Diana Wynne Jones
Mar. 26th, 2011 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThe fantasy-reading community is mourning her death this morning at the age of 76. She'd been in dodgy ill-health for some years, but this is still sad and unexpected news.
DWJ was an author who possessed the rare talent of being both very good and very prolific, and she could move between slapstick humor and intricate seriousness with ease, sometimes in the same book.
Many of her well-known books will get cited a lot - the Dalemark Quartet and the Chrestomanci series her largest-scale achievements, Archer's Goon and Howl's Moving Castle which are among my favorites, but I'd also like to stick in a word for some rare goofball books that are among my collection's rare gems, Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? (the world's most obnoxious houseguest) and The Skivver's Guide (or, how to goof off without anyone noticing). The Tough Guide to Fantasyland was obscure and hard to get (at least in the US) on publication, but this trenchantly sarcastic guide to generic fantasy tropes has since become well-known to the point of being iconic, not least because it spun off a pair of novels illustrating its points. The first of these, Dark Lord of Derkholm, may be her most-regarded novel today, and it was one of two DWJ novels to win the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. (The other was The Crown of Dalemark, conclusion of the Quartet.)
But my favorite of her books - and one of my Ten (or so) Great Fantasy Novels, one of those books I can, and do, re-read frequently - is Fire and Hemlock. This one is entirely serious, though it treats themes that were the subject of humor in other books, and it combines many remarkable things. One is to take the patterns of the legends of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer and place them in a contemporary setting. Unlike in many such retellings, the protagonists are aware of the pattern they're re-enacting, but they can't just follow the instructions in the ballads, either: they have to figure out what is going on and how to respond to it. It has an eerie conception of magic, in which the openly supernatural is deeply buried, and the sign of magic is the presence of deeply improbable coincidences in ordinary events. It has a lot to say about the fragility of and the imposition of memories, and it also has something to say about becoming a fantasy writer: how to trust your own imagination and not borrow ideas from Tolkien or from the (yet unwritten) Tough Guide. It has a string quartet, too. It has as its strong and active protagonist a girl named Polly, who over the course of the story gracefully matures over the tremendous gap between 9 or 10 and college age, different at each stage and yet firmly the same person. It's a deep, complex, and gripping book.
DWJ was an author who possessed the rare talent of being both very good and very prolific, and she could move between slapstick humor and intricate seriousness with ease, sometimes in the same book.
Many of her well-known books will get cited a lot - the Dalemark Quartet and the Chrestomanci series her largest-scale achievements, Archer's Goon and Howl's Moving Castle which are among my favorites, but I'd also like to stick in a word for some rare goofball books that are among my collection's rare gems, Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? (the world's most obnoxious houseguest) and The Skivver's Guide (or, how to goof off without anyone noticing). The Tough Guide to Fantasyland was obscure and hard to get (at least in the US) on publication, but this trenchantly sarcastic guide to generic fantasy tropes has since become well-known to the point of being iconic, not least because it spun off a pair of novels illustrating its points. The first of these, Dark Lord of Derkholm, may be her most-regarded novel today, and it was one of two DWJ novels to win the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. (The other was The Crown of Dalemark, conclusion of the Quartet.)
But my favorite of her books - and one of my Ten (or so) Great Fantasy Novels, one of those books I can, and do, re-read frequently - is Fire and Hemlock. This one is entirely serious, though it treats themes that were the subject of humor in other books, and it combines many remarkable things. One is to take the patterns of the legends of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer and place them in a contemporary setting. Unlike in many such retellings, the protagonists are aware of the pattern they're re-enacting, but they can't just follow the instructions in the ballads, either: they have to figure out what is going on and how to respond to it. It has an eerie conception of magic, in which the openly supernatural is deeply buried, and the sign of magic is the presence of deeply improbable coincidences in ordinary events. It has a lot to say about the fragility of and the imposition of memories, and it also has something to say about becoming a fantasy writer: how to trust your own imagination and not borrow ideas from Tolkien or from the (yet unwritten) Tough Guide. It has a string quartet, too. It has as its strong and active protagonist a girl named Polly, who over the course of the story gracefully matures over the tremendous gap between 9 or 10 and college age, different at each stage and yet firmly the same person. It's a deep, complex, and gripping book.
