The Oxford and Cambridge Schools of British Fantasy

From Slate’s interview with Maria Sachiko Cecire, professor at Bard and author of Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century:

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, of course, as many people know, were friends and colleagues, but they were actually working to reform the English curriculum at Oxford, in addition to writing their own fantasy.

They were the architects of this curriculum, which went into effect in 1931. And they really had an enormous role to play in the kinds of questions that were set in examinations, the texts that were required for undergrads to read; then this had this kind of huge knock-on effect in terms of what people were studying for the next nearly 40 years at Oxford. There’s still some vestiges of that curriculum in the Oxford education today. Then the younger authors I was looking at were Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman. They all studied this curriculum and got their degrees between 1956 and 1968.

This curriculum at Oxford was really heavy on medieval literature, just at the moment when most other universities were going in the direction of modernism and the kinds of writing that we now associate with literary fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. At Oxford they were doubling down on medieval literature and also looking at it not just as examples for linguistic analysis—which was how it had been primarily studied in the 19th century under philology—but really looking at it as literature. Really seriously asking students to meditate on both the English medieval past and also this idea of magic and enchantment. . . .

And for comparison’s sake, I also went to the archive at a few other universities, including Cambridge, which went in a really different direction from Oxford in the ’20s and ’30s—much more intentionally towards modernism, towards more contemporary texts, and cutting out medieval requirements for their undergraduate English degree.

And interestingly, Cambridge didn’t really have the same legacy of children’s fantasy writers. T.H. White was at Cambridge at a really interesting time, when there was still a medieval requirement, but right as they were ending it. If you compare his The Once and Future King to, say, The Lord of the Rings, they’re so different in the way they talk about the Middle Ages, with a different level of reverence. There’s anachronism in White’s writing, and pretty profound critiques of the warlike nature of the Middle Ages and of a lot of the nostalgia for that period. Whereas Tolkien and his students tend to be a lot more reverent of that material.

See previous discussions of Tolkien as a teacher of future fantasy writers in 2010 and 2011.

Defining a Sequel, for Marketing Purposes

Godson’s Father James Treadwell’s fantasy novel Advent has been published in Britain, and is getting some fine reviews.

He’s still working out the marketing process, though:

I was invited last week to appear on the BBC News 24 channel “Meet the Author” slot. Sadly, I didn’t get to meet any authors, but I did have a pleasant chat with BBC’s effortlessly genial and knowledgeable Nick Higham.

James was just on an Olympus (Eastercon) panel on the topic “Sequel-itis,” but says on his home page that he’s finishing the “second novel,” not the sequel:

I don’t think [“sequel”] quite describes the relation between Advent and the story that’s falling into its final shape now. Sequels are really the same thing again, aren’t they? — the timescale and events may be subsequent to the first book/film/whatever, but basically they exist to repeat what’s already been achieved. The case of Advent won’t work like that. Presumably you can’t have advents twice, anyway. There has to be an arrival after a coming.

But aren’t sequelae simply things that follow? Advent is an open-ended story, and its last pages set up a story in quite a different place. The result may be as different as The Dark Is Rising from Over Sea, Under Stone, or Witch Week from Charmed Life. But for marketing and saga-construction purposes, those are surely sequels.

Tolkien the Teacher

Back in early 2010, I quoted reminiscences about J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford from Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper, as collected by Leonard Marcus. Cooper said, “He was a wonderful lecturer,” but Jones said his lectures were “absolutely appalling.”

It looks like many more people shared Jones’s response. Adam Gopnik’s recent article in the New Yorker about high fantasy for young readers begins:

At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable.

“Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around.

“I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

Since Jones and Cooper were at Oxford at about the same time, and since Cooper can appreciate theatricality when she sees it, most likely she was remembering the more popular lectures of C. S. Lewis.

According to Philip Pullman, Tolkien left his stamp on the Oxford curriculum even after he had retired from teaching: “every undergraduate had to read and study—and suffer—Anglo-Saxon.”

