Hexwood

By Diana Wynne Jones

Are you of the age to remember Jackanory? A BBC childrens storytelling series, in which an actor would read a story, intercut with some illustrations, over the course of a week, sometimes two.
That was where I first encountered Diana Wynne Jones, who sadly died of cancer a few weeks ago.
Putting on a story a week, for most weeks of the year, Jackanory went through a lot of books. Very few stuck with me. There was Arabel's Raven, by the late, great, Joan Aiken, illustrated by the godlike, and happily still living, Quentin Blake. There were Quentin Blake's own mad stories, which would begin with him in front of a perfectly white board, and would be illustrated as he went along. There were Leon Garfield's stories about Georgian artful dodgers, whatever did happen to him? There was something about a cave boy and his tame mammoth. I keep trying to remember him as Little Plum, but he was a Red Indian from the Beano.
And there was Diana Wynne Jones, telling stories of magic and mystery. 'Dogsbody', in which Sirius, the star, is accused of murder and sent to learn humility on Earth. 'The Ogre Downstairs' in which a chemistry set (do children still have chemistry sets?) turns out to have a rather unusual set of substances, and we find out just what's in those blue and red bottles chemists used to have in their windows. There was 'Cart and Cwidder', to be honest a rather lacklustre story about political oppression in a fantasy land, the first book of a sequence that didn't really sparkle until the later books.
I was reading her books as well, the Chrestomanci books in particular shaped my ideas about what magic could and could not do. Well, that and Bewitched.
Then, I'd guess at about the age of 14-15, I stopped reading 'children's' books.
It was 5 years later that I came back, meaning that I'd missed the start of Diana's really productive phase in the eighties, which meant that I just had more available to read. Joy.
And now Diana is dead, and unless there are any final manuscripts clutched in a editor's hot little hands, there will be no more. So I thought I should re-read something.
But which? Such choice. 'Howl's Moving Castle', which works so much better as a book than as a film? 'Archer's Goon', which I say directly inspired Gaiman's Sandman, even if no one else can see it? 'Eight Days of Luke', which may have similarly influenced 'American Gods'. 'Dogsbody', 'The Power of Three', the Chrestomanci series. All had their appeals, and over the next several years, when I need light comfort reading I expect I'll come back to them all.
Instead I chose Hexwood, which is quite possibly Diana's most fiendishly complicated book.
If there was a common theme to Diana's more mature works (meaning those where she had matured as a writer, not those where she was trying to write for a more adult audience) it was that things were never what they initially seemed. Someone would be under an enchantment, indeed, if there was a McGuffin, and there generally was, it would always turn out to have been in the book from the first chapter, and moderately often would turn out to be the viewpoint character.
Hexwood does all all that and lays it on with a trowel.
There's a machine that turns dreams into reality. There's a magical wood that warps time and space, an echo of Holdstock's Mythago wood if ever I met one. A girl who has adventures with a magician who is raising the child that may overthrow the sinister bureaucrats who rule the galaxy. The bureaucrats chief assassin who dreams that he is a magician in a wood, or perhaps a dragon. The bureaucrats getting sucked one by one into the dreams. The girl is perhaps an extra-terrestrial conspirator dreaming that she's an earthly schoolgirl, or perhaps the sinister bureaucrats that she conspires against are themselves part of the fiction. The Fisher King suffers from an uncurable wound, failing to remember his past lives, there are outlaws and dragons, a robot, the Grail and hints of a one-eyed wanderer.
That's a lot to fit in. Couple that with the competing magics of the dream machine and the wood twisting time to fit their own purposes, so that characters first met wrapped up in fictions are then introduced in their (possibly) true forms. All very complicated.
It all very nearly fits together perfectly. There are a couple of characters introduced from left-field right at the end to mesh the whole thing together, but on the whole it comes as close as could be reasonably expected. It's a tribute to Diana's ability though that this is a 250 page paperback. Many writers wouldn't be able to tell this story without three plus volumes of 4-500 pages each.