Backlisted - Fire & Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones

Episode Date: December 10, 2017

Author and illustrator Alice Stevenson and her childhood friend, playwright Elinor Cook join John and Andy to talk about Diana Wynne Jones's novel of memory, childhood and friendship.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)4'02 - Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward10'14 - The Journey Home and Other Stories by Malachi Whittaker17'13 - Fire & Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. So what have you been up to this week? Well, I had a really fantastic time in the Robin II. It's not Wolverhampton. Did I talk about this last week, Dave Hill?

No. Good, fine. Dave Hill from Slade? Bilston, yeah, Wolverhampton, near Wolverhampton. Not in Wolverhampton, very much not, because they have different accents apparently but anyway he was he was great on stage with mike reed uh he of uh radio one fame and you keep calypso asking you pretty good questions about his life

so dave what was it like recording the world's best-selling christmas single in new york in 1973 in the heat and davis it was it was they were sort of perched slightly awkwardly on stools world's best-selling Christmas single in New York in 1973, In The Heat. And they were sort of perked slightly awkwardly on stools. But it was great. And he played some of the less raucous late hits. He started off with their first number one, which was Cos I Love You. Or Cos I Love You.

Yeah, yeah. And they did you know Every Day and Far Far Away it was really good really great really sort of interesting the new Noddy the guy from the band really good singer and guitarist called John Berry was there

so Dave they played it's an acoustic set unplugged basically slayed unbelievably set, unplugged, basically. Slade, unbelievably. Slade unplugged, sort of. So that was fun. I like, in publishing terms... I like lots of the pop stars, certainly of that generation.

The good thing about them, if you're doing a book with them, is that they are hard workers. They really are. They're used to being drilled on the road in the 60s and 70s. Absolutely. You cannot stop Dave talking. I mean, he's brilliant he's brilliant he's a very very very funny storyteller um and uh he told some great cracking stories but the book the book is doing well but um hello and welcome to backlisted the podcast that gives new life to old books we're gathered in the hallway of a mysteriously shuttered up grand house in a small village in the Cotswolds,

having shinned over the imposing garden walls and entered via an unlocked French window. Please don't tell the people at Unbound, our sponsor, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and other books. And joining us today are Alice Stevenson. Hello, Alice Stevenson. Hello. And Eleanor Cook. Hello, Eleanor Cook. Hello. Eleanor is a playwright who won the George Devine Award 2013 for Most Promising Playwright.

The judges were most perceptive as Eleanor's most recent work, an adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady of the Sea, was staged at the Donmar Warehouse earlier this year. Wow. Well, Alice is an author and illustrator, educator and slow traveller. Her books, Ways to See Great Britain and Ways to Walk in London, showcase her beautiful drawings

and have discovered a new way to look at landscapes, both urban and rural, right up my country lane. That is right up your rambling i bought it under my own steam did you did i did you off your excellent website and it all came beautifully wrapped it was very the whole experience after so it was very great and the book does not disappoint it i absolutely love it i want to go and explore a lot of these places some i know some i've never heard of. Good. Which is all you want from a book.

Excellent. All I want from a book. And so the book Alice and Eleanor are in to talk about today is Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne-Jones. And I'm not going to tell you anything about Fire and Hemlock or Diana Wynne-Jones until we get started. But there's so much to say. We're going to try and rattle through the first bit so we have plenty of time to really dig into it. So I think I'll ask you, John. All right, fine. John, what have you been reading this week?

I've been reading a novel, an American novel by Jessamyn Ward called Sing, Unburied Sing, a novel that has recently won the National Book Award. It's a harrowingly beautiful novel set in Mississippi, the Mississippi coast. And it's a story of a family, Leonie, who is a mother and drug addict,

leading a pretty shonky life, living with her parents, who are kind of long-suffering and kind of sort of interesting they got in but everybody in the book has got interesting backstories but her husband who is she's black and he's white she's he's being led out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary and she is driving to pick him up with her 13 year old son Jojo and her daughter Micha. And the book is narrated by Jojo, the son, and Leone, and also at least one ghost, Richie, who is a former inmate of Louisiana State Penitentiary. It's a kind of a road movie.

They're going back. They pick up Michael, the husband, and come back home. It's bleak by turns. The language is incredibly Falknerian-y rich. I'll read a little bit to give you a... And, I mean, the journey, you know, you can freight it with whatever metaphors you want. There's a sense of it going...

It's the journey back to the penitentiary is a sort of journey back into uh american history into there's a lot of horrific tales of slavery murder um it's it's it's who does it remind you well it's kind of like a i mean you can't really get away in this in this it's not really a genre but writing about slavery and not be reminded of a book that you and I both loved and felt aggrieved that the Underground Railroad was not on the Booker long list still seems to me a very peculiar omission.

