randy_byers | Entries tagged with diana wynne jones

This is the first novel in the Chrestomanci series, which is also known as the Worlds of Chrestomanci (a reference to the fact that it's about parallel worlds). During the Harry Potter craze the Chrestomanci books were touted as a predecessor, and it's true that Charmed Life is about a sort of boarding school for magicians. Charmed Life is the story of two orphans, Gwendolyn and Cat Chance, who go to live with a mysterious and powerful figure named Chrestomanci, who lives in a posh country estate with his extended family.

Like a lot of DWJ books it starts off somewhat banal, despite its strange setting full of witches and warlocks and magicians, but by the end it has become something truly weird and wonderful. I believe this novel is aimed at a somewhat younger audience than her young adult books, and by the middle of it I was beginning to feel that I wasn't the right reader for it. In particular it starts piling on crises for young Cat that are largely the result of his being too young to understand what's going on and therefore afraid to ask for help. I was beginning to find this tiresome when the story really kicked into gear and took off. I found the final act very satisfying indeed.

Like a lot of DWJ books, a lot of the power of the final act comes from explaining apparently banal things we encountered earlier in ways that create a shock of reconfiguration. Things that seemed like silly gags (a violin turned into a cat because it was played like a screeching cat) suddenly become potent plot points. I've said any number of times in my other reviews of DWJ's books that her central strength is characterization, but coming in only slightly behind that is her ability to plant seeds throughout the tale that burst into teeming life at the end. It feels nothing short of miraculous every time.

I'm often not sure how in control she is of her stories. They always feel as though they are twisting and turning beneath her hands like live things with minds of their own, and the endings often feel rushed. This one reveals some truths in the last few pages that seemingly cannot be resolved in the short time she gives them, and young Cat is left in a state of emotional whiplash that Jones doesn't even try to resolve. The novel ends on an explicit note of wild, clashing feelings, like a ragged sigh or laughing sob. Truly raw and remarkable.

Despite the fact that it's aimed at a younger audience, it's full of jagged edges too. Cat's sister, Gwendolyn, is an utterly loathsome creature, although Cat (and even Chrestomanci) is sympathetic to her throughout. Even some of the less overtly loathsome characters, such as the servants Mary and Euphemia, are given a nasty edge. Perhaps most remarkable on the jagged (or maybe ragged) front is the death by drowning of Cat and Gwendolyn's parents, which happens in the very first chapter but which isn't remarked upon directly until much later in the book. The lack of sentiment in the children regarding their parents' death leaves a very odd and possibly unpleasant aftertaste, but then again family is often a fraught subject in DWJ's books, as in life.

The Chrestomanci series is apparently not a sequence but rather a series of stand-alones. The Lives of Christopher Chant is the other one I've seen highly touted, and I'm wondering if I should read that next even though it's the fourth Chrestomanci book published. Or should I read The Magicians of Caprona next? Anybody have thoughts on this question? (Ah, Wikipedia reports that DWJ herself recommended reading The Lives of Christopher Chant next.)

This books suffered a bit from the fact that I was reading another book at the same time and thus wasn't as focused as I might have been. (Unlike some people I know, I don't usually read more than one book at a time, but the other one I was reading was a large format art book that wasn't conducive to reading on the bus or plane or otherwise out and about in the world.) It's also the first of the DWJ books I've read that I recall being primarily driven by children, as opposed to children working in concert with adults (or, say, adults in the form of dogs), and I confess I found this bit of convention irritating in this particular story. I'm also not a big fan of the time travel genre, so it had that strike against it as well. Nonetheless, overall I found it just as fascinating as everything else I've read by Jones, and I tore right through it.

For one thing, it's more of a science fiction story than most of the other DWJ books I've read -- or at least as much of one as a time travel story can be -- and I did enjoy her stfnal world-building. Aside from Time City itself, which exists somewhere outside of time and has incorporated a complicated array of elements from every time period, including what to us is the far, far future, the characters visit several different time periods in the course of their adventures, and Jones does a great job of creating a distinct feel for each future era. On top of that, the crisis of the novel, as in most (all?) time travel stories, is a crisis of causality, and we have several visits to a point in the past that changes as causality changes. That feeling of the familiar turning unfamiliar is another strong point of DWJ's novels.

The story starts in 1939, with children being sent out from London to the countryside to protect them from German bombing raids. This is something that happened to DWJ herself, and if you know this, there is an interesting autobiographical aspect to the book. Our heroine, Vivian Smith, is going to stay with a relative, but she is instead intercepted by two boys from the future who yank her out of time and into Time City. Later, however, they return to 1939 and meet the relative with whom Vivian was going to live, and she is a hateful creature. Considering that the relatives that DWJ stayed with in real life treated her very badly, this also has an autobiographical whiff to it. The awful fate avoided.

