Charmed Life

Charmed Life, Diana Wynne Jones – 1977


Charmed Life is a story not unlike a cat; playful and cute, until the claws come out. In discussing the genius of Diana Wynne Jones one encounters the same problem as when discussing Terry Pratchett; all the cleverness and craft that form the basis for their books are camouflaged by being written with such matter-of-fact elegance. In short; they make it look easy.

In this novel, written for children, we find ourselves in a quasi-Edwardian world where America is known as Atlantis, the French won Waterloo, and most importantly, magic is seen as simply another profession, such as the law or medicine, if one displays sufficient talent. After the deaths of their parents, Eric (Cat) Chant and his older sister Gwendoline go to live with Mrs Sharp their downstairs neighbour who is an affectionate, if deeply unscrupulous, Certified Witch. Though the meek and timid Cat clearly has no magical ability whatsoever, the haughty Gwendoline soon proves herself an exceptionally powerful sorceress. Dissatisfied with living with Mrs Sharp and discovering a connection to the renowned Chrestomanci, Gwendoline writes to him and the great man adopts them both, and brings them to live at Chrestomanci Castle. Sparks fly, however, as he refuses to acknowledge anything remarkable about the girl, and her actions become more outrageous by the day in an attempt to provoke a reaction. Finally, she disappears entirely, leaving Janet, a bewildered stranger from another world who looks identical to Gwendoline, for Cat to find in her place. And the trouble is only just beginning…

If this vague summary sounds intriguing to you, or if Charmed Life is sitting nicely on your to-read list, then stop now, get a copy, read it, and come back. Normally, I wouldn't bother with what is essentially a spoilers warning like this, but this is Diana Wynne Jones: the surprises in Charmed Life really will take you by surprise, and it's far better to experience them, without my having spoiled it for you. So, go on… shift! 

Jones' greatest skill in writing Charmed Life is her deft balancing of uncanny atmosphere and twisting plot; indeed the sheer darkness of Charmed Life is hardly apparent initially as Jones continually shifts the tone between whimsical and eerie, particularly once the children enter Chrestomanci Castle. Once there, Gwendoline's furious pranks and attacks are initially riotous, and as readers we revel in the spirited rebellion against the supercilious Chrestomanci and his luxurious, stifling household. The conflict escalates, however, and soon Gwendoline summons a creature 'weak, white and lonesome. It was draggled and slimy'1 outside the window, and when this horrifying apparition still provokes no response, Gwendoline uses an entire army of enlarged beetles and insects, as well as more of the ghastly white creatures, to interrupt an important dinner party. Though this scene is viscerally unpleasant, it is the events that follow which provide the first major curve-ball of the book. The beetles finally provoke a reaction from Chrestomanci and Gwendoline is punished, and just as we expect there will now be some important character development, Jones subverts our expectations and Gwendoline vanishes, leaving the terrified Janet in her place. This, in turn eventually leads to the major revelation; that Eric is a nine-lived sorcerer, and Gwendoline has merely been syphoning off his power while letting him believe he has no magic whatsoever. And finally we realise that the horrible white apparitions are in fact Eric's own lost lives, one of which at least, Gwendoline is responsible for him losing...


Making Gwendoline the villain, and happy to kill her brother altogether if necessary, is one of Jones' masterstrokes, and it is from here, rather than the ghoulish creatures and sometimes sinister feel of the castle, that the real darkness of the book arises. When we first meet Gwendoline as an arrogant, conceited girl, we assume that, in a children's book, these are traits that she will learn to grow out of, and that her affection for Cat will outweigh her power-hungry nature. To subvert this is a gloriously unsentimental choice of Jones', one that it seems unlikely would be made by a children's author today, certainly not without deep psychoanalysis of the character or considerable angst. The book gains its consdierable darkness from Gwendoline simply being a selfish and despicable person. A similar revelation is that all of the eccentric, entertaining villagers that Cat grew up around fully embrace their suspicion and hatred of Chrestomanci and are acting alongside Gwendoline, and are therefore willing to be complicit in the murder of Cat to achieve their goal. Looking very deeply at it from today's perspective, and given that Jones grew up in war-time, the idea of all the slightly eccentric figures from the town you grew up in suddenly being the villains and expressing views that are dangerous and ignorant, is a wonderfully sinister one, which is perhaps particularity resonant now. Indeed, in the townsfolk's dismissal of Chrestomanci and what he does, there is almost a faint whiff of being fed up of listening to the experts…


