Diana Wynne Jones

I saw Hayao Miyazaki's take on Howl's Moving Castle for the first time yesterday. I was afraid of watching a movie based on a book I love so dearly, but I enjoyed it well enough. Visually, it's amazing, as I've come to expect from Miyazaki; I especially enjoyed the way the castle was rendered. It's very different from the book, after an almost identical setup. I confronted it is an almost entirely different story. Not as good as the book, but that's... I'm trying to think of a phrase that is the exact inverse of "damning with faint praise" and failing.

There are very few writers for whom I have such unequivocal admiration as I do for Diana Wynne Jones, the author of Howl's Moving Castle and many, many other wonderful books. My older brother discovered her books in our library and recommended them to me; I devoured them whole, starting as far back, I think, as 8 years old. Jones, technically, is a young adult writer, though I chafe at that kind of limiting characterization (but more on that in a second). She writes fantasy, but not genre fantasy ala J.R.R. Tolkein and his imitators. (Her weakest work, in my view, is her most conventional fantasy writing, like the Dalemark Quartet.) She has a wonderful way of devising systems of magic and the fantastic that wend their way through regular life, so that even the most bizarre aspect of her plots seem natural, even inevitable.

What she really writes terrifically about, though, is childhood, and what it means to be young. Like Bill Waterson (the creator of Calvin & Hobbes), Jones is keenly aware that childhood isn't an idyllic time, but one filled with danger and fear and misunderstanding and powerlessness. That isn't to say that her vision of childhood is despairing; far from it. It's tough, and reminds us again and again that the greatest strength of young people is their resilience.

There's a strange edge I often find in young adult fiction, a closeness to the bone, if you will. Young adult authors are unencumbered by many of the constraints on adult, "serious" fiction. There's a real promiscuity of subject matter, a willingness to engage in the fantastic, and more than anything, an openness about dealing with adult themes in the true sense-- not adult themes as in sex (as in intercourse), abortion, addiction, crime, but adult themes like responsibility, the creation of personality (both natural and affected), mortality, loyalty, and the absolute terror most of us go through in the face of adulthood. I think that, when you are in your early adolescence, so much of life seems like an open nerve. Everything seems more intense and immediate and real. I think that's why so much of young adult fiction is focused on the rawest emotions; when you are confronted with the onset of adulthood, everything seems magnified.

Interestingly, this young adult fiction, and young adult fantasy, is free from what many have identified as the principal weakness of genre fantasy: the degree to which it seems to shrink from ideas of adult romantic love and sexuality. I know that this is kind of a cliched criticism, but it's one that I personally feel often. Look I deny no one their genre affinities, and it should be clear to anyone that reads this blog that I have no claim to greater maturity or whatever. I just find a conspicuous shrinking back from love and sex and fidelity and infidelity in most genre fantasy. Young adult books, interestingly, avoid this problem, even though they are almost always restricted in the kind of "adult" plot material that they can explore.

Consider the book Deep Wizardry, by Diane Duane, another favorite from my youth. It's also a young adult fantasy novel, this one set in the modern world. It's noteworthy because it has no sex (in plot terms) at all. And yet I find it completely suffused with sexual panic and sexual longing, and I think its real power is in its ability to demonstrate just how strange and scary sexual ideas and feelings are when you're twelve or thirteen or fourteen, how life can be at once utterly devoid of shared physical sexual acts and yet seem at the same time utterly concerned with sex. I don't think that fantasy always has to be allegorical, but it does, I think, have to do more than most genre fantasy does to mean something beyond elves and sorcerers and reflect on deeper human themes. I'm sorry to be a genre scold, but that's how I consistently feel. Incidentally, I like the rest of the Duane's Young Wizards series much less than Deep Wizardry, precisely because Duane shrinks away from any similarly mature themes. The fantasy fails when it isn't under girded by a thematically adult lattice.

Anyway, Diana Wynne Jones certainly doesn't have sexual panic or similar themes in most of her work. But that again just goes to show how smart, affecting and deft her writing is. She grasps into really deep themes of the possible and self with so light a hand you sometimes forget she's doing it.

So: recommendations. If you enjoy any kind of fantasy, or books about early adolescence, or are just a big reader, I really think you should try out a book by Jones. My favorite book of hers is Witch Week, a deeply authentic look at school and social status and friendship and secrets. It's just so real and so true, the kind of book that reminds you, when you're in a demeaning and lonely position (as school often is for most of us) that there are in fact other people who understand. I also love Aunt Maria, which is a book about men and women and how they are and aren't alike. Archer's Goon is really an amazing story, consistently smart and surprising. (Maybe her best, if I was to define such a thing apart from how much I personally enjoy it.) A Tale of Time City is a great exciting adventure story. If you're in the mood for something more macabre, a little darker, then you might try Eight Days of Luke.

For an adult reader, though, my recommendation for the best book to serve as an introduction to her fiction is Dogsbody, which I think has the most relevance for the adult reader. If you've got kids, a nice place to start is Charmed Life, the first book (or first published, anyhow) in the Chrestomanci series. Charmed Life is a great example of how Jones can put her characters through frankly terrible hardship, but demonstrate how tough and smart and resilient people can be.

By the way, I really dislike a lot of the covers on these new versions of the books, and I don't endorse them. But books and their covers, etc etc.

It's true that my love for her as a child and adolescent probably biases me as an adult. But don't take my word for it; listen to Neil Gaiman, the celebrated fantasy author, who said "Diana Wynne Jones is, quite simply, the best writer of magic there is, for readers of any age." Or better yet, read one yourself.

(Man, how these books-- how all my favorite books-- wrecked me as a kid. That's always been my attraction to the literary and cultural worlds; to interact with other people who have found themselves, and been surprised at what they found, through reading. Sometimes I feel like the books I read growing up were more real than real life. I know there's a poverty in that, but sometimes it's how I feel.)