Last books
Aug. 3rd, 2015 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraDiana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones, Islands of Chaldea.
E.L. Konigsburg, The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World.
So many of Diana Wynne Jones' books were crucially important to me when I was growing up - looking at the wiki list chronologically, everything from the 70s except Changeover (read once, didn't like at all), and all the 80s novels up until A Tale of Time City, which was the first time one of her books didn't quite work for me. That happened more often as she went on, and I think Hexwood is really the last of her books that has carved out a permanent place in my reading heart/mind. I've enjoyed many of the others, but they just don't stick.
This may certainly be me. I know many readers who love the Derkholm books, or the later Chrestomancis, or the Magids books and I'm sure these are all perfectly rational preferences (to them ☺ ).
Anyway. I was saddened to read her last book. She was a great writer and a profound loss, and knowing it was the last brought all that back. But I didn't expect to love it, uncompleted or not.
And I didn't. Liked, yes, but it's not going to be part of me going forwards.
I enjoyed the beginning (and despite what I just said the opening imagery does resonate), and the set-up and the start of the romp through other versions of a separated Great Britain. But as the book went on the characters kept multiplying, giving them each less and less time to establish much personality, and the line about Green Greet stuck out from a mile away, and from then on it was all too predictable, and unchallenging. The end has the usual DWJ strong willed individual force shoves magic around mentally that can work for me, but it does so best when it has limits and consequences (Witch Week, most obviously, but also that deeply unnerving bit in the puppet show in Magicians of Caprona).
In contrast, I have been remarkably slack in EL Konigsburg reading. I imprinted heavily on From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler the way any child who would love to run away to a large public art building would and could possibly still quote the odd chunk, and a book about children's literature that I also used to read obsessively had a bit about (George) that has stayed with me despite not ever reading the book. I own A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver and haven't read it. I may have read Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, and Me, but in my head it's mixed up with Zilpha Keatly Snyder's books and I'm unsure. I borrowed Journey to an 800 Number from the library once and took it back massively overdue and unread (not, alas, a unique experience). Despite all this I did eventually read and enjoy The View from Saturday, and now I've read this. Which is, I failed to realise, a sequel of sorts to her earlier The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place.
It's an excellent, complex (in structure), sophisticated book. It’s admirable to read because of its lack of concern for your reading experience – either you keep up and become engaged or you don't. Either you pick your way through a tentative friendship between two teenager boys that is really just backdressing to the revelation of an art crime committed by the Nazis, that is in its turn only important for one moment of action/decision that may not actually change anything – or you don't. I liked it a lot. I would not re-read it for a long time. And I will – slowly – pick my way through her backlist. And regret, again, another profound loss.
E.L. Konigsburg, The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World.
So many of Diana Wynne Jones' books were crucially important to me when I was growing up - looking at the wiki list chronologically, everything from the 70s except Changeover (read once, didn't like at all), and all the 80s novels up until A Tale of Time City, which was the first time one of her books didn't quite work for me. That happened more often as she went on, and I think Hexwood is really the last of her books that has carved out a permanent place in my reading heart/mind. I've enjoyed many of the others, but they just don't stick.
This may certainly be me. I know many readers who love the Derkholm books, or the later Chrestomancis, or the Magids books and I'm sure these are all perfectly rational preferences (to them ☺ ).
Anyway. I was saddened to read her last book. She was a great writer and a profound loss, and knowing it was the last brought all that back. But I didn't expect to love it, uncompleted or not.
And I didn't. Liked, yes, but it's not going to be part of me going forwards.
I enjoyed the beginning (and despite what I just said the opening imagery does resonate), and the set-up and the start of the romp through other versions of a separated Great Britain. But as the book went on the characters kept multiplying, giving them each less and less time to establish much personality, and the line about Green Greet stuck out from a mile away, and from then on it was all too predictable, and unchallenging. The end has the usual DWJ strong willed individual force shoves magic around mentally that can work for me, but it does so best when it has limits and consequences (Witch Week, most obviously, but also that deeply unnerving bit in the puppet show in Magicians of Caprona).
In contrast, I have been remarkably slack in EL Konigsburg reading. I imprinted heavily on From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler the way any child who would love to run away to a large public art building would and could possibly still quote the odd chunk, and a book about children's literature that I also used to read obsessively had a bit about (George) that has stayed with me despite not ever reading the book. I own A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver and haven't read it. I may have read Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, and Me, but in my head it's mixed up with Zilpha Keatly Snyder's books and I'm unsure. I borrowed Journey to an 800 Number from the library once and took it back massively overdue and unread (not, alas, a unique experience). Despite all this I did eventually read and enjoy The View from Saturday, and now I've read this. Which is, I failed to realise, a sequel of sorts to her earlier The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place.
It's an excellent, complex (in structure), sophisticated book. It’s admirable to read because of its lack of concern for your reading experience – either you keep up and become engaged or you don't. Either you pick your way through a tentative friendship between two teenager boys that is really just backdressing to the revelation of an art crime committed by the Nazis, that is in its turn only important for one moment of action/decision that may not actually change anything – or you don't. I liked it a lot. I would not re-read it for a long time. And I will – slowly – pick my way through her backlist. And regret, again, another profound loss.
