Adventures in Children's Fantasy
I’ve been reading precious little on my own account over the last few months. What I have been doing, most nights of the week, is reading to David. He’s a strong reader in his own right and is well able to cope with run-of-the-mill kids’ books, so I’m leaving the Horrid Henries of this world for him to explore on his own. However, for slightly more advanced reading we’ve instituted a reading hour where I will read him a couple of chapters of something (he now calls these “chapter books” as a result) and the rest of the time before lights out is for him to read simpler stuff by himself.
The material so far has been heavily slanted towards fantasy, as you can see from the list below -
· J.R.R. Tolkien: “The Hobbit”
· J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone” (Harry Potter I)
· Diana Wynne Jones: “Charmed Life” (Chrestomanci Chronicles I)
· Joan Aiken: “Tales of Arabel’s Raven”
· J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets” (Harry Potter II)
· Dianna Wynne Jones: “Archer’s Goon” (non- Chrestomanci)
· Joan Aiken: “Arabel & Mortimer”
· J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban” (Harry Potter III)
· Dianna Wynne Jones: “The Lives of Christopher Chant” (Chrestomanci II, in progress)
An Unexpected Journey
The ball got rolling with “The Hobbit”, which is appropriate given that this is what got me into fantasy and science fiction all those years ago. The dog-eared hardback was Jenny’s old copy - my paperback has long since disintegrated and been discarded. It’s many years since I read the book, and I’d forgotten quite what a bunch of clowns the dwarves are to start with, but it all went very well and Dave was entranced. Not quite ready for LoTR yet, I suspect, so we went looking for other possibilities. For a start, we had all the Potter books on hand - passed on from relatives with older children - so that was an obvious port of call. There was also a hardback copy of Diana Wynne Jones’s “Charmed Life” on the shelves, which Jenny had bought from a library clearance in Folkestone years ago and not read, but it looked promising and we decided to give it a try....
Hit Me With Your Quidditch Stick
It’s probably redundant for me to say too much about Harry Potter. Nevertheless, I’d not read it before and have only patchy knowledge of the films so, though I was familiar with the general outlines of the series, it wasn’t going over old ground. It wasn’t a total trial. It’s possible to see why they have been so successful - the collision of magical fantasy and school fiction was a clever choice, and Rowling has constructed a detailed, hermetic (pun intended) universe to draw in the youthful reader - but the style is workmanlike rather than brilliant and it certainly wasn’t designed to be read aloud. Our Joanne has a slightly tiresome fondness for alliteration which turns some sentences into tongue-twisters, and she could do with punctuating more rigorously to assist with some ambiguously structured passages. I have to admit to caring little about Quidditch or how many points whatever houses have got, so when we finally got to a Quidditch match that passed without supernatural incident it was all a bit tedious. I’m not convinced that the structural aspects of Quidditch stand much scrutiny, either, but I’m just being a geek there.
The third volume shows some signs of plot strain, requiring a massive infodump near the end to tie its thrashing tentacles together (not entirely satisfactorily), and the increase in size exhibited by the fourth volume makes me fear more of the same. David is very enthusiastic about Harry, and is looking forward to it, but I feel the need for some spacing between the books, however; hence, as the schedule above shows, I’ve been interspersing them with other works.
Charmed Lives
The availablility of Diana Wynne Jones’s “Charmed Life” was serendipitous, as this is a book which has been mentioned as a possible inspiration to Rowling for Potter. They are, in some ways, quite different beasts, but, one can see why the comparison is made; we have a boy (Cat Chant) who has lost his parents, both magicans, but who is not himself a magician, unexpectedly being taken away from his foster home to a grand castle to be tutored by wizards, and finding himself under threat from those who would use magic for selfish ends.
It’s not Hogwarts, however. The castle belongs to his uncle, the vague but apparently powerful Chrestomanci (a title, not a name, it eventually becomes clear). There is no magical boarding school - the only other children there are his sister, who has accompanied him, and Chrestomanci’s own two children. A number of other oddballs live there, but there is nothing of the jolly hockey sticks aspect of Hogwarts. Cat is, for much of the time, isolated and fearful, and when the threat to his wellbeing is revealed it comes from a fairly shocking quarter. Ron and Hermione are notable by their absence.
