YHB finally came across Conrad’s Fate at the library, took it home, and read it. It was good: swift-moving, funny in places, and surprising.
I did notice that there is a bit of a theme running through Diana Wynne Jones’ses books of the main character having a family member who turns out to be a villain, or at least untrustworthy. In this one, and it’s already too late to put a spoiler warning here, isn’t it, our protagonist, Conrad, lives with his mother and his uncle, and the mother appears to be quite useless and vague, and the uncle is clearly a Bad Guy (although this is clear only to the reader, and not to Conrad). At the end, the uncle gets his well-deserved come-uppance, and various other baddies get theirs. And, as has become moderately common in these post-Harry Potter times, our young hero is rewarded by being recruited to attend boarding school. Well, effectively boarding school. Not the point.
The point is that our hero is Betrayed by a Loved One, and is recompensed by getting to Leave Home at an early age. I wonder how this feels to somebody who is, oh, twelve or so, reading it for the first time. It seems to be to be very different from the superficially similar motif I keep hocking about, where our hero’s family turn out to be Not his (or her) Real Family, and our hero is eventually liberated and sent to Real Relatives. I mean, in some ways it is similar, but the important thing in that motif is the genetic link to the outside (and the lack of genetic link to the Bad Family), while in Ms. Jones’sess’ stuff, it is a realio trulio uncle or aunt or such.
I wonder if it’s a Welsh thing. In conversation about the topic, an acquaintance brought up Roald Dahl’s stuff by comparison: Matilda, but also James and some others. I do think that it’s a British Thing, particularly the boarding school part of it. For a variety of good reasons, life at American boarding prep schools didn’t become a focus of American children’s literature.
But what I really wonder about is this: where I find the Not My Real Family motif both creepy and annoying, particularly from American authors, I don’t find the My Real Family Are Villains motif anywhere near as creepy or annoying. Why is that?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I think you may find this useful as an insight into why Diana Wynne Jones writes the way she does. Her early life is perhaps more fascinating than her books.
http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/autobiog.htm
Another reader mentioned that one of the things she liked about DWJ books was that turning up of an adult in the story is not the “deux ex machina” (so beloved by many other authors) to resolve the situations; this is true even when these adults have themselves been children (Christomanci series), they hardly appear to see, let alone solve, important issues.
I enjoy your blog and have read it many time, first comment though!