The Enchantress of the Everyday
Nov. 14th, 2011 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselMay 2011
Enchanted Glass – Diana Wynne Jones – HarperCollins, 2010
* * * *
Britain lost a National Treasure earlier this year and almost no-one noticed. I first encountered Diana Wynne Jones at the age of ten or so, when I picked up a book called The Ogre Downstairs and was rapidly drawn into a charming and very funny story about a mysterious chemistry set full of bottles with labels like Misc. Pulv. and Animal Spirits that develops into a rapidly escalating farce as five children try to keep the resulting crawling chocolate bars, invisible fingers and skin colour changes from the notice of their forbidding step-father (the Ogre of the title). Behind all this was a grimmer story of half-sibling strife, poor parenting and a failing re-marriage that is all made right in the end.
And that is the genius of Diana Wynne Jones. She is a great children's writer, because she realised that the only difference between a children's and an adult book is, or should be, in the use of a child as a viewpoint character. You do not dumb down human personalities (unlike, say, most of the Harry Potter books) – children are just as capable as adults of understanding and appreciating the complexities of family life and the sometimes conflicting motivations that people have. A clear and straightforward style, with balanced sentences and well chosen words, is simply good writing regardless of the intended audience. And I personally would like a lot more authors to have the enjoyable little puzzles that crop up in all her books, whether it is trying to figure out from their names what the chemicals will do in The Ogre Downstairs, or her favourite trick of including characters from well-known myths and legends in disguise. But her best feature was her humour and the sly satire of modern life inherent in, say, Archer's Goon (my favourite of her books with its suggestion that inconvenient road works and smelly drains are the result of annoying the squabbling gods who run the local council services - it explains so much!).
Not everything she wrote was so light-hearted and the resulting works are memorable and strange. The Dalemark quartet is an object lesson in how to do a good fantasy series (I love Cart and Cwidder in particular) and Fire and Hemlock is a novel that I really must re-read one day once I know more about the legend on which it is based. The Homeward Bounders has one of the saddest endings I have ever read, but is an effective metaphor for the sometimes unresolvable tragedies of real life and a telling exploration of what the term "home" actually means.
Enchanted Glass, I am sure you will be glad to hear, is nowhere near as depressing. It is not one of her very best but is still an entertaining read with some funny and original ideas. The plot concerns Andrew Hope, a university lecturer who inherits a house and its field-of-care from his grandfather Jocelyn Brandon. With the house comes its attendant housekeeper Mrs Stock and gardener Mr Stock (unrelated) who, when annoyed, retaliate by cooking cauliflower cheese and delivering piles of huge vegetables respectively. Into his life comes Aidan Cain, a boy who has run away from his foster home after being menaced by mysterious Stalkers. There is also an ex-jockey with a missing leg called Tarquin, his beautiful and practical (if slightly mad) daughter Stashe, and Mrs Stock's simple-minded but surprisingly handy nephew Shaun. Andrew must learn about his new responsibilities, particularly with respect to the magical stained glass panel in the kitchen door, while fending off the incursions on his field-of-care from the mysterious Mr. Brown and protecting Aidan from his pursuers.
As always, there is a magical system behind the story which is partly logical and partly intuitive (at one point Aidan offers to draw pictures of the Stalkers, which Andrew - and the reader - instinctively senses would be a very bad thing to do). It is well worked out but felt a bit thinner than some of her more complex creations, and there seemed to be more repetition of the jokes than usual. I think it is not revealing too much to say that this is another of her books that is a riff on a well-known story, and once this was revealed I was, for once, able to figure out the secret identities of the main characters. Given the importance attached to it, the enchanted glass did not fit into the overall scheme as well as it could have done.
Nonetheless, it was a joy to see the subtle way in which the clues are planted and the sometimes extremely complex scenes are orchestrated. Wynne Jones herself had an extraordinarily awful upbringing as the eldest of three children who were neglected by her parents, which may explain why she is so good at family arguments between strong-minded people and why so many of her novels are about understanding seemingly unsympathetic characters. But most of all, it is her joyous sense of life and her ability to infuse the everyday with mad, inventive but somehow logical magic that makes her writing so memorable. We are lucky to have had her, and to have her books still.
