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coraaArcher's Goon
, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Goon who showed up at Howard's family's kitchen table, huge legs stretched out to take up the whole room, said he was from Archer, and that Archer wanted his "two thousand." But according to Howard's father, the two thousand Archer wanted was not money but words. And it wasn't just Archer who wanted it: all seven of the family of wizards (or whatever they were) who farmed the town wanted those words, for purposes of their own. And they were prepared to make things quite uncomfortable if they didn't get them....
This was the first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read, and while I've always been bad at picking favorites, this might be it. (That's your warning that this review is mostly an encomium.) It's part of what I call DWJ's odd standalones—odd not meant as an insult but as a genre designator—a class which includes A Tale of Time City
, Fire and Hemlock
, The Homeward Bounders
and Eight Days of Luke
. I say "odd" because they're not quite like anything I've found by anyone else: they are all set in our world, with secret or hidden magic, and the secret or hidden magic manages to be simultaneously very mysterious and very mundane in a way that's difficult for me to explain but that delights me to no end. And then there's DWJ's distinctive dry sense of humor, which permeates this book particularly.
Anyway. Archer's Goon. One of the things that I love most about this book is the way that the plot is a truly satisfying, sense-making, interesting plot that springs fully from character. In fact, it springs so fully from character that, on my first read-through, I was fairly certain that the plot was just an excuse for the characters to be fascinating (and fascinating they are, and often likable too)... and then at the end everything slotted neatly and inevitably into place precisely because of the way the characters had spent the prior two hundred pages being fascinating. It's beautifully done, and it's something I appreciate because I read books for character first, and so a character-driven plot that works so well is immensely satisfying.
And oh, the characters! There's Howard, the main character, who is smart and wry and sensible and daydreamy all at once. There's his little sister Awful, who I love to pieces: she's one of the least-romanticized child characters I've ever seen (she lives up to her name, let's just say), and who is nonetheless quite charming in her own Awful way. There's the Goon, who I came to like a great deal almost against my will, on the first read-through, and who now on re-reads I like from the beginning (which works, too). There's Howard and Awful's parents, who are delightful and infuriating by turns, and who neither solve the problems themselves nor are particularly useless. (Well, Howard's father is kind of useless, but for reasons that are in character and not just 'it's a kid's book, he has to be useless.') And then there are Torquil and Hathaway and Ginger Hind and Archer and Dillian and Shine and on and on. The book has a ton of characters, and they're all distinct and interesting, and some of them I love and some of them I want to punch in the nose and it all works.
There are other things that I love and want to talk about, but they're, hmm, varying degrees of spoilery. Here, I'll give you two cuts: one for things that are mildly to moderately spoilery but that, IMHO, won't ruin your book-enjoyment, and another for things that I suspect you would not want to know before your first read-through. (If you click the first cut, have no fear; I will make it boldingly clear at what point the spoilers switch over.)
Moderate spoilers
One thing that I really like about this book, and that I think is one of DWJ's strengths, is that the fantastic elements are explained enough to make sense, but no more, which gives the whole thing a great sense of the mysterious even though the book is thoroughly grounded in daily-life details. For example: the seven siblings that run the town—what are they? As far as I can see, the book never explains where they came from or why they have their powers. Howard's father calls them "megalomaniac wizards," but he doesn't have any special knowledge; they could be wizards, or they could be demigods, or fey beings of some kind, or Sufficiently Advanced persons, or... or who knows. It doesn't matter especially. We don't need a D&D classification or an essay on the origin of magic in humans. The important thing is who they are, not what they are, and the mystery remains mysterious.
The other thing I liked was all the little domestic details of what they did after Archer turned off the power and Torquil made the shops inaccessible to them and so on. Cooking over a fire made from the broken chair in the backyard! Sleeping under the mattress instead of on it! Frying an egg in a real hurry during the brief periods when the gas was on! Mostly I just love domestic details.
Big bad spoilers
I'll give a few lines here to be safe.
How's that?
Okay: One of the really fun things about rereading this, that makes it a very rereadable book, is watching the plot get set up in ways I didn't even notice the first time around. The two biggest things to watch for are a) hints that the Goon is Erskine, and b) hints that Howard is Venturus. Sure enough, hints to both are there, and sure enough, they whistled right over my head on the first read-through, but were obvious enough that my reaction to each, when it was revealed, was not "Huh?" but "Oh, of course!"
