#fh readalong

[no-where-new-hero]

I need to figure out just for my own satisfaction why the majority response to Dean Priest of the Emily trilogy is so negative, while the majority response to Tom Lynn of Fire and Hemlock is just kind of…neutral? Like I’ve seen people acknowledge that Polly/Tom is a little bit weird and the age gap is a problem, but it doesn’t translate to violent hatred of Tom as a character. And I’m trying to figure out if the difference lies in the way that their respective authors write them, write the relationship, or if the difference lies in the reader base. Honestly, though, I wonder if it comes down to the fact that Polly knows and acknowledges that she wants to be in love with Tom, while Emily rejects Dean’s romantic love and only wants his friendship. AKA, in one pairing we get the possibility of an equal happily ever after, and in the other pairing, it’s predicated on inequality with no chance of being anything else. Maybe that’s the key that I need—the way that Polly vs. Emily negotiate their way in, out, and through the relationship. Because otherwise, Tom and Dean really act quite similarly—they befriend the young Polly/Emily, give them books to read, kind of hang around and illuminate the world for them—and they do it for their own benefit. It’s true that Tom isn’t angling after Polly to marry her the way Dean seems to be, but at the end of the day, *Fleabag voice* it is a love story. I feel like it’s just kind of splitting hairs because Tom still gets Polly to rely on him the way Emily does to Dean. So it seems to me that the difference lies not so much in Tom vs Dean as Polly vs Emily.

Anyway, I’m curious if any other LMM and DWJ fans have thoughts about this difference in reception.

[ksfoxwald]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong: Extra Thoughts

Still thinking about the Nowhere vases in Chapter 2, particularly what Seb doesn't quite reveal about them.

"You," Seb said. "Took something when you came to our house, didn't you?" "I am not a thief!" Polly said angrily. "I didn't even break and enter. The door was open and I went in." "You didn't eat and you didn't drink and you worked the Nowhere vases round first."

And I've been chewing on the idea of what the Nowhere vases actually do, and when I finally got around to the answer it seemed so obvious I'm surprised I missed it.

The "not eating and drinking" rule is what allows you to leave Fairyland. The vases are what allow you to enter. Had Polly simply walked back in - or rather, had Tom not shown her the vases -she would only have seen the ordinary things that the Perry Leroys wanted her to see. But because Tom showed her the vases, and how to look between the No Where and Now Here and see both at once and in between, she has now entered Fairyland. And though she has left the house, she can never truly leave, because things seen cannot be un-seen.

[no-where-new-hero]

I hope someone out in the tumblr world will understand this, but Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones is a kdrama to me. Consider:

Mr Lynn is the friendly/romantic ajusshi to the MC.

Laurel is the scary chic chaebol lady who weirdly hates the MC.

Seb is the chaebol heir bound to his responsibilities that he doesn’t want and wrapped in a love/hate relationship with the MC.

There’s the thematic emphasis on the quotidian and the ability to make everyday life absurd but meaningful.

There’s the troupe of supportive side characters (the Quartet) who are/have always been implicated in the main story.

There’s the borderline abusive parental situation.

So much school drama despite not being a school story.

Token musical performances.

MEMORY LOSS.

Goblin parallels abound (mostly visually but also the disenchantment theme).

I need to start thinking of fancasts now…

[ksfoxwald]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong: Chapter 5

In which Polly trains to be a hero.

There is just so much gender about it, too. Part of it is that Polly is at that age, like ten or twelve, when gender goes from being a sort of background noise to something you actively participate in, but you don't know the rules and they keep shifting and you sort of zigzag back and froth between what you think you want and what you think you should want.

Polly's focus on hero training is atheleticism, resulting in her playing football/soccer with the boys at lunchtime. Her father gives her a dollhouse for Christmas - on the advice of her mother - when Polly really wanted a fort. These are masculine, hero things she wants for herself. But then when Tom invites her over again, she panics over not having a nice dress, and at the prospect of cutting her hair short. Polly moves between genders the way she moves between the real world and the imaginary one. The imaginary world is safe and free, unlike the real world of being pushed and pulled around in her parents' divorce. It is the world where she exists for herself, and gets to be a boy without having to worry about all the complexities of being a girl. The real world is in a way less true, because it's the one where Polly is less perceived as herself; Polly is constantly under scrutiny, but never truly seen; her mother thinks she wants a dollhouse. Her teachers think she is getting into fights because of the divorce. And after beating up the school bully:

The rest of the school regarded her as a heroine. This is nothing like being a hero, which is inside you. This was public.

