AND MAKE DEATH PROUD TO TAKE US.

hi! i ain’t rly here anymore, but you can find me on twitter at @aintstjames where sometimes i make stupid jokes about whatever weird esoteric nonsense i’m reading about :)

middlegradefantasy-archive:

I haven’t read nearly enough Diana Wynne Jones books to make viable claims about patterns in her writing, but from the five that I’ve read (Howl’s Moving Castle Trilogy, The Islands of Chaldea, Enchanted Glass) the thing that I like the best is her casual approach to magic.

Magic, in Jones’ books, isn’t so much complicated spells and studying as it is tied to someone’s feelings and the fabric of the world itself. Unlike the traditional, Harry Potter-style magic that is loud and bombastic, Jones writes magic like a calm, passive force. 

The best comparison that I can come up with is that traditional magic is a lot like a gun; a tool to be used, loud, noticible, dangerous in the wrong hands, and even in hands that want to do good, it’s easy to go wrong with it. Jones’ magic, however, is like oxygen: viable to the world it’s in, hanging in the air, invisible, but still noticible because you breathe it in on every turn.

I think that Enchanted Glass is probably the best example here. In Enchanted Glass, the main characters spend a lot of time exploring the limits of magic (sometimes literally), and figuring out their own ties to it. The magic in this book is defined by ‘fields of care’, which all have their own rules that need to be followed in order to maintain balance within the fields. At the same time, the magic in these fields of care is an essential lifeforce, and has been adapted into the residents’ lives, often without them knowing. 

Magic being an essential lifeforce rather than just being a tool to be used by wizards is a reoccuring theme in her books. The Islands of Chaldea is very noticible in this one (even though that book was finished by another author): the islands drive on their own types of magic, and the book explores all types. Not only that, but all islands have personifications of their magic, and at the end of the book, we find that one personification has been trapped by someone trying to use them for his own gain. This had profoundly negative effects on the island, so it’s made clear that those personifications are quite important for the continued well-being of both the island and its citizens. 

Another thing that Jones likes to play around with is the ties that magic has to the subconcious. Both main characters in Enchanted Glass have been using magic all their lives, but they had never noticed that they were doing it, partly because they repressed the thoughts of it, but mostly because the magic was so intrinsically tied to them that it’s almost as natural to them as breathing. The way they do magic is intertwined with their emotions and their subconcious wants, more so than with actual spells and tricks (though there ARE tricks to make magic do what you want). 

Howl’s Moving Castle (and the other books in that world) has the same approach to magic. Though there are wizards present in that book that can use spells in a way that’s similar to the traditional Harry Potter magic, Sophie, our main character, has been using magic all her life without realizing it. Her magic, too, is tied to her subconcious more than it is to any spells that she might know or learn, and the book makes it VERY clear that her magic is much, much more powerful than the traditional wizard’s. 

I’ve described Jones’ magic as passive, but really, that’s wrong. Jones’ magic is often either implied or actively stated to be alive; for example, in The Islands of Chaldea, we have the aforementioned animal personifications that very much have their own personality and wants. Even when the magic isn’t outright stated to be alive, it’s either implied or gives of the air of liveliness anyhow, such as in Castle in the Sky, when Sophie successfully talks the magic into making her and her companion go faster (i.e. implying that the magic has agency).

I don’t know where I’m going with this exactly, but it’s very interesting to see a form of magic used that is, at the same time, more alive and more passive than the traditonal type of magic, and that’s one of the reasons that I love reading Diana Wynne Jones books.