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lokifanOnly three books, so you’d think this would be a very short post. You would be tragically wrong.
The City & The City by China Mieville
In a word, disappointing. It’s got some cool stuff going on but the plot is far from dazzling, I liked but didn’t love the characters, and the setting/atmosphere/philosophy/human nature stuff that the reviews raved about was... disappointing. I had this reaction partly because of reviews on the back which are all “people are too quick to compare to Kakfa and Orwell but this actually deserves it”, which is not the fault of the book but actually totally UNDESERVED. Faintly satiric eastern European setting /= Kafka. One observation about human beings repeated ad infinitum /= sure as hell not Orwell.
The set-up - leaving aside the thriller-ish murder mystery plot, which for me only heated up right at the end, although that end stretch was awesome - is a fantasy eastern-European city that is actually two cities. Basically the city has been split, but not by a wall; some parts of the physical city belong to one city, and some parts belong to the other, and a very few belong to both. And the citizens live their lives pretending, on pain of being disappeared, that the other city isn’t there and they can’t see those people or streets or cars. Which is like the start of an Orwell novel. Except it does basically nothing with it. Humans have a capacity for self-delusion. Humans will look away from our fellow humans due to political pressure. And that’s it. Nineteen Eighty-Four had a hell of a lot more going on thematically, it was much more complex and richer. Mieville’s book has its strengths but it is just in no way that clever.
Earwig and the Witch by Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones’ last book. The production values are high - I’ve got a gorgeously illustrated little scarlet hardback - and there is a great deal of charm and wit and warmth going on, because it’s Diana Wynne Jones. It had a talking black cat who was as fun as DWJ’s cats always are, and a witchy heroine who made everyone do what she wanted. (She also had a pseudo-little-brother who was shy and obedient and was an orphan who got taken to live with powerful magical people. She was sort of like Gwendolen if Gwendolen was on the road to redemption.) But this book made me kind of sad, mostly. It’s short, and I thought that was because it was aimed at younger kids than her usual audience, but I think it’s that short because she was ill.
It is obviously meant for young children, but... there are several things set up that go nowhere. Most obviously there’s the fact that Earwig is abandoned outside an orphanage as a baby with a note that says “I will come back for her” and nobody does. There’s also this best friend who we basically don’t see after the start of the book - as it ends Earwig is sure she’ll convince him to visit her with her terrifying guardians but it doesn’t actually happen. There’s a climax at the end, but it feels somehow a bit more like a drama-in-the-middle than a final climax - it’s Gwendolen’s ruining the dinner party, not Cat and Chrestomanci captured in the garden.
Also, Earwig begins as a girl who can make everyone at her orphanage do what she wants, including the adults. She has a moment of self-awareness about this but it fades and she gets her new guardians to do what she wants instead. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s satisfying, but it’s not how Diana Wynne Jones tended to work. Nick in Deep Secret, Charles in Witch Week, Cat in Stealer of Souls, Christopher in Charmed Life, everyone in The Ogre Downstairs - and there are plenty of other examples - these characters were selfish or self-centred, unable to understand other people’s perspectives on the world or them. And they learnt better. Earwig strikes me as one of those characters - different from them, because Diana Wynne Jones was an incredibly original writer, but part of the same theme - and it feels like her story got cut off at a content midway point.
So yeah. A nice story that seems like it should have been a novel. I’m sad writing this, and I suspect Earwig and the Witch is going to stay sad for me. Diana Wynne Jones was my Kurt Cobain, my Amy Winehouse; I’m so passionate about her work, she was a shining star of a kind of art that I love, and she died when I was twenty-one and I spent a day crying and rereading and wondering about a tattoo. One of these days I’ll be going on a pilgrimage, I bet.
Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones
I LOVE THE DARK LORD OF DERKHOLM. I remember reading an interview with the author once where she said she’d got letters saying people went to university and took their Diana Wynne Jones as comfort reading. I was one of those people and this was the book in question. I just love it. It pulls off a neat trick it took Pterry a while to figure out - it’s witty, wicked satire of high fantasy, while having a complex, compelling plot and fantastic characters with emotional arcs ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It’s centred around this enormous, boisterous, loving family, and they’re that great combination of vastly different from each other and so much the same, and I just. Arrgh so many feelings, you guys. Querida! Derk! Blade! Shona! Kit! Pretty! Mara! Elda! Everyone!
This is a really unhelpful review... okay, so the book is set in a traditional high-fantasy Otherworld, except that it actually makes more sense than Otherworlds do. Every year for the last forty years Mr Chesney, a businessman from our world, has had tourists going through. The world’s completely wrecked because the tourists always come in a little band expecting to have adventures and kill the Dark Lord. This year they’re going to take Chesney and his demon down so the tours can stop - except Derk, a bumbling but very talented wizard, has to play the Dark Lord. So he and his kids and wife are trying to run the tours as well. It’s just. It’s really human and we see everyone’s motives and feelings while also swooping around the continent showing us this large-scale story. This is how I want to write - but I doubt I ever will!