The use of the gendered hero/heroine here is so fascinating. The heroine is what is seen from the outside. The hero is what is felt within.

So let's talk about trans!Polly.

And while we're at it, let's talk about trans!Tom. no-where-new-hero has some excellent observations about how Tom is coded as feminine, or at least as not-masculine. The other male characters we have met so far are Seb Leroy, Morton Leroy, and Reg who all have a sort of bluster about them, trying to make themselves seem bigger and more important, while Tom is meek and agreeable, to Polly's great annoyance. His relationship with Laurel also places him in a traditionally feminine spouse-as-property arrangement.

Both Tom and Polly identify strongly with each others' heroic counterparts; Polly, in a way, is creating Tan Coul as an avatar of masculine ideal that she wishes she could be, but can't quite imagine herself as, which is why she gives that role to the reluctant Tom and claims the role of assistant for herself. Tom, meanwhile, asks if he can't be the assistant, but she won't let him. Polly wants Tom to be the man she wishes to become - strong and heroic. Meanwhile, Tom wants Polly to be the girl he could have been - happy and protected.

It is true that none of these things need necessarily be gendered or transgendered, but it does show how both of them cross gender boundaries the same way the cross between the real world and the imaginary. Indeed, Polly isn't the only one crossing gender in this chapter, with Nina landing the role of King Herod in the school play for being "better than any of the boys at ranting and roaring and looking kingly." But the thing is, Diana always wrote of gender in such a queer way, as something that was put upon you rather than something that existed within yourself. I think if she had lived a bit longer she might have been one of those old people that say things like "I probably would have been nonbinary if we'd had such things when I was your age." But we'll never know for sure.

(The way she handles sex also struck me as rather ace, but that's a conversation for another time)

This is also the chapter where we are introduced to Tan Coul's friends; Polly can't yet recognize Tan Audel, because she still doesn't quite recognize that a girl can be a hero. We also struggle quite a bit in this chapter with what being a hero really means. Polly is quite certain in her head about what heroes are, but starts to find out that it doesn't quite pan out like that in the real world.

"It's not just strength that heroes need. It's also courage." "Heroes do not fight for themselves, but for other people. "The rest of the school regarded her as a heroine. This is nothing like being a hero, which is inside you."

Adding to the motif, we catch of glimpse of Tom playing Beethoven's Eroica, which, though it is very hard to not read as "erotica," is actually from the root "heroic" rather than "erotic."

Diana wrote of Fire and Hemlock that she specifically wanted a story with a girl hero, but the thing is, when she starts with "why shouldn't a girl be a hero?" she follows it up with "what makes one a hero? why should a hero do things a certain way?" Because while Tan Coul is a very Herculean great deeds kind of hero, Polly herself is the Odysseus type that is heroic through cleverness and tricks. But if you're holding up the ideas of girls and heroes next to each other, and asking what being a hero means and how to become one, you have an unspoken question of "what makes a girl? why must a girl be a certain way?" and makes being a girl a deliberate act as much as being a hero.

And that is very trans.

[no-where-new-hero]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong: Chapter 0

I’m starting this a day early because I realized that I had so much to say about the front matter that I didn't want to clog my discussion of Chapter 1. So here’s a little teaser to whet your appetite for tomorrow!

I always love entering this book because, much like entering a fairy tale or a ballad, it offers many introductory signs along the way to alert you to the textual milieu. The first is the part name: New Hero. If your edition has a table of contents, as mine does, you see that each of the four parts are anagrams of the same letters. Of course, this will become thematically important (as every other paratextual guide in the book is) but for now, we know that this part will introduce us to a new hero: Polly Whittacker. It also signals not only a protagonist, but heroism as a theme: though the novel's setting is grounded in 1980s England with only a few overtly magical moments, the events are filtered just as much through the heroic mode of adventure stories, fairy tales, and myths.

