Will this be more successful than the silent method? Who can say.
After some difficulty I located Enchanter Glass, the most recent novel by Diana Wynne Jones.
Diana Wynne Jones is one of my favourite authors, despite the fact that I think her last great novel was the adult-oriented Deep Secret. Her novels since have been decent, more imaginative and lively than others in her field, but far from the instant classics of some of her earlier works. Enchanted Glass is not a return to form — expecting this of an author recently diagnosed and operated on for lung cancer is beyond absurd. But the book is delightful, a breath of fresh, imaginative air after a near decade of sequels (except for the novella The Game, with which I had problems that I don’t think I should go into at this juncture). I read it in two nights.
Like many of Jones’ classics, Enchanted Glass is set in a world very recognizable to our own, with aspects which are not so much differences as additions. Her trademark of magic in mundanity is represented in full force (a grumpy gardener who has a gift for growing truly enormous produce for the sole purpose of triumphing in the village exhibition, a young woman with a knack for horses who can vaguely divine the future by reading the results of races in the paper, and so on). The favourite theme of duality is here, more blatantly and strongly than in any work since A Sudden Wild Magic. It is utterly English, from the setting to the mythos Jones draws upon as the novel progresses, and very modern (to a point where it’s almost startlingly – being so used to her contemporary fantasies having been written in the ’80s, it is a bit of a shock to find computers and cell phones about the place).
What is definitely the bulk of Jones’ work is that the first character we meet, almost definitely the main character, is not just an adult, but one who is middle-aged, a university history professor. Later a pre-teen boy, who has recently lost the grandmother who raised him, appears, on the run from a combination of social services and dangerous magical forces, but the book is as much about him as it is the professor. This is so unusual, so noteworthy and against genre conventions, that I have to wonder if Jones originally intended, or hoped, for this to be an adult novel, and changed her mind, or was talked back into the safety, and possibly the greater profitability, or her traditional market. Some of the material is dark, or shades to it, and while Jones has never shied away from dark material, that coupled with the adult protagonist makes me wonder.
Here as well, more so than in some of Jones’ recent works, is a feeling of something /more/. Jones often leaves loose ends and doesn’t neatly tie up her plot into a convenient package, but here it is more noticeable than usual. It’s odd and one of the few blemishes in an otherwise outstanding little novel. I enjoyed reading it and I think it is better than Jones has written in years, but I am still left with a sense of something off, a novel that was detoured away from the author’s original intentions, or ended more abruptly than Jones may have planned.
I haven’t actually seen any responses to Enchanted Glass; I think the American market is getting it several months after those of us in the Commonwealth, and it could be, quite possibly (and sadly) that in the absence of a tie to her well-recognized Chrestomanci and Castle series, the little book will be easily overlooked.
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