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Centaurs and ugly sweaters
Apr. 11th, 2014 08:24 pmFor no particularly good reason, I didn’t read a lot of Diana Wynne Jones growing up. I read Howl’s Moving Castle in college, but if I read any of her stuff as an actual child I don’t really remember it (I have dim memories of checking out The Dark Lord of Derkholm but I don’t remember a damn thing about it except the cover art). I’ve just finished reading Deep Secret along with the Mark Reads community, and I definitely suspect I may need to reconsider this whole “not reading Diana Wynne Jones” thing. Because Deep Secret was a hell of a book. It definitely wants rereading (or relistening to, maybe) sometime.
The two main characters in this book are Rupert Venables, a “magid”, and Maree Mallory, a young woman with an unfortunately interesting family and a possible magid candidate. Magids are, essentially, people with magical powers whose job it is to do various behind-the-scenes fixing of stuff to keep a bunch of different worlds (there are lots of parallel universes here, it’s great) moving “ayewards,” which basically means closer to the more-magic-having end of the parallel universe spectrum.
Rupert has two, seemingly unrelated pieces of business to attend to: one involves the succession of the politically unstable Koryfonic Empire, a brutal sort of place inhabited by paranoid militants and some cranky matrilineal centaurs. The other is to suss out who is the best candidate from the list of possible magids given to him by Them Upstairs to replace his just-deceased mentor Stan (temporarily sticking around as a disembodied ghost voice confined to Rupert’s car), to which end he ties all their fate lines together to draw them to a fantasy/scifi convention at the eminently strange Hotel Babylon. While stuff with the Koryfonic Empire’s succession gets increasingly creepy and starts to spill over into the real world, most of this spillover goes generally unnoticed at the convention because cons are weird places anyway. Maree is mostly just trying to deal with her dad having cancer and being poor and going to vet school and having just been dumped and living with her terrible aunt Janine and taking care of her younger cousin Nick and trying to stop having weird dreams about a judgy thorn-lady, but weird Magid business will find her whether she knows anything about it or not.
The convention setting is possibly my favorite part of the book, now that I have actually been to a few conventions. It’s interesting seeing it from the perspective of a non-nerd who has no idea what the hell he’s getting into; it’s also a ton of fun seeing how absolutely spot-on it is about the kind of stuff that goes on and the people you meet at conventions. I also had fun playing SPOT THE NERDY REFERENCE. The grand poobah of all nerdy references in this book, though, is the scene of Nick eating breakfast before waking up, which is apparently based on a real-life incident with Neil Gaiman.
This story is impressively plotted in a way that makes me despair of every being a fraction as good. It’s full of seemingly random shit but, in the end, there are no coincidences whatsoever. All the disparate-seeming plotlines ON DIFFERENT WORLDS ultimately tie together into one big complex Game-of-Thronesian succession scenario, and none of it is obvious, and none of it feels strained either. It takes forever to figure out who the bad guys really are but once you do it’s all I NEVER LIKED THAT PERSON ANYWAY so it’s actually quite satisfying.
Additionally, Rupert and Maree have an adorable Elizabeth-and-Darcy kind of dynamic, where they hit it off really badly and annoy each other hilariously in the first part of the book, but keep getting thrown together for plot reasons until they learn that the other one is actually awesome. (The reader kind of gets to go through this discovery too because Rupert is a bit of a douchebag in the earlier part of the book.) By the end of the book they are almost as adorable as the quack chicks, which are basically cuddly little blue ducks.
This is a wug, not a quack chick. But it’s close. I think.
The magic system is a bit vague at times but what we do get to see of it is very physical, it reminds me a bit of the Wise Child books at times. A lot of it requires mundane, natural materials; the incantations are generally entire poems, and there’s a truly impressive bit where Rupert puts a geas on someone that sounds more like the world’s most severe court sentencing than anything else.
