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Diana Wynne Jones, growing up, and unreliable narrators
Let the Monday “Booktalk” posts commence! 
I’ve been on a Diana Wynne Jones rereading kick lately. It started with Hexwood and proceeded to the Chrestomanci books, of which The Lives of Christopher Chant is my favorite by far, and one of my favorites of all of her books — mainly because I think the things I like most about her books are more clearly on display in this one than in many of her others.
I didn’t start reading DWJ ’til I was an adult. I expect I would have liked her books as a kid, but I think I might’ve appreciated them in a different way — more seduced by the sense of wonder, less distracted by how the plots go (or don’t go). As an adult reading her books, I sometimes find the plots very hit-or-miss, and in particular the endings frequently leave me feeling let down or simply frustrated. She has a meandering approach to plot that breaks just about all of the standard plotting rules at one point or another — important characters fail to appear until halfway through her books, critically important plot elements may be held back until the very end, Chekhov’s Gun may or may not fire, etc. It’s a style that feels much more like an oral storytelling tradition — someone telling you a story — than a lot of fiction tends to, and sometimes I really appreciate it for its lack of artificiality, but sometimes it just completely misses the boat for me.
But the thing I love most about her books, that keeps me coming back to them, is the layered-ness of the characters, and in particular the way the characters are presented to the reader. One thing that frustrates me about a lot of fiction aimed at kids is the flatness of the character presentation. Good people and bad people are evident at first glance; they wear their goodness or badness on the outside. (Good people pretty, bad people ugly….) And certainly they don’t do both good and bad things at once, so you can’t even tell how you’re supposed to feel about them …
But DWJ’s characters are complicated and surprising. Her hapless protagonists have to guess, like everyone in the real world, about who the good and bad people are: who to believe, who to trust. And often they guess wrong (frequently misjudging other characters based on superficial attributes), only to figure things out over the course of the book.
Many of her books deal with a particularly challenging aspect of growing up — the way that your perspective on other people, and yourself, tilts as you mature and begin to recognize your own humanity in other people, and become aware of the flaws in yourself.
I enjoy all of the Chrestomanci books to one degree or another — I’m currently reading The Pinhoe Egg, which doesn’t seem at all familiar, so it’s possible I’ve actually never read it before — but The Lives of Christopher Chant has always been the book in the series that stood out the most to me.
(Spoilers follow.)
The thing about the book that I’ve always found the most memorable is the extent to which Christopher is an unreliable narrator, not because he lies to the reader but because of how much he doesn’t understand about the world, and about himself, until near the end. Christopher initially assumes, as many children would, that smiling people who give you nice presents are your friends, and stern people who don’t particular care for you as a person and make you do things you hate are your enemies. And in most children’s books, he’d be right.
Here, he’s about as wrong as he can possibly be. Part of what makes the book so memorable, though, is that it’s not merely a 180-degree reversal. There are layers within layers. The cheerful smiling people are doing horrible things, and Christopher is in for some ugly revelations when he learns what his seemingly harmless errands are really doing. But there’s a lot more to it than that. The people he initially mistakes for the bad guys are really the good guys, but they are using him; he wasn’t wrong about that. And while the person he used to think was his only friend turns out to be complicit in terrible things, the friendship and loyalty is genuine.
Basically, people in this book, as in a lot of her books, don’t break down into nice neat categories of good and bad, so Christopher has to figure out for himself who to trust, who to believe, and whose side to take.
He’s also having to deal with some less-than-pleasant realizations about himself, not merely the epiphany that he was tricked into doing some bad things (and I was genuinely surprised at how dark these books get; I’d forgotten that “bad”, in this case, actually means “complicit in genocide”) but also that he’s not a particularly nice person himself. Even more or less knowing this, it still surprised me all over again how sympathetic DWJ makes Christopher considering how entirely unsympathetic he is when we get a glimpse of him from other people’s viewpoints. Through Christopher’s eyes, though, his coldness and superiority over the people around him are entirely justified, until all his illusions about himself and the world start to break down at the end. But even there, he’s not entirely wrong, nor is he forced to let go of his flaws in order to triumph. Christopher’s flaws — his egotism and tendency to reframe events so he’s in the right — are things that can actually be harnessed to be useful, as long as he’s able to overcome his selfishness enough to use it for good purposes rather than bad ones.
I’m really not sure how much of this I would’ve gotten if I’d read the book at ten instead of twenty-five and, now, thirty-eight. It’s one of those things where you almost have to have gone through this sort of change of perspective in order to appreciate it, I suspect. Which obviously is not to say that someone who’s ten couldn’t enjoy the book, or understand it. I can imagine, though, reading the book as a kid and rereading it as an adult and having a whole different reading experience. (In one of these posts, I really need to talk about Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory, and how different an experience it was reading it in my mid-20s versus reading it in my late 30s. It’s not that I didn’t get it intellectually at 25, but wow, reading it at 37 kicked me in the teeth.)
Crossposted from Wordpress.
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