A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: the mid 1990s!

In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read The Crown of Dalemark, Stopping for a Spell, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland!

Seriously, this was quite a lineup for a short month: it included our first ending of a series, our first collection of shorter works, and an alphabetized guidebook to fantasy tropes! All of these were rereads for me, and I felt like I gained perspective on all of them through the context of this readthrough process.

The Crown of Dalemark, (1993)
In the late 1970s, Diana Wynne Jones published three Dalemark novels: first, two novels of Dalemark in a kind of early industrial revolution era, with Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet in 1975 and 1977, taking place concurrently, in a land with slow travel, magic stuff, and firearms being introduced. Then came Spellcoats in 1979, which brought us back to an origin point of the very founding of Dalemark, far in the distant and mythologized past.

Over a decade later, the series concludes with The Crown of Dalemark: we meet Maewen, a girl in an era of Dalemark that feels contemporary to the 1990s: fast trains, divorced parents, boarding school shenanigans – the whole works. She gets tricked into traveling back in time to the era of Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet, in order to aid the gods of Dalemark in restoring a rightful king to the empty throne.

This is a really interesting way to conclude the Dalemark Quartet; bringing together multiple timelines, plot threads, personalities, and political considerations. I like Maewen as a character, and I like the focus this book has on  Mitt, one of the main characters from Drowned Ammet. The cameos of the Spellcoats characters are deftly done. It’s still not my absolute favorite Diana Wynne Jones book, however, as it definitely implies that a god-appointed king will solve the majority of our problems, and that a teenage girl is lucky to be romantically partnered wit ha much, much older guy.

In addition to that aspect reminding me uncomfortably of some of Diana Wynne Jones’s earlier books, I was also reminded of both A Tale of Time City and Hexwood with the girl protagonist thrown into a different environment, accompanied there by boys who are more at home in the world.

Stopping for a Spell, (1993)
Stopping for a Spell collects three short chaptered stories, that each feel kind of like Wild Robert felt—like they could easily stand alone as tiny little books early readers graduating to “chapter books” would love.

In each of these stories, “Chair Person,” “The Four Grannies,” and “Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?”  children confronted with magical situations get the better of grown-ups. They are all deeply domestic stories, with immediate family, a home setting, and home furnishings featuring heavily. Sibling relationships are important in all of them, as is needing to navigate adult expectations.

“Chair Person” is probably justly the most well-known and well regarded of these. In it, a dilapidated easy chair is turned into a barely functional dilapidated human, who has uncomfortably absorbed a lot of the television truisms watched in its presence, and has an astonishing level of entitlement. Hijinks ensue.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, (1996)

In the same satirical vein as The Skiver’s Guide, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a handy alphabetized guidebook to the kinds of people, places and things you are likely to encounter as a tourist/hero in a fantasy land. The entries are dripping with well-informed sarcasm, and are very satisfying for those of us slightly impatient with cookie-cutter fantasy quest stories. The week we were discussing this book, one fan told me she read the “horse” entry aloud to a speculative fiction class she taught. I imagine that was very well received.

I’ve spent a lot of time with this book, and for this readthrough, I intended to gird my loins and read it through from cover to cover. But I just couldn’t. Instead I open it randomly and read whatever entry I light upon, follow the cross references at the end of the entry, and so on, until I feel ready to open randomly somewhere else in the book. I think that is probably the best way to go. I should try keeping it nearby when I DO read a standard quest fantasy, and look up tropes like “female mercenary” or “ring” when they show up. That would probably also be a good way to do it.

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If you’d like to read along with me, my schedule is here! Deep Secret, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and Puss in Boots are up next: two of my absolute favorites and one I’ve never read before, so I’m excited.

Custom images for this series are by Marnanel Thurman.