There are layers upon layers of complexity, as usual, and a large cast of eccentric characters. The children are trying to prevent the destruction of Time City, but the whole timeline is under siege and Vivian is also trying to protect her own past world. It's a sign of my distraction while reading this book that I can't remember if the timeline is restored in the end or if it's left altered. I'm pretty sure it's the latter, which is the way it should be. There's something tremendously liberating and frightening about the idea that history itself is malleable. Equally bracing is the way that Vivian's separation from her family in 1939 London comes to mean so little to her compared to the matters of extreme consequence that she's swept up in, all the while we are treated to a sly domestic comedy about schoolwork and childhood pranks and butter pies and other mundane affairs. Not to mention a number of droll jokes at the expense of the twentieth century.

Maybe I didn't like it quite as my favorites by DWJ, but like Archer's Goon it grows in the mind.

All power corrupts, but we need electricity.

At last, on my sixth try, I've read a Dianna Wynne Jones novel that isn't a love story. Is that why I didn't like it as much as the others? Not that I disliked it. It just didn't really capture my fancy, even as it kept me turning the pages to see what happened next.

It starts out feeling like a mundane story in which something decidedly odd pops up. The eponymous Goon, who is huge and apparently simple-minded, shows up at the Sykes household and gradually reveals that he's there on behalf of someone named Archer, who demands that Mr. Sykes write 2000 words for him. Nobody knows what this is about, and we're trying to figure out just what kind of person this weird Goon character is and why he is pestering a perfectly normal middle class family. Slowly we discover that we are in a fantasy novel, and magic begins to exert itself on and in the characters. Even more slowly we discover that some of the characters aren't what they at first seem to be, and we are deep in a conflict between seven magical siblings who want to rule the world.

What works here, as in all of the DWJ books I've read, is the very organic sense of magic and the fantastic that she has. The magic siblings are said to "farm" various aspects of the world -- transport, power, sewers -- and this very odd use of the word "farm" gives a tantalizing feel for a unique approach to how magic is wielded. Jones ties magic to writing, and makes the conceit fresh and funny. Once again she gives us a large cast of well-delineated characters who clash and collaborate, cower and charge and change their minds. The problems of the adolescent protagonist, Howard, are a mixture of the commonplace (bullies, violin practice) and the bizarre, and Jones' sympathy for the trials of growing up are a strong anchor for the more fantastical issues that arise. Her sense of humor and snappy dialogue are as good as ever.

In fact, I'm not quite sure why Archer's Goon felt slight to me. It could be because it's pitched more to the comedy end of the story spectrum, and it just doesn't feel as serious as even something like Howl's Moving Castle, where Sophie's vulnerability and separation from her family is constantly an issue. Archer's Goon has no real sense of danger, perhaps. It felt as though it were aimed at a younger reader than the other ones I've read.

cpt_buggernuts says BBC did an adaptation of this for TV back in the '80s. That would be fun to see, although she went on to say, "given it probably had a budget of about forty pence I can't imagine that it'll have aged well." Anybody else seen it?

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.

In the introduction to this Firebird edition of Dogsbody, Neil Gaiman writes, 'It's a love story, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote very few love stories ... ' What's amusing to me about this is that all four DWJ novels I've read so far have been love stories. I didn't plan it that way!

In Dogsbody the stars are supernal beings of exalted power call Effulgents, and the novel begins with Sirius, the Dog Star, being consigned to incarnation in, well, a dog's body on Earth as punishment for an unnamed crime. He is further charged with finding a device of power called the Zoi, which has disappeared on Earth. If he can find it, his punishment will be ended.

As usual Jones is working in a lot of different dimensions with this novel. I'm not a dog person, but I have to say that she does an utterly superb job of capturing what the world feels like from the perspective of a dog (albeit a dog with a split nature that has more powers of comprehension than most). Then there's the life of the family he's adopted into, with all the cruelties and complexities common in Jones' novels. Sirius is cared for by Kathleen, an Irish girl whose republican father is in prison and whose mother has fled to America. Kathleen is cared for by an English relative, and she's despised by half the family for being Irish and the daughter of a terrorist. Meanwhile Sirius can not only understand what other animals (including humans, but also cats and foxes) are saying, but he can understand what the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon are saying as well. There's an animistic feel to this world that comes across in choice physical details that are treated as speech. To a dog, the whole world speaks.

It's a coming of age story as we see Sirius grow from a puppy to a nearly adult dog, and as he remembers more about his previous existence as an Effulgent, we learn more about what is at stake in the story. Our sense of what is in danger grows. This gradual expansion of the scope of the story feels effortless, and we are just as fascinated by more mundane matters of where Sirius will find a bite to eat and which chairs are most comfortable to a dog. As usual in DWJ's work there's a large cast of easily distinguished characters, all with their own foibles and urgent needs.

I did think things felt a little rushed at the climax, as a multitude of mysterious things happen in rapid and bewildering succession. Still, I was hooked throughout. The love story, such as it is, is another skewed one -- a DWJ specialty, in my brief experience. You might say it ends in tears, and you know I'm a sucker for romantic melancholy.

