Jones versus Rowling

Or: Why I Love Nan Pilgrim, Charles Morgan, and the Other Students in 6B More than I Will Ever Love a Gryffindor.

(By the way, I'm going to assume anyone reading this post either has already read Witch Week and all four Harry Potter books or doesn't mind spoilers.)

So what with the flu, I've been rereading the Harry Potter books. I should make it clear before I get up a head of steam that I like Rowling very much. I enjoy her books; I enjoy rereading them (which is key); and I'll certainly be snatching up #5 as soon as it comes out.

But.

I was introduced to Diana Wynne Jones's work when I was eight or nine. Witch Week wasn't quite the first book of hers I read, but it was close, and every time I reread Harry Potter, I think of WW (which I have to save rereading for special occasions--more special than being sick--because it's in danger of following Watership Down into the category of Books I've Read So Often--Oh, There's No Bloody Point, Stupid, Just Put The Damn Thing Back On The Shelf).

On the surface, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (stupid American rat-bastard publishers *grumble*) and WW have a lot in common--English kids at boarding school, dysfunctional families, friendships forming, witchcraft, yada yada--enough so that Jones gets a lot of comments along the lines of (from the Crabbes and Goyles of the world), Did you read PS before you wrote WW?, and from the more intelligent, Do you think Rowling ripped you off, and how do you feel about it?

For the record, although stunning originality is not Rowling's strong point, I don't think she ripped off WW. If I were going to be really nasty, I'd say PS would have been a better book if she had, but that's really just rhetoric, which often tries to lead me into saying things I don't really mean, just because they sound so cool. The fact of the matter is that WW and PS come from such fundamentally different mindsets that there's very little influence the one could have had on the other.

PS is written from the perspective that School is Fun. WW is not. In PS characters are neatly and cleanly divided into Those Who Like Harry (As All Right-Thinking People Ought) and Those Who Don't (Shame On Them!). Good and Evil may get a little fuzzy, but Liking Harry and Not Liking Harry remains simple. People who Don't Like Harry are always somehow Up To No Good. (Sorry about all the capitals. Dunno what's up with that.) See, Snape may not be Evil, but he Doesn't Like Harry, and thus he's a hypocritical, petty son of a bitch with lousy personal hygiene. It's very simple. People who Don't Like Harry also always deserve what's coming to them, so we don't have to feel guilty about the schadenfreude of watching Snape be utterly humiliated at the end of The Prisoner of Azkaban or Malfoy be turned into a ferret in The Goblet of Fire. And the people who Don't Like Harry are (a) a minority and (b) safely quarantined in Slytherin except for the ritual Harry As Scapegoat sequence in all four books. Nobody in Gryffindor is ever nasty except as the result of a misunderstanding; it's just those icky Slytherins. Harry's common room and dormitory are bastions of peace and security, and those, much more than classes, are what his world revolves around.

WW, on the other hand, creates a interpersonal dynamic much, much closer to what I remember from being eleven. The kids are all nasty to each other as much as they think they can get away with; the class has a very distinct and carefully observed pecking order (which Nan even writes about); friendships are things to be entered into only with the greatest of caution, particularly friendships across the gender divide. Rowling observes things from the perspective of a boy who is extremely brave (and with the magical powers, yes, I know), but otherwise quite ordinary. Jones observes from the perspective of extremely bright children, and observes with them that being extremely bright is a real handicap when you're eleven. Hermione's brains are for comic relief, advancing the plot, and getting Harry and Ron out of trouble; Rowling's sympathies are always with Harry. Nan and Charles, on the other hand, are just too bright for their own good. I was a lot like both of them as a kid. Jones knows that school isn't fun, and she knows exactly why.

Jones's world is also more complicated than Rowling's. Nobody in WW is entirely evil, although most of the adult characters are petty, blackmailing, scheming, and scared, and nobody except perhaps Chrestomanci (magnificent deus ex machina that he is) is entirely good. The kids come from a terribly dysfunctional society, and they've been warped by it--in some of the ways that Harry should be warped by his upbringing, but isn't. They aren't nice.

Looking back at this, I realize that I'm making WW sound terribly depressing, and it isn't. It's a funny, hopeful, goofily amazing book. But it's built on bedrock. I'm afraid, much as I love Harry Potter, that Rowling's foundations aren't that stable.

DWJ redux

I've been trying to figure out which DWJ book is my favorite, and I've come to the stunningly lame conclusion that I can't.

Partly this is because I started reading her when I was eight, so that I've gone through a number of different favorites. The Magicians of Caprona was the #1 first, then Witch Week, then A Tale of Time City, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. So I'm going to fall back on the ones that have worn the best, in which I keep finding more when I reread. (Witch Week is out of the running, because, as I said, I can't reread it any more.)

Fire and Hemlock, because it does so many extraordinarily difficult things so extraordinarily beautifully. It's a love story, and a bildungsroman, and a meditation on memory and loss and real love (not, please note, the same as Twue Wuv, but the kind of love that HURTS and splinters inside your heart and makes you not able to say anything to the one person in the world you most want to talk to), and a reworking of "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," and it explains so clearly just why and how teenage girls are so fucking stupid sometimes.

Power of Three: I have a big big weakness for boys who angst, and Gair angsts with the best of them. But also, this book is deceptive. I didn't much like it when I was a child, but rereading it as an adult, I found so much grace and pain, so much thought about why people can't stop hating each other, even when they want to.

Archer's Goon: Funny. I love her manic, labyrinthine plots, and this is one of my favorites. Also a favorite for the family dynamic of Howard, Awful, Quentin, and Catriona (which, to respond to something melymbrosia said in her reply to my previous post, is one of the few non-horrid families in DWJ. The Sykeses are just ... weird.). And the endless free-wheeling inventiveness--the first time I read it, I ended up with this huge goofy grin on my face that I couldn't have explained if anybody had asked.

Charmed Life, because, duh. Chrestomanci. Also the alternate history thing, and that favorite theme of hers that nobody is quite what or who they seem. And it's just such a damn good piece of children's literature.

The Homeward Bounders and Howl's Moving Castle, both of which have bits that I really just don't like, but which overall I'm extremely fond of. Social embarrassment isn't funny for me. It just isn't. It's squicky and makes me cringe. I can't even quite laugh at Basil Fawlty (the incomparable John Cleese) staging a faint to avoid introducing two people whose names he's simultaneously forgotten. So The Homeward Bounders tends to bother me. And Howl's Moving Castle always makes me weirdly anxious. I can't explain it; Sophie being changed into an old lady--although yes, funny, and yes, brilliant, and all the rest of it--just distresses me.

I also love Hexwood and Deep Secret, but they just aren't her best books. No matter how shamelessly I have a mad slavering crush on Rupert Venables, DS is still a patchy, uneven book. Although, truly, the large sections where she's on her game more than make up for the less-so bits.

I was about to apologize for going on at such insane and tedious length when I remembered that this is MY journal and I can babble as much as I want. Ha.