Balancing out the darkness of the book are some wonderful characters. Cat himself is almost unbearably wet at times, partly due to his own timid nature but also because of his emotional dependency on Gwendoline, but once she vanishes he gradually begins to develop. Janet and Gwendoline, so physically alike and emotionally different, both bring fire and energy into Cat's life, and are hugely entertaining characters in their own right, but also demonstrate the difference between a largely positive force and largely negative one in someone's life. Chrestomanci comes from the Sherlockian school of aloof-genius-heroes, often appearing in magnificent dressing gowns, but is most interesting in his relaxed and unguarded moments. The various figures of his household are a delight, particularly his wife Millie and the contrast we see in her between how she appears on the surface, and what she is capable of. Elsewhere, the Nostrum bothers make excellent secondary villains, and Mrs Sharp is another extraordinarily complex character for a children's book; the scene where Cat sees her again after missing her so badly, is deeply poignant as he begins to realise, despite her obvious genuine fondness for them, how unscrupulous and self-serving she really is.


Charmed Life is a novel of dazzling unpredictability and wonderful lack of sentimentality. Neil Gaiman, a life-long friend and fan of Jones, stated that her 'fiction was never improving'2, meaning that there was no moral or lesson to be learned from it. Unlike either the Narnia or Harry Potter series there is no message here, not even a predictable one of good and evil, it is simply a story, an enjoyable and unsettling story, and as such is a wonderful children's book. It is, in a word, enchanting.



Link to HarperCollins, where the book is available: https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007255290/charmed-life

1Jones, Diana Wynne. Charmed Life, Harper Collins 2000. pp. 77




2Gaiman, Neil. Reflections: On Diana Wynne Jones in The View from the Cheap Seats, Headline Publishing Group, 2016 pp. 104

The Book of the New Sun

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe – Book 1: Shadow of the Torturer 1980, Book 2: Claw of the Conciliator 1981, Book 3: Sword of the Lictor 1982, Book 4: Citadel of the Autarch 1983

So a couple of times now, I have alluded to a mighty SF/F text that I have slowly been making my way through, and now, here we are at last: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, one of the most extraordinary, mind-spinning epics I have ever encountered. Less well known than other SF/F writers, he has the distinction of being what one might call an author's author: Michael Swanwick has stated that Gene Wolfe is 'the finest writer in the English language alive today'1 and Ursula le Guin, Neil Gaiman, Patton Oswalt and George R.R. Martin have all showered praise upon Wolfe. The New Yorker itself described Wolfe as a 'genuis' and perfectly summed up New Sun's prestigious status: 'For science-fiction readers, “The Book of the New Sun” is roughly what “Ulysses” is to fans of the modern novel: far more people own a copy than have read it all the way through'2. Having actually finished both Ulysses (no, I'm bloody well not reviewing it!) and now The Book of the New Sun, the comparison is apt. Both are extraordinary pieces of writing that pushed the envelope in terms of their respective genre and left an indelible mark on the canon that followed them.

Right off the bat, I must state that in my limited experience of Gene Wolfe I have learnt one thing: Gene Wolfe does not write to be read. He writes to be re-read. Indeed, the Ulysess comparison is also highly accurate in that they are both difficult, often baffling, texts, far easier to start than to finish and if you do finish, you are left with a feeling that you've read something very good and very clever, but that will require rigorous re-reading before you work out just how good or clever it was. Gerald Jones, writing for the New York Times, declared that The Book of the New Sun 'does not make for easy reading'3, while Neil Gaiman, another Wolfe super-fan, has even produced a wryly written list entitled How to Read Gene Wolfe, of which number three is 'Reread. It's better the second time. It will be even better the third time'4. Indeed, a mere two pages from the end of The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe himself writes through Severian: 'Have I told you all I promised?...Before you assume that I have cheated you, read again'5. This, I have not done, mostly because, taken as one huge story, The Book of the New Sun is almost exactly 1200 pages in my editions, so my apologies if I obviously did not pick up on some key information, or have misunderstood something that should have been clear. When I re-read, and I certainly will, I may post subsequent thoughts (or I might spare you those!). 