Jones on “Birthing a Book”

The Horn Book just reposted Diana Wynne Jones’s 2004 essay “Birthing a Book,” in which she confesses:

I once, when asked to give a talk about my book Fire and Hemlock, did have a stab at describing what went on while I wrote it. I teased out every layer of the book. Starting with what I felt about heroes and the heroic, I went on to describe my passion for cello music and how a rereading of Eliot’s Four Quartets sparked the actual book and gave rise to the presence of a quartet of musicians in it. I charted the various myths and folktales that surfaced and sank in the course of it, and of course I expounded on the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer — regarded as the negative and positive of the same story — which were the framework for the narrative. I gave the paper and the audience nodded wisely. This, they seemed to feel, was real stuff. I then went to New York, where my publishers had taken a great interest and had asked for a copy of the talk. I went in to see Libby, one of the editors — a wonderful wise lady with a voice like a sack of gravel being shaken. She was just finishing the paper as I walked in. She looked up from it and shook gravel at me:

“Very nice, Diana, but writers don’t work like that.”

I wanted to shout, “Yes, I do! It’s all true!” Instead I sort of gulped and answered, “No. You’re absolutely right.” As soon as I thought, I realized that the book had not been written in at all the analytical way I had tried to describe. The second draft might have been, when I was trying to make clear all the various elements that went into it — a process I always liken to pointing up or grouting the basic brickwork — but the first draft had been written at white heat, in a state where I was unable to put it down. I worked at it in any spare five minutes I could find. I even got up at six in the morning to write. This was so unheard of that my family wondered if I was ill. And such was the passion with which I was going at it that it seemed to pull in all sorts of queer but relevant things from daily life — I can’t tell you half the weird things now, but I do remember being followed around by a van labeled King’s Lynn, and going to a lecture where the speaker turned out to be the image of Mr. Leroy, with great black bags under his eyes, who proceeded to talk about both the Four Quartets and the ballad of Tam Lin, in a lecture that I think was supposed to be about Shakespeare.

Yet the book got written with a shape and a coherent story. The various elements I so carefully dissected in my talk got fed in at the right places. And I know I was very careful throughout, even in the first draft, to keep all the supernatural elements just a bare thread away from things that could have a normal explanation after all. This was one of the prime requirements from the book itself when it first came thundering into my head.

Later Jones reports, “I had no idea what Chrestomanci was going to be like until he first appeared in Mrs. Sharp’s kitchen. This is in spite of the fact that Charmed Life was a book that came into my head almost whole and entire from the start.”

There’s lots more of value, but one shouldn’t read this essay as a guide on how to write. Every writer’s method is different. The main value of such author essays, I think, is in how they show the wide range of working styles, with bits and pieces that others can pick up while leaving the rest to wonder at.

Tor.com has fantasy scholar Farah Mendelsohn’s essay on Jones’s career and passing. Neil Gaiman’s very personal appreciation is here.

Shifts in Shifting Point of View

Not so long ago, authors were strongly advised to define their point-of-view character for each novel, or at least for each chapter or scene in a novel. While it was possible to describe events that character wasn’t privy to, the informal rules said, a good novel’s narration should show readers only one person’s thoughts or feelings at a time.

Shifting from inside one character’s head to inside another, the tastemakers warned, could confuse readers and/or remind them that they were reading fiction. If one had to make that shift, it was imperative to wait for a chapter break or other obvious signpost. And ideally such a book should be about different views of life; the shifts should not be driven merely by narrative convenience.

There were exceptions to this rule, of course. Many novels of the past had shifting points of view, and readers still enjoyed them—but new authors had to look at what was being published today. There were also some individual exceptions, such as Phillip Pullman.

Something changed over the last decade. Perhaps Pullman’s success undercut the rules. Perhaps the rebirth of the intrusive narrator via Lemony Snicket opened the door to other types of old-fashioned narration. However it happened, three of the last four novels I read had shifting points of view.

Catherine Stier’s The Terrible Secrets of the Tell-All Club works with very close point of view in part one, with each short chapter following one of four kids. The point-of-view character’s name even appears in each chapter title, and the story focuses on how different characters view and misinterpret the same events. That type of narrative complexity grew in popularity over the last couple of decades.

