A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: The late 1980s!

In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read Howl’s Moving Castle, A Tale of Time City, The Lives of Christopher Chant and Wild Robert!

It was fun to revisit Howl after the Ghibli film version became so popular, and Wild Robert was entirely new to me.

Howl’s Moving Castle (1986)
Howl’s Moving Castle is about narrative determinism. We are presented with Sophie, a talented and competent young woman who is absolutely sure she knows what her role in the world “should” be and doesn’t question it. This causes problems as she initially seems quite passive. Her two younger sisters are less accepting of the roles they are told to play, and are thus more active at first. Sophie’s magical abilities incur the anger of a powerful witch even without her trying, and she is cursed by turning into a plodding old woman.

As it turns out, Sophie finds this very freeing, and begins speaking her mind and standing up for herself, as she goes to work for the dreaded wizard Howl and gets embroiled in all kinds of interdimensional and political upheaval.

This is a really fun one, and if you are already a fan of the Ghibli film of the same name, I’d recommend it highly, with the caveat that the book is much more about the dangers of believing the stories others tell about you, and much less about the horrors of war.

A Tale of Time City (1987)
I enjoy it when Diana Wynne Jones dips a toe in technology with her fantasy, and some sci-fi elements get stirred into the mix. This one, with gadget-controlled time travel and robots, fits that criteria. Vivian, like many children in England in 1939, is evacuated from London, and sent to a relative in the country. On her way, however, she is waylaid by Jonathan and Sam, two kids around her own age who whisk her off to Time City. Vivian learns that Time City is a pocket of time and space outside of history, and it’s in trouble. It’s falling apart, and Jonathan and Sam erroneously believe Vivian can fix it. Their efforts to save their city, keep Vivian a secret, endure extremely boring lessons, and wear ridiculous clothing make for a high-stakes and fast-paced story with harrowing dips into history at various tension points.

The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988)
In the Chrestomanci series, this one tells the origin story of the current Chrestomanci, whom we have only seen so far as a very dapper adult. As a child, Christopher Chant was devastatingly neglected, and as an adult, that’s honestly pretty hard to read. I would like all the adults in this book who mistreat him to get much worse punishment than they actually do.

That aside, it is an excellent story with a lot of really engaging characters. I definitely recommend reading the Chrestomanci series in publication order, so you know  going in that he (and another loveable character, Millie) will be okay in the future!

Wild Robert (1989)
Heather’s parents are the administrators of a historical site, where they also live. One day when Heather is particularly annoyed by all the tourists, she manages to accidentally summon a magical practitioner, who has been in a kind of stasis under a mound. Diana Wynne Jones sure loves a legendary figure in a mound!

Wild Robert emerges, and is immediately annoyed at the status of his home, and plays all kinds of pranks on the tourists, to Heather’s delight. This is a short one, apparently developed for a school market, and the story lasts one day. It doesn’t seem easy to find, at least in the U.S. but if you do run across it, you can think of it as a kind of amuse bouche before one of Diana Wynne Jones’s more substantial works.

If you’d like to read along with me, my schedule is here! Castle in the Air, Aunt Maria, A Sudden Wild Magic and Hexwood are up next.

Custom images for this series are by Marnanel Thurman. 

Special thanks to the Frumious Consortium, for kindly hosting the second half of this series while WWAC is on hiatus! It’s always a delight to chat with Doreen about what we’re reading, and this basically ensures I get to do that even more often.