Recent Reading: Hexwood

by Diana Wynne Jones

I'm not on an Arthuriana kick at the moment, honestly. This book didn't even admit to being Arthuriana until half way through.

Unlike a lot of people I know, I've only read bits and pieces of Diana Wynne Jones's work. For the benefit of those who've read even less of her than that, I should note that she's classified as a children's author - one of many who was doing rather good magical fantasy for kids years before J.K.Rowling first hit the coffee shops - but that she has a significant adult readership. I've quite liked most of her stuff that I have read, but I've never felt the urge to be systematic about it. However, Hexwood finally came to my hand the other day.

It turned out to be a bit of an oddity, to put it mildly. It's structured as a conventional children's fantasy in some ways, with a child protagonist observing strange goings-on in her vicinity and entering the nearby woods to discover more, but it's presumably intended for slightly older readers; aside from the very discreet references to sexuality, the structure very soon turns rather weird. The wood which our heroine observes, and the power which turns out to be playing a godgame with everyone involved, generate a wildly achronological plotline, with the people who our heroine meets appearing at different points in what seems to be a process of childhood, youth, and education when she visits at different times over a period of a couple of days. If I'd tried reading this when I was young, I think that I'd have found the repetition and lack of strong chronology very off-putting.

Anyway - things eventually expand, and turn more linear again. From past reading, I get the impression that Jones has a weakness for throwing in numerous new characters whenever she thinks that a plot needs some jazzing up, and here, we get a shift to a realm of galactic commercial politics, complete with a batch of sleazy corporate/palace villains who flail around trying to work out what to do about the problem that's developing on Earth. There are also lumps of backstory, much of it solid but some of it sadly underdeveloped, and the growing mass of Arthurian imagery, which for a while looks like it might, say, be an incidental by-product of the imaginative influence of a minor character, but turns out to be fairly crucial. (Although actually, the Arthurian imagery of many of the plot incidents is pretty much unconnected to the Arthurian elements in the backstory.) Then our plucky child heroine, who'd seemed likeable enough if underdeveloped as a character, turns out to have been just an aspect of an adult heroine who wanders in from a bunch of minor offstage jokes. (Having the heroine turn out to be a princess is all very well, but, well, honestly...) Then we get some dragons, with little apparent justification except that the book's godgame-playing grail seems to be capable of almost anything and is doing whatever will drive the plot in order to educate the lead characters, in a way that I'd only expect from the plotting of far less respectable children's authors.

I dunno. Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe a lot. But Hexwood seems like a lot of under-digested ideas, cobbled together and rushed out. Fortunately, I do know that Diana Wynne Jones is capable of better.

Recent Reading: To the Chapel Perilous

by Naomi Mitchison

I picked this up a while ago... I'm not sure where or how now, actually, possibly even as a freebie, but doubtless at a roleplaying game event; it was republished by Green Knight Publishing, who mostly existed to publish Greg Stafford's Pendragon RPG, but who also reprinted a whole slew of modern treatments of the Arthurian myths.

I suppose, picking this up and reading descriptions, that I was vaguely expecting a new look at the Arthurian stories, filtered through the anachronistic lens of modern journalism - a sort of smarter Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, perhaps, or a more lit'ry Idylls of the Queen (the latter being Phyllis Ann Karr's unjustly forgotten stab at an Arthurian detective story). Actually, though, I think it's more a book about modern (well, mid-20th century) journalism, viewed through the lens of the Arthurian stories. I gather that Merlin (the editor of one of the newspapers in the story) is actually based on somebody Mitchison knew at the Guardian, and the news staff scenes have a certain period-specific tang of authenticity to them, clashing weirdly with the high-mythic feel of some of the grail quest action, especially early on in the plot.

Mind you, it's quite an abstruse sort of view of the nature of journalism - Mitchison was a literary novelist much more than she was a journalist - verging in places on a meditation on the nature of Truth and the processes by which one story/myth comes to dominate in the world of ideas, although others survive. It's also light on jokes, although there are some; I suspect it'd be funnier if you knew that journalistic milieu and period. And it does tend to tell rather than show, but I guess that's appropriate for a book about journalism, and one which perhaps assumes that readers know their Arthuriana fairly well.

All round, a bit of a period oddity, but not without interest, and I suspect it's really quite appealing to the real Arthuriana geeks.