But when Tell-All Club’s action shifts to a school camp, Stier abandons those delineations. Part two is titled “All Together Now.” (The first part has no title.) The narration starts jumping from one protagonist’s head to another within the same chapter and scene. That speeds up the action, but I’m not sure it serves the story—in part because I thought the story sort of petered out into valuable lessons about life.

M. T. Anderson’s Agent Q, or The Smell of Danger!, like the previous titles in the Pals in Peril series, features an intrusive, metatextual narrator who shifts point of view like a silent-movie comedian wrestling a fire hose. But all three books introduce us first to the thoughts of Lily Gefelty, the most normal of their three protagonists. The first couple show us the least normal, Jasper Dash, mainly from the outside, with the third finally letting us into his highly trained brain.

As I recall, the Pals in Peril series was originally presented and re-presented as a trilogy, which harmonized with its three protagonists and the first volume’s tripartite structure. But commercial success and the lack of any narrative limits in this universe put Agent Q in the interesting position of this trilogy’s fourth book. No single protagonist’s point of view or genre dominates as much as in the previous volumes, which results in a lot more switching from one head to another.

Agent Q also brings on a couple of claimants to be fourth member of our heroic threesome. However, neither of those young men gets point-of-view time, nor cover space on this volume or the next to come. (All I can say is that someone else appears to have disliked the Alex Rider books.)

Finally, Diana Wynne Jones’s Enchanted Glass has two protagonists/point-of-view characters, middle-aged Andrew and adolescent Aidan. Indeed, it proceeds for quite a while from its opening with no child in sight, still an unusual feature in a novel for children. As in Pullman’s novels, the narration jumps from one main character’s thoughts to the other within chapters without any section breaks or other typographical signals. But at that point in her life, Jones was well able to break the rules.

Divided by a Common Language under Enchanted Glass

One consequence of the late craze for British fantasies is that US publishers are much less worried about letting young American readers see original British language. Indeed, readers of the sort who know what Hogwarts house they would belong to might even demand those exotic details.

Here’s an example from Diana Wynne Jones’s Enchanted Glass, as a character flips through a telephone book:

“I’ve been through all the Browns twice now,” he told Aidan, “and there’s no Brown of Melstone Manor in here! The wretched crook must be ex-directory. He would be!”

Context makes it easy to figure out that what this British character calls “ex-directory” an American would call “unlisted.”

Another character in the book regularly makes “cauliflower cheese,” and to confirm that dish exists here’s a recipe. It even has a Wikipedia entry. In contrast, the “big, sloppy bowl of potato cheese” that same character sets out in chapter 8 has no equivalent webpages, indicating that she’s just thrown stuff together, and the result doesn’t even necessarily pass muster as rural English cuisine. I wouldn’t have gotten that nuance if I hadn’t tried looking up both phrases.

Remembering the Stories of Diana Wynne Jones

This morning brought news of the death of Diana Wynne Jones. Though she started publishing fantasy novels in the 1970s, they didn’t make a splash in the American market for years. I therefore didn’t read my first Jones novel until after college and a few years of work, when Harry Potter was making U.S. publishers once again see lucre in British children’s fantasy.

That first book was Charmed Life, the launch of Jones’s Chrestomanci stories. (Chronologically, it became the third—at least.) And I was delighted by the find. The storytelling seemed to effortlessly combine quaint, quotidian details with high magic and powerful personalities. Jones didn’t take a classical approach to plot, so her stories could make sudden turns—e.g., suddenly replacing one apparent protagonist for another—so as a reader you had to stay on your toes.

Jones’s storytelling grew out of an emotionally deprived childhood. Born in 1934, she grew up in the Depression, World War 2, and Britain’s postwar lean years, but suffered most from her parents’ child-rearing. This Guardian profile explains:

Utterly neglected by their parents, she and her sisters, Isobel and Ursula, lived in a shack apart from the main house. They ran wild, washed seldom and grew very close. Because of the damp, Diana contracted juvenile rheumatism, a trial to her mother who declared: “Sympathy damages me”. Her father, who according to Diana “could beat Scrooge in a meanness contest”, did not allow the girls many books. He kept an entire set of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books locked up, giving his daughters one to share each year. Desperate for books, Diana wrote two epic novels herself, aged 12.