All rights to Orion/Millennium publishing

The Book of the New Sun concerns Severian, a young apprentice in the Guild of Torturers, who lives in the Citadel, a vast construct of towers rising above the city of Nessus, the largest settlement in the Commonwealth, a land upon Urth, our own planet many millions of years in the future, long after humanity has risen to colonise the stars and fallen again, so much so that the great deeds of the species are little more than legends. In Shadow of the Torturer, Severian is banished from the Guild after he falls in love with one of their 'clients', a young woman called Thecla. Thecla is imprisoned in the Torturer's oubliette by order of the Autarch, ruler of the Commonwealth who is regarded by the people as somewhere between king and god because she is believed to have information about Vodalus, the leader of a force rebelling against the Autarch. Severian has, unbeknownst to any but them, already saved Vodalus' life, and provides Thecla with a knife to commit suicide with, rather than be submitted to the further ministrations of his guild. For this he is banished, and sent out to become the jailor/executioner of a distant city called Thrax, wearing only his black robes and armed with the sword Terminus Est, a parting gift from the master of the guild. In the course of his travels he falls in with a troupe of actors, meets and is betrayed by, a woman called Agia, is forced to fight a duel, encounters Dorcas, a woman who it appears has risen from the dead, and most importantly, gains, by seeming accident, a mystical jewel called the Claw of the Conciliator. In the second book of the series, The Claw of the Conciliator, he finally reunites with Vodalus, who, by use of drugs and unwitting cannibalism on Severian's part, inserts what remains of Thecla's consciousness into Severian's mind. Severian rejoins the acting troupe to perform at the House Absolute, the underground residence of the Autarch himself. In The Sword of the Lictor, Severian finally arrives at Thrax, but it is not long before his mercy once again makes him an outcast; this time fleeing into the mountains, he encounters a young boy who bears the same name as himself, and a two-headed man who claims to have once been king of the surrounding area, before leading a force of island dwellers against a giant who lives in a castle. And finally, in The Citadel of the Autarch, Severian experiences the war being fought on the Commonwealth's borders, re-encounters Vodalus and Agia, before coming face-to-face with the Autarch, ultimately succeeding him. Each book is followed by a short appendix by Wolfe, explaining his attempts at 'translating' Severian's manuscript, adding another layer of complexity to the shifting, dreamlike text that is The Book of the New Sun.

If the story of a figure walking over the snowy peaks and through dense forests, underneath an old, red sun, clad in a black cloak that leaves his chest bare, armed with a mighty sword and a mystical jewel, fighting monsters and two-headed men, bedding beautiful women and meeting aliens, and finally becoming the ruler of the land, sounds an awful lot like an appalling pulp novel of the Robert E Howard or Edgar Rice variety, then this is entirely deliberate. Just as Tolkien reached back into earlier narrative traditions, that of Norse mythology and Old English poetry, and reshaped them to his own needs, Wolfe does the same, borrowing tropes and aesthetic details from the pulp fantasy magazines of the twenties and applying them to an infinitely complex narrative. This is done mainly through weaving a densely layered labyrinthine narrative, but also by his vivid world building and extraordinary diction. Wolfe places us within the world, and leaves us to intuit for ourselves the fact that their sun is red, the ins and outs of the rigid hierarchical social systems and that the decaying civilisation is millennia after, or possibly before our own, only providing details once you are already brain deep in the mire. This intuition is made considerably harder by Wolfe's eclectic language, digging deep into the complete English lexicon, using words such as 'fuligin' for the colour of Severian's black robes, 'destrier' for the huge and impossibly swift horses of the world, and 'exultant', 'armiger' and 'cacogen' to name various social strata.

Of huge importance in discussing the novels is that they are told entirely in the first person, narrated by Severian – and it is important to note that this is not Severian the torturer's apprentice narrating events as they happen to him, but Severian the Autarch looking back, and telling the story of his ascension. We are assured time and time again that Severian never forgets anything, that indeed 'From my earliest memory I remember all'6,yet we also quickly learn 'I realised for the first time that I am in some degree insane'7. which immediately puts the reader on their guard. We are kept acutely aware that we are being told by a ruler the story of his rise to power, only ever being told what he wants us to know – the details of his guild are always kept suspiciously secret for instance – and that even if he is being as honest with us as he is capable of being, his may still be a very warped version of events. The gap between Severian's account and any supposed 'truth' widens when we discover the extent to which Thecla is still a conscious part of his mind, to the point of occasionally breaking into the narration, changing who the 'I' being referred to is, without Wolfe giving us any immediate notification. This effect is exacerbated towards the end of the final book, when Severian becomes the Autarch by absorbing the consciousnesses of all the previous Autarchs, as he did Thecla’s. As Peter Wright states, 'The gulf between plot and story, between the apparent and the real, alerts the reader to the fact that Wolfe is playing a complex and contrived textual game that facilitates a number of methods of interpretation.'8

 

