A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: The early 1990s!

In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read Castle in the Air, Aunt Maria, A Sudden Wild Magic and Hexwood!

Honestly, it was a big month. Those are some hefty ones, and I think Hexwood is among her very best. It’s a high bar!

Castle in the Air (1990)

Castle in the Air takes place in the same world as Howl’s Moving Castle, and some of our beloved characters from Howl make cameo appearances. The main character and setting, however, are quite different. In Howl, Diana Wynne Jones comments on European fairytale tropes, with protagonist Sophie making assumptions about what life might be available to her based on who gets to have adventures in stories. In Castle in the Air, Diana Wynne Jones is similarly commenting on story assumptions, but this time she is working with the British consumption of “Eastern” stories, especially from the Thousand and One Nights. Her protagonist Abdullah is a rug merchant who falls in love with a beautiful maiden, secluded in a garden by her wealthy father, and hijinks ensue. There’s a roadtrip, and a chaos-loving genie.

Aunt Maria (also published as Black Maria) (1991)

I really like the narrative voice in this one. Mig is an aspiring author, and tells us about her process of chronicling these events as they happen. Mig, her brother, and their mum all go together to the quaint village of Cranbury-on-Sea, to visit Mig’s dad’s Aunt Maria. When they get there, it quickly becomes clear that Aunt Maria rules the village like a cozy despot, and most people are terrified of her.

Aunt Maria’s villainy is so close to normal varieties of bad behavior — manipulation, guilt trips, feigned helplessness, adherence to “traditional” roles — that the supernatural aspects of her hold on the village unfold slowly and terrifyingly.

Diana Wynne Jones generally has a wicked mother figure in her books, and in this case, Aunt Maria is using a matriarchal role explicitly to oppress the men of Cranbury-on-Sea. The war of the sexes stuff in Aunt Maria is not particularly to my taste, but I do find it refreshing that since Aunt Maria herself is a villainous matriarch, Mig’s mother can be just a normal, well-intentioned mum doing her best.

A Sudden Wild Magic (1992)

Reading this one right after Aunt Maria is quite a journey! Diana Wynne Jones must have had some Gender Stuff going on in the early nineties. A Sudden Wild Magic is one of Diana Wynne Jones’s few books explicitly for adults, and it is a somewhat satirical look at gendered institutions. In A Sudden Wild Magic, the overwhelmingly female organization of British Witches discovers that beings from a nearby alternate universe have caused basically all of our world’s problems, including wars and climate change. The problems, it develops, are coming from a pocket universe of an exclusively male monastic order. The witches send an elite strike force to undermine that group … through sexpionage. It kind of works?

This is not my favorite Diana Wynne Jone book, but it is really interesting to see how cynical she is about how adults treat each other, especially adults in “romantic” relationships. And there are some laugh-out-loud funny parts that I still think of happily weeks after reading.

Hexwood (1993)

On the other hand, Hexwood might indeed be my favorite Diana Wynne Jones book. It’s so good! We open with a government official on another world, learning that on Earth, someone has activated an ancient machine at Hexwood Farm, one that has a serious field of manipulative influence. He hopes it is a hoax.

Meanwhile, Ann has been ill. Extremely bored, she chats with the imaginary friends she’s had her whole life, and sets up a mirror so she can better observe the mysterious comings and goings from nearby Hexwood Farm. As soon as she feels well enough, she goes into the wood to explore and gets sucked into the machine’s field of manipulative influence herself.

I don’t want to say more because beyond that would be spoilers! The reveals come fast and thick in this book, and the twisting plot showcases Diana Wynne Jones’s talents for invention and character creation. By the end, I’m cheering for the victors.

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If you’d like to read along with me, my schedule is here! The Crown of Dalemark, Stopping for a Spell, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland are up next.

Custom images for this series are by Marnanel Thurman.