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.

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Another book picked up in the collapse of Borders, another taken off the shelf to try and posh up my reading list, another arguably SF novel by a mainstream writer that seems to be trying to avoid genre associations, another that it's hard to discuss without massive spoilers. Which you might want to avoid, so stop now OK?
Sometimes a work contains such a big reveal that it can never be seen in the same light for a second time. Last year I watched Sixth Sense with a then girlfriend. She hated ghost stories, but (surely by now we all know the Sixth Sense twist?) because it wasn't presented as a ghost story she enjoyed it. At least up to the reveal. I doubt she would watch it again, even though it is one of those films that does reward a second watching, as the director's craft is so clear, as clue after clue is presented only to be ignored. The first time round anyhow.
Never Let Me Go strikes me as such a work, and with the recent film it's almost impossible to avoid the big reveal, but you can still appreciate the craft behind it.
Do we all know the big secret? Kids growing up in a slightly odd private school in the country, destined to be organ donors for the rich and powerful?
Within the book the talk is of Donations. A nice fluffy word. I have made 33 (blood) donations, but the young donors of Never Let Me Go make only four, presumably the Fourth Donation is the heart.
Its an engaging and powerful book. One of those ones that you read and wonder quite why it didn't win the Booker. Was the competition especially strong that year?
So. Organ donation. Altruistic in our world, murderous exploitation in theirs. But had you such a world, in which people accepted the morality of rearing clones like cattle, how to treat them?
Here they are educated, taught to be artists, encouraged to love, while subtly being taught that they are less than human, that their duty is to offer their bodies for their metters. Is that better than to just farm such people in concentration camps? While the characters wish for a 'deferment', they barely rail against their fate. Some even relish getting on with it.
Quite a thin book, but complex and challenging. Well worth reading. I don't have answers to any but it's most obvious questions. Is that just because the concept, of young people being raised and indoctrinated with the idea that it is their duty to give up their organs for others is just too alien?

Perhaps. But we still partially cling to the old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori, at least as far as soldiers go. I can certainly believe the premise of the story that had we bumbled into a state where medical science made such things possible, we would fight tooth and nail to come up with reasons to imagine that the clones saving our lives were less than human, that our lives mattered more. God knows, otherwise respectable people said much the same thing about South Africa.
The oddity is that society is otherwise, apparently so mundane. It would be a very dull book if written about technocrats in floating skyscrapers exploiting an underclass, and probably that dull book has been written. But this isn't it, the questions are good, and I worry a bit that I don't have the answers.

After America

By John Birmingham

After several 'worthy' books, some trash thriller. Sequel to the slightly better 'Without Warning' which I read last year and needs to be explained for this to make any sense at all.
There is a rather idiotic dream possessed of some Guardian readers that the world would be a better place without the USA, or slightly less stupidly, without George W. Bush. In WW something weird and still unexplained happens, and the inhabitents of the continental USA vanish in a shimmering energy field on the eve of the Iraq invasion.
Distressingly for Guardian readers, the world does not become a better place. Israel using a fair portion of it's nuclear arsenal on it's neighbours before they can overrun it makes sense. The French banlieu riots of XXXX developing into a full scale civil war less so. And then, nine months later, the energy field vanishes. That's the first book.
Where the focus of WW is international, AA is largely concerned with the attempts to recolonise the mainland USA. There are American survivors, trying to rebuild and reassert their nations authority, a cowboy plot, a spy story, a military story which grows to consume much of the second half of the novel. It makes reasonable sense and is an OK page turner, but hardly great literature.
The disappointing thing is the degree to which nothing gets resolved. While the first book obviously set up a sequel, this is really only the first half of that sequel. Still, it's an effective page turner. I'll not be rushing to get hold of the third book, but I expect I'll pick it up sooner or later.