The second signpost is “allegro vivace”: I actually never looked up the translations/definitions of the musical notations in the book before, so I figured now was a good time. This one means "fast and lively," instructing a brisk pace of energy and dynamism, which sets up the vitality of Polly's youth and its concerns. The musical direction signals a tone for the initiated, and to those who aren’t, it establishes music as another major theme, alongside literature and stories.

Finally, we have the epigraph at the start of the chapter ("A dead sleep came over me / and from my horse I fell") taken from the 17th-18th century Scottish ballad, “Tam Lin.” Fire and Hemlock is most obviously a retelling of the ballad (though it retells and draws from other tales, as Diana Wynne Jones has cataloged in her essay on the novel), and interweaves the original material throughout. Later epigraphs will also be drawn from a medieval lay, Thomas the Rhymer, which is typically accepted as Tam Lin's direct antecedent.

It isn’t necessary to know the plot of Tam Lin to appreciate how the themes comes in—partially thanks to these epigraphs—but I also wrote my senior thesis on the ballad, so I’m going to offer a summary anyway: Janet, a noblewoman’s daughter, goes into the forest of Caterhaugh, where Tam Lin lives/hangs out. They have a sexual encounter, initiated by Janet’s own confidence. She becomes pregnant, and her father, not knowing who the forthcoming baby’s dad is, wants to marry her off to one of his nobles. Janet prefers to abort the baby and is about to do so when she meets Tam Lin again, who tells her to keep the child. He explains that he has been placed under a curse by a Fairy Queen, and unless Janet liberates him, he will be offered to the devil as a fairy tithe. Janet agrees, mostly to legitimize her child. Through holding onto Tam as the Fairy Queen attempts to shapeshift him into submission, Janet turns him back into a human (there is an assumption throughout that he is a bit fay himself, though born a man) and the queen rages at them for having escaped her control. The ballad ends with an unspoken HEA. Several of these thematic resonances will become really important as we work through F&H, even though the plot itself is altered (crucially, neither a sex scene nor a pregnancy feature in this version, though sexuality and transgression and also creation certainly do).

This particular quotation is an interesting choice from the ballad itself, if you excuse my nerding out: it doesn’t feature in the main version but in one of the variations, and it is spoken in Tam Lin’s voice, which contradicts the immediate narrative expectation of a line in Janet’s voice (since Polly is pretty consistently Janet throughout). But what’s most important about it is that Tam says this line (and only in a variation on the main version, incidentally) to describe what happened when he fell under the Fairy Queen’s thrall. At the outset, it signals us to enchantment: as a reader, following Polly’s navigation of this perilous world she becomes drawn into, but also merely as readers. One of my favorite things about this novel is DWJ’s ability to pull her readers into her richly felt, incredibly paced world. The first time I read this, I gulped it down in the course of an afternoon, and when I finished, I surfaced feeling as though I had woken from a dream. This book is a beautiful enchantment, and it very kindly lets you know so.

[no-where-new-hero]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong: Day 26 (Coda)

...in which our novel closes.

Our last chapter, the coda, represents a musical epilogue, and the notation of scherzando returns to the mood of play where we started. It invokes a quotation from Four Quartets that also plays back into DWJ's circularity and symmetry (I believe she does mention these lines in her "Heroic Odyssey" essay):

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Polly and Tom literally must start over. They must no longer be defined by their past if they are to pursue a successful relationship with each other.

