Dry Ice Factory

It's amazing that it's taken me so long to get to this 1986 book, which seems to have earned classic status by this point. It's a bit strange that it took Loncon 3 selecting her as a guest of honor to prod me into finally reading it. I think one reason I've been wary of the book, despite its Seattle setting, is that the nutshell description of it -- a homeless man is a wizard -- sounded like a condescending liberal dream of the nobility of poverty. Well, it turns out to be pretty much nothing like that at all.

This is a surprisingly gritty novel about life on the street, and in fact it often feels like a horror novel. (I was reminded numerous times of Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Seattle-based horror-fantasy, Anthony Shriek.) Wizard's daily routines in search of food and shelter are described in painful detail. As in many a genre fantasy novel, he is threatened by a Wrongness that is an existential threat indistinguishable from his vulnerability to starvation, sickness, and privation. While his backstory is somewhat melodramatic in nature, the exaggerated fictional universe never undermines the nitty gritty. Wizard's exhausting life is almost exhausting to read about.

Along with the depiction of life on the street, the other great strength of the book is the characters, particularly Wizard himself and his strange nemesis, Lynda. I guess I would go so far as to say that Lynda is the supreme creation of this book. Wizard is a great protagonist, full of contradictions and subtle strengths that power the story, but Lynda is an amazing portrait of a personality type that feels torn bleeding from real life. Her neediness and generosity, non-stop chatter and physical boundary-pushing bristles with an anxious, intruding energy that gave me the heebie-jeebies. She refuses to be incapsulated or contained. It's curious (and marvelous) that she embodies the greatest threat to Wizard, and yet she is never villainous. She made my skin crawl, and yet I always retained a horrified fascination. Truly a brilliant piece of work.

In contrast, Wizard's true love, Cassie (short for Cassandra, one supposes), is an idealized figure who doesn't feel real at all. Yet she works as mythology, and actually another strength of the novel is how her relationship with Wizard, not his self or his soul or his power, turns out to be thing that is existentially threatened. Can't say too much about that without spoilers, but this novel manages to avoid a lot of cliches in the end by treating their relationship as the matter of central importance.

One other curious thing about how this novel struck me is that as a portrait of Seattle it felt a bit touristy at times, and I think that's because it's mainly set around Pioneer Square, which in my mind is a tourist playground and not the real city. But of course it's also a major hang out for homeless people, so I'm guessing that I'm revealing my own biases here. It doesn't help that most of the other places visited, such as the Public Market and the Seattle Center, are also tourist attractions. I dunno. It also has become a catalog of Lost Seattle after nearly thirty years, with references to the Kingdome and to a lone Starbucks by the Market and to the Fun Forest at the Seattle Center.

Well, I thought this was a really great novel. It's about a homeless man who is a wizard (and, yes, a protector of pigeons) and who is threatened by a Wrongness that grows out of his history as an emotionally damaged Viet Nam vet. It's a compelling portrait of life on the street and what it takes to survive it. It's horrific, but it's also very sweet. It deserves its vaunted reputation.

I'm beginning to think that Neil Gaiman is full of shit. In his introduction to Diana Wynne Jones' Dogsbody he wrote, 'It's a love story, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote very few love stories ... ' Well, all five of the DWJ novels I've read have been love stories! It's true, however, that Deep Secret isn't primarily a love story, and the love story is one of the least interesting aspects of the novel. Still, it's there, and it's very much of the same cloth as her other love stories, sharing with Howl's Moving Castle, for example, the way in which the love first looks like hate.

Anyway, Deep Secret has many things other than love on its mind. In fact, it's a rather complicated story; perhaps too complicated for its own good. It concerns Rupert Venables, a software developer in the UK who is also a Magid -- a wizard working for a secret organization of Archons who administer the multiverse. Rupert is charged with two things at the beginning of the story: to find a replacement Magid for his mentor and old friend, Stan, who has just died, and to help the Koryfonic Empire elsewhere in the multiverse to manage a succession crisis after the emperor is assassinated. The plot rockets out of the gate from the get-go, and the pace never lets up. This leads to an exhilarating ride for the most part, although the number of threads and characters proliferates to such an extent that it started to feel overly busy and fussy to me in the final third, before it sticks the ending with a magisterial bit of the mysterioso.

