So. I finished rereading the Dalemark quartet with The Crown of Dalemark. Again, mostly enjoyable, but not really great.
The odd thing I noticed when reading Crown was the time factor. In this one, there’s a more-or-less modern girl who goes back to the time of the first two books, that is, back about two hundred years (from her point of view). If we take her to really be more-or-less modern, that takes us back to 1800 or so. And that fits some of what we see in the world, although not very closely. There is steam power, and there’s a start at railroads. We know that during the next generation, there’s an Industrial Revolution.
The problem is that neither of the first two books feels to me like they are set around 1800. I suppose that the second book ought to; a large part of it is set in an early gun factory. But it doesn’t. Perhaps the freedom fighters are supposed to remind me of the French and American revolutionaries; they don’t. The first book feels to me as if it is set in Elizabethan times (or fantasy-Elizabethan times, if you know what I mean). There are big cities, but no organized trade routes. Communication is by horse-messenger, and there isn’t much of it, and what there is, is slow. There’s no Pony Express. There’s no Post Office. There is a Post Office in the fourth book (the part of it that’s set in pre-Industrial Dalemark), and there are universities, of sorts. The second book is set largely in a city (and the other part on board a boat, so there aren’t a lot of cultural clues, particularly to a desert rat like YHB), but we don’t see much of the actual workings of the city. Other than the gun factory, there isn’t much industrialization.
Now, the world is a fantasy world, not our world, and I understand that. Things don’t have to match up exactly. Nor is Diana Wynne Jones responsible, even in two-and-a-half books, for detailing the entire socio-politico-economic situation in her fantasy world. Furthermore, the first time through the series and most of the way through the second, it didn’t bother me. But eventually it did, and I suspect that if I go through a third time (and I probably won’t for many years) it will get right up my nose, from the very first chapter of the first book.
Ah, well.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.