But it also, because of its use of ghosts and the idea of people from the past, kind of Leone, I mean, one of the things that is sort of strong is Leone can see the ghost of her brother who was murdered by a friend of her husband's. But given her brother is sort of there, she can see him. And Jojo is haunted by Richie,

who's the ghost of this boy that was basically, in the end, put in jail for stealing meat. I'm getting flavours of Lincoln in the Bldo from what you're getting um flavors of lincoln in the boulder yeah what you're saying yeah yeah it's kind of that's yeah i mean i you know it's one of those books i enjoyed it but i like i like the full-on florid yeah beautiful i'll read you a kind of a passage gives you a sense of it some people might feel it's you know that the darkness of the story is maybe obscured

by the language i know some some reviewers have said that but what do you do i mean i think you're trying to tell a very very dark story i mean it does feel to me that it's it's again trying to restore both the horror of of of america's past but also a kind of a challenge the journey is a sort of you know it isn't it isn't all darkness there are glimmers of hope particularly in jojo the young 13 year old who's trying to piece together you know he's got fairly dodgy role model in his in his own father but he has his his his grandfather who is um and he also has this strange relationship but i really really enjoyed it and i think if you're interested in contemporary American fiction,

she's kind of floated pretty close to the very top of the pile. It's not her first novel. She's written three novels before and a pretty extraordinary memoir. But someone to watch, I think. This is just a really good example. This is Leonie, the mom on her way back from the, she's picked up Michael from the jail and she's dreaming. When I wake, Michael's rolled all the windows down. I've been dreaming for hours. It feels like dreaming of being marooned

on a deflating raft in the middle of the endless reach of the Gulf of Mexico, far out where the fish are bigger than men. I'm not alone in the raft because Jojo and Michaela and Michael are with me, and we are elbow to elbow. But the raft must have a hole in it because it deflates. We are all sinking, and there are manta rays gliding beneath us and sharks jostling us. I'm trying to keep everyone above water, even as I struggle to stay afloat. I sink below the waves and push Jojo upward so he can stay above the waves and breathe, but then Michaela sinks and I push her up, and Michael sinks so I shove him up to the air as I

sink and struggle, but they won't stay up. They want to sink like stones. I thrust them up towards the surface, to the fractured sky, so they can live, but they keep slipping from my hands. It is so real that I can feel their sudden clothes against my palms. I am failing them. We are all drowning. You know, she does that thing, kind of, again, again, you can't get away from the journey as I lay dying, you know, that investing.

This is the, you know, the crack mom, you know, investing her with a level of kind of eloquence and metaphorical kind of esprit that, you know, is not attempting to be naturalistic. But I like that because I think why shouldn't ordinary, so-called ordinary characters not... I mean, that's surely one of the great things that literature can do is invest ordinary lives with kind of poetry and insight. This sounds like one of those books that I need to read quite soon before I get to the point where I feel I don't need to read it because I've heard too much about it.

I mean, it's... I have to this from you very very impressed with it it's you know it's not and it's not it's not a towering you know forever masterpiece but what it is is i think a really really she's she's only going to get become more important as a writer yeah you can sort of feel and it's a big big subject handled well andy what have you been reading uh i've been reading a collection of short stories by a writer called malachi whittaker called the journey home and other stories it's just been published by our friends at persephone books and malachi whittaker was born in the late 1800s in brford. She was one of 11 children. Her father was a bookbinder. In the mid-1920s, she started publishing stories in magazines.

She published a collection in 1929, and then three more followed in 1930, 1932, and 1934. And she then wrote another quite peculiar memoir called And So Did I. And that was it. She never wrote anything again. She died in 1976. And you haven't been able to buy any of her stories for 30 years. This is the first time any of her stories have been in print.

And she was very well known in her era. She was called famously the Bradford Chekhov. Ian McMillan is a great admirer of hers, our former guest Ian McMillan. And so I'd heard about her from him. This is the first time I'd ever read her. And first of all, I really love the stories. I'm going to read you a tiny bit from here

because I've got something else I want to read you as well. But this is from one of the stories called Smoke of the Tide. And this really gives you the flavour of it. It starts like this. A fair middle-aged man with a red face and prominent light blue eyes walks out of the door of a pleasant-looking cottage in the high street.

The name of the man was Albert Shepard. He had been born in the cottage which he had just left. Indeed, his father and mother still lived there, although all their children had married and left them. Albert was the youngest, and he had been the most successful. That is to say, in northern standards, he had made a lot of brass. He was married to a London woman, and did not often come home,

because she could not see the astonishing beauty of the industrial north. She thought it was dirty and depressing. The blue-grey landscapes with their design of mill chimneys, Marion called them smokestacks and nobody knew what she meant the rolling hills the mingling of smoke and cloud the white steam from the dye houses the cobbled streets and houses of black and stone all this meant nothing to marion it meant a great deal to albert shepherd he was never fully happy in the South. I mean, right, it's wonderful. So the stories are set in the North, and there's lots of dialect.

That comparison, the Bradford Chekhov... But it transcends the e-buy gum kind of... It absolutely is perfectly accurate in terms of both the Bradford and the Chekhov. And these stories really reminded me of an author, a writer that I talked about on Backlisted last year, I think. Or maybe earlier this year. Dorothy Edwards, anyway.