One big attraction of this book to inhabitants of the multiverse called Fandom is that most of it takes place at a science fiction convention, namely the British National Convention, or Eastercon. (I actually don't remember that it's ever referred to by that name in the book, but it's set on Easter weekend and has all the hallmarks of the national convention that we know and love.) I assume DWJ had first hand experience of such things, because her portrayal of the convention, while humorously exaggerated and satirical, felt like that of a seasoned pro. The ongoing joke about how the convention hotel, located in a mythical market town called Wantchester, is situated on a magical node that makes the hallway corridors work in non-Euclidean ways felt like it could have been a description of the hotel in Hinckley where I attended an Eastercon in 2003 -- or indeed any number of other confusing convention hotels where wandering the halls feels like an epic adventure that could lead just about anywhere except where you want to go.

As I think I've said after every DWJ book that I've read so far, one of her great strengths is character, and Deep Secret is again full of strong characters. Even the characters themselves note the strength of character of the people they meet in the story. Rupert is a bit of a prat, and Maree is pugnacious. Her younger cousin Nick has the selfish power to wriggle out of any situation that he can't be bothered with, and Rupert's brother Will is an earthy bohemian farmer. Zinka is a seductive sophisticate who calls her own tune, and Nick's father is a fantasy writer who thinks only of money and hasn't a creative bone in his body. It goes on and on, with characters in the Koryfonic Empire, including several centaurs, other Magids, other relatives to various characters (including centaurs), the committee running the convention, other potential Magids that Rupert is considering -- so many characters that I really did start to lose track of who was who by the end.

Jones' other terrific strength is her depiction of magic. I suppose I should try to analyze how she does it at some point. I'm reminded of Joanna Russ' old distinction between those writers who depict magic as a power external to the wielder, like a workshop tool, and those who depict it as something that changes them when they wield it. Jones is the latter type, I think. Rupert is the sort who probably thinks of magic as instrumental. He wields it automatically as problems arise, and seems at first to be a sort of mechanic (or software engineer) who fixes concrete, discrete issues in a methodical, logical way. But one of the things we learn about Rupert over the course of the story (and which he learns about himself) is that he's actually pretty careless and thoughtless in his seemingly methodical approach, and that what he does almost always has ramifications that he wasn't prepared for. Magic is much wilder than it seems to him, and it ends up transforming the situation -- and the characters -- in unexpected ways.

I wasn't always sure that Jones was in control of all the vast, bristling array of material that she tossed up into the air. As usual with her novels, the story felt dreamlike and alive, as though it were uncontrolled wild magic itself. Rupert isn't the only narrator, but when he's the viewpoint it always feels as though every last loose end is going to be tracked down, because that's his desire and belief. At times he felt like a character from a Gene Wolfe novel, busily asking questions to try to get at some discursive truth that keeps eluding him despite his persistent, patient efforts in the face of constant interruptions and new crises, always adding items to his mental To Do list in another kind of running joke. But the very fact that earlier in the novel Jones switches away from Rupert's point of view to give us a few alternating chapters from Maree's point of view, only to abandon Maree's point of view completely in the final third of the novel, began to feel like incredible sloppiness to me, as though (once again) the story's wild magic was getting away from Jones and leading her all over the place willy-nilly.