Enchanted Glass – Diana Wynne Jones – HarperCollins, 2010
* * * *
Britain lost a National Treasure earlier this year and almost no-one noticed. I first encountered Diana Wynne Jones at the age of ten or so, when I picked up a book called The Ogre Downstairs and was rapidly drawn into a charming and very funny story about a mysterious chemistry set full of bottles with labels like Misc. Pulv. and Animal Spirits that develops into a rapidly escalating farce as five children try to keep the resulting crawling chocolate bars, invisible fingers and skin colour changes from the notice of their forbidding step-father (the Ogre of the title). Behind all this was a grimmer story of half-sibling strife, poor parenting and a failing re-marriage that is all made right in the end.
And that is the genius of Diana Wynne Jones. She is a great children's writer, because she realised that the only difference between a children's and an adult book is, or should be, in the use of a child as a viewpoint character. You do not dumb down human personalities (unlike, say, most of the Harry Potter books) – children are just as capable as adults of understanding and appreciating the complexities of family life and the sometimes conflicting motivations that people have. A clear and straightforward style, with balanced sentences and well chosen words, is simply good writing regardless of the intended audience. And I personally would like a lot more authors to have the enjoyable little puzzles that crop up in all her books, whether it is trying to figure out from their names what the chemicals will do in The Ogre Downstairs, or her favourite trick of including characters from well-known myths and legends in disguise. But her best feature was her humour and the sly satire of modern life inherent in, say, Archer's Goon (my favourite of her books with its suggestion that inconvenient road works and smelly drains are the result of annoying the squabbling gods who run the local council services - it explains so much!).
Not everything she wrote was so light-hearted and the resulting works are memorable and strange. The Dalemark quartet is an object lesson in how to do a good fantasy series (I love Cart and Cwidder in particular) and Fire and Hemlock is a novel that I really must re-read one day once I know more about the legend on which it is based. The Homeward Bounders has one of the saddest endings I have ever read, but is an effective metaphor for the sometimes unresolvable tragedies of real life and a telling exploration of what the term "home" actually means.
Enchanted Glass, I am sure you will be glad to hear, is nowhere near as depressing. It is not one of her very best but is still an entertaining read with some funny and original ideas. The plot concerns Andrew Hope, a university lecturer who inherits a house and its field-of-care from his grandfather Jocelyn Brandon. With the house comes its attendant housekeeper Mrs Stock and gardener Mr Stock (unrelated) who, when annoyed, retaliate by cooking cauliflower cheese and delivering piles of huge vegetables respectively. Into his life comes Aidan Cain, a boy who has run away from his foster home after being menaced by mysterious Stalkers. There is also an ex-jockey with a missing leg called Tarquin, his beautiful and practical (if slightly mad) daughter Stashe, and Mrs Stock's simple-minded but surprisingly handy nephew Shaun. Andrew must learn about his new responsibilities, particularly with respect to the magical stained glass panel in the kitchen door, while fending off the incursions on his field-of-care from the mysterious Mr. Brown and protecting Aidan from his pursuers.
As always, there is a magical system behind the story which is partly logical and partly intuitive (at one point Aidan offers to draw pictures of the Stalkers, which Andrew - and the reader - instinctively senses would be a very bad thing to do). It is well worked out but felt a bit thinner than some of her more complex creations, and there seemed to be more repetition of the jokes than usual. I think it is not revealing too much to say that this is another of her books that is a riff on a well-known story, and once this was revealed I was, for once, able to figure out the secret identities of the main characters. Given the importance attached to it, the enchanted glass did not fit into the overall scheme as well as it could have done.
Nonetheless, it was a joy to see the subtle way in which the clues are planted and the sometimes extremely complex scenes are orchestrated. Wynne Jones herself had an extraordinarily awful upbringing as the eldest of three children who were neglected by her parents, which may explain why she is so good at family arguments between strong-minded people and why so many of her novels are about understanding seemingly unsympathetic characters. But most of all, it is her joyous sense of life and her ability to infuse the everyday with mad, inventive but somehow logical magic that makes her writing so memorable. We are lucky to have had her, and to have her books still.