Troubled families and demanding institutions (her parents were busy managing a conference center) run through many of Jones’s stories. Her fictional families are messy and full of secrets, and inheritances—of traditions, property, powers—are a burden. After coming back from a Jones conference Penthe wrote of her stories:

Lots of the action is driven by children having to cope with the fairly unpleasant events set in train by their elders - parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. The kids often end up taking the consequences and solving the problems because the adults are too self-absorbed, stubborn or lazy. Or just lack the imagination to understand what they are doing, which I think is the worst sin of all in the Jonesiverse.

The “Jonesiverse” is actually made up of many dimensions. I’m most fond of the novels rooted in modern England, with balky television sets and council flats, like The Homeward Bounders, Eight Days of Luke, and especially Archer’s Goon. I haven’t dug fully into the high fantasy of, say, the Dalemark Quartet and Howl’s Castle series. But of course the power of Jones’s imagination lies in how those levels of reality are never far apart.

Batting for the Cycle

What comes after trilogy?

Christopher Paolini and Random House originally announced his Inheritance books as a trilogy, but writing Brisingr revealed plot threads and vowels that needed to go somewhere. The trilogy therefore became a four-book “cycle,” which will conclude this year. Unless he has more ideas.

For Diana Wynne Jones, the Dalemark books are a “quartet” while other series are open-ended. For Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time grew into the “Time Quartet,” though some critics have used the term “tetralogy.”

And for Stephenie Meyer, Twilight just seems to be a “series.” That has the non-specificity of “cycle” without even the implication of a closed circle.

Conflicting Recollections of Prof. Tolkien

In his book The Wand and the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, literary scholar Leonard S. Marcus asked a number of established fantasy writers about their influences, particularly J. R. R. Tolkien.

Diana Wynne Jones (born in 1934) and Susan Cooper (born in 1935) attended Oxford University at about the same time, and they gave Marcus completely different memories of Tolkien.

Cooper said:

I never met him, but I went to his lectures on Anglo-Saxon literature, along with hundreds of other students. He was a wonderful lecturer. Like C. S. Lewis, whose lectures I also attended, he was a tweedy, pipe-smoking, middle-aged man. We were all waiting for the third volume of The Lord of the Rings to come out.

But Jones told Marcus:

I went to his public lectures. They were absolutely appalling. In those days a lecturer could be paid for his entire course even if he lost his audience, provided he turned up for the first lecture. I think that Tolkien made quite a cynical effort to get rid of us so he could go home and finish writing The Lord of the Rings.

He gave his lectures in a very, very small room and didn’t address us, his audience, at all. In fact he looked the other way, with his face almost squashed up against the blackboard. He spoke in a mutter. His mind was on finishing The Lord of the Rings, and he was really musing to himself about the nature of narrative.

But I found this so fascinating that I came back week after week, as did one other person. I’ve always wondered what became of him, because he was obviously equally fascinated. And because we stuck there, Tolkien couldn’t go away and write Lord of the Rings!

He would say the most marvelous things about the way you take a very basic plot and twitch it here and twitch it there—and it becomes a completely different plot.

Perhaps these writers are remembering different series of lectures, and Tolkien was more engaged in the topic of Anglo-Saxon than in his “public lectures.” Perhaps Cooper’s memory of Tolkien is mixed with her memory of Lewis, whom Jones recalls as a polished, popular speaker in a large, packed auditorium.

Story Museum Tells Half of the Story?

Fuse #8 offered a link to the Story Museum, devoted to Oxford, England’s rich tradition of children’s literature. The website calls the city “A world centre of language and learning, home to some of the best-loved children’s writers and illustrators in the world – from Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis to Philip Pullman.” A July 2009 handout from the museum also mentions Kenneth Grahame, who attended school at Oxford but wasn’t allowed by his guardian to go to the university.

