In memoriam: Diana Wynne Jones

[truepenny]

I can't even begin to explain how much Diana Wynne Jones' books meant to me as a child.

My science-fiction-reading librarian aunt gave me The Magicians of Caprona and Power of Three the Christmas I was ten, and then continued, patiently and benevolently, to find me Jones' other books, including a copy of Charmed Life that must have been (in the 80s in America) like hunting down the Grail. Or the Snark. I don't know how many times I read Witch Week, which may be the only school story I found as a child and adolescent in which the main characters were the loners and oddballs, instead of the popular kids. I love Jones forever for Theresa Mullett and Simon Silverson--for representing the popular kids the way I experienced them, instead of the way they were presented in Enid Blyton (and would later be presented in the Harry Potter books).

And it wasn't just Witch Week. All of her books centered on kids who were unpopular, weird, lonely. I didn't like Power of Three as much as The Magicians of Caprona when I was ten, but I later came to love it dearly because it was so deeply about kids who were outsiders.

And Jones never collapsed into pathos; the counter-example is Menolly in Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall books (which I also loved as a kid); everyone picks on Menolly except for the handful of characters who we know are special because they protect her. But Jones' outsiders are like Charles Morgan, who is just as selfish and self-protectively hostile as a kid in his situation would naturally be, and her "ordinary" kids, protagonists like Vivian Smith in A Tale of Time City or Caspar in The Ogre Downstairs or Jamie in The Homeward Bounders, all have to learn what it's like to be outsiders, Vivian by being thrown into a completely foreign culture, with only oddball outsiders Jonathan and Sam as her guides; Caspar by switching bodies with his loathed stepbrother Malcolm; and poor Jamie by becoming a permanent outcast. And in books like Power of Three and Charmed Life, we also see that the "ordinary" kids are human beings, too: Gair's popular siblings, Ceri and Ayna, are fiercely, lovingly partisan to Gair, and Janet turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to Cat. (Witch Week is probably the most Manichean of Jones' books in this regard, and even there, Estelle changes sides to become Nan's friend, and of course, at the end, popular and unpopular kids alike turn out to be witches.)

The other thing I came to appreciate more and more about Jones' work as an adolescent is that her books are frequently, quietly, about very adult subjects. Power of Three, after all, starts off with the murder of one child by another, and Charmed Life is, very quietly, mostly subtextually, about abuse. Gwendolyn is abusing Cat, even if Cat himself never quite recognizes it. And Fire and Hemlock, which may be, for me, the most impressive of Jones' books, is all about stupid things adults do in sexual relationships, and the way those things affect children. Not to mention The Time of the Ghost, the most autobiographical of Jones' novels, which is openly about a horrendously dysfunctional family and the terrible things the daughters of that family do in attempting to survive.

Jones taught me a lot about unreliable viewpoint characters. Cat in Charmed Life is the strongest example. There's something wrong with Cat, as Janet worriedly notes, but we never see it head on because Cat himself can't see it. Sirius/Leo in Dogsbody is another example, although I can't reread Dogsbody because it makes me cry. But I remember the way Jones shows the reader things that the viewpoint character can't understand, and it's brilliant.

But mostly, I just loved her books, whole-heartedly, as a child, and I love them now. I love Chrestomanci and his dressing gowns, I love Howl and Sophie, I love Vivian saving the world almost despite herself. I love Howard in Archer's Goon and his relationships with his siblings, epitomized and concentrated in his little sister Awful (and Awful is awful, and I love her for it). I love Polly in Fire and Hemlock learning that being a hero is about not letting humiliation stop you. Jones taught me so much--about being a writer, sure, but more importantly, about being a human being, about being kind and compassionate and about doing the right thing, even when you don't want to.

Thank you, Diana Wynne Jones. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I had the privilege of meeting her a few times when her health still permitted her to go to conventions. She was a lovely, interesting, witty woman who made conversation a joy. And I treasure her books, and reread them regularly (apart, like you, from Dogsbody, because I grew up in one of those places where terrorism breaks families and it is too close, and The Homeward Bounders which just breaks my heart. She was very special.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I regret never having had the chance to meet her, although I would only have made a fool of myself. But I do like to think she would have understood.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

She was great. She would have put you at your ease and had you falling about with laughter. Seriously. I wish you could have met her, too.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

All of this, yes. And I once found somebody's master's thesis online -- I think it was a master's thesis -- talking about the recurrent motif of language and storytelling having power in her worlds, which is something I have imprinted on hard, because that's a power we have here in the real world, too.

[kayselkiemoon.livejournal.com]

I really loved to read this post. Her works brought a lot of goodness and compassion.

[oceankitty1.livejournal.com]

We are collecting Japanese anime, my daughter and I, and one of our favorites is Studio Gibli's "The moving castle". There's an interview with Diana Wynne Jones at the end of the DVD, and as I watched it I realized that here was something that I had totally missed out on. I ordered "Howl's moving castle" on Amazon, and I loved it. My daughter loved it too, and as she's now able to read english pretty well, I think I'll order more of Jones' books for her. Leaving such a legacy behind, Jones will never be forgotten.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this tribute, and yes, thank you, Diana Wynne Jones.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

I searched very hard for my favourite childhood books for years, since I had forgotten everything about them except for the plot, the cover art, and their approximate shelf location in the previous layout of my public library - almost all of them were by Diana Wynne Jones. I love her books, and will continue loving her books, although I am sad that there is no longer a possibility of meeting her in my future.

