Magic? It’s mostly ideas

Ritratto Di Gentiluomo by Bartolomeo Veneto (ca. 1502-1555). Fitzwilliam Museum. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Diana Wynne Jones: A Sudden Wild Magic
Avon Books 1994 (1992)

Magic is mostly ideas — they’re the strongest thing there is!
— Gladys, X/2

The fantasies of Diana Wynne Jones are the epitome of wild magic, as other commentators have previously noted. You can guess what ‘wild magic’ is — uncontrolled flights of powerful fancy spiralling off in unexpected directions, or some such will-o’-the-wisp definition — and virtually every writing of this much missed author is replete with it. A novel entitled A Sudden Wild Magic is naturally going to include rather a lot of it.

The novel’s premise is easily summarised. A neighbouring universe has been harvesting ideas and inventions from our world without our knowledge — not such a fantastic notion these days — but has also been experimentally interfering with our lives, introducing global warming and epidemics for example to see how we cope with disasters on this scale. A UK-based group of magical guardians decide to infiltrate a crack team of female adepts, their mission being to disrupt this covert action conducted by male mages by introducing magical viruses; the novel switches back and forth from Earth to this parallel world as it follows the ups and downs of this team and those monitoring progress. Being a Diana Wynne Jones fantasy things are not always as they seem, however.

It’s almost pointless to outline the intricacies of the plot narrative in a straightforward review: there is so much going on, so many strands, such a varied cast, so many distinctive individuals. It’s a novel of its time, of course: issues current in the 1990s have assumed different perspectives a quarter of a century later — AIDS-HIV and global warming, for example — and we might baulk at their semi-humorous treatment both from a retrospective viewpoint and because they are matters warranting serious consideration. But it can be argued that humour used as a means of drawing attention to the misuse of power — from issues concerning exploitation and gender to technology used irresponsibly and child abuse — deserves its place in fiction.

Instead then of discussing the narrative’s twists and turns, I want here to indicate some of the ways the author’s own wild magic operates, how she takes ideas from here and there and allows them to follow their own courses.

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“A strong female lead”

The featured challenge for March 2018 in the window of Book·ish, Crickhowell

Not long after the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere, three quarters of the way into March — a month in fact featuring two patron saints of Celtic countries — and I’ve missed marking this period in any special way. But anyway, what’s a date but an arbitrary point in the calendar? Measure time in any way other than by the solar year and all our anniversaries, birthdays and feast days count for little.

Still I feel a little bit put out because I failed to celebrate one of my favourite authors. Maybe it’s because I’ve read almost all her books. Maybe it’s because I’ve been too busy celebrating the bicentenary of another author — Mary Shelley, ‘onlie begetter’ of Frankenstein — or was still stupefied after a revisit of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea that I forgot to check in on Kristen’s We Be Reading blog where she hosts March Magics, a celebration of the worlds and works of Terry Pratchett and … Diana Wynne Jones.

Better late than never.

Fantasyland

Non-specific Fantasy World Map (credit: http://freefantasymaps.org/

Diana Wynne Jones
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
Gollancz 2004 (1996)

Dark Lord (dread lord). There is always one of these in the background of every Tour, attempting to ruin everything and take over the world. He will be so sinister that he will be seen by you only once or twice, probably near the end of the Tour. Generally he will attack you through MINIONS (forces of Terror, bound to his will), of which he will have large numbers. When you do get to see him at last, you will not be surprised to find he is black […] and shadowy and probably not wholly human. He will make you feel very cold and small. […]

In The Tough Guide to Fantasyland Diana Wynne Jones created an imaginary tourist’s guidebook to a generic world where magic is a given — in fact the kind of world conjured up for almost any example of the epic fantasy genre you can name. Think Middle Earth, Narnia, Earthsea or, less familiarly, the Old Kingdom, Prydain, Zimiamvia or Pellinor. Jones imagines them all perhaps as aspects of Fantasyland, though it’s clear that the Disney version is not really what she has in mind. As pretty much all fantasy is predicated on conflict leading to some sort of resolution the nemesis of each world is thus nearly always some incarnation of a Dark Lord. It’s hard to think of any dread adversary who doesn’t conform in some way to Jones’ description, their motivations exactly those of Milton’s Satan:

One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

But a Dark Lord alone does not a Fantasyland make.

A heavy responsibility well acquitted

Diana Wynne Jones
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing
Foreword by Neil Gaiman
Greenwillow Books 2012

Where to start? Diana Wynne Jones was a very individual and distinctive voice within British fantasy writing, highly regarded and rightly so, though that recognition was perhaps long coming: for example, though I was aware of the name I only first read her work in 2004, on a strong recommendation, beginning with The Merlin Conspiracy. However, from then on I was hooked. She had a growing loyal following from the mid-seventies onwards, but perhaps the fillip to her popularity came with an audience keen for more fiction along the lines of the Harry Potter books, aided by the success of the Japanese animated film of her Howl’s Moving Castle. Sadly, within a relatively little time she discovered she had cancer, dying just two years later in 2011.