Right now the Story Museum is its website, handouts, and school visits program, “taking lively storytelling performances, hands on exhibitions and creative activities to schools and family venues and offering training and resources for teachers and parents.”

On my first visit to England, I stayed with friends in Christ Church College at Oxford. And by that I mean I stayed in the college, with a view of Alice Liddell’s garden from the window above my bed. I was thrilled. So I appreciate the city’s heritage of children’s literature.

But right now the Story Museum gives short shrift to part of that heritage: the female side. Though the organization has many female supporters, its literature emphasizes the male, donnish aspect of British children’s literature and gives little attention to women’s historic contributions.

The museum website doesn’t mention Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, Edith Nesbit, Enid Blyton, or Lucy M. Boston, as far as Google can tell. None has a strong Oxford connection, but of course as women they didn’t have the same university opportunities as their male contemporaries. (Similarly, I suspect that female dons at the women’s colleges in the mid-1900s would have suffered worse harm to their scholarly stature if they’d written children’s books than Tolkien and Lewis did.)

But what about female authors who did attend Oxford? Susan Cooper went to Somerville College and received an MA from the university; she was the first woman to edit the university’s newspaper. Diana Wynne Jones graduated from St. Anne’s College at Oxford. Their names don’t appear on the Story Museum website, either.

(I’m not bringing up women like Philippa Pearce of Cambridge or J. K. Rowling of Exeter. I understand how choosing to go to another university might be unforgivable.)

Jones Conference in Bristol

Through the Child_Lit email list came an announcement that there will be a scholarly and critical conference on Diana Wynne Jones at the University of the West of England, in Bristol, on 3-5 July 2009.

Jones herself lives in Bristol and hopes to attend on Saturday, which is the 4th. Presumably her American fans will simply have to figure out their priorities.

The conference issued this Call for Papers:

On any and all aspects of the writing of Diana Wynne Jones, on her influence and influences. Papers on fan activity and scholarship, TV and film adaptations also welcome. Deadline: 31 January 2009.

The organisers [sic] add that they'll entertain papers on closely related topics, and invite any and all queries about applicability. Those folks:

• Chris Bell has been involved at committee level in running Eastercon, the annual British Science Fiction Convention for more than fifteen years. She lives in Bristol.
• Charles Butler writes fantasy for children and is a well known scholar in the field (his book Four British Fantasists was nominated for a Mythopoeic Award). He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
• Farah Mendlesohn has organised and co-organised several academic conferences and been on the committee of an Eastercon. She is currently organising the programme for the 2009 Worldcon. In 2005 she published Diana Wynne Jones, Children's Literature and the Fantastic Tradition. She is a Reader at Middlesex University.

Email addresses for queries to be found on the latter two organisers' websites.

“Some People Are Better for Making It Up as It Goes Along”

Last week Publishers Weekly ran an interview with Diana Wynne Jones on the occasion of the landing of House of Many Ways, the second sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle. She had some interesting comments on her working methods.

You’ve said you don’t start out with a thoroughly plotted-out book. What do you start out with, when you begin writing?

I start out with people very often. Also some very, very clear scenes from the middle of the book. And usually a notion of how it’s going to go in the end, but that isn’t always the case. But it’s the clear picture from the middle that’s the important bit, I think. In the case of House of Many Ways, it was the bit when Peter first comes in out of the rain into all the bubbles in the kitchen and Charmaine reaches out and shuts his mouth with a clop. Because that for some reason was a very enduring image and I knew that was in there somewhere. But as I say, the Lubbock, which came just before that, was completely uncharted.

When I used to go and visit schools I always used to shock the teachers because I used to tell the kids that I didn’t plan it out, I waited to see how we got from the beginning to the picture I’d got of the middle of the book, or somewhere into the book, anyway. They were always very shocked. Because they always insisted on all their kids planning it out in advance, and I did sort of plead with them that this was not always necessary. In fact, some people are better for making it up as it goes along.