The Welsh writer Dorothy Edwards. From a similar kind of period, she published one novel and one volume of short stories. A volume of short stories called Rhapsody, I think. Absolutely terrific. Anyway, so this is the first time her stories have been available this selection was uh chosen by philip hencher there's an introduction by philip hencher who is a great supporter of her work as well and it has a an afterword by valerie waterhouse and in

the afterwards valerie waterhouse mentions a piece that malikiittaker wrote in the late 1930s about the books that she had read growing up called I Could Not Miss a Word of Ryder Haggard. And so this being the modern world, I got in touch with Valerie Waterhouse and said, I really enjoyed this. This piece by Malachy Whittaker isn't in print. You haven't got a copy you could send me

and he said yes I'll send it to you so I'm going to read you a tiny amount from this piece because if after having heard this you don't want to go and buy this book I would be very very surprised and I'd also like to thank Valerie Waterhouse for

sharing this with me this is the words of Malachi Whittaker writing in 1939 after she had stopped writing short stories. Perhaps it isn't the book but the feeling of life around one at the moment that makes the whole thing memorable. The books I remember with fondest love were mostly discovered in my teens. I was supposed to stay at home and help my mother with the housework to this day i cannot make a bed a bed to me anybody's bed was merely a place on which to fling myself and a story i had no sense of honor i would promise to work as heartily as i do today and with the same results the whole thing

flies out of my head as soon as a book gets in my hand she goes on to say for instance 16 is the ideal age to read the decameron i have a copy in the house growing old and musty and forbidding looking so that by the time the children are 16 they will find it innocently and yet hide it under the bedclothes as I did feeling there are things in it that no parents should see and that is true I reread it myself the other day but the first thrill is gone the little band of people flying from the plague idling in their lovely garden telling not so witty stories can't hold the whole of my interest as it did in 1911 and then John she goes on to talk about and this is the bit i really i just thought this is so wonderful she she devotes a paragraph to george gissing brilliant right now george gissing author

of new grub street and many other lesser well-known books listen to this this is one of those paragraphs you think okay this person is a real writer There was nothing wrong with gissing. His world was an unhappy one to a child, but it was a true one. New Grub Street, the unclassed, workers in the dawn, but I read all of gissing. I don't know where he lived, for I never look anything up. But if I'm walking in Bloomsbury at night and the British Museum looms through the fog and the lamps seem to flicker and there is the sound of a horse's hooves on the road

I always think that the dim weary figure letting itself into some dark doorway may be Gissing's ghost and I pray that his fire may be burning red and not be just a sad black pretense of a fire so that he can get on with his work this night and stop now and then

to warm his pen-stiffened hands and perhaps even make himself a hot drink before the cold dawn comes in through the curtains. But no, he will forget, and the fire will go out, and the lamp will smoke, and he will never notice until it's too late. Now that's an exclusive for the first time since it was published in the Bradford Mercury in 1939.

Anyway, that book is called The Journey Home and Other Stories by Malachi Whittaker. It's published by Persephone. I find it hard to believe that anyone who listens regularly to this podcast wouldn't absolutely love it. So, that said, we are now going to talk for a while about Diana Wynne-Jones and her novel Fire and Hemlock. There is a key fact that I haven't revealed about our guests, which will possibly come to light when I ask this next question. Alice and or Eleanor, where were you? What were you doing when you first encountered the novel Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne-Jones? I think you should start.

OK, so this is Eleanor speaking. I went to boarding school and all my friends were always getting parcels and packages and I felt a bit aggrieved that I wasn't getting any parcels. So I basically ordered my mum to send me a parcel, and um she did so and uh she sent me a package of books which is quite prescient considering the book that was contained within the parcel um i don't remember what the other two were but one of them one of them was fire and emmerich yeah but one of them was fine when when are we talking about it, Rafa? We can try and guess what it's going to be. So this was 1993.

I was 11. Yeah. And I read this book. It could have been anything, though. Yeah. Like, it wouldn't... Could have been a Philippa Pierce. John's head in his heart.

It wouldn't have been something of that time, I don't think. No, it was a classic, I think. It would have been a classic. Yeah. This was the wild card. The Fire and Hemlock was the wild card. That's quite interesting, though, because this Fire and Hemlock reading in Fire and Hemlock

is a big thing for Polly the Heroine, right? Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, go on. I interrupted you. Yeah, so I knew nothing about it. I started reading it. A teacher nicked it off me because I left it in a classroom. And she said, oh, you left it and I've started reading it,

so you can't have it back until I've finished it. So I waited with bated breath, finally. How far were you? Oh, I was at like a crucial bit. I was like three-quarters of the way through. Oh, damn her. So I finally got it back. But it sort of meant that the whole process of reading this book

felt really extended and epic. And finishing it at age 11, I think I've continued to read it pretty much every year since then. And this book has pretty much made it into, I think, everything I've ever written, all of my plays. One of my plays is kind of a reworking of the Tam Lin myth as well, which I'm sure we'll go on to discuss. But Alice can explain how she got hold of her copy. Well, I think I was recommended Fire and Hemlock by you. But as I said to you today,

and I don't know if you remember, but I think it was either in person or like a long phone conversation but before I read it you actually described and told me the story of it in great depth, probably took about two hours. It wasn't a summary, like I knew every scene. I don't remember this at all. Yeah, like you sort of much summarised it word for word.

I think you were so enthusiastic that you just told... Just to clarify, you have known one another since you were 11? Yeah, that's the crucial fact. No, since we're one. One and a half, yeah. Very small. All your lives. All our lives.

