I have been struggling mental-health-wise lately, and needed some comfort reading, so I reached for Fire and Hemlock, which has been my top comfort read ever since I first read it about thirty years ago. Despite that, it's a long time since I last actually read it from cover to cover, rather than just re-reading my favourite parts.

Fire and Hemlock is Diana Wynne Jones's take on the ballads 'Tam Lin' and 'Thomas the Rhymer'. It's not a retelling of either, but it takes as its central premise the idea that the Queen of Elfland in each ballad is the same person, and that Tam Lin and True Thomas are just two of her long string of human husbands. The latest husband is cellist Thomas Lynn, who has succeeded in divorcing the Queen (currently known as Laurel) when he meets ten-year-old Polly, who has accidentally gatecrashed a funeral party at Laurel's house, and Polly invents the story of Tom's secret alter ego, the hero Tan Coul, and herself as his assistant. Over the next few years, their relationship develops through a handful of meetings and numerous letters, as well as the books that Tom sends Polly from bookshops up and down the country, and yet, at the start of the book, Polly finds that she has forgotten Tom, having done something that caused him to vanish from her life and her memory and be drawn back into Laurel's clutches.

It's a complicated book, although at first glance it seems straightforward. The supernatural plot runs in a mostly-quiet counterpoint to the normality of Polly's 1980s childhood and the difficulties of her parents' divorce, occasionally building up to a crescendo and then dying away until the next time. There are lots of layers of meaning and references to myths, legends and other books; as well as the two ballads, the structure and imagery owes a lot to Eliot's Four Quartets (which I didn't read until long after I first read Fire and Hemlock), in particular the mixture of reality and unreality, Nowhere and Now-Here, that runs throughout the book. Even the good characters are often not very nice; Tom and Polly's friendship is clearly genuine, but that doesn't excuse the fact that Tom is using Polly to try to get free of Laurel, and that in turn doensn't excuse her betrayal, and there's an awkwardness about it as Polly's childish affection becomes a teenage girl's crush which is no less difficult to read for being very true-to-life. It's not an easy read, and even now I'm not sure I completely understand it*.

It remains one of my favourite books. I love the way the story builds up, with the truth gradually being revealed rather than coming as a single revelation. I love that Polly makes terrible mistakes, picks herself up and does what she can to set them right. I love the way DWJ's typical sense of humour pervades the book. And more than anything, I love the way this book describes the emotions Polly feels, the bleaching all-pervading uneasiness and the jet of misery that wells up inside her, because those are such perfect descriptions of the way anxiety and depression feel. I was pretty familiar with both of them by the time I first read the book but didn't even know that other people felt the same way, let along having ever read descriptions of them that I could identify with this way. So I love Fire and Hemlock more than any other of DWJ's books, and still turn to it when I'm struggling, because it's the book that told me I wasn't alone in feeling this way, and that the monsters in my head could be fought.

* One of the essays in DWJ's Reflections** talks about all the layers of meaning and influence she included, and it's worth seeking out.

** Flicking through Reflections after finishing Fire and Hemlock this afternoon, I also discovered that one of my Faculty members is DWJ's son and possibly the original of Sebastian Leroy.

As we approach the solstice and a time of year I generally find difficult*, I'm deliberately seeking out comfort reading and avoiding anything that might set off a negative thought spiral. I thought that Diana Wynne Jones might fit the bill, and went for The Dark Lord of Derkholm, which is one of the books of hers I missed when it was first published because I didn't think to check for new books by the authors I'd loved as a child.

The Dark Lord of Derkholm isn't exactly a sequel to The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which was published two years earlier, but its deals with the consequences for a fantasy world of the kind of tours that the Tough Guide purports to be a guidebook for. After forty years, the inhabitants are desperate to break the contract for the tours, which are a huge drain on resources; between planning, guiding the parties of tourists and putting on battles, ambushes and other events typical of a clichéd fantasy journey, no-one has any time to do anything else, and much of the land is left devastated by the required battles and sieges. When the Oracles suggest that the mild-mannered wizard Derk, whose skills are mostly in agriculture and breeding magical creatures and who just wants to be left in peace with his family and his garden, should be appointed as Dark Lord for the year, things don't quite go according to plan.

