#69 - #73: OH MAN DIANA WYNNE JONES

[extemporally]

Books I read!

Cathedral, by Raymond Carver.

...... would it be obnoxious or disingenous to say, without having read very much Hemmingway at all, that Raymond Carver is like Ernest Hemmingway only better? Probably, right. Welp, I can't help what I feel! This collection packed a wallop - a lot of the time I get pretty disillusioned with the short story genre and the way lots of contemporary writers write it as, 'there were two people and this thing happened between us, and things are now the same except different', and I'm not saying that those stories can't be great; the problem is that they so often aren't. Here Carver writes stories about interactions between two (or three) people and things that happened between them, except that he brings this warmth and humanity to his writing that I love, even if things are bleak.

.... LOOK AT ME, I AM SO ARTICULATE.

But here's what I'm talking about: Raymond Carver sits down on a chair and starts to write. He writes a story. There's a woman and her son. Her son is having an eighth birthday party. She walks into a bakery and orders a sixteen-dollar cake. Her son gets knocked down by a car. She rushes to the hospital. The hospital says nothing is wrong. Her son slips into a coma and dies. The baker won't stop ringing over two days to see about the cake. Her husband answers the phone. 'It's about your son,' the baker says. The man tells him to fuck off. The baker won't stop ringing. How should he have known what happened? Finally they figure out who this horrible wraith across the phone is, the one who won't stop yawning on and on about how it's about their son without any sympathy at all. It's the baker. They pay him a visit. Maybe the husband wants to rough him up. And here's what happens:

Ann wiped her eyes and looked at the baker. "I wanted to kill you," she said. "I wanted you dead."

The baker had cleared a space for them at the table. He shoved the adding machine to one side, along with the stacks of notepaper and reciepts. He pushed the telephone directory onto the floor, where it landed with a thud. Howard and Ann sat down and pulled their chairs up to the table. The baker sat down, too.

"Let me say how sorry I am," the baker said, putting his elbows on the table. "God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I'm just a baker. I don't claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten, I don't know for sure. But I'm not any longer, if I ever was. Now I'm just a baker. That don't excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I'm deeply sorry. I'm sorry for your son, and I'm sorry for my part in this," the baker said. He spread his hands out on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms. "I don't have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must be feeling. All I can say to you now is that I'm sorry. Forgive me, if you can," the baker said. "I'm not an evil man, I don't think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got to understand what it comes down to is I don't know how to act anymore, it would seem. Please," the man said, "let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?"

It was warm inside the bakery. Howard stood up from the table and took off his coat. He helped Ann from her coat. The baker looked at them for a minute and then nodded and got up from the table. He went to the oven and turned off some switches. He found cups and poured coffee from an electric coffee-maker. He put a carton of cream on the table, and a bowl of sugar.

"You'll probably need to eat something," the baker said. "I hope you'll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said.

He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. "It's good to eat something," he said, watching them. "There's more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world in here."

They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he'd worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn't a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.

"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the flourescent trays of light. They talked on to the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

Yeah. ♥♥♥

The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones.

This was maybe perfect and everything I want from a story ever. Wondering between the worlds! Bringing trinkets back! Boarding school! Magic in a vaguely 19th century Victorian setting! Traffickers! Wordplay! Maybe I will stop exclaiming now.

It's also worth remarking, despite how cool and sexy he gets in the later novels, Christopher here is so not the highlight of the book (though I identified with him a lot, for sure - if I was also sulky and difficult as a child, does this mean I get to grow up irrepressibly magnetic and enigmatic???). Instead:

"She doesn't look as clever as you," he said. It was the only thing he could think of that was not rude.

"She's got her Very Stupid expression on," the Goddess said. "Don't be fooled by that. She doesn't want people to know how clever she really is. It's a very useful expression. I use it a lot in lessons when Mother Proudfoot or Mother Dowson go boring on."

A Very Stupid expression!!! I must procure one of my own, post-haste. Also, I would be fooling myself if I didn't say TACROY:

Tacroy's face lit up. "Are you bowler or batsman?"

"Batsman," said Christopher. "I want to be a professional."

