A Year of Diana Wynne Jones: The late 2000s!

This month I reached the end of Diana Wynne Jones’s life in my year of reading all the books by Diana Wynne Jones! I read The Game, House of Many Ways, and Enchanted Glass. That’s one final book in Howl’s universe and two stand alones – three extremely strong books.

The Game (2007)

In The Game, we meet Hayley, who lives with her repressive grandmother and uninvolved grandfather. Odd things happen around Hayley, so she gets sent to live with her sprawling extended family in a big country house where the teenagers and kids play “the game:” they explore the spirals of the mythosphere and bring back trophies. As Hayley starts realizing that she and her family have unusual abilities, she learns a lot about herself and the world of stories.

The mythosphere kind of posits that a taxonomy of folklore is traversable: you can walk along the spirals and encounter all the dragon stories or the wild women stories, for instance.  Hayley’s family harkens back to some of the worldbuilding in Dogsbody, and the way you walk along these spirals seems reminiscent of some of the multiverse travel techniques in the Magids and The Lives of Christopher Chant. I wish, though, that we had more mythosphere books! The interaction between different figures is delightful and I feel it could have sustained a whole series.

As it is, The Game is pretty short, but feels nuanced and realized. 

House of Many Ways (2008)

House of Many Ways features Charmain Baker, who does not want to do housework, does not want to learn new things, she just wants to disappears into her book, thank you very much. On this reread, Charmain now reminds me of Murderbot, who wishes to ignore the world around it by watching its shows. Charmain isn’t dealing with PTSD like Murderbot is, however. Rather, she just finds whatever is happening in a book more interesting than whatever isn’t.

Charmain is sent to take care of a distant relative’s complicated and magical home while he, a wizard, is off getting healed by the elves. From there ensues a plot that eventually includes Howl and Sophie as well as the royalty of Charmain’s land and various other places.

Compared to The Pinhoe Egg, which finished the Chrestomanci series in 2006, House of Many Ways feels like it leaves Howl’s universe ripe for more stories. That seems appropriate, since each book in the Howl series provides a commentary on types of stories. I prefer House of Many Ways to Castle in the Air. It feels less heavyhanded about stories of bookish girls who don’t want to do housework, than Castle in the Air felt about England’s importing of stories from “The East.”

This one doesn’t require you to know anything about either previous book in the Howl series, though if you have already read them, it feels like some old friends are making enjoyable cameos in this story.

Enchanted Glass (2010)

In Enchanted Glass, Andrew Hope is a professor in his thirties when his grandfather dies, leaving him a home to live in, and a magical field of care extending around it. Andrew is attempting to wrap his head around this situation when Aiden Cain shows up: an orphan pursued by magical menaces. They both try to figure out what’s going on, aided by a colorful cast of locals.

The interplay of personalities in the small town is fun and good natured, even when they are not always particularly nice to each other. In some ways it seems like a functional version of the village dynamics in Pinhoe Egg, as here everyone is aware of the magical field of care and works together … more or less.

The “enchanted glass” of the title is a key to what is happening in the area to a certain extent, but it is also a lovely image that adds a kind of glow to the book overall. I bought a copy of Enchanted Glass as soon as it came out in 2010 and read it immediately, but I don’t think I had read it since then. On this reread, it has shot up to be one of my favorite standalones of Diana Wynne Jones’s whole body of work, and one I will keep in mind as a recommendation for people asking where to start with her books.

Next month I will wrap up the whole year with a kind of coda dealing with the outliers. I’ll be reading Earwig and the Witch, Poems, Plays, and Reflections on the Magic of Writing; all of which were published posthumously.