In the Land of Ingary...

Sitting at my desk this morning at work, I found myself with the rather overwhelming need to sob. Not really sure how to handle it other than bursting into tears in the office, I went to my boss and confessed all: How this was incredibly silly and stemmed mainly from the fact that I'd been naughtily looking at facebook, sorry, and all that had happened was I'd found out my favourite author had died.

I have a history of over-attachment to authors. I went through an extended and unfortunate Enid Blyton phase as a pre-teen and remember crying when Roald Dahl (deservedly) won a best-loved children's author award instead of her. But unlike Blyton, whose books I long ago shipped off to a charity shop, Diana Wynne Jones has been a part of my life since I picked Witch Week up for the first time aged about 10.

As a young girl with an old-fashioned perspective and a lack of understanding about what many of my contemporaries were even talking about, as well as a fairly insistent belief that there had to be a more magical world on offer than the one I could see (I had a tendency to double-check wardrobes and I was forever picking up keys in the hope that I would find the door and it would lead somewhere exciting), there was a real identification with the fantasies that she offered. Rooted in a peculiarly English sensibility and with a surprising lack of sentimentality, I fell in love with her flawed heroes and heroines and their way of looking quite practically at the incredibly unlikely and difficult, generally magically-influenced, situations they found themselves in. Her plots were fun and convoluted, and the resolutions were these breathless whirlwinds of strangeness where everything would be tied up but often in a way where you felt like you'd been dreaming and woken up thinking that everything was in order but not in a way that you could ever explain to someone else. Often, re-reading her books, I'd get so excited about reaching the resolution that I would make sure to stop reading several chapters beforehand if I didn't have time to finish, in order to be able to revel in it.

It's difficult to pinpoint the book that I love the most as there are so many of them. Aunt Maria remains the most accurate depiction of the matriarchal control that I experienced from my maternal grandmother growing up. The real love of English that informs her books with multiple references to Shakespeare (such as the feuding families in The Magicians of Caprona), folk ballads (Fire and Hemlock makes reference to and updates The Tale of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer) and brilliant names like Market Chipping (I had no idea until a recent episode of University Challenge that the name Chipping comes from a word meaning market. I love how darned silly yet clever this is) show her playfulness and knowledge of the roots of the language. Witch Week is a precursor to Harry Potter; a boarding school for witch-children set in an England where witches are regularly burned in bone-fires mean that the setting is much darker than Rowling's even though the tone is lighter.

Then there are the characters. I've already mentioned that they are flawed and in some ways they remind me of Jane Austen's characters where they tend to obfuscate their true intentions due to shame or embarrassment or pride. There are some agonising moments as they realise their own feelings or that they've trapped themselves in something that they have no control over, often as a result of their own cleverness. The phrase "bleached with misery" is one of my favourites from Fire and Hemlock and the subsequent depiction of the protagonist Polly trying to suppress this misery with feigned jollity and feeling all the time as if she were trying to hold down a jet of sadness with her hands is one of the most visually and emotionally vivid sections of the book. Jones' men, who become even more interesting as the books grow more adult and they become love interests instead of father figures, are powerful men who, often as a result of their responsibilities, are interestingly imperfect. The most fun is Christopher Chant, most often seen as the vain Chrestomanci who becomes more distant and apparently distracted as he gets more stressed, and the most heart-rending is Mordion of Hexwood.

However, if I'm honest, although I am fond of many, my favourite is Howl's Moving Castle. More people are probably aware of it than most due to the Miyazaki film of the same name made about five or six years ago as a follow-up to the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (the only other adaptation of her work that I know of is Archer's Goon made by the BBC in the 90s, which should be on Youtube somewhere, have a look. It is pretty faithful to the book and appropriately mental). The film doesn't work for me and that's probably because I don't recognise the world or the people it shows and a lot of that is because it loses all sight of Jones' peculiarities and her characters become perfect versions of themselves. Although Howl still sulks through the medium of green slime, it isn't quite the same. He is noble in the film, which is so weird. Talking about Jones' flawed men doesn't even begin to describe Howl. To paraphrase Sophie, he is vain, shallow, mindblowingly arrogant, manipulative, terrible with money, a coward and those are his good points. He's also Welsh, confusingly, given that the book is set in another world to this one. Then there's Sophie, the book's narrator and the character that I relate to the most. She sounds like me and although she has some quite bizarre things happen to her, especially spending most of the book as a woman in her 70s, she reacts to most things in the same way I feel I would: Mainly by being amused at her own stupidity; talking to herself; adjusting to bad things surprisingly quickly; getting irritable and grouchy; and by having an endearing lack of common sense despite being fairly logical. Howl and Sophie are people that I feel I know. Their world is fantastic and their actions are often over-the-top but they themselves are completely believable human beings.

I think that is key to why I love Diana Wynne Jones so much. It's the ability to make fantasy real and joyous. Her books have made me laugh and cry, populated by characters that feel like friends, and are full of invention, fun and darkness. Although a writer for children, she never shied away from complicated, sad, deep ideas and I think she's been a big influence on the way that I view other people. I have grown up with her characters and I am grateful for the way in which she has touched my life with her wonderful, beautiful stories. "Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a strange, true, fact in it, you know, which you can find if you look". Fire and Hemlock