So I lent it to you. No, I think I got it from the school library. Oh, okay. it to you no i think no i think i got it from the school library okay because um my school library had a very good diana win jones selection so and i think i read it on holiday when i was about 11 on a family holiday and um i i was very excited for you to finish it. I'm fascinated to think what you made of it at 11. I mean, Polly is 10 at the beginning of the book. But it's a really complex... We should just say this book was published in the mid-80s

and it's published as in what would have been the teen bracket then and would probably be young adult now. But it's teen in the same way that redshift by alan garner's team and we will come back around to redshift i think yeah yeah i think i read it well we both read it very differently now i think when i was younger it was the sort of mystery and the kind of love story of it that really grabbed me which now is sort of troubling to think of a little bit consider it maybe that's a whole other thing we'll probably get on to yeah yeah go on no you go yeah and i think polly whitaker herself the protagonist who is

i've i struggle to think of a uh female character in a book for children as complex. Lyra Bellacqua, maybe. Oh, I don't know. We were talking about Lyra the other day and saying that we felt that Lyra maybe falls into that kind of... Lyra always seems to know what to do. She's very kind of naturally rebellious, whereas Polly is much more watchful. She's careful. She's always...

She's very good at reading situations. She's always trying to kind of protect the people around her. And she's very ordinary. And that feeling, yeah, reading it at that age, I think, reading a character of basically the same age as we were when we read it, who felt really raw, really real, was just so refreshing. So I'm going to read the blurb on the back of my 1990 edition, which we double-checked and is the same as...

We should just say, in fact, Eleanor's copy is your school's copy. Yeah, it's my contraband. Hang on, the teacher stole it from you. Right, so... You sent it to Alice and then... I don't know where the original one is but i was clearly very upset about this because i've stolen a copy from this we're not condoning library theft let's be honest but yeah there is the stamp here um it's a it's a crime in plain

sight if any librarians of wiltshire schools are listening. You know, go and check your shelves. Yeah, it's a contraband copy. Anyway, so they retained the blurb. I don't know what the... Well, you can tell me what the blurb on that recent edition is, but here we go. Fire and Hemlock. Halloween, nine years ago. She gate-crashed a funeral party at the big house.

She met Tom Lynn for the first time, and he gave her the strange photograph of the hemlock flowers and the fire but what has happened in the years between why has polly erased tom from her own mind and the rest of the world as well how could she have forgotten him when he had meant so much to her a gripping story of intrigue sorcery and love from an incomparable storyteller now we through several running jokes on bat listed have somewhat devalued the term storyteller which whenever we do we're now faced with it i feel bad about the thing about this book was uh is that um diana winJones is tremendously good

at doing a thing that many writers aren't, which is telling you a story which feels inevitable while at the same time you have no idea what is going to happen on the next page. Right? And this book unfolds in a way that I found totally fascinating because, as ever with books that I like, it didn't seem to be following any rules

we'll talk particularly about the last 30 pages of the book because you have both read it several times, I've only read it once what did you think John? You've not read it before No I haven't read it before, I hadn't read any Diana Wynne-Jones but I always, you know she was one of those writers who's absolutely been on my list largely because of the Howl's Moving

Castle, Studio Ghibli movie which is one of my was one of my boys favorites as they were growing up and i loved but i guess the thing i loved about the movie is sort of what's here in the book is it's again that strange feeling of not quite knowing where you are except an amazingly strong uh character in polly and there's a pretty brilliant cast of supporting characters her granny in particular her parents there's a there's a kind of a divorce I mean the odd thing about this book is on one level it's a it's a classic in the same way as say you know Curious Incident is about about a family breakup it's about a family where the mother and father decide they

all the mother certainly decides that she doesn't want to live with her husband breakup it's about a family where the mother and father decide that all the mother certainly decides that she doesn't want to live with her husband and it's difficult for the kid to so there's basic level family breakdown but then there's this other mythic structure that's going on and this strange appealing but not altogether uh easy to to relate to character Tom, who she forms a kind of a connection with, which is kind of the story of the book. And then obviously that will come onto the sort of the, the Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin sort of structures. What I felt a lot was,

well, I was really, God, I wish I'd discovered this when I was, you know, 11. Yeah. Unfortunately, I was 11, 11 years before this book was written but it's it's it's it's that it does feel to me that you know you in the great tradition of you know that includes alan garner and philipa pierce and susan cooper of um and i it certainly makes me think i want to explore more Diana Wynne-Jones

because I probably do want to re-read it because I think you read it once usually for the story Would one of you like to have a bit with one of the awful parents? I've got

the bit when she realises about Bristol that she's not actually welcome. Oh, that bit. We should give a bit of background to that because she's left her... Her mum has basically blamed her for the breakdown of her relationship. Her mother's sort of paranoid and thinks her new lodger, who she sort of put all her hopes on,

is now being secretive. She's obsessed with people being secretive. And now the lodge is being secretive, and it's sort of Polly's fault. And she sort of basically throws Polly out, blames Polly for this completely irrationally. Yeah, and sends her to live with her father. But basically, in Bristol, basically doesn't really

tell, I mean, there's obviously some miscommunication. Polly turns up thinking she's going there to live and soon realises that they think she's just come to stay. And she is, you know, it's the most hard, I think it's reading it now, it's to me the most sort of upsetting

but also the most effective part of a book in a way. Let's hear it. Okay. She was so bleached through by her uneasiness that she found it hard to eat even the small nut cutlet Joanna cooked for supper. Dad was now talking feverishly. Neither Polly nor Joanna laughed at his jokes. Joanna simply got up and went to fetch the sweet. She came back and set a glass of yogurt in front of Polly. Polly, she said, without wanting to pry, is there any chance

of you telling us how long this visit of yours is going to go on? Reg and I do have to go out tomorrow night as it happens. Shane bleached Polly right through. She knew now for certain that Dad had not told Joanna. He had simply hoped, or made himself believe, that Joanna would take to Polly, and Joanna hadn't. Oh, that's all right, she said brightly, without even having to think. I'm going tomorrow morning. What time train?

