Your Humble Blogger had enjoyed Cart and Cwidder when it was a Bedtime Book some years ago. I had picked it up for a reread at some point but failed to get into it, so I opened it with some misgivings. Still, the bath was hot. And even if the second time through was not nearly as good as the first, I still liked it.
The main flaw is that I don’t particularly like the main characters. That’s a problem. The plot is a trifle slow to get moving, although it seems slower because I’m wasting my time getting to know these vaguely unpleasant people. On the other hand, the world is pleasant enough, and once we get going, there’s enough action.
Diana Wynne Jones does the sort of thing that’s fairly common in fantasy novels: our protagonist is a nobody from nowhere, who gets involved in some local brouhaha, and then finds out that the local brouhaha is being pushed by bigger actors from outside, and then in dealing with (or, more usually, fleeing from) those people, he discovers that they are being pushed by even bigger forces, and the next thing you know our hero is hobnobbing with kings and deciding the very future of the realm. It’s done quite badly, usually, and sometimes I find it annoying, just because—doesn’t anything bad happen to our hero that isn’t part of an evil plan to take over the world? In this case, it’s the version where our hero is already involved in politics, although he doesn’t know it, and many his obstacles are thrown up by people who don’t know that they are involved in politics on that level, either, so it works just fine.
The ending, though, which involves a massive amount of magic, seems to me so poorly realized that I can’t make a visual image of what ought to be a memorable set piece. Ah, well. Can’t have everything, I suppose.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.