If I try to plan anything out in that kind of detail it just goes completely blank on me. And I don’t understand what I’ve written as a plan. I just found a plan several weeks ago, actually, when I was looking through stuff to see what I’ve got. And I looked at this plan, and I knew it wasn’t any plan of any book that I’d actually written, and I could not understand a word of what I’d done.

I’m much more comfortable with an outline myself, but results are results.

Jones’s choice to name a villainous character after a city in Texas reminds me vaguely of a book that Douglas Adams published a few years ago.

Models of Magical Law Enforcement

My recent return to the world of Artemis Fowl left me thinking about magical law-enforcement. It's widely recommended that fantasy authors figure out how magic works in the worlds they create, communicate those processes and limits to readers, and then stick to them. So rules of magic are part of nearly all fantasies.

But rules against magic that characters could do but shouldn't are another matter. These, too, have a long history, back to the sorcerer's apprentice and beyond.

Sometimes such laws are given the force of government, as when Princess Ozma of Oz forbids her subjects from practicing magic, excepting only Glinda and the Wizard--and herself--and Dorothy, when she needs to--and her other friends, come to think of it. Hmmm.

Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci is also a magical law enforcer and fixer, though his source of authority is not exactly clear. This is an aristocratic model of government: a carefully educated strong man chosen for his power, passing down his title and property (though not within his family).

In recent years, magical regulation has become more bureaucratic. We met the feckless Ministry of Magic in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a branch of the British civil service headed by a politically minded wizard. Harry and his friends get a close-up look at its workings in HP7, when they penetrate its headquarters in disguise, and that book's epilogue tells us that as adults they basically seize its levers of power.

We also encountered an entire magical government of Great Britain in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. In these books, wizards don't serve a non-magical Prime Minister but hold the ministries themselves, oppressing the commoners who can't work magic and the genies who actually perform all the spells.

All these models of magical law enforcement involve human magicians regulating other humans. Magical creatures, even sentient ones, basically remain above (or below) any law but nature's. A genie or giant might have to be suppressed here and there, but no one expects magical creatures to significantly adapt their behavior to society. After all, such creatures are basically embodiments of mysterious natural forces.

Which brings me back to Artemis Fowl. In that novel Eoin Colfer shows us all the bureaucratic rivalries and back-biting of the Bartimaeus books, the abject concern for public relations and petty rules of the Ministry of Magic. But in Colfer's world, the law enforcers are fairies themselves. They have natural laws they must follow, but they also have rules they've decided on for their protection and enforce ruthlessly. Far from being beyond human-style politics, they're in the thick of it. No wonder the series leaves some readers dyspeptic.

Once More Into the Wild

Tomorrow at 3:30 Sarah Beth Durst will read at the Worcester Barnes & Noble, so this posting about her book, Into the Wild (previously highlighted back here), is more timely than I'd planned.

Both that novel and Diana Wynne Jones's The Game (discussed this week) take their heroines into supernatural landscapes where they witness, and are caught up in, the endless playing out of traditional stories. In Into the Wild those tales are Europe's fairy tales. In The Game they're Greek myths.

In both cases, the books highlight the beauty and the cruelty of those stories, and their implacable, cyclic unstoppability. Jones doesn't delve into the mechanics of her "mythosphere," and her characters defeat its governor quickly, without much planning. Durst's story, on the other hand, is all about trying to figure out the workings of the Wild and bringing it under control, which means Durst spends more time explaining just how those stories play out over and over again.

Does the difference reflect British versus American sensibilities? The acceptance of age versus the eagerness of youth? Or just the two authors' visions? These parallel tales were in the works at the same time, so there's no direct inspiration, just two storytellers exploring similar ideas.

Two of Durst's choices in Into the Wild struck me as particularly bold. Her second chapter and later passages of the book shift the point of view from the young heroine, Julie, to hairdresser Zel. What makes this so bold is that Zel is Julie's mother. Yes, a book for young teen girls asking them almost immediately to sympathize with the heroine's mother. Not that Zel's a typical mother, but still.

