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.

Summary Thoughts on The Pinhoe Egg - SPOILER edition

Here's more of my thinking about The Pinhoe Egg, this time with no concern about giving away the ending. So I start with the ***SPOILER*** label.

Diana Wynne Jones's portrait of senile dementia in Gammer Pinhoe is frighteningly true to life, even if Gammer can also use magic to root herself to the ground and cloud people's minds. This produces an opening as claustrophobically scary as any of her previous starts. Those scenes also establish how one of the book's two main, intersecting plots (Marianne's story) will play out within a family.

As for the end, I think endings are usually the weakest parts of Diana Wynne Jones's novels. Often the action seems to slow down instead of speeding up. In Witch's Business, for instance, the kids are all frozen in place for a while. In Conrad's Fate, there's a long wait for a creature to shamble out of a magical distance.

The Pinhoe Egg has a big, riotous battle between two magical families, as in The Magicians of Caprona, but then the real plot resolution comes with Chrestomanci gathering everyone in a room like suspects at the end of an Hercule Poirot mystery and talking a lot. Chrestomanci likes talking, of course, but that's no reason to indulge him. And then follows a chapter of all the kids ending up in a happy place, as I discussed on the 1st.

Furthermore, for all his talk about who did what when they shouldn't have, Chrestomanci doesn't address the emotional depths of the family betrayals. Of course, that's not a topic he's good at addressing (and we see why in The Lives of Christopher Chant). That makes the end seem a bit perfunctory, fizzing out after the real issues have been dealt with but before they've been resolved.

It would have been nice to see Cat, who knows a bit about family betrayal, talk this over with Marianne, just as he told her about her powers. As it is, she has discovered that her father and many other relatives have been involved in horrible family dysfunction--at the level of early Greek myths, that bad--but seems to move straight from the horrified first reaction to pleasure at being able to go to a different school. The book's two main protagonists might have benefited from working through their feelings together. But then we don't know what the future holds for Cat and Marianne, do we?

One final observation: Chapter 1 mentions three magical clans in this part of Chrestomanci's England, the third being "the Cleeves in Underhelm." But all the action seems to be played out by Pinhoes and Farleighs alone. I kept waiting for the Cleeves to play a bigger role. Are they still out there?

[Past postings--
18 May 2006: whispers of a new Chrestomanci book.
10 Oct 2006: first impressions.
12 Oct 2006: enter the horse.
14 Oct 2006: Joe bears watching.
16 Oct 2006: Cat escapes a cliché.
19 Oct 2006: enter the griffin.
31 Oct 2006: a Gump in the works?
1 Nov 2006: how it stands in a series.]

Summary Thoughts on The Pinhoe Egg

I realized I should get around to some remarks on Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg, or else people might think I'd never finished it.

This is the first true sequel in Jones's Chrestomanci series of novels--the first to pick up shortly after a previous volume (Charmed Life), and to reuse a young protagonist from that volume (Cat). The Lives of Christopher Chant was a prequel, Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona are set far from Chrestomanci Castle (in so many ways), and Conrad's Fate fits in the middle but doesn't immediately follow or precede any title, not to mention having a very different narrative style. Only some of the short stories in Mixed Magics are closely tied to the same time and place as Charmed Life and The Pinhoe Egg.

And The Pinhoe Egg makes me think more strongly that we have to consider series novels considered differently from standalone novels. In this book Jones assumes that her readers will know about Chrestomanci's job; about Cat's difficult family history and peculiar sort of sinister magic, so much stronger than his classmates'; and about Lady Chrestomanci's immense powers and mothering skills. She wastes no space reintroducing them.

Furthermore, The Pinhoe Egg offers the pleasure of the familiar more than the pleasure of the new discovery. Chrestomanci appears not as an intimidating stranger or a last-ditch rescuer but as an eccentric father and guardian. We learn nothing new about him or his wife--but that's all right. In this sort of sequel, the pleasure arises in the reassurance that they're the same.

In this context, annoying behaviors can become beloved quirks. Of course Roger would think that because he had the idea to patent Cat's mirror game that he can claim to have invented it, and of course Cat keeps quiet. Similarly, in the Oz books Button-Bright is endearingly dim. We don't need these characters to grow and change. We don't want them to change!

