A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: the mid 2000s!

In my quest to read all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books in one year, this month I read The Merlin Conspiracy, Conrad’s Fate, and The Pinhoe Egg!

We have now entered the era of Diana Wynne Jones books I read one time when they came out, and generally have not read since. It is an interesting perspective to be revisiting these for the first time in the context of this readthrough! I definitely appreciate their places in their various series more this time around. For instance …

The Merlin Conspiracy (2003)

The Merlin Conspiracy is a sequel to Deep Secret, which I love very much and reread annually. The two main point of view characters in Deep Secret don’t even appear in The Merlin Conspiracy, however. Rather, the sequel features Nick—slightly older and slightly more mature—on adventures in several worlds, and his counterpart Roddy, who is experiencing some real problems in her own homeworld.

When I first read The Merlin Conspiracy, I missed the voices of Rupert and Maree from Deep Secret too much to appreciate what was actually featured in The Merlin Conspiracy. This time around, I appreciated the inventive worldbuilding, and the intricate way the plot elements are intertwined.

Nick, yearning to become a magid, has been trying to traverse between universes, so when he is pulled through to a different one he thinks it might be a dream. He gets caught up in political issues spanning several worlds, which ultimately seem to culminate on Roddy’s world. As in Deep Secret, there are two points of view, this time alternating between Nick and Roddy, who of course eventually join forces. From my older and wiser 2025 perspective, I think I would recommend The Merlin Conspiracy at least as much as Deep Secret. It’s got a lot of great stuff.

Conrad’s Fate (2005)

Conrad’s Fate is a really fun insert in the Chrestomanci series. Our point-of-view character, Conrad, lives with his selfish wizard uncle and neglectful mother, when his uncle sends him off to get a job at Stallery, the nearby manor house. Conrad’s uncle persuades him that the magic users up at Stallery, who have been tweaking reality in ways that are messing with his goals, have also adversely affected Conrad’s fate from a previous life and he needs to track them down and destroy them.

On the way to the manor, however, he meets a teenage Christopher Chant, in from another world, who also gets a job at Stallery. Together they explore the strange way magic is behaving there (as much as their punishing schedules as servants allow).

Christopher is there looking for Millie, who has run away from a terrible boarding school and somehow gotten trapped in a pocket world. He and Conrad each help each other deal with the hijinks that ensue, and the real and menacing problems of the magic misuse, even as they also take part in a kind of drawing room farce with the manor house’s Family.

In addition to this enjoyable combination of genres, it’s also just nice to see Christopher as a fairly well adjusted teen being nice to a younger kid and caring about Millie. Between Christopher’s terrible childhood and his shockingly well dressed adulthood, Conrad’s Fate feels like a palate cleanser.

The Pinhoe Egg (2006)

The Pinhoe Egg is the final Chrestomanci book. It brings things very close to home with a group of hereditary witches right on the doorstep of Chrestomanci Castle, hiding their problematic practices from the “Big Man.” We alternate between Marianne Pinhoe, tapped to be the next Gammer for her family’s witching practices, and Eric Chant in the castle, as they each try to navigate the adults doing problematic things around them.

In a lot of ways, The Pinhoe Egg feels like we are revisiting the premise of Aunt Maria, with Marianne and her brother rebelling against a despotic magical matriarch who has their community in thrall. Their mother is again partially immune from this thrall as an outsider, and the magic is again gendered.

The Pinhoe Egg is the final Chrestomanci book, and without any detailed spoilers, I will say that it is extremely tied up at the end. Everything that could conceivably be thought of as a loose end is tucked in neatly, and it feels to me as though Diana Wynne Jones was putting away the idea of Chrestomanci.

It’s not my favorite Chrestomanci book overall, but just like it’s nice to see Christopher having a fairly well-adjusted time in Conrad’s Fate, it’s also nice to see Eric thriving in castle life in The Pinhoe Egg.

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If you’d like to read along with me, my schedule is here! The Game, House of Many Ways, Enchanted Glass and Earwig and the Witch are up next, which will take us all the way into the posthumous era!

Custom images for this series are by Marnanel Thurman.