The second bold choice involves the character who lets the Wild loose in underhanded fashion, thus endangering our heroine, her mother, and all of central Massachusetts. This fact isn't deeply hidden, it doesn't drive the plot or the heroine's emotional journey, so it's only a small ***spoiler*** that I feel comfortable highlighting.

That character is the town's librarian. She wants the Wild to spin more traditional tales for the world, and her library. How's that for a gutsy move by a first-time author? Make the closest thing your novel has to a villain someone from your most important constituency!

Slimming Down in The Game

Last October I wrote about how HarperCollins had expanded the heft of Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg with larger than usual type and generous leading. The result was a 500-page brick, the way we fantasy readers are supposed to want our books these days. Even Publishers Weekly has noticed how thick such books had become.

Now Jones has a new US publisher in Firebird, a Penguin imprint led by Sharyn November. Penguin brought out a new edition of her Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and it's the publisher of her latest fiction, The Game. (Presumably the firm will soon correct the spelling of Jones's middle name on its webpage for that book.)

Harper commissioned new cover art for its US edition of The Pinhoe Egg, and dropped the interior art. In contrast, the two Penguin editions of The Game are the same size--and a small size it is, too. This book represents a complete turnaround from Jones's last novel.

The typeface is small, the leading proportional, the margins slim. The Game comes in at well under 200 pages, even with a small trim.

The result looks like a young adult fantasy, not a middle-grade one, particularly with the cover art. The girl's face and neck are long, the light falling on her chest shows the start of breasts, and the image of a female holding out an apple in western culture carries connotations of Eve, the first fallen woman. Yet I think that's supposed to be Hayley, the protagonist. Although we never learn exactly how old Hayley is (which turns out to be significant), she behaves like a middle-grade child, and she's definitely one of the two smallest cousins in her family.

Of course, even with a different design, The Game couldn't be large. It's a small story, though full of magic. It doesn't have the two (or more) protagonists of The Pinhoe Egg. The plot is brief, without many turns. Hayley doesn't set out on a mission or accomplish much; her story mainly involves discovering who she is and where she belongs. In Jones's oeuvre, The Game seems like a minor work, fun and clever while it lasts but over awfully quick.

Indeed, in this story Jones *****SPOILERS IN SO MANY WAYS***** seems to be trying variations on a number of themes that she's explored before. Celestial objects embodied on Earth (Dogsbody). A pantheon of gods stomping around modern Europe (Eight Days of Luke). An immensely magical family that turns out to include the protagonist (Archer's Goon). A competition across multiple realities soured with a frightening glimpse of eternal punishment (The Homeward Bounders). And no doubt there are echoes of other books as well.

What Has She Got in Her Pocketses?

And the Oz and Ends Award for Best Use of an Inexplicable Trend in Kids' Clothing goes to...

The Game, by Diana Wynne Jones.

This brief novel is yet another of Jones's magical explorations of sibling relationships. At the start young Hayley, an only child who's been raised by strict, old-fashioned grandparents in the city, is suddenly sent off to a country house in Ireland that's buzzing with cousins.

To symbolize Hayley's initial isolation, Jones highlights the contrast between her clothing and how her cousins dress. On page 3 Hayley is wearing "her neat floral dress and her shiny patent leather shoes." Her cousins, she notes bitterly, wear "long baggy trousers with lots of pockets down the sides." But in chapter six we know Hayley can fit in with her family when an aunt supplies her with "shorts with pockets, trousers with pockets,...jackets with pockets, sweatshirts with both hoods and pockets..."

Yes, Jones manages to find meaning in what has struck me (and what I suspect has struck her) as an inexplicable fashion trend: cargo pants. Shorts and trousers with spacious pockets hanging off them like popped blisters. Given all the electronic devices we carry around these days, there may be a practical purpose for all those pockets. But how many kids actually use them all? Why are they there?

Leave it to Diana Wynne Jones to supply a masterly answer. The game in The Game is a cousinly competition to collect things in the mythosphere (I'll discuss later). Hayley has pockets to store golden apples so she can pull them out later. In other words, her pants with lots of pockets down the sides turn out to be significant both to revealing character and furthering the plot.