I found “Charmed Life” quite impressive, though the ending felt a little overblown. Diana Wynne Jones (who died last year) was a better writer technically than Joanne Rowling, and her plots have a rather less mechanical feel to them. “Charmed Life” was well received enough to produce (eventually) a number of sequels, and I have obtained two omnibus volumes which, as well as repeating “Charmed Life”, also contain “The Lives of Christopher Chant”, “The Magicians of Caprona” and “Witch Week”. We are currently reading “The Lives of Christopher Chant”, and it starts absolutely brilliantly. These two books are set in a sort of Edwardian parallel world where magic is practised, if not entirely accepted, but other parallel worlds are known to exist; the beginning of “Lives” concerns Christopher’s discovery that he can travel to them in dreams, and feels like a sort of anti-Narnia where the dimensional traveller is not a tiresome little prig being set up for clumsy Christian allegory, but a sad and neglected little boy who is in danger from the very people he should be able to trust. I approve of this message.
We also read a non-Chrestomanci novel, “Archer’s Goon”, which Jenny had bought in the 1980s after seeing a BBC adaptation, but which I’d never encountered. It’s set in modern (well, 1980s) times but has some thematic commonalities with the Chrestomanci books. It’s quite a wild ride, with a feeling that it might all run horribly out of control at any moment, as if Wynne Jones had written it all down in a rush after waking from a dream. I’m not aware of the circumstances of its writing, but that feel -and certain elements of the plot - make it seem like a book written after a lengthy period of writer’s block, like a dam bursting. (I also get the feeling Wynne Jones’s experiences of family life haven’t been entirely positive.)There’s something slightly crazed about it, and I really liked it. To try to explain the plot would be madness, so I won’t, and also rather difficult without spoiling a couple of big (but subtly signposted) surprises.
What Is It That Ravens Eat, Exactly?
The final author we’ve been sampling is Joan Aiken. I remember the Arabel’s Raven stories, in particular “The Escaped Black Mamba” and another whose title I forget, and which wasn’t in the collections we read, with affection from Jackanory in my childhood. They’re for younger readers than Potter or Chrestomanci, and I’m sure that Dave could read them himself. We already had the first volume, “Tales of Arabel’s Raven” - I think Jenny bought it for me some years ago as a joke - and Dave got the second (“Arabel and Mortimer”) for Christmas.
Arabel Jones is a pre-school girl who lives in a fictional part of London with her taxi-driver father and rather panicky mother. When her dad brings home a stunned raven which had been hit by a motorbike, she adopts it as a pet. Mortimer, as he is christened, proves to be a troublesome pet, with a penchant for eating anything that takes his fancy, particularly staircases, for stealing shiny objects , especially keys, and for investigating things. He says “Nevermore” a great deal, but has learnt no other words.
The stories (three in each volume) are absurd in character, and indeed the sillier they are, the better they seem to be. The quality is a little variable but when they come together they are good fun, and I’m considering getting the same author’s best known work - the somewhat less comic “Wolves of Willoughby Chase” and its sequels - as a further alternative to Harry Potter. Unfortunately the later Arabel stories have gone out of print - even the second one was clearly an American edition, with a few word substitutions giving it away (e.g. points/switch, windscreen/windshield).
It is fascinating to see how much has dated in a children’s story written and set in the 1970s. It’s a period that’s close enough to seem modern (especially if you grew up during it and remember it) yet contains things that seem odd from a purely 2010s perspective, and have to be explained to a contemporary child; making your own clothes on a manual sewing machine, LP records, the differing value of money, the fact that Arabel hardly ever seems to watch TV, or that there are no computer games or internet. The past is another country....
Summary
I’m impressed with Diana Wynne Jones, especially having read “Charmed Life” (and, currently, “The Lives of Christopher Chant”) in close proximity to Harry Potter. It’s not that Rowling is bad, exactly, but that Wynne Jones is good; it’s “from concentrate” versus “freshly squeezed”. We have plenty of Chrestomanci to be going on with (there are two more to read that we have, and a couple more volumes we don’t) but “Howl’s Moving Castle” also beckons, especially as we could then watch the Studio Ghibli animated version.