And perhaps it was. It doesn't help that the plot begins to feel like a very formulaic fantasy action-adventure with much running to-and-fro and sudden defeats followed by narrow victories, sneering villains, characters turning out to be secret heirs to empire, characters who hated each other turning out to actually love each other. In short it begins to make sense in fairly standard, predictable ways. But then at the very end she switches to yet a third character's point of view, which seemed like the final straw (really? now?!!!), the proof that Jones had completely lost control and was desperately trying anything to Explain It All At Last, and this ridiculous maneuver actually turns into something unexpectedly daring and profound. It's part of a section in which Rupert, Maree, and Nick have to report to the Archons on everything that's happened and face questions about things that don't make sense. Jones does an impressive job of addressing tiny details that were seemingly lost in the confusion along the way, but there's still this nagging feeling that it's all a bunch of hand-waving to distract us from the things that don't add up. And then Nick launches into a narrative about a mystical journey that he and Maree undertook earlier in the book while we, as readers, waited with Rupert for them to return, and the void opens beneath our feet to confront us directly. New mysteries are revealed that cannot be explained, even by the powerful Archons. The too-obvious world is once again shrouded in the deep secrets of the infinite multiverse.

So I mostly enjoyed Deep Secret very much. The way that it layers on the multiverse world-building (with great names and words another DWJ strength, e.g. Nayward and Ayeward directions) and then piles the convention experience on top of that is really quite something, rich and strange and organic and involving, even if the climax and the resolution to the action are more than a bit rote. But that coda makes up for a lot of formula. Amazing how many sins a good ending can salve.

I'm not completely convinced that Jones was in control of what she was trying to do here, but this is the kind of novel that you'd have to reread before really having read it, if that makes sense. It's a story about story-telling at it's root, I think. Not a story about stories (or meta-story) as I thought at first, but a story about story-telling.

It's science fiction, but it's science fiction married with fantasy. There's a galactic civilization and advanced technology, but most of the action takes place on Earth in an Arthurian setting with magic and dragons. The driver of the story is a machine called the Bannus (great name, is it derived from something?) that's described as a machine to aid in decision-making. The way it works is to take a basic scenario and run through all the alternative versions of it to help people choose which one they prefer. Thus a story-telling machine. What decision it is trying to help the characters in the novel make is complicated and involves spoilers. Likewise to discuss the characters themselves is difficult, because most of them aren't who they seem to be at first and appear in multiple guises as the Bannus works through various versions of the scenario.

The first part of the novel leaps between different versions of the scenario and is extremely disorienting. As the novel progresses, more and more characters are added to the mix (or so it seems), and everything just gets more and more complicated. Ultimately the plot is a very familiar one, but the multitude of versions on offer (sometimes only in brief glimpses) is what makes the book extremely difficult and dense.

One reason I'm not completely convinced that Jones was in control of all this is that the ending felt like a lot of people explaining to each other what just happened. Then again, if it's a story about story-telling, maybe it's appropriate that the resolution consists of a lot of people telling more stories. Yet the other thing that felt slightly off about the ending is an apparent attempt to make it all about the titular forest, which to me felt disconnected from everything else -- and a bit of deus ex machina (or ex sylvanus, or whatever the Latin for forest is) -- but could well make more sense on a reread.

It's a very strange book, and I liked that about it. Once again the characters are very engaging, although perhaps slightly less so amongst some of the minor characters (even Hume, who isn't really minor) than in the other two Jones books I've read. As in Fire and Hemlock there's the presentiment of a romantic relationship between a younger girl and an older man (but not much older) that isn't what it looks like at first but still inhabits uncomfortable territory in what feels like a weirdly realistic way. Once again Jones unleashes her imagination into unexpected and risky corners and byways. I really admire that about her. Her stories feel alive, conflicted, writhing and wriggling in your hands and in your mind. You're never quite sure which way they're going to squirm.

I've been hearing good things about Diana Wynnes Jones for decades, but hadn't read any of her books until now. What got me to pick one up was, of course, a movie. I finally watched Miyazaki's adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle last year, and I've watched it twice more since. If I loved the movie so much, it was obviously time to read the book.

Well, the movie is quite a bit different from the book! The basic set-up is the same: a 17-year-old girl named Sophie is placed under a spell by the Witch of the Waste, which turns her into an old crone. She runs away from her family and ends up in the mobile castle of a wizard named Howl, where she also finds an apprentice named Michael and a fire demon named Calcifer. Sophie insinuates herself into the life of the castle and is soon swept up in various threads of magical and romantic intrigue.