One Month Away

Booklist says:

Educated at home and sheltered from the world, Hayley has grown up with her unloving grandmother and inaccessible grandfather. She is suddenly sent to stay with a more freewheeling, affectionate aunt in Ireland. There, her many cousins want nothing more than to play "the Game," which sends each one off on a separate quest in the mythosphere, a magical yet easily accessible place peopled by characters from myths and legends. Events grow stranger and more dreamlike as Hayley, introduced as an orphan, discovers that her parents still live in the mythosphere and, perhaps, she can reunite with them there.

Family relationships continue to be absolutely central to Jones’s work. Even her orphans are hardly ever without families, and her families hardly ever without tensions.

(Thanks to Fuse #8 and Misrule for the tip.)

In other pub date news, Bloomsbury and Scholastic have blinked at the competition from Greg Fishbone's Penguins of Doom and moved the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows two weeks back from its rumored date of 7 July.

Maps, Footnotes, and Other Historians' Fantasies

There are books on my reading table that together add up to 1,516 pages. Of those pages, over 141 are reference material, including:

• 12 maps
• multiple glossaries
• multiple tables of names
• footnotes

Are these the Revolutionary War history books that I study? No, of course not! Academic historians must beg for a budget that covers maps. And as for footnotes on the same page instead of endnotes stuck at the back of the book (if they're stuck in at all)--well, only Bartimaeus has the power to make that possible.

Yes, the books I've dissected are all fantasy novels for young readers:

• Monster Blood Tattoo, Book One: Foundling, by D. M. Cornish
• Beka Cooper: Terrier, by Tamora Pierce
• Ptolemy's Gate, by Jonathan Stroud, the third book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy

And yes, each of these thick-enough-to-stand-in-a-high-wind books is also merely one installment in a series. There are thousands of more pages about these worlds on the shelves or in the works, quite possibly with hundreds of more pages of reference material. In fact, Monster Blood Tattoo started as notebooks of non-narrative reference material and only later turned novelistic (a journey I don't think it's completed with full success, but that's a topic for another day).

Creating a verisimilitudinous world is one of the joyous responsibilities of fantasy writers who set their stories in other universes. A map can ease that task and excite readers with the possibilities of life in that world beyond the borders of the book. But dictionary entries just aren't that much fun to read, especially when one must read them to understand a story, when they duplicate information in a story, or when they give away bits of the story--which some of these reference materials threaten to do. At the very least, they make the historian in me jealous.

One dissection of fantasy literature that reads exactly like a collection of dictionary entries--because it is--is Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland, republished last fall in trade paperback form. Originally that book was a mass-market paperback in the US, so it had to be reset and redesigned for this edition. It looks like that task was handled by a designer with the geographically evocative name of Tony Sahara.

Unfortunately, a major casualty of the shift to larger pages was the old-fashioned map in the first edition. It's been replaced with a mere thick-lined representation of a map, like something one would found on the back of a cereal box. No, no, no! Fantasy novel maps are crowded, antique affairs full of stippled mountains and far too little farmland. If this genre of fiction must include reference material, those pages should look right.

Barging Through Fantasyland

The orphan has taken a river barge to the big city, only to discover that its crew are smuggling illicit goods. Escaping from that danger, the orphan sets out along the river road on foot, soon meeting a horse-drawn vehicle carrying an enticing upper-class woman--who turns out to be even more dangerous.

Frances Hardinge's Fly By Night? No, it's D. M. Cornish's Monster Blood Tattoo: Foundling. But a lot of MBT1 is seeming familiar, like a case study for Diane Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Jones's Tough Guide in Trade Paperback

Penguin boasts: "Now this cult classic is back, and readers can experience Diana Wynne Jones at her very best: incisive, funny, and wildly imaginative. This is the definitive edition of The Tough Guide [to Fantasyland], featuring a new map, an entirely new design, and additional material written for it by Diana Wynne Jones."

This 2006 edition of Jones's guidebook is also in trade paperback format, making it more durable than the 1998 mass-market edition for those difficult journeys from castle to hovel to cave lit only by unexplained glowing rocks.