If you don't mind my asking, what is wrong with Cat Chant? I am very interested in viewpoints, what gets seen and what doesn't, and I tend to get absorbed in them. I remember Janet saying something is wrong with him because he does what people says, but I can't see it head-on either because he can't.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Cat's been taught that Gwendolyn can use him, and his power, for whatever she wants, and that therefore whatever Gwendolyn wants is okay. And what Gwendolyn wants is NOT okay. Gwendolyn is selfish and power-hungry and never thinks about Cat at all (remember how shocked she is when he takes his power back?). So Cat, aside from never learning to assert himself or to think that he has rights just like everyone else, has been given no kind of moral compass at all, no way to judge what's right and wrong. He lets Gwendolyn seal herself back in the world where she's a priestess, even though it means Janet is trapped in his world, because he hasn't learned any middle ground between being a sacrificial victim and being, well, Gwendolyn.

Jones went back to Cat in some of her later stories, "The Stealer of Souls," in which he worries that he's going to grow up to be an evil enchanter, and The Pinhoe Egg. I found those stories much less satisfying than Charmed Life, both because Jones wasn't as subtle in later books as she was in the books she wrote in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, and because, well . . . I talked about my difficulties with The Pinhoe Egg here (http://truepenny.livejournal.com/553867.html), and that encapsulates pretty neatly the problems I've had with all of Jones' later books.

[comrade-cat.livejournal.com]

because he hasn't learned any middle ground between being a sacrificial victim and being, well, Gwendolyn.

Oh, that makes sense.

I had the same problem with The Pinhoe Egg as you did, and it seems to be the other side of what happened in House of Many Ways, which I wished to love. The purple monsters are evil because they are evil, and they're downright evil and just evil. It's isolating evil - in one book it has no consequences, in the other it becomes removed from humanity. I don't mind characters being evil for the sake of being evil and going muahahahahaha, but the purple monsters seem different somehow from that. Maybe because it's their nature and not their choice??

I didn't notice didacticism in Year of the Griffin though, because it is one of my favourite DWJ books for its description of learning and college. I love it, whereas Dark Lord of Derkholm doesn't do much for me. (And I'm conflicted over how the daughter's rape was treated. It seemed like an excellent way of explaining what happened to children, without any partisan excesses, but in a way it also seems to trivialize it. I suppose the truth is somewhere in between, but I don't really know how to figure it out. Some sf/f novel somewhere said that women could be trained to deal with rape so that it didn't hurt them as badly or fatally incapacitate them when it happened. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or trivializing.)

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

I loved her books.

They had a taste and feel to them unlike any other. I hate, hate, hate it when authors, or any artist, really dies. It feels like some of the world dies with them.

[annaoj.livejournal.com]

We're discussing adding a Celebrating Diana Wynne Jones panel to WisCon; would you be interested in being on it?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I would be delighted.

[nnozomi.livejournal.com]

You and me both, lady. (Um, random lurker putting in her two cents here. Please forgive.) I discovered Diana Wynne Jones when I was ten years old and living in London, and can remember reading _Charmed Life_ with the kind of absorption that makes putting the book down, even for ten seconds, painful. Been a fan ever since, although I agree with you that the later books aren't as superb. (As an amateur cello player, I especially love _Fire and Hemlock_ and its description midway through of the string quartet rehearsal--I still sometimes listen to the violins at orchestra practice on a good day and think "bright, sharp streaks of sound...if you could hear lime juice...").
If you're interested (in your copious spare time) I have a post somewhere a page back or so in LJ comparing _Howl's Moving Castle_ with a Japanese folktale (no relation to the Miyazaki movie). Self-promotion sorry.
Anyway, thank you for the lovely eulogy. Now I want to go reread all the books.

Parenthetically, on the "there's something wrong with Cat" thing, I'm pretty sure I read a comment by Diana Wynne Jones herself somewhere to the effect that "Cat is slightly autistic." Various people immediately jumped in to protest that the way Cat behaves doesn't match the usual definitions thereof, which is true, I think, but it's still an interesting idea to ponder.

[de-nugis.livejournal.com]

You don't know me -- I love your books and lurk here from time to time -- but this tribute articulated so much of what I valued in DWJ's books, as well as ideas I'd never never thought through (Cat as unreliable narrator), that I linked to it from my journal today when I noted her death. Letting you know in case you find the Pingbot annoying and turn it off like I do, but still want to know when you are mentioned around LJ. Of course, if you would prefer not to be linked from strangers' journals I will be happy to take the link down.

And since I am here, thank you from the bottom of my heart for Felix and Mildmay.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, I don't mind a bit! (If I didn't want people to read and link to my entries, I'd friends-lock them.)

And you're welcome.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing this lovely tribute to Diana Wynne Jones - I only discovered her books when I was already an adult but I absolutely love them for all the reasons you mention above but also for the deep humour and affection for her characters I always found in them. I am really saddened by her death - as someone says above, when an author dies we lose more than the person, we lose everything they could have gone on to create, so that it is as if we have lost a little bit of magic from our dull world.