Chrestomanci at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrestomanci
Chrestomanci at Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chronicles-Chrestomanci-Charmed-Lives-Christopher/dp/006447268X
The material so far has been heavily slanted towards fantasy, as you can see from the list below -
· J.R.R. Tolkien: “The Hobbit”
· J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone” (Harry Potter I)
· Diana Wynne Jones: “Charmed Life” (Chrestomanci Chronicles I)
· Joan Aiken: “Tales of Arabel’s Raven”
· J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets” (Harry Potter II)
· Dianna Wynne Jones: “Archer’s Goon” (non- Chrestomanci)
· Joan Aiken: “Arabel & Mortimer”
· J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban” (Harry Potter III)
· Dianna Wynne Jones: “The Lives of Christopher Chant” (Chrestomanci II, in progress)
An Unexpected Journey
The ball got rolling with “The Hobbit”, which is appropriate given that this is what got me into fantasy and science fiction all those years ago. The dog-eared hardback was Jenny’s old copy - my paperback has long since disintegrated and been discarded. It’s many years since I read the book, and I’d forgotten quite what a bunch of clowns the dwarves are to start with, but it all went very well and Dave was entranced. Not quite ready for LoTR yet, I suspect, so we went looking for other possibilities. For a start, we had all the Potter books on hand - passed on from relatives with older children - so that was an obvious port of call. There was also a hardback copy of Diana Wynne Jones’s “Charmed Life” on the shelves, which Jenny had bought from a library clearance in Folkestone years ago and not read, but it looked promising and we decided to give it a try....
Hit Me With Your Quidditch Stick
It’s probably redundant for me to say too much about Harry Potter. Nevertheless, I’d not read it before and have only patchy knowledge of the films so, though I was familiar with the general outlines of the series, it wasn’t going over old ground. It wasn’t a total trial. It’s possible to see why they have been so successful - the collision of magical fantasy and school fiction was a clever choice, and Rowling has constructed a detailed, hermetic (pun intended) universe to draw in the youthful reader - but the style is workmanlike rather than brilliant and it certainly wasn’t designed to be read aloud. Our Joanne has a slightly tiresome fondness for alliteration which turns some sentences into tongue-twisters, and she could do with punctuating more rigorously to assist with some ambiguously structured passages. I have to admit to caring little about Quidditch or how many points whatever houses have got, so when we finally got to a Quidditch match that passed without supernatural incident it was all a bit tedious. I’m not convinced that the structural aspects of Quidditch stand much scrutiny, either, but I’m just being a geek there.
The third volume shows some signs of plot strain, requiring a massive infodump near the end to tie its thrashing tentacles together (not entirely satisfactorily), and the increase in size exhibited by the fourth volume makes me fear more of the same. David is very enthusiastic about Harry, and is looking forward to it, but I feel the need for some spacing between the books, however; hence, as the schedule above shows, I’ve been interspersing them with other works.
Charmed Lives
The availablility of Diana Wynne Jones’s “Charmed Life” was serendipitous, as this is a book which has been mentioned as a possible inspiration to Rowling for Potter. They are, in some ways, quite different beasts, but, one can see why the comparison is made; we have a boy (Cat Chant) who has lost his parents, both magicans, but who is not himself a magician, unexpectedly being taken away from his foster home to a grand castle to be tutored by wizards, and finding himself under threat from those who would use magic for selfish ends.
It’s not Hogwarts, however. The castle belongs to his uncle, the vague but apparently powerful Chrestomanci (a title, not a name, it eventually becomes clear). There is no magical boarding school - the only other children there are his sister, who has accompanied him, and Chrestomanci’s own two children. A number of other oddballs live there, but there is nothing of the jolly hockey sticks aspect of Hogwarts. Cat is, for much of the time, isolated and fearful, and when the threat to his wellbeing is revealed it comes from a fairly shocking quarter. Ron and Hermione are notable by their absence.
