chaotic good

an ode to diana wynne jones

For Christmas, I received yet another edition of Howl’s Moving Castle. I now have three. Quite frustratingly, I only have two each of Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways, as I am missing the most recent British editions. Oh, well. I’ll pick them up eventually.

Diana Wynne Jones is one of my three favorite fantasy authors of all time. A prolific writer, she wrote over forty fantasy novels in the span of her career and won numerous awards. In a posthumous article, one of her sons noted that, as a key influence on the ‘70s and ‘80s era of speculative fiction, she’s been credited with making Harry Potter possible and paving the way for the current fantasy craze. Though funny enough, she had a rather low opinion of the current craze—and of Harry Potter. She was firmly opposed to “fashions” in writing, and this is perhaps what I like best about her. She is unapologetically unique, with an unmistakable voice, mind-bending plots, and a clear love for myth, often blending dozens of different folktales and classics into her stories. It can be difficult to know where to start with her books, given how many she wrote, so I thought I’d share a few of my top picks.

“Most adults, in fact, if you question them, will admit that there was this marvelous book they read when they were eight, or ten, or maybe fifteen, that has lived in their minds ever since.”

I first read Howl’s Moving Castle as a young teenager, obsessed with Studio Ghibli’s film adaptation and curious about its origins. While I enjoyed the book, I found it somewhat confusing. It’s a jumble of fairy tales, swerving into “modern” (80’s) Wales, borrowing curses from John Donne, and subverting all the fantasy tropes while still rollicking its way to an honest happily ever after. I didn’t know what to make of it. Later, after reading the two companion novels, Castle in the Air and House of Many Ways, I decided that I liked the series. I think it was the magically duplicating baskets of laundry in House of Many Ways which convinced me. Now, many rereads later, I often list Howl when asked about favorite books, and if you’re unfamiliar with Jones, it’s a perfect place to start.

First, however, you should probably put aside all your thoughts and feelings about the film adaptation. Howl’s Moving Castle is one of those rare instances where I love both the book and the movie equally, for different reasons. Each stands on its own. What I like best about the book (aside from Howl and Sophie, who are hilariously perfect for each other) is how it balances irony with sincerity. The modern fantasy world is full of retellings, many of which do their best to undermine, challenge, or even outright refute the original themes of their chosen fairy tales. These books seem intent on replacing the source material, rather than paying homage to it. I dislike this type of retelling. Myth is a vessel of truth, and any story which tries to supplant that truth tends to fall flat.

Howl’s Moving Castle manages to walk that delicate line between poking fun at certain fairy tale tropes and respecting the underlying truths. Jones was an Oxford scholar with a remarkable memory; she studied under Lewis and Tolkien and cited them as significant influences on her own work. I doubt anyone could study under these men and not come away with a love for myths and a greater understanding of how they reveal reality. Jones certainly seemed to recognize the power of myth. In one article, she comments on her reluctance to explicitly retell them: “The immense and meaningful weight of all myths and most folktales could drag a more fragile, modern story out of shape.” This reverence shines through the tongue-in-cheek delightfulness of Howl, most obviously in its happy ending. While the narrative may laugh at the possibly inconvenient nature of seven-league boots, at Sophie’s insistence that she has no chance at finding her fortune because she’s the oldest of three, at Howl’s cowardliness getting in the way of his heroism, it still brings us to fairy tale conclusion.

My initial mixed reaction to Howl likely had to do with how it failed to fit my expectations. I couldn’t tell if it was a fairy tale retelling, portal fantasy, high fantasy, YA or MG. This is typical of Jones’ books; they resist strict categorization, blurring the lines between young adult and adult, between contemporary fiction and fantasy. In one address given in 1995, Jones made it quite clear that she found the boundaries of Genre stifling: “Each [genre] has hunkered down inside what it believes to be its own boundaries, and inside those boundaries the Rules of Being Of That Genre have proliferated and hardened until almost no one can write anything original at all. But the Rules say that if you write the same book all the time, that’s okay. That’s fine. That’s Genre.”¹ And while Jones freely admits to reusing the same five characters over and over, I doubt anyone could accuse her of being unoriginal.

“There are times when everyday life echoes or embodies traditional stories. These are more frequent than most people think.”

Jones’ most genre-defying book is also one of my favorites, and happens to be the closest she ever got to a straightforward retelling. And by that, I mean Fire and Hemlock somehow combines “Tam Lin,” “Thomas the Rhymer,” the myth of Cupid and Psyche, the Odyssey, and Eliot’s Four Quartets into one novel. At its core, the story is about a girl becoming a heroine; according to Jones, this journey was also her way of exploring the feminization of the heroic ideal. She wanted a heroine who behaved “like a woman and not like a pseudo man,” and for that she needed a narrative structure “which did not simply put a female in a male’s place.”² The result is a kind of fantastical Bildungsroman following the protagonist, Polly, throughout her childhood and adolescence. “What I wanted to do,” Jones later explained, “was to write a book in which modern life and heroic mythical events approached one another so closely that they were nearly impossible to separate.”³ She certainly achieves this, to the point where Polly spends much of the book doubting whether there really are such things as Fairy Queens and curses.