The City & The City by China Mieville
In a word, disappointing. It’s got some cool stuff going on but the plot is far from dazzling, I liked but didn’t love the characters, and the setting/atmosphere/philosophy/human nature stuff that the reviews raved about was... disappointing. I had this reaction partly because of reviews on the back which are all “people are too quick to compare to Kakfa and Orwell but this actually deserves it”, which is not the fault of the book but actually totally UNDESERVED. Faintly satiric eastern European setting /= Kafka. One observation about human beings repeated ad infinitum /= sure as hell not Orwell.
The set-up - leaving aside the thriller-ish murder mystery plot, which for me only heated up right at the end, although that end stretch was awesome - is a fantasy eastern-European city that is actually two cities. Basically the city has been split, but not by a wall; some parts of the physical city belong to one city, and some parts belong to the other, and a very few belong to both. And the citizens live their lives pretending, on pain of being disappeared, that the other city isn’t there and they can’t see those people or streets or cars. Which is like the start of an Orwell novel. Except it does basically nothing with it. Humans have a capacity for self-delusion. Humans will look away from our fellow humans due to political pressure. And that’s it. Nineteen Eighty-Four had a hell of a lot more going on thematically, it was much more complex and richer. Mieville’s book has its strengths but it is just in no way that clever.
Earwig and the Witch by Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones’ last book. The production values are high - I’ve got a gorgeously illustrated little scarlet hardback - and there is a great deal of charm and wit and warmth going on, because it’s Diana Wynne Jones. It had a talking black cat who was as fun as DWJ’s cats always are, and a witchy heroine who made everyone do what she wanted. (She also had a pseudo-little-brother who was shy and obedient and was an orphan who got taken to live with powerful magical people. She was sort of like Gwendolen if Gwendolen was on the road to redemption.) But this book made me kind of sad, mostly. It’s short, and I thought that was because it was aimed at younger kids than her usual audience, but I think it’s that short because she was ill.
It is obviously meant for young children, but... there are several things set up that go nowhere. Most obviously there’s the fact that Earwig is abandoned outside an orphanage as a baby with a note that says “I will come back for her” and nobody does. There’s also this best friend who we basically don’t see after the start of the book - as it ends Earwig is sure she’ll convince him to visit her with her terrifying guardians but it doesn’t actually happen. There’s a climax at the end, but it feels somehow a bit more like a drama-in-the-middle than a final climax - it’s Gwendolen’s ruining the dinner party, not Cat and Chrestomanci captured in the garden.
Also, Earwig begins as a girl who can make everyone at her orphanage do what she wants, including the adults. She has a moment of self-awareness about this but it fades and she gets her new guardians to do what she wants instead. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s satisfying, but it’s not how Diana Wynne Jones tended to work. Nick in Deep Secret, Charles in Witch Week, Cat in Stealer of Souls, Christopher in Charmed Life, everyone in The Ogre Downstairs - and there are plenty of other examples - these characters were selfish or self-centred, unable to understand other people’s perspectives on the world or them. And they learnt better. Earwig strikes me as one of those characters - different from them, because Diana Wynne Jones was an incredibly original writer, but part of the same theme - and it feels like her story got cut off at a content midway point.
So yeah. A nice story that seems like it should have been a novel. I’m sad writing this, and I suspect Earwig and the Witch is going to stay sad for me. Diana Wynne Jones was my Kurt Cobain, my Amy Winehouse; I’m so passionate about her work, she was a shining star of a kind of art that I love, and she died when I was twenty-one and I spent a day crying and rereading and wondering about a tattoo. One of these days I’ll be going on a pilgrimage, I bet.
Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones
I LOVE THE DARK LORD OF DERKHOLM. I remember reading an interview with the author once where she said she’d got letters saying people went to university and took their Diana Wynne Jones as comfort reading. I was one of those people and this was the book in question. I just love it. It pulls off a neat trick it took Pterry a while to figure out - it’s witty, wicked satire of high fantasy, while having a complex, compelling plot and fantastic characters with emotional arcs ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It’s centred around this enormous, boisterous, loving family, and they’re that great combination of vastly different from each other and so much the same, and I just. Arrgh so many feelings, you guys. Querida! Derk! Blade! Shona! Kit! Pretty! Mara! Elda! Everyone!
This is a really unhelpful review... okay, so the book is set in a traditional high-fantasy Otherworld, except that it actually makes more sense than Otherworlds do. Every year for the last forty years Mr Chesney, a businessman from our world, has had tourists going through. The world’s completely wrecked because the tourists always come in a little band expecting to have adventures and kill the Dark Lord. This year they’re going to take Chesney and his demon down so the tours can stop - except Derk, a bumbling but very talented wizard, has to play the Dark Lord. So he and his kids and wife are trying to run the tours as well. It’s just. It’s really human and we see everyone’s motives and feelings while also swooping around the continent showing us this large-scale story. This is how I want to write - but I doubt I ever will!