Joanna asked almost eagerly. Polly glanced through her hair at her father. There was profound and utter relief on his face. Ten o'clock, she invented. She was drowning in bleach. That look on Dad's face, mum had been right about him after all oh it's very good very good one of the things that i really loved about this book i felt diana win jones has set herself an ambitious task which she had successfully fulfilled yeah which was to

map adolescence so so so the character of poll, we meet her when she is... Ten. Ten, yeah. And we leave her when she is 19. And although there's a gap in the middle, nonetheless there is a year-on-year change in her character which felt very accurate, familiar to me in terms of that sort of... It's not so much the going through a breakup it's the falling

in and out of of relationships relationships with other girls and friendships nina so she starts she's sort of a bit large kind of spaniel like kind of overweight and ends up being a kind of minx vamp if not a bitch but also it's it's funny the way also you know nina kind of has the sort of privilege of being able to be rebellious because she's sort of from yeah exactly and if nina had narrated this book who and i feel like the nina character does does narrate a lot of books aimed at children that kind of naturally very rebellious and confident and brash it would be a less interesting book yeah i think yes i think yeah i mean i can't i can't help thinking of americat in um

yeah we always lived we always lived in the castle we did we we've always lived in the castle a few weeks ago who's who's another sort of circumstance dictate, in the same way that Polly dictates that she has to cope and deal and find a strategy. And I think Polly is really great. But like We've Always Lived in the Castle, the narrative of the book is driven partly by the external events, but by the psychological and emotional development

of the protagonist yeah you know that's what you that seems to me what's so fascinating yes garden a long way from the right and this sort of fantasy world and the real world are interwoven i think so well in this book like so cleverly there are you know it it's so difficult to sort of tell where one starts and one begins in a way and the emotion and they're sort of equal kind of emotional truth in both sides of it which i think is really clever because i think you could almost have the book without the fantasy element and it would still work but it wouldn't be the same because almost through the fantasy you can kind of really explore the the emotions and the feelings well we've got

we've got a clip here of um dina win j-Jones talking. She's talking here about the book, stroke, film that you mentioned, John, Howl's Moving Castle, but she's also talking about things in her work which are relevant to what you were saying, Alice, so let's hear that now. I was overwhelmed, actually. I thought it was wonderful. It was rich and strange, full of the most beautiful animation. And I was just, you know, sort of thrown back in my seat with amazement.

Because I've loved his work for about 20 years now, long before I knew he was going to make a film of mine. And when we met the other night, we discovered, at least I discovered, that he understood my books in a way that nobody else has ever done it really was quite striking and we we had through an interpreter a very long and interesting conversation about this you know it is um a story as i wrote it and as it occurs also in the film about if you love someone enough all sorts of extraordinary other things happen in your surroundings as well and you can achieve

great things even if the world falls to pieces around you you know and i i think both of us seem to be on the same track there, me and Mr Mirzaki. See, I think that's such a... That last thing that she says there about even as the world is falling apart, love can allow you to do great things, that's sort of one of the things that Fire and Hemlock is about. But also, Diana Wynne-Jones had a particularly miserable childhood.

Very hard, knowing that that not to read this book as a kind of autobiographical at least in terms of her the relationship to the really selfish mother and father yeah well she had these parents who were I think think, progressive educators. Slash child abusers. Slash child abusers. Although it's interesting because I was listening to an essay that her son Colin Burrow wrote in which he says, he suggests that perhaps the version of her childhood

that Diana Wynne-Jones has elaborated on is perhaps slightly steeped in exaggeration but nonetheless um the story goes that her parents um would make her and her two sisters um go and sleep in a shed um unheated unheated and um the dad would give them arthur ransom books but one a year he bought a complete set of the ransom but he decided to get the value for money by only giving them one volume and so you'd get to know that book pretty well yeah well so this is apparently where diana um began storytelling because she was forced to entertain her younger siblings yeah the other thing i i'd

like to say about diana win jones um is that as a writer so she was born in 1934 she studied english at oxford she attended lectures by c.s lewis and tolkey and he was reading lord of the rings which was one of the things that spurred her on to writing and she published her first novel in 1970 when she was 36 it's a novel for adults and then she has a big hit in the mid 70s with a book called a novel called charmed life and charmed life which i read this week i could barely concentrate it's really great book but i could barely concentrate on it because of how similar it is and i'm not the first person to say this thousands of people have said it how similar it is to the first Harry Potter. It is remarkable. And Diana Wynne-Jones said,

it was on the record as saying, I think J.K. Rowling probably read Child Life when she was a child. And it kind of suggested it. And once books are out there, they belong to everyone. But I can elaborate on this slightly because my wife Tina worked with Diana Wynne-Jones in the early noughties when her backlist,

a lot of her books in the 80s were out of print. She found it increasingly difficult to get published. And in fact, when Fire and Hemlock was published, she was not Flavour of the Month at all. Oh, wow. What happens is Harry Potter is a phenomenal hit. And our pals at HarperCollins look around for something, anything that has young wizards in it.