There are also, more subtly, hints that the Goon is really coming to genuinely like the Sykes family, and hints as to which of the seven siblings are redeemable and which are not. (My response, upon first reading the book, was relief when they determined not to put Torquil up in the rocket along with Archer and Shine and Dillian, but it wasn't until the second read-through that I began to notice the indications that Torquil was not a bad guy despite his self-centeredness. In that way he's a bit like Howl, I think.)
But really, I think my favorite part of the Howard = Venturus thing is related directly to his relationship with Awful. In his birth family, he was not only the youngest, he was the spoiled youngest who everyone had to watch out for and who pretty much always got his way, and who was fated to be more powerful than any of them. But on his second time through being part of the Sykes family, he was the responsible elder brother of a pretty thorough brat, and it's clear to me that it's precisely that that caused him to grow up, that third time, into someone who was not going to be an insufferable spoiled monster. (And since he has his memories of both growing up as Venturus and growing up as Howard, he can see both sides of it—having been the obnoxious and yet left-out littlest and having been the responsible and rather put-upon elder—which hopefully will help him keep Awful from growing up too much like Shine....)
And seeing both sides of that makes both the Goon/Erskine's anger at him, and Torquil's attitude, make sense. And makes it comprehensible to Howard/Venturus, bringing it all full circle.
Anyway, this is a beautifully-plotted book with a lot of great characters, and I'm sad that it's out of print. Recommended.
EDIT: Spoilers welcome in the comments, so be aware of that if you are unspoiled!
, by Diana Wynne JonesThe Goon who showed up at Howard's family's kitchen table, huge legs stretched out to take up the whole room, said he was from Archer, and that Archer wanted his "two thousand." But according to Howard's father, the two thousand Archer wanted was not money but words. And it wasn't just Archer who wanted it: all seven of the family of wizards (or whatever they were) who farmed the town wanted those words, for purposes of their own. And they were prepared to make things quite uncomfortable if they didn't get them....
This was the first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read, and while I've always been bad at picking favorites, this might be it. (That's your warning that this review is mostly an encomium.) It's part of what I call DWJ's odd standalones—odd not meant as an insult but as a genre designator—a class which includes A Tale of Time City
, Fire and Hemlock, The Homeward Bounders and Eight Days of Luke. I say "odd" because they're not quite like anything I've found by anyone else: they are all set in our world, with secret or hidden magic, and the secret or hidden magic manages to be simultaneously very mysterious and very mundane in a way that's difficult for me to explain but that delights me to no end. And then there's DWJ's distinctive dry sense of humor, which permeates this book particularly.Anyway. Archer's Goon. One of the things that I love most about this book is the way that the plot is a truly satisfying, sense-making, interesting plot that springs fully from character. In fact, it springs so fully from character that, on my first read-through, I was fairly certain that the plot was just an excuse for the characters to be fascinating (and fascinating they are, and often likable too)... and then at the end everything slotted neatly and inevitably into place precisely because of the way the characters had spent the prior two hundred pages being fascinating. It's beautifully done, and it's something I appreciate because I read books for character first, and so a character-driven plot that works so well is immensely satisfying.
And oh, the characters! There's Howard, the main character, who is smart and wry and sensible and daydreamy all at once. There's his little sister Awful, who I love to pieces: she's one of the least-romanticized child characters I've ever seen (she lives up to her name, let's just say), and who is nonetheless quite charming in her own Awful way. There's the Goon, who I came to like a great deal almost against my will, on the first read-through, and who now on re-reads I like from the beginning (which works, too). There's Howard and Awful's parents, who are delightful and infuriating by turns, and who neither solve the problems themselves nor are particularly useless. (Well, Howard's father is kind of useless, but for reasons that are in character and not just 'it's a kid's book, he has to be useless.') And then there are Torquil and Hathaway and Ginger Hind and Archer and Dillian and Shine and on and on. The book has a ton of characters, and they're all distinct and interesting, and some of them I love and some of them I want to punch in the nose and it all works.