On one level, this is a very funny parody of fantasy clichés and, like the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, points out the unrealistic nature of much epic fantasy (quite apart from the fantastic elements). But it's also a serious novel about Derk, his wife Mara and their two human and five griffin children working together to deal with adversity; it isn't just a romp and is really quite dark in a couple of places. On a third level, just because it's set in a fantasy world and not the real world doesn't stop in making an important point about the impact of tourism and the negative effects adapting to service a tourist industry focused on the "authentic" experience of a country can have on that country.

***

Shira Glassman's Knit One, Girl Two is a sweet, if rather slight, novella about a romance between an indie yarn dyer and an artist, both of whom are also fans of a fictional TV series called Captain Werewolf. I really liked the references to knitting and geek culture throughout the book; it was cute and fun and if the writing was sometimes a bit clunky I really didn't mind that much.

* I really dislike Christmas; it isn't my festival, but it's so all-pervasive I can't just ignore it the way I can ignore Easter, and while having a break from work is good, having a break from work just when the days are shortest and when it's hard to actually go out and do things because everywhere is either closed or mobbed is not entirely helpful, as it does mean I end up with a lot of time on my hands in which depression and/or anxiety can easily spiral out of control

It's taken me several years to track down a copy of A Sudden Wild Magic, one of only two novels for adults written by Diana Wynne Jones (the other, Deep Secret, appears to have been repackaged as Young Adult to go with The Merlin Conspiracy, which is set in the same universe and features at least one recurring character, but is clearly aimed at a younger audience). Given how hard it was to get, and how little it seemed to be rated by reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads, I was a bit worried that it was actually going to turn out to be dreadful, particularly as the blurb on the back said "It is up to the Ring, a secret society of witches and warlocks dedicated to the continuance and well-being of mankind, to fight the virtuous, unbendingly traditional stronghold of Arth with an arsenal of psychological sabotage, internal dissension -- and kamikaze sex..." and I wasn't at all sure I wanted to read about kamikaze sex. (Spoiler: there is not actually any kamikaze sex in the book, although there are enough references to non-kamikaze sex that I can't see this being repackaged as YA any time soon. Someone makes a throwaway comment about it at one point, and the blurbers clearly felt that it would sell more copies. If you did want to read about kamikaze sex, this is not the book to do it in.)

Essentially, this is classic DWJ, full of witches and wizards, overlapping plots and interlinked multiple universes. Several of the plot threads reminded me of her other books, particularly Fire and Hemlock, but the familiar elements were combined in a different enough order that I didn't feel that was a problem. The main difference between it and the rest of her books is that while some of the central characters are young adults in their late teens/early 20s, most of them are older adults (including one wonderful witch of a certain age who reminded me a lot of Granny Weatherwax). I thought it was great fun, if a bit silly, with engaging characters, and while I don't think it's her best book I rather liked reading a DWJ about adults for once.

When I read Diana Wynne Jones's Dalemark books in the mid-80s, there were only three of them, and I didn't really get a lot of things in them as they were a lot more complicated than most of her other books which I was reading at the time. So when I found the fourth book (published in 1993, after I had gone to university and stopped looking in the children's sections of bookshops, because somehow it never occurred to me that the authors I'd loved five or ten years earlier were still writing new books) in the Oxfam bookshop a few years ago I bought it, and then bought the other three so I could re-read them and remind myself of what happened in them. I re-read Cart and Cwidder quite some time ago now, eventually moved on to Drowned Ammet last summer and picked The Spellcoats off the shelf this weekend.

( The Spellcoats )

( The Crown of Dalemark )