And they buy her backlist. And her backlist is re-promoted. And she finds whole new generations of readers and then how's moving castle comes along so she's back and tina i was asking tina this morning about dying what she remembered about diana win jones and she said well first of all i remember about diana win jones is uh she likes a cigarette that's the first thing and the second thing i remember about her is she was the most easygoing author i've ever worked with oh I'm so glad to hear that because because she'd seen it and she'd been through it and she understood that she was she was one of those writers who loved writing what she wanted was paper and pens

and everything else the fact that another author had come along who'd created this big market that hadn't been there five years earlier or was perceived not to have been there, great, fine, my book's about out there, you know. Which I think is fantastic. And so she was enjoying having another go round. That's nice to hear. That's sort of, but that kind of wisdom, I feel is absolutely there in the book at every turn.

You know, and funny, there are bits of the funny. I love this about The Three Musketeers by Dumas. She wondered why Alexandre was spelled wrong, but she'd seen the cartoon of The Three Musketeers. She thanked the librarian and took the book home to Granny's. It was difficult. Half the time she was not sure what was going on or why everyone lived in hotels. It was full of conversations where you could not tell which

person was speaking but Polly loved it even so. From the very beginning when D'Artagnan appears on his yellow horse she was utterly captivated. She loved huge portos and the elegant aramis but Athos was the one she liked best. best oddly enough despite the yellow horse and the fact that d'artagnan was long and thin she knew athos was the one who was most like mr lynn it's just it's i love that idea of of reading that we've all been that child reading a book that's probably too difficult for us but you kind of persevere absolutely should i read this yeah let's hear it so in the midst of her friendship with Tom Lynn, they've concocted these two characters

called Hero and Tan Kool. And she lovingly constructs a narrative which she proudly sends to Tom Lynn. Polly finished her huge narrative during the summer term. The day after she had finished it, she went round with the oddest mixture of feelings, pride at having got it done, sick of the sight of it and glad it was over,

and completely lost without it. By the evening, Lost Without It came out on top, and she began to make a careful copy in her best writing. The longer she spent copying, the more she admired it. Some parts were really good. The part in particular where Tanancool is wounded in the shoulder and Hero has to dress the wound. She strips off Tancool's armour and sees the smooth, powerful muscles rippling under the silken skin of his back. Wonderful.

Polly went round whispering it admiringly to herself. The silken skin of his back. She was still wonderfully pleased with that bit when she finished copying it at last. Oh, well done. Polly packed it in a vast envelope addressed to Anne, with a note asking her to give it to Tom. Then she waited for signs of applause and admiration from Mr Lynn.

Nothing happened for quite a while, and when it did, it was mr lynn felt strongly on the matter he had risked writing himself maybe this was because he was far away or maybe not the postcard was from new york it had two words written on it sentimental drivel it's the brilliant thing the brilliant thing is that like you know many of the books that we like on Backlisted, but it's a book about reading and writing you have Polly discovering how to write

in the course, this is why I mean it's such a clever book in terms of the development of the character the passage of observation of things that are happening and the way that gets transformed by story into fairy tale and you know the ending of the book with other things to talk about is you're i'm thinking i'm

not sure can i yes i can i can i can let this author take me take me to i i'm not sure i understood the ending no i i know I didn't understand the ending. But you've read it lots of times over a long period. So enlighten me. I mean, I take something different from the ending every time I read it, I think. And I think so much of it is about... That's because it's good. Exactly. And I love the kind of ambiguity of it.

And so much about Polly is her intuition and her instinctiveness. And it seems to me that the ending of this book is an absolute celebration of divorcing yourself from logic and absolutely following your instincts. And it has that kind of wonderful dreamlike quality. Yeah, she's a wonderful thing. She says, two sides to nowhere, Polly thought. One really was a dead end. to know where Polly thought. One really was a dead end. The other was the void that lay before you

when you were making something new out of ideas no one else had quite had before. So Diana Wynne-Jones died in 2011 and after she died I just want to read you something that her great supporter Neil Gaiman wrote

about her and I think this is relevant to what we were talking about her career and the strengths in her writing he said and this is from a book called Reflections it's the introduction of a book called Reflections on the Magic of Writing which is a collection of her non-fiction pieces Neil Gaiman said I'm baffled that Diana did not receive the awards and medals that should have been hers no Connie you meddle for start, although she was twice a runner-up for it. There was a decade during which she published some of the most important pieces of children's fiction to come out of the UK.

Archer's Goon, Dog's Body, Fire and Hemlock, the Crestomancy books. These were books that should have been acknowledged as they came out as game-changers and simply weren't. The readers knew, but they were, for the most part, young. I suspect that there were three things against diana and the medals firstly she made it look easy yeah much too easy like the best jugglers or slack rope walkers it looked so natural that the reader couldn't see her working and assumed that the writing process really was that simple that natural and that diana's works

were written without thought or effort or were found objects like beautiful rocks uncrafted by human hand second she was unfashionable you can learn from some of the essays in this volume just how unfashionable she was as she describes the prescriptive books that were fashionable particularly with teachers and those who published and bought books for young readers from the 1970s until the 1990s. Books in which the circumstances of the protagonist were as much as possible the circumstances of the readers in the kind of fiction that was considered good for you, capital G, capital F, capital Y, what the Victorians might have considered an improving novel.

Diana's fiction was never improving, or if it was, it was in a way that neither the Victorians nor the 1980s editors would have recognised her books took things from unfamiliar angles the dragons and demons that her heroes and heroines battle may not be the demons her readers are literally battling but her books are unfailingly realistic in their examination of what it's like to be or to fail to be part of a family the ways we fail to fit in or deal with uncaring carers. The third thing that Diana had working against her was that her books are difficult, which doesn't mean they're not pleasurable, but she makes you work as a reader.