This is fundamentally a love story, of that sort that looks like a hate story on the surface. Sophie is always trying to run away from the castle because she's angry at Howl. Howl is constantly bemoaning her nosiness and ingratitude. Howl has the reputation of being a horrible womanizer, and he appears to have his eyes set on Sophie's sister, Lettie. Sophie believes that as the eldest sister of three who lives in a fairy tale, she's doomed to failure in life and love. And so on.

It's a somewhat meandering story, but a lot of things that seem irrelevant at first take on meaning later. Jones has a wonderful sense of humor, and her sense of magic is very strong as well (and is tied explicitly to poetry in this book). The characters have character, and Sophie can be quite annoying even to the reader. The world of the book is full of strange nooks and crannies, and Howl seems to come from contemporary Wales, which is treated as an exotic wonderland in the eyes of the other characters. There is a great sense of wonder and freshness and beauty, but almost everyone is also suffering under a spell that leaves them lost and confused and helplessly dependent on outside intervention.

The differences between book and film are too numerous to recount, although you can start with the fact that Sophie has two sisters in the book and only one in the movie and that the film is a war story where there is no war (although the mild threat of one) in the book. Jones herself, in a interview included at the back of the book, says that Miyazaki's versions of Sophie and Howl are gentler and more noble than hers. They are still recognizably the same characters, however. Sophie still promises to free Calcifer from his contract with Howl if Calcifer will free her from the old age spell. Both book and movie are beautiful stories in their different ways.

Jones wrote two sequels to Howl's Moving Castle. The next one is Castle in the Air, which oddly sounds like Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky. I think I'll give it a try. Or maybe not. It doesn't get a lot of love, so maybe I'll move on to Fire and Hemlock instead.

'In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist.'

-- H.P. Lovecraft, "Celephaïs" (1920)

I had high expectations for this Terry Gilliam movie, since everything I'd read about it made it sound like prime Gilliam material, but I came away slightly let down. The visual invention is wonderful as always (although perhaps too familiar), but I was never engaged by the characters or the story, never got in synch with its rhythm, and often felt baffled by the symbolism. The antic shtick seemed perhaps a little tired. I'll need to revisit it on DVD to see what I think a second time through. It was difficult for me to understand what the movie was trying to do, that's for sure.

Last night holyoutlaw mentioned that an LJ friend had commented that Gilliam had made another movie about himself. I said I didn't know what that meant, unless he was saying that Gilliam saw himself as Dr Parnassus. This morning on the walk to work I took that ball and ran with it.

( Spoilers and flailing 'analysis' below the cut )

I recently reread Joanna Russ' short story, "The Zanzibar Cat," when I discovered that it was an homage to Hope Mirrlees. The Zanzibar Cat is also the name of one of Russ' short story collections. I've never understood the title, and now I find that it's most likely a reference to Thoreau's comment in Walden, "It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." The commentary I've found on the internet says that Thoreau was denigrating travel to foreign places as a path for growth or self-discovery and was advocating development of the soul instead. He was specifically advocating that we follow our dreams rather than try to find happiness in the material world.

It's interesting to try to connect these ideas (as garbled as they may be at second hand) to Russ' story. The cat in the story is a familiar of the evil Duke, who seems to represent Fairyland, which is perhaps a dream world. Yet this would seem to contradict what I'm understanding of Thoreau's quote, where the cats represent the triviality of the material world. At the same time, however, the protagonist of the story, the Milleress, defeats the Duke by asserting her authorship of the story, if I'm following things correctly. Thoreau is said to be preaching that we be the authors of our selves, that we rely on our own being for self-worth, rather than pursuing material wealth or worldly power. Is that the moral of Russ' story? Do the Duke and his cat actually represent the illusion of worldly power, thus reversing the usual significance of Fairyland?

Yesterday I stumbled across a reference to Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" (1862) and was reminded that it is about fruit sold by goblins and the effect that it has on humans, much as Mirrlees' novel Lud-in-the Mist (1926) is about fairy fruit and the effect it has on humans.

We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?

