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The DWJ Project: Fire and Hemlock
Apr. 20th, 2011 05:52 pmThis is the other book that had to be put up at the top of the reading order: The Lives of Christopher Chant because it's the first one I read, and Fire and Hemlock because it is, as I've said before, the book that made me a writer. Since this month is the five-year anniversary of my first novel being published, the time seemed very right to re-visit it.
As with Lives (and a few others to come), I'm going to cheese out a bit on writing up broad commentary and just point you at my recommendation from 2004. This is, as I say there, a "Tam Lin" story (and a "Thomas the Rhymer" one, too); it's because of this book that I picked up Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which in turn became one of the foundational inspirations of the first novel I ever finished writing. But it isn't a straightforward retelling of either of those stories. It is, instead, its own riff on the idea, with its own twists and solution.
For many years, I would have told you I didn't understand that solution. In some ways, I still don't -- I mean, I kind of do, but slim as this novel is, I never feel like I can quite hold the entire shape of it in my mind at once. Bits keep slipping through my grasp. This used to bother me a lot, and I blamed it on the fact that I first read the book when I was nine; having gotten a certain form of not-understanding into my head, I couldn't let go of it and see what was there. Then I read this two-part post by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks, and that referenced an old essay by Diana Wynne Jones that I was able to find online (pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), and you know what? I no longer feel the slightest bit ashamed of not being able to comprehend this whole book at once. The layers that went into it boggle me: not just "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," but the Odyssey, and Cupid and Psyche, and a T.S. Eliot poem I'd never read that turns out to be quite important, not to mention all the trios I'd never consciously thought about, Nina/Polly/Fiona and Granny/Ivy/Polly and Laurel/Polly/Ivy. Re-reading it this time, I bent my brain in half mapping out similar trios among the men. The novel is worlds more complicated than I ever consciously noticed before.
(In case you didn't guess, you shouldn't read those essays without having read the book first. Spoilers, and a lot of stuff won't make sense.)
I never thought of DWJ before as the sort of author who would do that kind of intricate weaving within a narrative (hah, the irony of deploying my usual textile-based narrative metaphors for this). I've always known she was an incredibly strong storyteller, but now I find myself wondering if I'll spot anything as elaborately layered in her other books, or if Fire and Hemlock is going to stand apart from the others in that regard. I know it's always felt different; only The Homeward Bounders ever seemed comparable to me. But as I go back for this project, I may find it has other cousins among her work.
Okay, behind the cut for more spoilery bits.
( Read more... )
As with Lives (and a few others to come), I'm going to cheese out a bit on writing up broad commentary and just point you at my recommendation from 2004. This is, as I say there, a "Tam Lin" story (and a "Thomas the Rhymer" one, too); it's because of this book that I picked up Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which in turn became one of the foundational inspirations of the first novel I ever finished writing. But it isn't a straightforward retelling of either of those stories. It is, instead, its own riff on the idea, with its own twists and solution.
For many years, I would have told you I didn't understand that solution. In some ways, I still don't -- I mean, I kind of do, but slim as this novel is, I never feel like I can quite hold the entire shape of it in my mind at once. Bits keep slipping through my grasp. This used to bother me a lot, and I blamed it on the fact that I first read the book when I was nine; having gotten a certain form of not-understanding into my head, I couldn't let go of it and see what was there. Then I read this two-part post by
rushthatspeaks, and that referenced an old essay by Diana Wynne Jones that I was able to find online (pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), and you know what? I no longer feel the slightest bit ashamed of not being able to comprehend this whole book at once. The layers that went into it boggle me: not just "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer," but the Odyssey, and Cupid and Psyche, and a T.S. Eliot poem I'd never read that turns out to be quite important, not to mention all the trios I'd never consciously thought about, Nina/Polly/Fiona and Granny/Ivy/Polly and Laurel/Polly/Ivy. Re-reading it this time, I bent my brain in half mapping out similar trios among the men. The novel is worlds more complicated than I ever consciously noticed before.(In case you didn't guess, you shouldn't read those essays without having read the book first. Spoilers, and a lot of stuff won't make sense.)
I never thought of DWJ before as the sort of author who would do that kind of intricate weaving within a narrative (hah, the irony of deploying my usual textile-based narrative metaphors for this). I've always known she was an incredibly strong storyteller, but now I find myself wondering if I'll spot anything as elaborately layered in her other books, or if Fire and Hemlock is going to stand apart from the others in that regard. I know it's always felt different; only The Homeward Bounders ever seemed comparable to me. But as I go back for this project, I may find it has other cousins among her work.
Okay, behind the cut for more spoilery bits.
( Read more... )