Now, I really felt that with Fire and Hemlock. I felt I had to be on my metal yeah right to get the most out of it and while there are passages which are incredibly exciting and gripping and while emotionally and funny and all the rest of it nonetheless the intellectual flow of the book requires you to be on it is that did you is that something that you discover more as you got older when you've gone back to it i think i think the fact that we can reread it so frequently and never really be bored or you know i've read it twice something new yeah i've read it twice this year and i i'm not i'm not bored and i it feels like a discovery like i think it's so rich um and it's dense with literary allusions that obviously when you're 11 are completely lost on you like what um well I mean that the fact that the whole thing is

kind of based on the ballad of Tam Lin yeah um which which we should talk about um and the the many many books that Tom Lin sends to Polly are obviously the kind of literal literary allusions that are there. But this bonkers ending that Andy and John are both saying that they sort of struggled with is apparently based on T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets. I can... But Bert Norton is the beginning. I can read a bit of it yeah let's hear it okay there they were as our guests accepted and accepting so we moved and they in a formal pattern

along the empty alley into the box circle to look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown-edged, and the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, and the lotus rose quietly, quietly. The surface glittered out of heart of light, and they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird. Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present. Oh, well, he's pretty good. Now I get it. But that's the thing, isn't it?

It's just that it's the picture, the photograph that gives the book its title, which sort of is a kind of magical object through the book. But you're never quite... I mean, the book starts with her trying to sort of stimulate her memory by whether she gets a picture of people either putting out a fire or trying to get a fire to to to to start again and

that she's never quite sure whether the shadowy figures in the background are are real or not it's you're already in the in the realm of sort of mirrors and pools and shadows and reflections which i mean is kind of you get that sort of spine tingly thing with this book is that you're not going to get you're not going to get everything the first time around no and i think there's there aren't kind of fixed readings of it like i think you know because we talk about it and you know you can read it a different point in your life and sort of see it quite differently like and find more um kind of path it's i feel like it's a very patterned book like i feel like the themes and ideas that run through it kind of coordinate in really interesting ways like it sort of occurred to me reading it this time that there's a sort of echo in Polly's mother

of the idea of Laurel, of the witch. The queen of the fairies. Yeah, of taking, of sort of sucking, you know, kind of sucking the life out of men, of taking their lives. In a weird way, she's sort of doing that in this kind of slightly comical suburban way and yeah you know there are all these like different um happiness yeah you've got to go out

and get it oh i love that so okay so so ellen you were talking about tamlin so this book so this book is a is a based on the um ballad of tamlin as indeed alan Garner's Red Shift which we've covered on Backlisted at the start of the year is based on Tamlin Tamlin, the legendary ballad Child Ballad number 39 it's associated with a reel of the same name also known as the Glasgow Reel and we're going to do something now we've never done on Backlisted before

we are going to have a Backlisted round of University Challenge so we are going to play you and John you can play along, a setting of, this is your starter for ten. This is a performance of the Ballad of Tam Lin. I want you to tell me who is the singer. Oh.

Okay, so this is your starter for ten. Here we go. She had nipooda, double rosaros, but under brine. She had nae pooed a double rose, a rose but under brine. When out and started young Tamlin, says Lady Alpoo nae mare. Why poo ye the rose, lady, and why break ye the wand? And why come ye to Carterhough without my command? Sean, I do actually know, because I listened to it earlier this week.

Who is it? It's one of my favourites, Ewan McColl. So it's Ewan McColl. Is he the finger in the ear guy? He would not thank you. He would not thank you for saying, okay,

so that was it. So you go, congratulations team. You are now going to be played three adaptations of the Ballad of Tamlin by late 60s or early 70s folk rock groups. In each case, I want the name of the group and the singer.

Okay, so here's the first clip. He's just wanting to do this. Oh, this goes great. Great, let's go. Tamlin was a-walking on a bright morning Across the hills so green And he scared nothing for where he'd go Nor nothing for where he'd go or nothing for where he'd be

and that is Pentangle and the singer was Sheila I can never remember her name Jackie McShee and it's the Pentangle, technically speaking, is their building. That comes from a film of Tamlin,

which we're going to talk about in a minute. Like the doors. Like the doors. Absolutely, yeah. Okay, so that was Pentangle. Okay, let's have the next one, please. How dare you pull my rose, madam? How dare you break my tree?

How dare you come to God's home without the leaf of me? in my tree How dare you come to Carter Hall without the leave of me Well may I follow the road she said Well may I break the tree For Carter Hall is my father's

I'll ask no leave of me Steel Ice Pan, Maddy Pryor That is correct! Mitchinson Backlisted Let's hear the last one I grew up with that I forbid you maidens all That wear gold in your hair

To travel to Carter Hall For young Tamlin is there So that is Fairport Conventions and the singer is the inimitable Sandy Denny. Yeah. Hooray. Congratulations, you win the last bottle. There's also a fantastic version by Anne Briggs. Anne Briggs, yes, young, tamlin.

