DWJ Reread: Dark Lord of Derkholm
“Rules,” he read. “1. Wizards are to grow beards, wear their hair below shoulder length, and carry a staff at all times.”
“Help!” said Blade. He leaped up and rushed to the mirror. After half an hour of trial and error, he found a way to grow himself a long white beard and a bush of white hair. Out of it, his face stared, rosy and rounded and young. He looked like an albino dwarf. Hopeless. He found how to turn all the new hair dark. This time he just looked like a dwarf who had forgotten to do his plaits, but it would have to do.
- Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones
Dark Lord of Derkholm was first published in 1998, and I got my copy (a 2001 reissue) in 2006. By this time, I had started working part-time at our first (and if I were to judge on availability of DWJ and other favourites, which I do, the only) decent bookstore in my city (note that I also got my copy of Deep Secret in 2006!). I remember having seen copies of Dark Lord and Year of the Griffin on the YA shelves a few times, despite the fact that these books are definitely not YA. I went on collecting almost all the other DWJs I could find first, before finally picking Dark Lord up, because unlike the rest of the books, which mostly had cost me about RM 14.90-19.90 per copy, this book was RM 27.95. This was a lot of money to me then, and thinking about it now it seems hilarious, because I don’t think the average salary have increased much since then (if I was still a part timer, I would only be making 1 extra ringgit per hour now!) but the cheaper paperback books are now around RM 45, with many American editions going up to 80 ringgit.
And they wonder why people don’t read…
Anyway! If you look this book up one of the first things you will find out is that it’s a parody of high fantasy. But like Daphne recently pointed out, it’s also a really good example of a high fantasy novel… despite technically being a subverted portal fantasy? My friends know that portal fantasies are among my favourite kinds of fantasy, even if high fantasies usually aren’t. You see, DWJ was helping out with a Fantasy encyclopaedia when she thought of writing The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which is also a sort of fantasy encyclopaedia detailing the tropes and cliches in fantasy novels of the time. And working on Tough Guide in turn had her writing a story set IN Fantasyland, which is this book. (This was mentioned in the back pages of Tough Guide.)
If Tough Guide’s conceit was that it’s a guide book to a run-of-the-mill Fantasyland, with all the tropes and cliches that came with it, Dark Lord is set in one such Fantasyland, with tourists pouring in from our world every year. The first time I read it, I thought it was clever and very funny, but nothing (outside of this one scene which I will comment more on later) stuck with me. Reading it for a second time, and so soon after Tough Guide, I appreciate it so much more.
The Wizard Derk is a typical mad scientist/absent-minded professor type who just wants to be left alone experimenting on his own special kind of magic - creating animal hybrids (winged horses and pigs, carnivorous sheep, etc.) and magical children (griffins!) that he and his wife Mara raised alongside their biological children. Unfortunately, he lives in Fantasyland - or rather, a magical world that has been shaped into our idea of Fantasyland after years and years of being managed by Mr. Chesney and his Pilgrim Parties.
Mr. Chesney is a typical one-percenter/coloniser type who employs a powerful demon to force Derk’s world into a contract, saying that they had to host his annual tours. People from our world book these tours and get to go on a typical portal fantasy adventure where they visit a magical world oppressed by some Dark Lord, and heroically saves this world from him.
To prepare for the tours, the wizards running the University (led by High Chancellor Querida) would have to appoint people to all the required roles, and that year’s Dark Lord and Wizard Guide turn out to be Derk and his teenage (human) son Blade. Derk being a very unconventional sort of wizard, and Blade untrained and rebellious, this is surely a recipe for disaster!
Like Tough Guide, and true to my first impression, this book is hilarious and clever, but I think the first time around I never appreciated how DWJ doesn’t just poke fun at all these fantasy cliches (in ways that isn’t offensive at all if you happen to love these cliches), she subverts quite a few of them, and comes up with explanations for all the things that we fantasy readers normally either never ask, or laugh about but never find a satisfying answer for. (My brothers always get annoyed when I insist on an explanation why there are no domestic cats in our D&D games.) The tours explain most of it, of course - characters are purposely COLOUR CODED to make things easier for tourists to tell between GOOD and EVIL encounters, and villages are meant to look like they have been recently sacked each time a touring party arrives at one. And then there are things like why there’s always nothing to eat other than STEW, which still amuses me now, thinking back on it.
I also love that this is kind of a reverse portal fantasy (although not quite in the same way that Howl’s Moving Castle is one), where our POV characters are the ones whose world is being invaded and trampled all over by people who are trying to play at being heroes. The focus on the level of environmental exploitation that Mr. Chesney is responsible for just begs for pages and pages of discussion of this book (and how we expect Derk's world to recover from all this exploitation) from a post-Colonial perspective, and then there’s exploitation of the labour put in by all these characters whose lives get upended by the tours. Blade discovering the evils of Capitalism made me think of how reading this as a much younger person I would be with him stamping my feet exclaiming “but that’s not FAIR!”, but now I just sigh in resignation, being one of many whose magic (whatever magic I may have) is being drained away for someone else’s profit.
