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A couple years ago, I made a lengthy Dalemark Quartet playlist!
For those of you unfamiliar with the Dalemark Quartet, they're set in a culturally and politically divided nation and are some of my favorite Diana Wynne Jones books -- I mean, okay, I have a lot of favorite DWJ books, but the Dalemark Quartet is quite different than a lot of hers books, much less madcap, and much more thoughtful and numinous and sad, with themes about war and revolution and history and storytelling and mythology woven all through it. (It is also one of the main influences on the Attolia books, so, you know, if you like those . . .)
The books in the series, which all stand alone except for the last one, are
Cart and Cwidder: the most outwardly straightforward, this one centers on Moril, the youngest member of a family of traveling musicians whose father has turned out to be harboring dangerous secrets. Eventually the three kids have to make their way alone from the South to the North, in company with a teenaged fugitive and armed with nothing but Moril's potentially magical old cwidder, his sister's sense of bravado, and his brother's emo poetry.
Drowned Ammett: this is nobody else's favorite book of the first three, but it's MY favorite book of the first three, for all the painful character development. Growing up bitter and impoverished in a city in the South, Mitt has spent his whole life training for the huge act of revolutionary terrorism he is going to commit when he turns thirteen; then the time comes for him to carry out his plans and everything goes TERRIBLY WRONG.
The Spellcoats: this is the one that everyone else I know likes best! Probably because it is the most gorgeously numinous of the lot. Tanaqui and her siblings look like the invaders who have just started attacking their people. When their oldest brother comes back from the war different, and their father doesn't come back at all, they have to flee the village and set out on a journey up the river. Which might also be their grandfather. It's complicated.
The Crown of Dalemark: This is the one that brings all the previous three books together, and complicates the setup immensely into the bargain. (Growing up in the South, the protagonists of the first two books both thought there was a binary that went South: OPPRESSED AND TERRIBLE, North: FREE AND WONDERFUL. Alas, it doesn't quite work like that.) Several characters are on a mission to campaign for a prospective queen, except none of them like or trust each other, and the prospective queen is not who she seems, and a god keeps telling her to kill all her friends, which she is naturally reluctant to do. Also, there is time travel. IT'S WONDERFUL AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
Anyway, the reason I am suddenly lauding these books to you now is that today![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
izilen emailed me unexpectedly and said, "HEY BECCA I MADE YOU COVER ART FOR YOUR DALEMARK MIX AND ALSO PUT IT IN A MEDIAFIRE FILE FOR EASY DOWNLOAD," because she is amazing.
So hey! Have a Dalemark playlist with proper gorgeous cover art which you can then click to download in convenient .zip files!
For those of you unfamiliar with the Dalemark Quartet, they're set in a culturally and politically divided nation and are some of my favorite Diana Wynne Jones books -- I mean, okay, I have a lot of favorite DWJ books, but the Dalemark Quartet is quite different than a lot of hers books, much less madcap, and much more thoughtful and numinous and sad, with themes about war and revolution and history and storytelling and mythology woven all through it. (It is also one of the main influences on the Attolia books, so, you know, if you like those . . .)
The books in the series, which all stand alone except for the last one, are
Cart and Cwidder: the most outwardly straightforward, this one centers on Moril, the youngest member of a family of traveling musicians whose father has turned out to be harboring dangerous secrets. Eventually the three kids have to make their way alone from the South to the North, in company with a teenaged fugitive and armed with nothing but Moril's potentially magical old cwidder, his sister's sense of bravado, and his brother's emo poetry.
Drowned Ammett: this is nobody else's favorite book of the first three, but it's MY favorite book of the first three, for all the painful character development. Growing up bitter and impoverished in a city in the South, Mitt has spent his whole life training for the huge act of revolutionary terrorism he is going to commit when he turns thirteen; then the time comes for him to carry out his plans and everything goes TERRIBLY WRONG.
The Spellcoats: this is the one that everyone else I know likes best! Probably because it is the most gorgeously numinous of the lot. Tanaqui and her siblings look like the invaders who have just started attacking their people. When their oldest brother comes back from the war different, and their father doesn't come back at all, they have to flee the village and set out on a journey up the river. Which might also be their grandfather. It's complicated.
