hold of Witch's Business, the American edition of Wilkin's Tooth, to compare, and it was quite odd. The gang which swore in the UK by using perfectly innocent colour words had switched to using offal. This made the part where they were described, in both versions, as turning the air blue, rather meaningless in the western text.

[ 03. March 2015, 21:55: Message edited by: Penny S ]
 

---

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
For a period of time Tough Guide to Fantasyland was not available in a US edition. I purchased the UK edition at a SF convention, and took it up to my hotel room. I was sharing the room with another author, and we took turns cracking the book open and reading a random entry. It was kind of scary. She read the 'eye color' listing out loud (all villains have black eyes, all good guys have blue, green eyes means musical, etc.) and we both cried out in horror. She said, "OMG, my novel has already gone to galleys -- I can't change the villain's eye color now. They were black!" And I cried, "OMG, my hero's eyes are green and he is indeed musical, dammit!"
 

---

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :
 
Brenda: Do your horses reproduce by pollination as well? (that's my favourite entry after the one about boots).

If the 'Tough Guide' wasn't released in America simultaneously with the UK edition, that explains why you thought it was published after 'Dark Lord of Derkholm' - I'm pretty sure it came out before 'Dark Lord' in the UK.

I like Spellcoats too - I found it fascinating, and quite unlike any of the other Dalemark books. OTOH I like things about all the others as well. I thought the mother in Cart and Cwidder came across as a relatively sympathetic character; OK, she does effectively abandon her children but on the other hand she was more or less kidnapped in the first place, so you can't really blame her for rushing off to marry the other guy as soon as Clennan is dead. It's not like she had a choice originally, if he used the magic of the cwidder to get her to marry him and then used her own sense of duty to trap her into doing everything he wanted, whether she agreed with it or not (and I find it difficult to believe that she agreed with his decision to use his children as cover for his activities in the South). And I like the descriptions of sailing in Drowned Ammett, and the quest in The Crown of Dalemark...

[ 04. March 2015, 08:41: Message edited by: Jane R ]
 

---

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
Yes, when you know that DWJ was a completely improvisational writer, it is amazing how well long works like the Dalemark volumes hang together. Or Christopher Chant -- he is a consistent character throughout the many volumes of his adventures, and you can in later works like The Pinhoe Egg see how he's trying to compensate for the things that he knows were bad in his own upbringing.
 

---

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :
 
Has anyone else read anything by Catherine Fisher? (British, writes YA fantasy). I've just discovered her and her books are like DWJ's, though that's not an entirely fair description because she has a distinctive 'voice' of her own.

I bought a copy of DWJ's last book (finished by her sister). I'm glad they published it because it has some interesting ideas, though it made me sad all over again that there won't be any more... There's an introduction by her sister in which the reader is challenged to spot the 'join' where DWJ left off. I must admit, I couldn't see an obvious change in style but there was a bit near the end when I thought 'that's not DWJ'.

[ 04. March 2015, 14:59: Message edited by: Jane R ]
 

---

Posted by Sarasa (# 12271) on :
 
My son's just finished DWJ's last book Islands of Chaldea, he thought the end trailed off a bit, but couldn't see an obvious change between one author and another.
I'm loving this thread - so many wonderful books.
 

---

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
I couldn't spot the join, either.
 

---

© Ship of Fools 2016


UBB.classic^TM 6.5.0