Yes, indeed. And what about the Benjamin Zephaniah version? Ooh, I don't know that one. It's about a girl who goes into a nightclub and ends up having sex in the car it's great oh my god how is that

searching for the weed oh my goodness so anyone who follows me on twitter will have seen me talking about it with

absolute rapture and disbelief there is also a film adaptation of Tam Lin called the devil's widow aka the ballad of Tam Lin

amongst key elements of this 1970 adaptation called The Devil's Widow, a.k.a. The Ballad of Tam Lin. Amongst the key elements of this 1970 adaptation, it has music by The Pentangle, as you've just heard, but it's also the only film that was ever directed by the actor Roddy McDowell. All filmed on location in Scotland, and it features the incredible cast of, amongst others, Ava Gardner, Ian McShane, Stephanie Beecham, Joanna Lumley, Richard Wattis, and the young Bruce Robinson.

The film director, Bruce Robinson, when he was still an actor, is in one scene. I watched this the other day with my jaw hanging open. The thing is, it's quite an odd film. I think it's a bad, not a bad film. Did you watch it? Yeah. I mean, it's very beautiful.

It's that very 70s, quite campy. Yeah. Ava Gardner really camping it up in some amazing gowns. Yeah. The clothes were amazing. I think the clothes were my highlight. Yeah. And you and McShane, you... Really handsome. amazing gowns yeah the clothes were amazing i think the clothes were my highlight yeah and you and mcshane you you you really handsome he was i just couldn't believe it i don't know who'd have

thought it he was so smoldering yeah he smolders but it follows the story of the ballet tell us the story because that's crucial and because you you've turned this into a play as well. Yeah, so the story is that the Elfin Queen has a bit of a penchant for young men, often called Tom. And she sort of captures them and sacrifices them for eternal life. And an amazing young woman called Janet, or sometimes Margaret in some versions, hitches her skirt above her knee and comes and rescues Tom, but not without him having previously had sex with her and impregnated her.

So it's quite a complex and hashtag problematic ballad. I think we can say it's not a spoiler alert. I think one of those, you know, as you talk about that, Eleanor, this is one of the things that I find I can totally see. I've only read it once, but I can entirely see that reading it again and again would throw up all sorts of different readings because the integration of the ballad with the fantasy elements,

which are quite thrilling, the ballad with the fantasy elements which are quite thrilling with the social realist kind of breakup of the the family unit plus then the the as i said the literary task of mapping a character's adolescence from beginning to end that's incredibly ambitious yeah no no less ambitious than what elliot was trying to do with Four Quartets. Absolutely, yeah. And everything that Neil Gaiman says, I felt that strongly, is that this is a kind of, because it's sort of for kids, but it isn't at all.

You know, this stuff tends to get, I mean, you know, Garner has suffered from this as well, that the real the these are not i mean they're only incidentally for kids i mean i think diana when jones was writing for children she's just trying to write a great novel which i think i think she's done it's a it's a really powerful haunting story i want to ask you one last question about this what's your favorite scene in the book or who is your favorite character in the book alice you first i was thinking about this because i feel that now reading it now i feel less sympathy towards tom and we think he's a tiny do you feel he does feel a tiny bit predatory doesn't he yeah He's a bit groomy.

Yeah, he is a bit groomy. I mean, he knows. You wouldn't be getting away with that now, would you? No. And he knows he is. I think he has a... He's very... You know, I think I was very much in love with him and probably am still to an extent,

but I think that actually... Why not? I think that's real know I think that's real I think you do fall in love with fictional characters and they don't you know they sort of especially when you read them at that age and you go back

I was in love with Alison in the Al service because that fantastic actress played her in the TV who turned out to be in really naughty movies but I think that later in the TV. We turned out to be in really naughty movies all the time. Didn't she? But I think that now,

you sort of think, reading it now, I feel that in some ways, it's not a sort of, you know, it's a problematic relationship. And actually, you think more and more, her real saviors actually granny and um her friend who I who annoys me a bit at Fiona Perks but you know they're actually the people who've kind of really got her back because Tom's sort of relationship with her is actually quite

selfish absolutely um having said that um uh in defense of of Tom, my favorite bit of the book is the moment where they finally kind of come together and have this incredibly passionate snog. Sort of snog? No, this is the real snog. Oh, the real snog. Yeah, so I'm going to read it. Tom put down his cello in the gateway and leaned against the left-hand pillar. Polly did not blame him for being reluctant to go in.

Let's not wrangle anymore, he said. I'm almost out of time. He held out a hand toward Polly. Polly stumbled over the cello in her hurry to get near and nearly fell against tom's chest they wrapped their arms around one another tom was more solid and limber than polly had expected and warmer and just a little gawky he threaded both hands into polly's damp hair and kissed her eyes as well as her mouth i've always loved your hair he said i. I know, Polly said. I mean, that kind of lovely, I mean, fairy tales, right?

Creepy as well as being kind of erotic, but also, so, yeah. The passion of that moment is just... Amazing. I mean, they're pent up. So compressed and so economically delivered. No, she's terrific. Well, thank you again for making us read it. Yeah. It's a terrific book.

I never would have read the book. No, absolutely. Oh, great. So glad you enjoyed it. Another backlisted classic for us. It's just such a treat. And I will definitely go back and read it again. And maybe some of the others as well.

I'd love to read, having watched the movie, Howl's Moving Cars. So I guess that's a good point for us to stop. Thanks to Alice Stevenson and Eleanor Cook, to our producer Matt Hall, and thanks once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, BacklistedPod, Facebook, BacklistedPod,

and on our page on the Unbound site, unbound.com forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, good night. I forbid you may talk I swear I've gone on your head