The Crown of Dalemark: This is the one that brings all the previous three books together, and complicates the setup immensely into the bargain. (Growing up in the South, the protagonists of the first two books both thought there was a binary that went South: OPPRESSED AND TERRIBLE, North: FREE AND WONDERFUL. Alas, it doesn't quite work like that.) Several characters are on a mission to campaign for a prospective queen, except none of them like or trust each other, and the prospective queen is not who she seems, and a god keeps telling her to kill all her friends, which she is naturally reluctant to do. Also, there is time travel. IT'S WONDERFUL AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
Anyway, the reason I am suddenly lauding these books to you now is that today
izilen emailed me unexpectedly and said, "HEY BECCA I MADE YOU COVER ART FOR YOUR DALEMARK MIX AND ALSO PUT IT IN A MEDIAFIRE FILE FOR EASY DOWNLOAD," because she is amazing. So hey! Have a Dalemark playlist with proper gorgeous cover art which you can then click to download in convenient .zip files!
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eta: which is to say I would like to have them so I could listen while reading Dalemark, as I never have.
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. . . but EITHER WAY I hope you will enjoy Dalemark! :D
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Cart and Cwidder
Drowned Ammet
The Spellcoats
Crown of Dalemark
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Wow, I love this. I love these books. And the songs are so perfect. The only trouble is, it's been so long that I read them that I'm finding the song descriptions to be spoiling me for plot elements I'd forgotten. I need to reread these!
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Also, this is an A+ plan and I support it.
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I find that the 15+ year gap before she went back to Dalemark in the final book really shows - her work had changed quite a bit in the meantime.
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It really had. At the same time, I find it kind of amazing that there was a period of time when she was considering not writing the fourth one, because there seems to be so much in the first three that cries out for the stuff that happens in the fourth! It makes them all retroactively better books, I think.
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I might like Cart and Cwidder more, though, pretty much only because I have a sneaky love for musicians (and Moril) and family, and also because the climactic scene just. Oh, Moril.
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It's mine for the mythology.
(I read The Crown of Dalemark first. That was awkward.)
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(...oh dear, I can't imagine that would work at all.
Though, that said, in the hypothetical television series that will never be made and certainly not directed by me, I think I would start with Crown as a framing device and then deep flashback-dive into everyone's backstories as we go on.)
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I can see how that happens—and The Spellcoats has the textile-epistolary form, which to my knowledge has never been used in another fantasy novel—but the sideways strange familiarity of the Sea Festival and Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer is what makes the book for me, even more than the political complexity. I love the lesser names for the gods as they are commonly thought of and the strong names for the gods as they really are, the Poseidon-and-Gaia aspects of the Earth Shaker and She Who Raised the Islands not really lost at all but slipped into a different key in the present day with a sea-sacrifice ritual like the making of the Greenwitch, Mycenaean Greece by way of Cornwall. It's the same trick as the translation of Universal Symbols in A Tale of Time City—the text doesn't show the thing itself, but it becomes visible between the contrasts of what we're told. And the meeting between the two Alhammitts has all the numinous I consider an essential quality of encounters with the divine or the more-than-mortal.
(Good God, there's a Greenwitch perfume. Well, that happened.)
...oh dear, I can't imagine that would work at all.
It worked in that The Crown of Dalemark, against all odds, actually functions as a standalone novel—and why shouldn't it, seeing as the series hasn't exactly been a linear progression before then—but I am confident that some of the emotional payoffs would have landed much more powerfully if I had come in knowing more of the characters than what Maewen can perceive within the text of Crown. Also the last-chapter reveal with Wend made me basically sad throughout most of The Spellcoats, which probably wasn't the point. Dammit, these books are in storage and now I want to read them again.
I imagine you've seen it already, but there is an entire Tumblr of Dalemark fanart. Discovered while trying to double-check a quote from a book I don't have to hand. I really like the Attolia and Dalemark crossover. [edit] I certainly imagine you've seen at least that last one, since the artist did Frances Hardinge fanart for you.
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