The focus on Polly’s interior world, and her struggle to cope with the often miserable reality of ordinary life, is perhaps what makes her such a remarkable and compelling heroine. Yes, the story is steeped in myth. Polly is “Gerda in ‘The Snow Queen,’ Snow White, Britomart, St. George, Pierrot, Pandora, Andromeda, and Janet from ‘Tam Lin’ and many more, in a sort of overlapping succession.”⁴ Yet she is also a child shuffled between two extremely immature and selfish parents who finds consolation in inventing stories; she is a teenager with a crush on the only man who ever showed her real care and kindness; she is a young woman who struggles with self-doubt. To approach the book just as a romance or as a fantasy novel misses the real heart of it—Polly’s heroic journey. It also happens to be Jones at her finest, a blend of the painfully real and the wonderfully more-than-real, with a bittersweet ending tinged with humor and cleverness and hope.

“A good book should be another place, beyond ordinary life and quite different from it, made with care and containing marvels. But though it is beyond everyday life, it is by no means unconnected with it. You have to beg the key.”

It was Jones’ distinctive humor that first won me over to her books, and I think her absolute funniest work is Dark Lord of Derkholm. Much like Howl, it parodies the fantasy genre, this time targeting the derivatives of Tolkien so popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And yet this book somehow has more emotional weight that many of those books it parodies. The first chapter introduces us to a fantasy world thoroughly sick of fantasy tropes but forced to perform for “Pilgrim Parties,” large groups of people from the real world brought through a portal and expecting a show.⁵ The inhabitants of the world, tired of having their crops destroyed by epic battles, decide to organize a resistance.

There are very few authors who could take a hilarious premise and actually turn it into a solidly good book, but Jones, of course, is one of them. Perhaps what works best is that she uses this premise as a premise and not simply a backdrop. All of her books have a tactile quality, a vibrancy that makes both the setting and the characters feel real. She describes this authenticity as vital to her process: “One has to see, feel, smell, touch, and thoroughly experience what is going on as one writes.”⁶ The result is that her worlds are full of solid, everyday people, and in Derkholm, these people outright rebel against the one-dimensionality of pulp fantasy. While their rebellion is extraordinarily funny, it provides a perfect externalization of the main characters’ internal conflict. After all, the desire to self-identify using labels is typical of teenagers, and amidst all that fantasy, Derkholm is about a bunch of teenagers in a big family. The three eldest children—Shona, Kit, and Blade—each have a role in the Parties, and though these roles help them grow, they also outgrow them quite fast. They must mature, and in this process become more and more themselves, gaining independence and yet also realizing just how much they need and love their family.

It’s the perfect conflict for a young adult novel, but it also feels completely natural to the story, rather than forced on it for the sake of marketing or popular interest. According to Jones, people often asked her why she didn’t write “real” books, the kind set in “real” places and dealing with “real” issues. Yet her books do deal with real issues. They just do it sideways. She considered this a necessity in writing for children, and perhaps even for adults. “If you know two people who are divorcing,” a friend asked her once, “Would you give them each a copy of Anna Karenina? Can you imagine a less helpful book? Yet people do this to children all the time.”⁷ Jones both agreed and disagreed: “It seemed to me, and still does, that facing this kind of problem in your life is actually what most fairy stories do; and they do it much better than any realistic story because they can distance the trouble with magic, cool it off by setting it so often in a strange country, and make the reader able to walk round the bad stuff, pretend it isn’t theirs, examine it, and then solve the problem along with the hero. And, what is more, have fun doing it.”

Perhaps she drew this idea from Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” in which he opposes the idea that fantasy is pure escapism. Tolkien considered the fairy-story more than real, a glimpse of the “joy beyond the walls of the world.” Jones’ argument against the whole escapism theory is similar; she insists that “imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful.” She takes fantasy seriously, and she invites her readers to take it seriously as well—and yet taking things seriously also means being able to laugh at them, sometimes uproariously.

“Quite recently my doctor asked me, ‘What do you do when you’re depressed?’ and I said automatically, without thinking about it, ‘Write a book.’”

Fantasy provides an escape, but the kind of escape that allows us to breathe, get our bearings, regain a sense of hope. At least, good fantasy does that. It seems to have done that for Jones herself, who wove the fears and pains and joys of her messy childhood into her stories. That’s maybe what strikes me the most about her books, how they can be unapologetically frightening and dark and hopeful and funny all at the same time. She writes the world as it is—even if it’s a made-up world—but also as it should be, directly fighting against the pessimistic temptation to believe that “things are only real and valid if they are unpleasant or boring.”⁸ This is, of course, a lie, but it is an especially harmful lie in books for children, which should always be truthful and thus hopeful.

And that’s why Diana Wynne Jones is one of my favorites. That and the fact that she had a very poor opinion of sparkly vampires and fluffy werewolves, and that she had this to say about the pressure on authors to market their books:

“That’s the thing I feel that publishers are supposed to be doing. I don’t know why they don’t.”

1. “A Talk About Rules” included in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones

2. “The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey” included in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5. Basically, imagine if your DnD campaign could pay to visit a fantasy world and then play a highly realistic RPG.

6. “Some Truths About Writing” included in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones

7. Quote ascribed to Jill Paton Walsh in “Freedom to Write” included in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones

8. “The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey” included in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing by Diana Wynne Jones