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Jan. 12th, 2015 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSo now that I'm no longer secret for Yuletide, who wants to talk about Hexwood? POSSIBLY my favorite Diana Wynne Jones (although as we all know that is a constantly shifting target.) So complex, so id-tastic, so completely fucking weird.
On Tumblr recently I said this about Hexwood:
My favorite thing about Diana Wynne Jones’ Hexwood continues to be how it is basically just Diana Wynne Jones triumphantly checking off an entire trope-bingo card. Diana Wynne Jones, thoughtfully perusing someone’s imagineyourotp list:
- linked by a psychic soulbond!
- forced to co-parent a small child!
- cute office coworkers AU!
- middle ages AU!
- contemporary high school AU!
- one of them has amnesia!
- the other one has amnesia!
- aliens try to make them do it!
- SOMEBODY’S A DRAGON!
and looking at her romantic leads, who are ALREADY a galactic revolutionary space heiress and an angsty mind-controlled slave who assassinates people for the evil overlords that her family is trying to overthrow, and being, like, “yeah, OK, pretty sure I can also hit all these in one book.”
AND SHE DOES, and the book isn't even ABOUT all of that, is the thing. (Although in a way it is, because what is the main theme of angsty fanfic AUs if not the amount of physical and psychological trauma that a person can take and still retain a self that is capable of loving others? The Bannus is the world's most dedicated writer of hurt/comfort idfic.) Anyway. I don't actually think DWJ started out by planning to write the world's greatest one-book fanfic bingo square, ALTHOUGH MAYBE SHE DID. I waffle on where I think DWJ did start out when planning Hexwood, because it's a book in which almost every main character turns out to be somebody completely different from the person they're introduced as (and they don't usually know it) and, like, how do you even start planning out that plot in advance?
But today, at least my strongest hypothesis is that Diana Wynne Jones started by reading at Arthurian myths, and said, "well, there's sure a lot of weird incest in that story," and then she looked at Norse mythology and said, "well, there's also even more weird incest in those stories," and then said, "hmmmm, you know what would make all that weird incest make sense? If it was all part of a GIANT GALACTIC BREEDING PROGRAM."
...and let's just stop for a minute and remember that Diana Wynne Jones wrote a book about a giant galactic breeding program, among other things. Hexwood is actually probably DWJ's most weirdly sexual book? Which also goes back to the idfic factor of Mordion and Vierran's relationship, and is especially strange for a book that I think ... is probably ... in large part about parenting? Or at least child-raising. The most important lesson in the book, the one that everything is about getting Mordion and Hume both to learn and internalize, is that the ultimate sin a person can commit is in thinking of a child as something to be used. Such as, for example, in a GIANT EVIL INTERGALACTIC BREEDING PROGRAM. It is not the child's fault if they are used, but it is their responsibility not to go on to do it to anyone else.
Which also is all tied in with the ways that the book is also about trauma and recovery, and how it is therefore very deliberately structured incoherently -- "like human memory" -- or like a traumatic experience relived. Sometimes with the help of a giant sparkly diamond net of manpain. Wow, this post is possibly more incoherent than the book. I JUST LOVE HEXWOOD A LOT.
On Tumblr recently I said this about Hexwood:
My favorite thing about Diana Wynne Jones’ Hexwood continues to be how it is basically just Diana Wynne Jones triumphantly checking off an entire trope-bingo card. Diana Wynne Jones, thoughtfully perusing someone’s imagineyourotp list:
- linked by a psychic soulbond!
- forced to co-parent a small child!
- cute office coworkers AU!
- middle ages AU!
- contemporary high school AU!
- one of them has amnesia!
- the other one has amnesia!
- aliens try to make them do it!
- SOMEBODY’S A DRAGON!
and looking at her romantic leads, who are ALREADY a galactic revolutionary space heiress and an angsty mind-controlled slave who assassinates people for the evil overlords that her family is trying to overthrow, and being, like, “yeah, OK, pretty sure I can also hit all these in one book.”
AND SHE DOES, and the book isn't even ABOUT all of that, is the thing. (Although in a way it is, because what is the main theme of angsty fanfic AUs if not the amount of physical and psychological trauma that a person can take and still retain a self that is capable of loving others? The Bannus is the world's most dedicated writer of hurt/comfort idfic.) Anyway. I don't actually think DWJ started out by planning to write the world's greatest one-book fanfic bingo square, ALTHOUGH MAYBE SHE DID. I waffle on where I think DWJ did start out when planning Hexwood, because it's a book in which almost every main character turns out to be somebody completely different from the person they're introduced as (and they don't usually know it) and, like, how do you even start planning out that plot in advance?
But today, at least my strongest hypothesis is that Diana Wynne Jones started by reading at Arthurian myths, and said, "well, there's sure a lot of weird incest in that story," and then she looked at Norse mythology and said, "well, there's also even more weird incest in those stories," and then said, "hmmmm, you know what would make all that weird incest make sense? If it was all part of a GIANT GALACTIC BREEDING PROGRAM."
...and let's just stop for a minute and remember that Diana Wynne Jones wrote a book about a giant galactic breeding program, among other things. Hexwood is actually probably DWJ's most weirdly sexual book? Which also goes back to the idfic factor of Mordion and Vierran's relationship, and is especially strange for a book that I think ... is probably ... in large part about parenting? Or at least child-raising. The most important lesson in the book, the one that everything is about getting Mordion and Hume both to learn and internalize, is that the ultimate sin a person can commit is in thinking of a child as something to be used. Such as, for example, in a GIANT EVIL INTERGALACTIC BREEDING PROGRAM. It is not the child's fault if they are used, but it is their responsibility not to go on to do it to anyone else.
Which also is all tied in with the ways that the book is also about trauma and recovery, and how it is therefore very deliberately structured incoherently -- "like human memory" -- or like a traumatic experience relived. Sometimes with the help of a giant sparkly diamond net of manpain. Wow, this post is possibly more incoherent than the book. I JUST LOVE HEXWOOD A LOT.
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Date: 2015-01-13 07:50 am (UTC)HOW CAN YOU FORGET THE CHAPTER-LONG MAGICAL CONGA LINE?
[edit] I agree that A Sudden Wild Magic feels like an outlier among her works, partly because of its explicit sexuality where elsewhere, as in Hexwood, the sex is more implicit and tangled up with other things. Also because in many ways it feels like a dry run for Deep Secret to me, with the latter being a much more successful novel. A Sudden Wild Magic really evaporates at the end, and not in the good way where identities rain out of the woodwork and everyone who hasn't turned out to be someone else sits around blinking and going, ". . . okay!" But it has several characters that I enjoy, and a nice retake on pocket universes, and some genuinely numinous and delightful images, like the striding pylons and the king—"His Majesty Rudolph IX, King of Trenjen, Frinjen, and Corriarden, Protector of Leathe and Overlord of the Fiveir of the Orthe"—shopping with his string bag full of oranges and his spectacles that he cleans with a handkerchief.
And I will always love the conga line.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 01:47 pm (UTC)...I do however remember the conga line.
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Date: 2015-01-14 08:45 pm (UTC)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.