I found “Charmed Life” quite impressive, though the ending felt a little overblown. Diana Wynne Jones (who died last year) was a better writer technically than Joanne Rowling, and her plots have a rather less mechanical feel to them. “Charmed Life” was well received enough to produce (eventually) a number of sequels, and I have obtained two omnibus volumes which, as well as repeating “Charmed Life”, also contain “The Lives of Christopher Chant”, “The Magicians of Caprona” and “Witch Week”. We are currently reading “The Lives of Christopher Chant”, and it starts absolutely brilliantly. These two books are set in a sort of Edwardian parallel world where magic is practised, if not entirely accepted, but other parallel worlds are known to exist; the beginning of “Lives” concerns Christopher’s discovery that he can travel to them in dreams, and feels like a sort of anti-Narnia where the dimensional traveller is not a tiresome little prig being set up for clumsy Christian allegory, but a sad and neglected little boy who is in danger from the very people he should be able to trust. I approve of this message.
We also read a non-Chrestomanci novel, “Archer’s Goon”, which Jenny had bought in the 1980s after seeing a BBC adaptation, but which I’d never encountered. It’s set in modern (well, 1980s) times but has some thematic commonalities with the Chrestomanci books. It’s quite a wild ride, with a feeling that it might all run horribly out of control at any moment, as if Wynne Jones had written it all down in a rush after waking from a dream. I’m not aware of the circumstances of its writing, but that feel -and certain elements of the plot - make it seem like a book written after a lengthy period of writer’s block, like a dam bursting. (I also get the feeling Wynne Jones’s experiences of family life haven’t been entirely positive.)There’s something slightly crazed about it, and I really liked it. To try to explain the plot would be madness, so I won’t, and also rather difficult without spoiling a couple of big (but subtly signposted) surprises.
What Is It That Ravens Eat, Exactly?
The final author we’ve been sampling is Joan Aiken. I remember the Arabel’s Raven stories, in particular “The Escaped Black Mamba” and another whose title I forget, and which wasn’t in the collections we read, with affection from Jackanory in my childhood. They’re for younger readers than Potter or Chrestomanci, and I’m sure that Dave could read them himself. We already had the first volume, “Tales of Arabel’s Raven” - I think Jenny bought it for me some years ago as a joke - and Dave got the second (“Arabel and Mortimer”) for Christmas.
Arabel Jones is a pre-school girl who lives in a fictional part of London with her taxi-driver father and rather panicky mother. When her dad brings home a stunned raven which had been hit by a motorbike, she adopts it as a pet. Mortimer, as he is christened, proves to be a troublesome pet, with a penchant for eating anything that takes his fancy, particularly staircases, for stealing shiny objects , especially keys, and for investigating things. He says “Nevermore” a great deal, but has learnt no other words.
The stories (three in each volume) are absurd in character, and indeed the sillier they are, the better they seem to be. The quality is a little variable but when they come together they are good fun, and I’m considering getting the same author’s best known work - the somewhat less comic “Wolves of Willoughby Chase” and its sequels - as a further alternative to Harry Potter. Unfortunately the later Arabel stories have gone out of print - even the second one was clearly an American edition, with a few word substitutions giving it away (e.g. points/switch, windscreen/windshield).
It is fascinating to see how much has dated in a children’s story written and set in the 1970s. It’s a period that’s close enough to seem modern (especially if you grew up during it and remember it) yet contains things that seem odd from a purely 2010s perspective, and have to be explained to a contemporary child; making your own clothes on a manual sewing machine, LP records, the differing value of money, the fact that Arabel hardly ever seems to watch TV, or that there are no computer games or internet. The past is another country....
Summary
I’m impressed with Diana Wynne Jones, especially having read “Charmed Life” (and, currently, “The Lives of Christopher Chant”) in close proximity to Harry Potter. It’s not that Rowling is bad, exactly, but that Wynne Jones is good; it’s “from concentrate” versus “freshly squeezed”. We have plenty of Chrestomanci to be going on with (there are two more to read that we have, and a couple more volumes we don’t) but “Howl’s Moving Castle” also beckons, especially as we could then watch the Studio Ghibli animated version.
Chrestomanci at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrestomanci
Chrestomanci at Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chronicles-Chrestomanci-Charmed-Lives-Christopher/dp/006447268X