There are other things that I love and want to talk about, but they're, hmm, varying degrees of spoilery. Here, I'll give you two cuts: one for things that are mildly to moderately spoilery but that, IMHO, won't ruin your book-enjoyment, and another for things that I suspect you would not want to know before your first read-through. (If you click the first cut, have no fear; I will make it boldingly clear at what point the spoilers switch over.)
Moderate spoilers
One thing that I really like about this book, and that I think is one of DWJ's strengths, is that the fantastic elements are explained enough to make sense, but no more, which gives the whole thing a great sense of the mysterious even though the book is thoroughly grounded in daily-life details. For example: the seven siblings that run the town—what are they? As far as I can see, the book never explains where they came from or why they have their powers. Howard's father calls them "megalomaniac wizards," but he doesn't have any special knowledge; they could be wizards, or they could be demigods, or fey beings of some kind, or Sufficiently Advanced persons, or... or who knows. It doesn't matter especially. We don't need a D&D classification or an essay on the origin of magic in humans. The important thing is who they are, not what they are, and the mystery remains mysterious.
The other thing I liked was all the little domestic details of what they did after Archer turned off the power and Torquil made the shops inaccessible to them and so on. Cooking over a fire made from the broken chair in the backyard! Sleeping under the mattress instead of on it! Frying an egg in a real hurry during the brief periods when the gas was on! Mostly I just love domestic details.
Big bad spoilers
I'll give a few lines here to be safe.
How's that?
Okay: One of the really fun things about rereading this, that makes it a very rereadable book, is watching the plot get set up in ways I didn't even notice the first time around. The two biggest things to watch for are a) hints that the Goon is Erskine, and b) hints that Howard is Venturus. Sure enough, hints to both are there, and sure enough, they whistled right over my head on the first read-through, but were obvious enough that my reaction to each, when it was revealed, was not "Huh?" but "Oh, of course!"
There are also, more subtly, hints that the Goon is really coming to genuinely like the Sykes family, and hints as to which of the seven siblings are redeemable and which are not. (My response, upon first reading the book, was relief when they determined not to put Torquil up in the rocket along with Archer and Shine and Dillian, but it wasn't until the second read-through that I began to notice the indications that Torquil was not a bad guy despite his self-centeredness. In that way he's a bit like Howl, I think.)
But really, I think my favorite part of the Howard = Venturus thing is related directly to his relationship with Awful. In his birth family, he was not only the youngest, he was the spoiled youngest who everyone had to watch out for and who pretty much always got his way, and who was fated to be more powerful than any of them. But on his second time through being part of the Sykes family, he was the responsible elder brother of a pretty thorough brat, and it's clear to me that it's precisely that that caused him to grow up, that third time, into someone who was not going to be an insufferable spoiled monster. (And since he has his memories of both growing up as Venturus and growing up as Howard, he can see both sides of it—having been the obnoxious and yet left-out littlest and having been the responsible and rather put-upon elder—which hopefully will help him keep Awful from growing up too much like Shine....)
And seeing both sides of that makes both the Goon/Erskine's anger at him, and Torquil's attitude, make sense. And makes it comprehensible to Howard/Venturus, bringing it all full circle.
Anyway, this is a beautifully-plotted book with a lot of great characters, and I'm sad that it's out of print. Recommended.
EDIT: Spoilers welcome in the comments, so be aware of that if you are unspoiled!
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 07:05 pm (UTC)Wait, it's slipped out of print again? Argh!
---L.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 08:55 pm (UTC)Maybe I'll request The Continued Adventures of Awful and the Goon for Yuletide.
...And yes, it's out of print, woe! As are most of DWJ's stand-alones. I had to order A Tale of Time City and The Homeward Bounders used, too.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 09:00 pm (UTC)Truer words.
I have always, always, always wanted a sequel because I desperately want Awful as a teenager being conflicted about trying to farm the world.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 09:12 pm (UTC)I think this was the first read-through where I realized that the Goon liked them so well because he wanted a family that was semi-functional. Of course, it's rare that you can get your wish by literally shooting your worst family members off into space, but who hasn't wished they could do that?
I agree; I think there must be a fascinating story about Erskine and Awful and Venturus, ten years later. I'd love to read it.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 12:04 am (UTC)published poet
Date: 2011-05-21 10:04 am (UTC)[IMG]http://www.sedonarapidweightloss.com/weightloss-diet/34/b/happy.gif[/IMG]