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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: 2015-01-12 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-12 11:39 pm (UTC)(What I recall right now: Opens like an ordinary magic-in-contemporary world book, then gets truly bizarre. Literally no one and nothing is what they seem. At all. The hero and heroine are brainwashed assassins, and also King Arthur and virtual reality and time travel and aliens and dragons????)
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Date: 2015-01-12 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:21 am (UTC)The funny thing is I've read Hexwood so often (and started reading it often at such a young age) that a.) everything about it is burned into my brain and b.) I have the pleasant illusion of complete understanding of the plot. Every time someone talks about how it's confusing and doesn't make sense I have to stop and remember that, oh, right, the whole book IS written backwards. (And forwards, and sideways, in multiple repetition.)
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Date: 2015-01-13 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:24 am (UTC)IT IS DEFINITELY HARD TO WRITE FIC FOR. So much complicated backstory, so little time!
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Date: 2015-01-13 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:29 am (UTC)Oh yes and everyone is full of half truths and existing and new relationships, very confusing and you don't want to have to make your reader work too much to remember as that's not fun.
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Date: 2015-01-13 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-01-13 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 02:51 am (UTC)NOT JUST ME THEN
Oh that book was so weird, and not in the good way. People warned me not to read it, and I was all "But it's DWJ! It cannot be bad!" and....it was. Well not bad-badly-written-bad. Just....very not for me.
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Date: 2015-01-13 02:55 am (UTC)It is totally DWJ's epic trope bingo card, in FULL BLACKOUT MODE, because that is just how she rolls. I seem to recall reading somewhere that DWJ never really plots her stories in advance, just sort of figures them out as she writes? Which is both terrifying and yet also weirdly hilarious to me. I imagine any writer sitting down to try and plot this in advance would probably just throw their hands up in terror and quit anyway.
I probably need to get my own copy so I can re-read it another... 5 times or something. I should probably re-read Fire and Hemlock too, speaking of peculiarly inexplicable DWJs.
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Date: 2015-01-13 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 03:50 am (UTC)Ha! TRUE. The thing about Fire and Hemlock is that it almost seems like it's going to make sense, until the end, at which point everything reveals itself to have been poetry logic and not logic logic ALL ALONG.
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Date: 2015-01-13 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 03:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 04:21 am (UTC)(All of the above wildly inaccurate due to me completely forgetting who was who when what where how in Hexwood)
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Date: 2015-01-13 04:28 am (UTC)Also, hello, I started following you because your Hexwood fic in Yuletide was amazing. :)
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Date: 2015-01-13 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
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.
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Date: 2015-01-13 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:24 pm (UTC)I am going to reread all the things, yeah. It was pretty much perfect for keeping myself busy while clawing myself out. :-)
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Date: 2015-01-13 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 12:29 pm (UTC)POSSIBLY ESPECIALLY THE FLAILING ALLCAPS :D
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Date: 2015-01-13 02:00 pm (UTC)But it was still pretty bad.
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Date: 2015-01-14 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 02:56 am (UTC)I adore Hexwood unreasonably. I know! It is weird! Its plot is typically DWJ lopsided! It is the puzzliest of puzzle books and I eat it up with a spoon. I loved the time and identity hijinks of it – this is a very niche literary boast, compared to the people who flaunt their aesthetic enjoyment of Joyce, say, but Hexwood has always made total and complete sense to me, it hit me in my intellectual id – and I have never read anything else that has lived up to that level of twisty.
Fire and Hemlock, on the other hand...
By the way! I have bought Hild and one of these long plane rides I am really looking forward to it!
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Date: 2015-01-14 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 01:35 pm (UTC)This is also how I feel about it! Well, not quite, I do know there probably was a point at which I didn't understand Hexwood, but it was so long ago that I have absolutely no memory of it, and now rereading it's just like -- well, of course! Yes, that makes sense! Oh, gosh, and the way he thinks about that when he's this person makes so much sense in context of the way he's really that person, ISN'T IT GENIUS! And there's always something new to find in it. On this read especially I really enjoyed following the undercurrents with Hume/Martellian/Merlin, and the sort of sub-plot of the question of whether his personality is recoverable from the moral depths to which he's sunk in his fight against Orm, which isn't something I'd particularly paid attention to before.
On the other hand? :D DO GO ON.
Oh yay! I'm looking forward to your thoughts on it!
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Date: 2015-01-14 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-01-14 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 01:46 pm (UTC)I will look forward to hearing about your reread whenever it happens. :D
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Date: 2015-01-14 01:47 pm (UTC)...I do however remember the conga line.
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Date: 2015-01-14 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
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.
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Date: 2015-01-19 05:51 am (UTC)-I also enjoyed your Yuletide Hexwood fic!
and
-Hexwood is one of those DWJ books that I read in adolescence and am terrified to re-read in case it makes less sense this time around. Er. Is that relatable at all?
Also I feel one could get even more trope-ticks out of the assassin breeding program.
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Date: 2015-01-19 11:20 pm (UTC)That's SUPER relatable and is sort of how I feel about Fire and Hemlock -- I didn't bother to think about how the ending was confusing until I got old enough to find LJ/DW and see other people talking about how it was confusing. It always seemed to make a reasonable amount of sense when I was younger! I'm fairly sure it won't anymore, but I haven't been brave enough to try.
Every time I reread Hexwood I'm more taken aback by the TWO SEPARATE incestuous assassin/hero breeding programs. Like, OK, the villains are running one and that's dramatic enough, but SO IS ONE OF THE PROTAGONISTS. Thank you, Martellian and your terrible life choices.
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Date: 2015-10-29 02:00 pm (UTC)It also contains so many identifiable cross-references between Mordian and the figure of the Mabon in Celtic mythology that I suspect Diane of having deliberately used "Mabon and the Mysteries of Britain" and "Arthur and the Sovereignty of Britain" by Caitlin Matthews as source books.