Who is the Dark Lord?

The citadel of Derkholm?

Roland Chesney has found a way to access a parallel world, a world of real fantasy and magic. For four decades he has sent Pilgrim Parties on tourist package holidays to these lands, forcing one hapless individual after another to become the Dark Lord for the duration while the tourists attempt to defeat his forces. The question is, will this be the last year that this exploitation of an innocent population happens, the year when the worm turns?

There are Dark Lords aplenty in modern fantasy: take your pick from Sauron, Darth Vader, Voldemort or any one of a multitude of evil megalomaniacs. Yet Diana Wynne Jones’ comic fantasy The Dark Lord of Derkholm is different, and an intriguing tale, full of mysteries — some of which get solved by the end of the novel, others seemingly insoluble. =Tamar Lindsay very kindly agreed to pen this guest post attempting to answer the question, “Who is the Dark Lord?”

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Calmgrove has kindly offered me space to set out some ideas I have about Dark Lord of Derkholm, which is one of my favorite books. This discussion involves major spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book already, go read it.

A celebration of true magic

This is a repost of a review first published 26th March 2014
and republished here to mark #MarchMagics and #DWJMarch,
a celebration of all things Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett

Diana Wynne Jones The Islands of Chaldea
completed by Ursula Jones
HarperCollins Children’s Books 2014

Fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones would have been 80 this year. Since her death on March 26th 2011 some fans have designated March as Diana Wynne Jones Month — by reading, reviewing and discussing her novels they felt that this would be “a way to turn mourning to celebration on the anniversary of Diana’s death”. The third #dwjmonth (also tagged #dwjmarch) is being observed as I write [March 2014].

This year was extra special: her final novel, completed by her sister Ursula (an author in her own right), was published just in time for a celebration of the woman and her work. As a result of suggesting — rather cheekily, I thought — that I was Diana’s “greatest fan”, I was lucky enough to win one of ten copies offered in a competition by her British publishers. As always with posthumous novels the worry is, will this work be up to her usual standard, or will disappointment cloud the reputation that she painstakingly established for herself?

A Matter of Lives and DEATH

Over at Kristen’s We Be Reading blog the annual March Magics celebration of the work of Diana Wynne Jones — to which was recently added the fiction of Sir Terry Pratchett — will be observed, starting tomorrow. Both authors, giants in their respected fantasy fields, are much missed by their legions of fans (a cliché, I know, but they are legion). As Kristen writes,

DWJ March began in March 2012 as a celebration of Diana Wynne Jones and last year I added Terry Pratchett as he had passed the year before. I changed the name to March Magics but a few of us didn’t want to let go of the DWJ March name so now it kind of has two names. I guess this is the 6th year of the event!

Kristen tells us she has for a while wanted to focus DWJ March on the figure of the enchanter Chrestomanci; of the seven books in the series she omits The Magicians of Caprona, Witch Week and the short story collection Mixed Magics only because they’re not directly about nine-lived enchanters. (Like cats, since you were wondering.)

She will pair these up with four of Pratchett’s five DEATH books (omitting Hogfather since she will be featuring it on her blog in December). I’ve already read and reviewed the Chrestomanci novels, plus one of the Pratchett titles, so shall instead be concentrating on the three Discworld novels featuring DEATH I haven’t as yet tried, Reaper Man, Soul Music and The Thief of Time — if I can acquire them in time!

The schedule, should you wish to join in, will be as follows (I’ve added links to my reviews where applicable):

Friday 3rd: DWJ’s Charmed Life review

Monday 6th: STP’s Mort review

Friday 10th: DWJ’s The Lives of Christopher Chant review

Tuesday 14th: STP’s Reaper Man

Friday 17th: DWJ’s Conrad’s Fate review

Wednesday 22nd: STP’s Soul Music

Sunday 26th: DWJ’s The Pinhoe Egg review

Friday 31st: STP’s The Thief of Time

I’m being selfish here: I need excuses to read Pratchett’s work but the sheer volume of his oeuvre is so daunting. I’ve read a collection of his non-fiction pieces, the aforementioned Mort, Equal Rites, Johnny and the Dead and Good Omens (which he co-authored with Neil Gaiman) but would really like to get on with more Discworld novels. I have The Colour of Magic on my shelves but am loath to start this as I’ve been warned off it a couple of times. (In a nice way, not with a horse’s head in the bed or anything like that.) So the three March Magics titles noted above may be just up my Ankh.