All rights to Orion/Millennium publishing

If this is sounding unbearably heavy, there is also a fair smattering of humour, sometimes due to witty dialogue – Jonas in particular tends to use phrases like 'I'm going to tell you what all housewives sooner or later tell their husbands: 'Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to know the answers''9. More often, however, there is a wryness to the narrative itself that counterbalances Severian's earnestness; the two-headed titan Typhon, who, after being accidentally resurrected by Severian, captures the torturer and boasts how he 'was autarch on many worlds. I shall be autarch again, and this time on many more'10 is easily dispatched by Severian within pages. Deeper still, there is the growing feeling that our unreliable narrator himself is even more clueless than the reader, which makes Severian's philosophic diversions awkwardly entertaining for the reader, as we begin to realise he knows less about what is happening than we do.

As I have stated, these are only some of my first impressions. There is so much, so densely packed into 1200 pages, that it will probably only be on a third or fourth reading that I can get anywhere close to understanding The Book of the New Sun. There are things that, having read more about the novels since finishing, I will appreciate the second time, such as the photo of the moon-landing that Severian sees at one point. There are also references that I will almost certainly never fully understand, particularly Wolfe's use of his Catholic faith, although even I recognise the messianic flavour of the Conciliator's legend and the parallels between the torturers' festival of Holy Katherine's feast and real-life celebrations surrounding saints. Perhaps Alison Flood, writing in the Guardian, describes The Book of the New Sun the best: that the 'whole thing is dreamlike in quality, unfathomably large in scope, deliciously, slyly puzzling'. For myself, reading Gene Wolfe's masterpiece has made me understand far more Neil Gaiman's fifth piece of advice for reading Wolfe: 'It's a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn't mind. Gene is throwing the knives.'11

Link to Orion Books page where the SF Masterworks The Book of the New Sun is available: https://www.orionbooks.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9781473211971

1 http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intms.htm
2  http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sci-fis-difficult-genius
3  http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/22/books/inside-elsewhere.html?pagewanted=all
4  Gaiman, Neil. How to Read Gene Wolfe in The View from the Cheap Seats, Headline Publishing Group, 2016. pp 118
5 Wolfe, Gene. The Book of the New Sun Volume 2: Sword and Citadel, Millennium, 2000. pp. 608
6 Wolfe, Gene. The Book of the New Sun Volume 1: Shadow and Claw, Millennium, 2000 pp. 20
7 Vol 1. pp. 36

8 http://ultan.org.uk/review-botns/

9 Vol 1. pp. 370

10  Vol 2. pp. 212

11 Gaiman, N. How to Read Gene Wolfe. pp. 118

The 13 Clocks

The 13 Clocks, James Thurber – 1951

If various references to Neil Gaiman haven't given the game away, I am a huge fan of his. As such, when he described The 13 Clocks as 'probably the best book in the world'1 it seemed to be worth a read, and discovering that my Mum had a copy I dived straight in. And although I have many favourite books, and there are many books that could be considered objectively better, I'm still finding it very difficult to disagree with Mr Gaiman's analysis!

The 13 Clocks is a story for children – the edition I have is only 80 pages long – an extraordinary mixture of darkness and silliness, set around the icy Coffin Castle, the villainous one-eyed Duke who rules the land, and his niece, the beautiful Princess Saralinda. 'He did not wish to give her hand in marriage, since her hand was the only warm hand in the castle'2 whilst he continually wears jewelled gloves because 'his hands were as cold as his smile, and almost as cold as his heart'3. He enjoys setting impossible tasks for the princes who come to win her hand, and to Zorn of Zorna, who arrives in the Duke's land disguised as a minstrel, he sets the task of finding a thousand gems in ninety-nine hours and placing them on the Duke's table when the Castle's thirteen clocks all chime five. Unfortunately for the prince, these clocks had 'all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night, seven years before, and after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle'4; indeed, 'the Duke decided he had murdered time, slain it with his sword, and wiped his bloody blade upon its beard and left it there, bleeding hours and seconds'5. Fortunately for the prince, however, there appears before him 'the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device'6, a strange little man in an indescribable hat, whose cunning, ingenuity and contortion of logic and language might just prevent the prince from being split 'from your guggle to your zatch'7 and fed to the geese.

