Towards the Fire

When I read Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, I was impressed by the complexity and detail of the plot; but even more impressed by the fact that the complexity wasn’t very obvious until the final chapters. It seemed a delightfully haphazard and eccentric book, until I realised just how important every little bit of the book actually was (not that this made it any less delightful to read).

The same thing applies to Fire and Hemlock, although I was more prepared for it this time; and the narrative voice is somewhat less chaotic. What I was not prepared for was how much I would love this book. I felt affection for the style and characters in Howl, but in the case of F&H it was more than this. I just might have fallen head-over-heels in love.

The novel is based on the legend of Tam Lin. It follows the story of Polly Whittacker from the age of 9 until 19. It begins with her just about to return to university for her second year. She is reading a book of stories that she swears were different when she first read them. This leads to her realising that a whole set of her memories has disappeared. She once thought that the main events in her childhood were her parents’ divorce, and the usual things like playing with friends and going to school; but there was once something else, too: her relationship with Tom Lynn.

She starts to recall her second, lost set of memories. She meets Tom Lynn, a cellist, at the age of 9, after wandering into a grand old house and accidentally gatecrashing the funeral of Tom’s ex-wife Laurel’s mother. He asks her to help him choose some pictures from the house that he is entitled to, one of which is Fire and Hemlock. They strike up a friendship which they mostly keep alive through letters, and during which they make up the adventures of Tan Coul, his assistant, Hero, and three other heroes who play with Tom in the Dumas Quartet; all of which have an unsettling habit of coming true. Laurel’s family also seem keen on trying to make Polly stay away from Tom.

At some point, Polly does something terrible which makes her, and others, forget that Tom even exists. She must find out what she did, and get him back. She deduces, from books that Tom has sent her as veiled messages (including The Oxford Book of Ballads, which includes Tam Lin), that Tom’s life is under the control of the beautiful and monstrous Laurel. Polly sharply employs Laurel’s “chilly, malicious logic” as a final attempt to save Tom from the fate that other musically gifted young men have suffered before him at the hands of Laurel and her husband, a.k.a. the faerie king and queen.

I’m aware that the synopsis above is woefully incomplete. There’s a lovely quote on Wikipedia from a journal article by Wynne Jones, in reference to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which influenced the structure of F&H. She writes that it “combines static meditation with movement in an extraordinary way, to become a quest of the mind away from the Nothing of spiritual death (Hemlock), towards the Fire which is imagination and redemption – the Nowhere.” A lot of F&H is indeed “static meditation”: Polly spends a lot of time living her ordinary life and pondering what steps to take next, while Tom, the Dumas Quartet, and the unsettling happenings connected to Laurel and family remain constantly in the background. There is magic and the supernatural in F&H; but there is also warmth, down-to-earth humour and huge intelligence. As some commenters say in response to the article that inspired me to read her, Wynne Jones manages to effortlessly combine so many elements in her books, and it’s practically impossible to tell how she does it.

It’s a shame that it’s taken me this long to discover her, and that she does not enjoy the amount of recognition that she obviously deserves. If I had spent my childhood reading the likes of Wynne Jones instead of (or as well as) Enid Blyton, Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club, not only would I have discovered a brilliant writer, but the many literary references in F&H would have led me on to other works that I’ve missed out on too. I suppose it’s not too late to start from scratch. In the meantime, though, I’ve pretended that I haven’t restricted my spending on unnecessary things, and ordered Charmed Life and Hexwood.