Rossetti's poem is much more overtly sexual than Mirrlees' novel, but to the extent that Mirrlees does make the connection to sexual passion and potential debauchery, she also does so in the form of the effect of the fruit on adolescent girls. Both writers also compare the effect of the fruit to drugs and addiction, depicting symptoms of withdrawal in the aftermath of ingesting the fruit.

"The Goblin Market" is amazingly ambivalent about its subject matter. It has something of a Hollywood ending in which normalcy is restored and the events of the poem are said to be a warning to children, but which leaves us feeling that the images of sexual arousal and dangerously unconventional behavior (well, otherworldly and lesbian at least) are much more vivid than the conventional conclusion. (Rossetti apparently did tell her publisher that the poem was not actually intended for children.)

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore

I see that Neil Gaiman made the connection between "The Goblin Market" and Lud-in-the-Mist in an article for the Guardian, "Happily ever after". I don't know much about Rossetti except that she's connected with the Pre-Raphaelites. My sense is that both she and Mirrlees are associating Faerie here with bohemianism. Sex and drugs and the horns of Elfland, baby!

20 Nov. Update: Eventually, she manages to save her sister by running home and asking Laura to "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you," explaining that "For your sake I have braved the glen / And had to do with goblin merchant men." Laura's cure, implemented by her sucking the juices from Lizzie's face, is somewhat baffling; the reader is left confused as to what actually cured her, the residual juices or her sister's love.

So what we are left with is this: a woman performed a heroic, self-sacrificing action (certainly related to Christ's sacrifice of himself) to save her sister. Good. However, it seems apparent that there are problems with the framework for feminine heroism constructed by Rossetti. It remains a passive kind of heroism. Lizzie does not attack the goblin men, demanding the antidote for their fruit, or weave a spell of benign magic over her sister. She is forced to offer herself up to goblin abuse (physical, sexual goblin abuse) to perform a positive action. It is possible to account for the passive nature of Lizzie's act by putting it into the context of Rossetti's Christian beliefs, but that does not seem enough. The ambiguities at the end of "Goblin Market" and the almost out of place, strangely irrelevant feel of the last few lines (caused by their sanitized, formulaic tone at the end of a poem so rich in erotic and violent detail) indicate that Rossetti herself had not reached a satisfactory conclusion on the subject of female heroism.

-- W. Glasgow Phillips, "Theme in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'"

YOU MAY, PERHAPS, have wondered why a man so full of human failings, and set in so unheroic a mould as Master Nathaniel Chanticleer should have been cast for so great a role. Yet the highest spiritual destinies are not always reserved for the strongest men, nor for the most virtuous ones.

But though he had been chosen as Duke Aubrey's deputy and initiated into the Ancient Mysteries, he had not ceased to be in many ways the same Master Nathaniel of old -- whimsical, child-like, and, often, unreasonable. Nor, I fear, did he cease to be the prey of melancholy. I doubt whether initiation ever brings happiness. It may be that the final secret revealed is a very bitter one ... or it may be that the final secret had not yet been revealed to Master Nathaniel.

And, strange to say, far from being set up by his new honours, he felt oddly ashamed of them -- it was almost as if he was for the first time running the gauntlet of his friends' eyes after having been afflicted by some physical disfigurement.

-- Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

Saw this with holyoutlaw at the Majestic Bay last night (after dinner at Hattie's Hat, yum). I thought it did a great job of exploring a child's internal emotional landscape. It's all from the boy's point of view, even the framing scenes in the real world. The Wild Things themselves behave like children. The story switches moods as quickly as a child.

The production design really is great, as others have said. The Wild Things have real character, as does the world they inhabit. It isn't a slavish attempt to mimic Sendak's style, but it captures the spirit of his style.

I didn't read the book as a child, so I don't have that kind of connection to it. I read it as an adult, and I was curious how they would expand the story for a feature length film. From memory, I'd say they took it deeper into issues of power and powerlessness, creativity and destruction. The ending has a nice impish quality amidst the tears. This story is resolved, but there's still a lot of growing up to do.