"I'm a bowler myself," said Tacroy. "Slow leg-spin and though I say it myself, I'm not half bad. I play quite a lot for - well, it's a village team really, but we usually win. I usually end up taking seven wickets - and I can bat a bit too. What are you, an opener?"

"No, I fancy myself as a stroke player," Christopher said.

They talked cricket all the time Christopher was loading the carriage. After that they walked on the beach with the blue surf crashing beside them and went on talking cricket. Tacroy several times tried to demonstrate his skill by picking up a pebble, but he could not get firm enough to hold it. So Christopher found a piece of driftwood to act as a bat and Tacroy gave him advice on how to hit.

After that, Tacroy gave Christopher a coaching session in whatever Anywhere they happened to be, and both of them talked cricket non-stop.

Normally, I abhor sportstalk about sports I don't know very much in real life, but it's a pleasure to read (also see: oliphaunts' hockey fics). But this was even more charming than usual, oh my god. Hockey practice in different worlds!!! And also, I would love all the stories about their father-son / elderly-brother dynamic in the world, please:

"Somewhere in our world," he said, sighing, "there is a young lady who plays the harp and doesn't mind if I turn transparent, but there are too many difficulties in the way between us."

"Probably because Tacroy kept saying things like this, Christopher now had a very romantic image of him starving in his garret and crossed in love. "Why won't Uncle Ralph let me come and see you in London?" he asked.

"I told you to stow it, Christopher," Tacroy said, and he stopped further talk by stepping out into the mists of The Place Between with the carriage billowing behind him.

Like I said, ALL THE STORIES.

Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones.

I mean, really. The bored look he give the creature in the window! His snark! I think this has got to be one of my very favourite passages in the book:

Cat gasped at the way she spoke. Chrestomanci seemed perplexed. "How are you not having it?" he said.

"I won't put up with it!" Gwendolen shouted at him. "In future, my letters are going to come to me closed!"

"You mean you want me to steam them open and stick them down afterwards?" Chrestomanci asked doubtfully. "It's more trouble, but I'll do that if it makes you happier."

Ahahahaha, dude. I have no idea why I find that so impossibly funny but I do. Another thing I am going to dream about all the time now: what parallel lives I have in parallel universes! I love that Gwendolen finds her place in another universe as a figurehead Queen and is perfectly happy in there; it just make sense somehow.

Mixed Magics, by Diana Wynne Jones.

God, all the stories in here were so charming. My favourite in here, of course, was Cat and Tonino! Look, I just have a thing for shy children with appalling self-doubt in degrees practically crippling:

"I think I did stop him being sick," Cat said uncomfortably. Here was his old problem again, of not being sure when he was using magic and when he was not. But what really made Cat uncomfortable was the knowledge that if he had used magic on Tonino, it was not for Tonino's sake. Cat hated seeing people be sick. Here he was doing a good thing for a bad selfish reason again. At this rate he was, quite definitely, going to end up as an evil enchanter.

♥

Conrad's Fate, by Diana Wynne Jones.

Despite the fact that the premise (pulling probabilities, a really majestic castle I am now picturing as Downton Abbey, for some reason, TEENAGE CHRESTOMANCI IN SERVICE IN DISGUISE), I think this was my least favourite? Idk! For some reason all the threads of the book just didn't quite come together for me. Potentially that is my problem; I did sort of plunge through this book so I'm not sure I get all of this yet.

Teenaged Chrestomanci, though, so great:

After that, all the while Millie was eating the pudding - which started as jam roly-poly and then became chocolate meringue - we both tore Christopher's character to shreds. It was wonderful fun. Millie, from having known Christopher for years, found two faults in him where I only knew one. His clothes, she told me, he fussed about his clothes being perfect all the time. He'd been like that for three years now. He drove everyone in Chrestomanci Castle mad by insisting on silk shirts and exactly the right kind of pyjamas. "And he could get them right anyway by magic," Millie told me, "if he wasn't too lazy to learn how. He is lazy, you know. He hates having to learn facts. He knows he can get by just pretending to know - bluffing, you know. But the the thing that really annoys me is the way he never bothers to learn a person's name. If a person isn't important to him, he always forgets their name."

When Millie said this, I realised that Christopher had never once forgotten my name - even if it was an alias.

♥♥♥