At this point in her nearly 40-year writing
career, fantasy master Diana Wynne Jones has fallen into a predictable pattern:
Throw a semi-sympathetic character into a hairy situation, then pile on the
overwhelming, distracting forces of chaos, skimming past deeper character
development while stirring the action up into a wild froth. Then resolve the
central plot thread with a short, sharp tug at the end. Each of her books
frequently reads like a collection of screwball comedies, distilled down to
their essence and poured together so plotlines cross and crash. The formula
isn't always satisfying, but it's inevitably a great deal of fast-paced fun.
Jones' latest, House Of Many Ways, is being billed as "the
sequel to Howl's Moving Castle," the 1986 fantasy classic that Hayao Miyazaki
loosely adapted into an animated film in 2004. But it's actually the second Howl's sequel, after 1990's Castle
In The Air,
and like Castle
(and like many of the other books in Jones' "series"), it's only tangentially
related to the first book, with some common characters turning up toward the
end.
House Of Many Ways starts abruptly with
sullen, bookish, spoiled teenager Charmain Baker being uprooted from her
parents' house and tasked with looking after an ailing distant relative who's
also her kingdom's royal wizard. But the second she arrives at his house, elves
show up to take him away for healing, leaving her in charge of a dismally
disordered, highly magical house with seemingly endless rooms. The problem is
that she was never taught magic, which her provincial parents didn't consider
"nice." And in short order she has to deal with an evil prince, a buglike
monster that wants to lay eggs in her, a plague of furious gnomes, a
well-meaning wizard's apprentice whose magic invariably goes explosively awry,
and a long-dreamed-of job assisting the king in his library. Then things get
really complicated.
Jones handles the burdens of half a dozen
interlaced plot threads with the deftness of long experience, though one of her
tricks for getting out of plot corners is just to make things wilder; she
barely skims the surface of her characters, because there's just too much going
on to give them time to think or talk among themselves for long. Her books
might almost qualify as comedies, if they didn't so often center on situations
where the characters are in dead and desperate earnest. Like Terry Pratchett,
she mixes plot and comedy comfortably; unlike Pratchett, she skips clever
wordplay in favor of water-slide speed and giddy thrills. Now in her mid-70s,
she shows no signs of slowing down, either in terms of how quickly she writes
or how quickly her novels move. Given how addictive slick, well-practiced books
like House Of Many Ways are, here's hoping she never does.