(Sorry if this review lacks inspiration, but I'm down with a cold at the moment.)

'They were all three no more than half awake. What they were doing seemed as logical to them as the things you do in dreams. They were too sleepy to notice it was cold outside, and the empty echoes in the street simply added to the dreamlike feeling. So did the lit-up deserted shops, the late yellow Moon, and the way the street lights and the moonlight doubled and sometimes tripled the shadows stretching from their clopping feet. When their feet stopped clopping and crunched on cinders, and the only light was from the Moon, it felt like another phase of the dream. None of them was alarmed when they saw a man and a woman slip out of sight behind a bank of rubble. It was odd, but natural, the way it is in dreams, that the man was outlined in faint turquoise light and the woman in white.'

--Diana Wynne Jones, Dogsbody

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 want to say that Diana Wynne Jones' core strength is characterization, but I actually think her powers are multivalent. But it's true that her skill at characterization is superb. Every character in this novel feels unique and recognizable, with perhaps only the narrator-protagonist, Polly, feeling slightly ... what? Not generic so much as someone we can all identify with, someone who encompasses all of us. A reader-shaped person? I don't know. But half the fun of the two novels by DWJ I've read so far is living with her characters, and the way that even the minor ones -- such as the violist, Ann, in this book -- can leave a powerful impression. Indeed, I can't remember for sure whether this book actually passes the Bechdel Test (I assume so), but the number of memorable female characters is seemingly endless: gritty Granny, delusional mother Ivy, weird Laurel, faddish Nina, sturdy Fiona, horsey Mary Fields, warm Ann, nervous Edna. Neither is this at all a happy sisterhood, but rather a bristling bevy of clashing and collaborating personalities and powers. Polly herself is conflicted, contradictory, and multivalent (or I guess polyvalent), and part of her heroism is her ability to work through all of her scrambled impulses and tangled worldly and otherworldly experiences and find the sacred in the mixed messages therein.

In DWJ's essay "The Heroic Ideal: A Personal Odyssey", about her conception of Fire and Hemlock, she writes about the layers upon layers of mythic, poetic, and fairy tale images and inspirations in the book. It definitely has a feeling of great complexity and density while also functioning as a easily-relatable young adult coming-of-age story. It covers nine years in Polly's life, and her perspective changes dramatically as she goes from age ten to age nineteen, which is something I think we've all experienced. On top of that is the narrative complexity of the story being about Polly discovering one set of memories beneath another in her own head. Thus as a novel it is aligned with Modernist ideas of consciousness and personal identity at the same time as it is aligned with pre-Modern ideas of heroism and magic. (Jones explicitly argues here that pre-Modern is pre-Chaucer, by the way.) I suppose this is typical of modern novels of the fantastic, but perhaps it's unusual in those that land solidly on the side of the delusion -- the otherworld -- being real. There's no ambiguity in the end that Polly has had an encounter with the world of Faerie, yet what actually happened is quite ambiguous and largely symbolic or mystical.

Amanda Craig, writing about the comparisons between J.K. Rowling and DWJ that sprang up in the wake of the huge success of the Harry Potter books, says, "Where Rowling’s plots are highly controlled thrillers, Wynne-Jones’s often come to her in a dream and retain the organic strangeness, comic unpredictability, dread and sense of wonder that a volcanic subconscious can throw up." There's a strange feeling of wildness in this book that I find difficult to explain. Maybe it's because there are so many sources to the story, and it ends up feeling like an explosion of ideas and incidents. But in both DWJ books I've read I've also been fascinated by the powerful sense of connection she creates between incidents or objects that seem innocuous when they are first introduced but then take on numinous meaning later. So it's not just the powerful ideas she introduces into the story but the way she connects them and the way they seem to suddenly possess and turbocharge the narrative.

This brings me around to the way that magic is used in these stories. I remarked in my bit about Howl's Moving Castle that DWJ connects magic to poetry, and she does that here too, both explicitly in the quotations from the ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer that head each chapter and in the influence of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" that she writes about in her essay about the book. In Fire and Hemlock she also ties magic to music, both in the way the novel is structured, after Eliot's poem, as four musical movements (with a coda) and in the character of Tom Lynn, whose musical abilities both brought him to the attention of the Queen of Elfland and gave him and his string quartet partners the power to resist her for a time. Thus DWJ draws parallels between art and magic, and these parallels can't help but suggest that her novel too is a magical spell of some sort. It's a gateway into the otherworld, in which imagination and creativity invoke a sacred space where mystical transformations can occur and the world is suddenly, like objects in a mirror, closer than it might appear.

It's heady stuff. These two books by DWJ have hit me with a jolt that I last felt when reading Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist. They have that same sense of old folk wisdom and eerie, fey lunacy about them. They are stories of the uncanny, grounded in the mundane troubles of growing up and getting on with life. I can see why DWJ has such a devoted following. It's Hexwood next for me.

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.