You know what, I think that this book would make an excellent Ghibli film. It has the beautiful landscapes, complex themes, Strong Female Characters that they could focus more on than the book did, quiet moments that let you breathe but also big scenes where you lose track of what’s happening, flying… all the hallmarks of my favourite Ghibli films.
When talking about it on our Discord, I mentioned that I only remembered three things from my first read: the general plot, the fact that I found it funny and clever, and this one scene that I couldn’t get out of my head. We don’t get to see what happened, and it is never made clear, but there’s a scene where it seems like a character had just went through sexual assault. The fact that this happened, and the somewhat cavalier way it was treated (she was very obviously traumatised and another character did something to her mind and it just… went away) was disturbing to me even as a younger reader. BUT, since this is a book that comments on fantasy tropes, I won’t say that this scene is completely unnecessary, because just based on the (grown up) high fantasy of the 90s and early 00s that I’ve flipped through (I’ve flipped through more fantasy books than I’ve actually read, due to the fact that both of my older brothers are big high fantasy readers*), back then people seemed to consider that a book without a sexual assault scene is “unrealistic”. I mean, look at George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. It’s definitely a cliche of the time.
Even in around the time I first read Dark Lord, I remember a fantasy author (I think it was Seanan McGuire) who said in a panel that sexual assault was NOT something she would put her character through, and so many sites and forums were lashing at her for not being “realistic.” It was a strange and very uncomfortable time to be coming of age in, and the only reason I felt the scene was out of place was because I found Dark Lord in the YA section, and at the time only “issue books” in YA covered these topics, and besides, I guess I thought I was “safe” with Diana Wynne Jones, so I wasn’t expecting it.
I’ve read a lot of reviews by people reading it for the first time NOW who felt that the scene was uncalled for and doesn’t belong in the book. I’m not so sure. Will the book be just as good without it? Yes, definitely. But while we still live in strange and uncomfortable times, where sexual assault is no longer considered as par for the course for female characters in fantasy novels, Dark Lord is a reflection of the genre at a very different time, and sometimes looking into the mirror involves seeing the flaws that aren’t so forgivable or funny.
DWJ Re-Read no. 53 | Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998)
previous read: "The Girl Jones"
next read: Puss In Boots
“Help!” said Blade. He leaped up and rushed to the mirror. After half an hour of trial and error, he found a way to grow himself a long white beard and a bush of white hair. Out of it, his face stared, rosy and rounded and young. He looked like an albino dwarf. Hopeless. He found how to turn all the new hair dark. This time he just looked like a dwarf who had forgotten to do his plaits, but it would have to do.
- Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones
Dark Lord of Derkholm was first published in 1998, and I got my copy (a 2001 reissue) in 2006. By this time, I had started working part-time at our first (and if I were to judge on availability of DWJ and other favourites, which I do, the only) decent bookstore in my city (note that I also got my copy of Deep Secret in 2006!). I remember having seen copies of Dark Lord and Year of the Griffin on the YA shelves a few times, despite the fact that these books are definitely not YA. I went on collecting almost all the other DWJs I could find first, before finally picking Dark Lord up, because unlike the rest of the books, which mostly had cost me about RM 14.90-19.90 per copy, this book was RM 27.95. This was a lot of money to me then, and thinking about it now it seems hilarious, because I don’t think the average salary have increased much since then (if I was still a part timer, I would only be making 1 extra ringgit per hour now!) but the cheaper paperback books are now around RM 45, with many American editions going up to 80 ringgit.
And they wonder why people don’t read…
Anyway! If you look this book up one of the first things you will find out is that it’s a parody of high fantasy. But like Daphne recently pointed out, it’s also a really good example of a high fantasy novel… despite technically being a subverted portal fantasy? My friends know that portal fantasies are among my favourite kinds of fantasy, even if high fantasies usually aren’t. You see, DWJ was helping out with a Fantasy encyclopaedia when she thought of writing The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which is also a sort of fantasy encyclopaedia detailing the tropes and cliches in fantasy novels of the time. And working on Tough Guide in turn had her writing a story set IN Fantasyland, which is this book. (This was mentioned in the back pages of Tough Guide.)
If Tough Guide’s conceit was that it’s a guide book to a run-of-the-mill Fantasyland, with all the tropes and cliches that came with it, Dark Lord is set in one such Fantasyland, with tourists pouring in from our world every year. The first time I read it, I thought it was clever and very funny, but nothing (outside of this one scene which I will comment more on later) stuck with me. Reading it for a second time, and so soon after Tough Guide, I appreciate it so much more.