The book also has a very large range in tone that few authors can pull off without giving emotional whiplash (Sarah Rees Brennan is also quite good at this)—it goes from murdered children to nerds thinking a real centaur is just a really good cosplay in short order, but it all works. It’s distinctly, but not overwhelmingly, eighties and distinctly, but not overwhelmingly, British.
Overall I thought it was finely crafted and quite enjoyable, even during the times when I couldn’t stand any of the characters except Maree.
The two main characters in this book are Rupert Venables, a “magid”, and Maree Mallory, a young woman with an unfortunately interesting family and a possible magid candidate. Magids are, essentially, people with magical powers whose job it is to do various behind-the-scenes fixing of stuff to keep a bunch of different worlds (there are lots of parallel universes here, it’s great) moving “ayewards,” which basically means closer to the more-magic-having end of the parallel universe spectrum.
Rupert has two, seemingly unrelated pieces of business to attend to: one involves the succession of the politically unstable Koryfonic Empire, a brutal sort of place inhabited by paranoid militants and some cranky matrilineal centaurs. The other is to suss out who is the best candidate from the list of possible magids given to him by Them Upstairs to replace his just-deceased mentor Stan (temporarily sticking around as a disembodied ghost voice confined to Rupert’s car), to which end he ties all their fate lines together to draw them to a fantasy/scifi convention at the eminently strange Hotel Babylon. While stuff with the Koryfonic Empire’s succession gets increasingly creepy and starts to spill over into the real world, most of this spillover goes generally unnoticed at the convention because cons are weird places anyway. Maree is mostly just trying to deal with her dad having cancer and being poor and going to vet school and having just been dumped and living with her terrible aunt Janine and taking care of her younger cousin Nick and trying to stop having weird dreams about a judgy thorn-lady, but weird Magid business will find her whether she knows anything about it or not.
The convention setting is possibly my favorite part of the book, now that I have actually been to a few conventions. It’s interesting seeing it from the perspective of a non-nerd who has no idea what the hell he’s getting into; it’s also a ton of fun seeing how absolutely spot-on it is about the kind of stuff that goes on and the people you meet at conventions. I also had fun playing SPOT THE NERDY REFERENCE. The grand poobah of all nerdy references in this book, though, is the scene of Nick eating breakfast before waking up, which is apparently based on a real-life incident with Neil Gaiman.
This story is impressively plotted in a way that makes me despair of every being a fraction as good. It’s full of seemingly random shit but, in the end, there are no coincidences whatsoever. All the disparate-seeming plotlines ON DIFFERENT WORLDS ultimately tie together into one big complex Game-of-Thronesian succession scenario, and none of it is obvious, and none of it feels strained either. It takes forever to figure out who the bad guys really are but once you do it’s all I NEVER LIKED THAT PERSON ANYWAY so it’s actually quite satisfying.
Additionally, Rupert and Maree have an adorable Elizabeth-and-Darcy kind of dynamic, where they hit it off really badly and annoy each other hilariously in the first part of the book, but keep getting thrown together for plot reasons until they learn that the other one is actually awesome. (The reader kind of gets to go through this discovery too because Rupert is a bit of a douchebag in the earlier part of the book.) By the end of the book they are almost as adorable as the quack chicks, which are basically cuddly little blue ducks.
This is a wug, not a quack chick. But it’s close. I think.
The magic system is a bit vague at times but what we do get to see of it is very physical, it reminds me a bit of the Wise Child books at times. A lot of it requires mundane, natural materials; the incantations are generally entire poems, and there’s a truly impressive bit where Rupert puts a geas on someone that sounds more like the world’s most severe court sentencing than anything else.
The book also has a very large range in tone that few authors can pull off without giving emotional whiplash (Sarah Rees Brennan is also quite good at this)—it goes from murdered children to nerds thinking a real centaur is just a really good cosplay in short order, but it all works. It’s distinctly, but not overwhelmingly, eighties and distinctly, but not overwhelmingly, British.
Overall I thought it was finely crafted and quite enjoyable, even during the times when I couldn’t stand any of the characters except Maree.
