skygiants

This is fascinating, you are the only person I've ever met who likes A Sudden Wild Magic! I'm glad that somebody does.

I don't in any way adore or consider it one of my favorites,* but I have read it two or three times now, I've enjoyed it each time, and I find it a really interesting failure, because Diana Wynne Jones doesn't have a lot of those: interesting or otherwise. There are books of hers that I don't find as strong, and books of hers that I don't like as much, and even some books of hers that I think are only so-so, but A Sudden Wild Magic actually doesn't work in several structural ways. (One of them being possibly that DWJ couldn't write sex farce, although points to her for trying. The passive-aggressive cooking-based romance between Helen and Brother Milo is quite good, though.) What works best about it for me as a novel is the depth of field of the world—multiple sentient and magical species other than humans, alternate universes with different laws than she'd used previously, similarly a system of magic that does not appear in her other science fantasy, although I really mean it about Deep Secret taking all these themes and doing them better, with a plot that actually holds up and characters that don't feel like experimental sketches. What works best about it for me as a story is the stuff I mentioned previously.

* My formative novels by DWJ were Howl's Moving Castle (1986), The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988), and A Tale of Time City (1987). After that, everything I could find. [edit] It helped that my mother loved Diana Wynne Jones and my god-aunt collected her books, in a fannish, bibliophilic way. I read the first two books mentioned here because my mother brought them home from the library.

Maybe it's because of the way it evaporates that I remember so little of it.

It doesn't run as deep as most of her other books. There is nothing in it as transfixing as (to refer back to the actual subject of this post) Mordion dragon-bound to the icy spikes of his memory, a constellation of trauma. The conga line really is its one indelible image for me. It's hilarious and absurd and grief-triggered and dangerous and very, very human; it's a gigantic explosion of genuine id in a book which needed a lot more of that sort of thing if it was going to pull off the seduction-based sex farce plot. It's as weird and real as people are. That is frustratingly not true of the actual climax of A Sudden Wild Magic, which is one of the reasons I believe it fades from memory. I will remember the mechanics if I read the book again, but I should at least be able to recall the emotions. The fact that I can't tells me something about it.