As you may have noticed from the quotes, The 13 Clocks is a glorious, playful submersion into language, twisting sound and meaning alike. Almost all of the story has a constant internal rhyme scheme which means that phrases like 'the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets' are never far away. In a proto-Roald Dahl manner, Thurber gleefully makes up words – Golux, guggle, Todal – without ever veering into nonsense poetry. It is tremendous fun to read aloud and I recommend that you do so. Thanks to Thurber's skill, this, like the Golux himself, never becomes annoying or off-putting; instead it only builds the fantastical atmosphere. The Golux, a creature of near-total whimsy, gets many of the best lines; when he first appears he claims not to be 'a mere Device'8 - literally a device of the writer to get the prince out of trouble – and when the prince says he resembles one, he replies 'I resemble only half the things I say I don't...the other half resemble me.' Indeed, despite the cunning of the Golux and the Prince, the title problem of the book is solved through yet more clever wordplay: 'If you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them. That's logic, as I know and use it'.


Much of what makes the story so effective is found in the symbolic clash between Duke and the Golux. There is a dark and eerie undertone to the story, and the Duke sits at the very centre of it. As well as being dark and cold – pretty standard villain specs – Thurber gives the Duke an added level of nastiness; this is the passage in which he lists the things that the Duke's gloves made difficult for him, 'to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or tear the wings from nightingales'9. In what is a self-aware fairy-tale, the Duke is a self-aware villain and appears utterly at home within the role, joyously vicious and completely irredeemable. Most sinister of all, however, is what Thurber leaves almost entirely unsaid, as we learn 'about the children locked up in my tower'10 and a few pages later we learn 'the children are dead'11. When the Duke is finally caught by the monstrous Todal, all that is found is his sword, a 'small black ball stamped with scarlet owls'12 which is 'very like a ball the Golux and those children used to play with'13 and 'the sound of someone laughing'14. I have quoted all we ever hear about these children, and these veiled hints balance the exuberant wonder of the story with chilling insinuations.

There are also constant allusions to other works, most of which only an adult reading the book will understand. Most obviously there is the playfulness of language and form that makes Alice (both in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass) so head-spinning a read, but also nods to Gilbert and Sullivan, as the disguised prince is first described as 'a thing of shreds and patches'15 and later almost manages the entire quotation, except that he is too preoccupied with having his zatch split: 'A wandering minstrel, I,...a thing of shreds and zatches'16. As for the Duke, there is something of Richard III in his limping about the castle plotting evil deeds, but when he becomes rightly suspicious of his invisible spy, things become downright Shakespearian as he cries 'Let me have men about me that are visible'17. Most obvious are the allusions to Arthurian lore, as when someone tries to guess Zorn's parentage: 'You must be Tristram's son, or Lancelot's, or are you Tyne or Tora?'. The latter, as far as I can tell, have been made up by Thurber, while the former need no introduction. In this, along with references to Gwain, we see how Thurber borrows at will from established mythos, using them to add heroic flavour, without ever being constrained by them.

Within the silliness and darkness of the story, there is also the character of Hagga, whose cries jewels. However, her tears of laughter turn back to water in two weeks, while her tears of sorrow remain permanently jewels. In this we may, at first glance, find a mournful commentary on the transient nature of happiness and the constancy of sorrow. The 13 Clocks, however, is far too clever for this, and it is worth noting that although the jewels the Prince receives from Hagga ultimately dissolve, they have already served their purpose and freed Saralinda from the Duke's clutches. Taken with the Golux's final words to Zorn and Saralinda, 'Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After'18, we understand that although happiness does not last forever, it will last long enough, and that there is always more joy to be found.

I should also note that the edition I (my mum) own(s) is accompanied by the extraordinary illustrations of Ronald Searle, probably best known as the creator of St. Trinian's school for girls, which just reinforces the immeasurably strange atmosphere of the story.

The 13 Clocks is an extraordinarily entertaining, entirely self-aware fairy tale that is never allowed to slip into parody. Even this, however, does not do the book justice, and much as I have tried to describe it, it has to be experienced. So, if you've never read it, go on and do so! If you have read it, read it again out loud! And if you have already done so, do it again: its even better the third time!

1http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/536859/the-13-clocks-by-james-thurber-introduction-by-neil-gaiman-illustrated-by-marc-simont/9780143110149/
2 Thurber, James, The 13 Clocks & the Wonderful O, Puffin Books, 1962. pp. 8
3 pp. 7-8
4 pp. 8
5 pp. 9
6 pp. 19
7 pp. 18
8 pp. 19
9 pp. 8
10 pp. 64
11 pp. 70
12 pp. 87
13 pp. 65
14 pp. 87
15 pp. 12
16 pp. 18
17 pp. 65
18 pp. 83