The Wizard Derk is a typical mad scientist/absent-minded professor type who just wants to be left alone experimenting on his own special kind of magic - creating animal hybrids (winged horses and pigs, carnivorous sheep, etc.) and magical children (griffins!) that he and his wife Mara raised alongside their biological children. Unfortunately, he lives in Fantasyland - or rather, a magical world that has been shaped into our idea of Fantasyland after years and years of being managed by Mr. Chesney and his Pilgrim Parties.
Mr. Chesney is a typical one-percenter/coloniser type who employs a powerful demon to force Derk’s world into a contract, saying that they had to host his annual tours. People from our world book these tours and get to go on a typical portal fantasy adventure where they visit a magical world oppressed by some Dark Lord, and heroically saves this world from him.
To prepare for the tours, the wizards running the University (led by High Chancellor Querida) would have to appoint people to all the required roles, and that year’s Dark Lord and Wizard Guide turn out to be Derk and his teenage (human) son Blade. Derk being a very unconventional sort of wizard, and Blade untrained and rebellious, this is surely a recipe for disaster!
Like Tough Guide, and true to my first impression, this book is hilarious and clever, but I think the first time around I never appreciated how DWJ doesn’t just poke fun at all these fantasy cliches (in ways that isn’t offensive at all if you happen to love these cliches), she subverts quite a few of them, and comes up with explanations for all the things that we fantasy readers normally either never ask, or laugh about but never find a satisfying answer for. (My brothers always get annoyed when I insist on an explanation why there are no domestic cats in our D&D games.) The tours explain most of it, of course - characters are purposely COLOUR CODED to make things easier for tourists to tell between GOOD and EVIL encounters, and villages are meant to look like they have been recently sacked each time a touring party arrives at one. And then there are things like why there’s always nothing to eat other than STEW, which still amuses me now, thinking back on it.
I also love that this is kind of a reverse portal fantasy (although not quite in the same way that Howl’s Moving Castle is one), where our POV characters are the ones whose world is being invaded and trampled all over by people who are trying to play at being heroes. The focus on the level of environmental exploitation that Mr. Chesney is responsible for just begs for pages and pages of discussion of this book (and how we expect Derk's world to recover from all this exploitation) from a post-Colonial perspective, and then there’s exploitation of the labour put in by all these characters whose lives get upended by the tours. Blade discovering the evils of Capitalism made me think of how reading this as a much younger person I would be with him stamping my feet exclaiming “but that’s not FAIR!”, but now I just sigh in resignation, being one of many whose magic (whatever magic I may have) is being drained away for someone else’s profit.
You know what, I think that this book would make an excellent Ghibli film. It has the beautiful landscapes, complex themes, Strong Female Characters that they could focus more on than the book did, quiet moments that let you breathe but also big scenes where you lose track of what’s happening, flying… all the hallmarks of my favourite Ghibli films.
When talking about it on our Discord, I mentioned that I only remembered three things from my first read: the general plot, the fact that I found it funny and clever, and this one scene that I couldn’t get out of my head. We don’t get to see what happened, and it is never made clear, but there’s a scene where it seems like a character had just went through sexual assault. The fact that this happened, and the somewhat cavalier way it was treated (she was very obviously traumatised and another character did something to her mind and it just… went away) was disturbing to me even as a younger reader. BUT, since this is a book that comments on fantasy tropes, I won’t say that this scene is completely unnecessary, because just based on the (grown up) high fantasy of the 90s and early 00s that I’ve flipped through (I’ve flipped through more fantasy books than I’ve actually read, due to the fact that both of my older brothers are big high fantasy readers*), back then people seemed to consider that a book without a sexual assault scene is “unrealistic”. I mean, look at George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. It’s definitely a cliche of the time.
Even in around the time I first read Dark Lord, I remember a fantasy author (I think it was Seanan McGuire) who said in a panel that sexual assault was NOT something she would put her character through, and so many sites and forums were lashing at her for not being “realistic.” It was a strange and very uncomfortable time to be coming of age in, and the only reason I felt the scene was out of place was because I found Dark Lord in the YA section, and at the time only “issue books” in YA covered these topics, and besides, I guess I thought I was “safe” with Diana Wynne Jones, so I wasn’t expecting it.
I’ve read a lot of reviews by people reading it for the first time NOW who felt that the scene was uncalled for and doesn’t belong in the book. I’m not so sure. Will the book be just as good without it? Yes, definitely. But while we still live in strange and uncomfortable times, where sexual assault is no longer considered as par for the course for female characters in fantasy novels, Dark Lord is a reflection of the genre at a very different time, and sometimes looking into the mirror involves seeing the flaws that aren’t so forgivable or funny.
DWJ Re-Read no. 53 | Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998)
previous read: "The Girl Jones"
next read: Puss In Boots