Similarly, the plot echoes the basic structure of past Chrestomanci novels: Young person is oppressed by family/society, turns out to be immensely powerful magician, gets to learn even more magic in Chrestomanci Castle. In a like way, most of the Oz books finish with a party in the Emerald City. Who could complain?

Well, that castle classroom is getting awfully crowded, isn't it? Cat, Roger, Julia, Janet (despite having no magic), Marianne, Joe, and a griffin who can be expected to grow to dinosaur size. Of course, the only danger in that pattern is that there might not be room for another sequel.

[Past postings--
18 May 2006: whispers of a new Chrestomanci book.
10 Oct 2006: first impressions.
12 Oct 2006: enter the horse.
14 Oct 2006: Joe bears watching.
16 Oct 2006: Cat escapes a cliché.
19 Oct 2006: enter the griffin.
31 Oct 2006: a Gump in the works?]

Gump in The Pinhoe Egg?

So what's Diana Wynne Jones's latest fantasy doing on the right, the spot I usually reserve for Oz-related images? And why is that the British cover of the book instead of the American?

Today I received a comment from Gili in Israel. She wrote:

I take it you read the American edition of this book, and I don't know if that contains the chapter heading illustrations drawn by Tim Stevens. But if it does, go back to the illustration for chapter 18. Look! It's the Gump!!

The Gump, for the unitiated, is a character from L. Frank Baum's The Marvelous Land of Oz. Originally it was a wild horned ruminant, like an elk with a goat's beard, but then it heard a loud noise and all went black. When the Gump regained life and consciousness, it found that its body had been replaced with a roped-together hodgepodge of sofas, palm leaves, and a broom for a tail.

Here's a picture of the Gump by John R. Neill, the moosy version from the Return to Oz movie, and a latter-day image.

But I can't see the image by Tim Stevens that Gili wrote about because his illustrations aren't in the US edition of The Pinhoe Egg!

Progressing Further through The Pinhoe Egg

Diana Wynne Jones's last Chrestomanci novel, Conrad's Fate, was a departure in being written in the first person, and thus exclusively from Conrad's point of view.

In The Pinhoe Egg, Jones is back to using the third person with the point of view shifting among the various children in the story: mostly Marianne Pinhoe and Eric (Cat) Chant, but also Janet, Roger, and Julia. Even Joss Callow, a young man, gets a passage. Only one child has been left out so far: Marianne's brother Joe.

Therefore, Joe bears serious watching.

[Past postings--
18 May 2006: whispers of a new Chrestomanci book.
10 Oct 2006: first impressions.
12 Oct 2006: enter the horse.

More Bloggers' Reviews I Have Refrained from Reading--
Startredder
My Lady Tongue
La Guinevere
Rowana]

The Shape of Fantasy Novels Today

Working at a book publisher spoils one's pure enjoyment of books. When publishing vets open new volumes, they don't start off by reading. That would be too natural. Instead, they look at the copyright page for printing data, scan the acknowledgments for familiar or unfamiliar names, sniff to see if it's a POD copy (yes, they have distinctive smell--not that there's anything wrong with that).

So yesterday I bought my copy of The Pinhoe Egg, the latest Chrestomanci novel by Diana Wynne Jones. And the first thing I noticed wasn't the focus on adolescents having to work as household servants (continued from Conrad's Fate, the last in the series) or on sibling relationships (continued from practically all Jones's books). No, I looked at the leading.

"Leading" is book-design jargon left over from the era of type set by hand. Between each line of words printers placed a thin strip of lead to keep the letters in place. The more strips or the thicker the lead, the more space appeared between lines. That amount of space is called the "leading" (rhymes with "sledding"). The term has survived because typewriting's "line-spacing" isn't quite as precise.

The Pinhoe Egg has a lot of leading. It also has a slightly larger size of the same typeface--Granjon--that Harper used in its 2001 reissue of The Lives of Christopher Chant. As a result, the older book has 4.77 lines per inch while Pinhoe has 3.66. Furthermore, the new book has a smaller trim size, so its text block (the amount of space covered by the main text) is smaller. All of which means that a novel which might be about the same word count as its predecessor fills over 500 pages instead of 330.

Not too long ago, publishers thought readers would balk at the bulk and expense of such a thick book. That's why Christopher Chant is a tall, willowy volume, relatively speaking. But now in this post-Rowling world, fantasy readers seem to want thick books that they can dive into, and leading is one way to indulge them.