This is always the part where my brain starts twisting into knots to figure exactly what DWJ was doing with her logic, but I think it lies in this notion of Tom using Polly according to Laurel's rules vs. Tom's affection for Polly regardless of who they were and what roles they played. If he only used her selfishly, then they would continue to be trapped by Laurel and her curse. But he's leaving her open to choose--unlike Ivy, telling people how they feel, and unlike Seb, coercing and conniving, and of course unlike Laurel herself. He has taken himself out of the situation and proving to Polly that the future--her future--is still hers to control, even if he is in it. They can't re-enter the Nowhere of her childhood, but they still must work together to create something that's real and free from the expectations of heroism and the rules of fairyland--which were also intensely gendered. Their relationship is a paradox, but that's also what makes it work. It recalls something that Polly realized in the previous chapter, while listening to the quartet play their dirge:

Here was a place where the quartet was grinding out dissonances. There was a lovely tune beginning to emerge from it. Two sides to Nowhere, Polly thought. One really was a dead end. The other was the void that lay before you when you were making up something new out of ideas no one else had quite had before.

Polly and Tom's previous arrangement led to their dead end. But Nowhere is two-sided. The truth between two people cuts two ways. Creativity will always lead to a way out, if you believe in it hard enough, and that's true in the real world as well as in fairyland, which I think is what DWJ said at the end of her essay (I'm remembering completely on fumes here because my book is packed away but I'm certain @ksfoxwald will have a citation for me!)

At the end, we're back in the ordinary wintry Hunsdon House, and the horse is a car again, and the quartet and Leslie have made it back out of the enchantment mostly unscathed. The eucatastrophe is normal life, and in a way that has been another theme sounding throughout the novel: forget the sentimental drivel. Heroism is ordinary and mundane and intentional and comes down to the equality negotiated between people. That's the way to have your cake and eat it too. Which is another incredibly mature takeaway.

This is also why I find the book improving, for me, on each successive reread. A little personal note is that the first time I read this book, I disliked it (much like Polly disliking East of the Sun, West of the Moon, actually). My parents were divorcing, I was processing the embarrassment of a pretty intense crush on my middle-school drama teacher, everything hit too close to home, and I had to reject Polly in order to give myself some breathing space. But it refused to leave my mind. Because it was so relatable, I kept thinking about it, and when I reread it a year later, I sensed the genius underneath it, which I've been trying to unearth ever since. I'm so grateful this book is in my life--whether living in it as a reader or studying it as a writer or relating with it as a person, it continues to feed me.

[ksfoxwald]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong - Chapter 4

In which our heroes acquire a horse.

Here the relationship between Tom and Polly starts to get a little weird - a grown man asking a little girl to come visit him in another city? But note also that Polly's mother only thinks of how it makes things convenient for her to "dump" Polly somewhere other than Nina's. Ivy is similarly oblivious in later chapters when her boyfriend starts acting inappropriately toward Polly.

This is actually very much an Ivy chapter, because Ivy is also Edna, which actualizes at the end but is still very much present throughout. Polly herself doesn't realize who Edna is, really; she's sort of pasted pop culture stereotypes over her own anxieties about her mother. Which is why when she encounters "real" Ednas - Carla the landlady, and later Edna in Stow-on-the-Water - she is surprised at how nice and normal they are. Because she is expecting her mother.

This is a good chapter to look at intertextually too, because there's a line in Aunt Maria/Black Maria about how young children don't think of their parents as people, and it's quite a shock when they realize their parents do in fact have histories and personalities as individuals. And that's part of what's happening here. The other part is that Polly is being pushed out of her role as daughter and into a role as Emotional Support. Too relatable.

The other DWJ book that echoes here is The Crown of Dalemark, where our heroines are mortified to find themselves unheroically crying for help in a dangerous situation. Polly, however, has a much stronger reaction than Maewen, and kicks off her hero training. Next chapter is going to have a lot of interesting gender in it.

"I don't think I will get married," Polly said. "I'm going to train to be a hero instead." But she could tell her mother was not listening.

[Editing to add some shower thoughts]

Why does Tom want to see Polly again anyway? He hasn't yet realized the extent of his gift or how it works. I think at this point his motivations are the same as Polly's: Laurel doesn't want him to, therefore it must be important. I think he knows that Polly is the key to his freedom, even if he hasn't yet realized how. Which is a little unsettling still; later on he even admits to using Polly. But also, because of the way the power dynamics work, he is also very child-coded; yes part of him is using Polly, but part of him is just lonely and wants a friend to play with.

[no-where-new-hero]

Fire and Hemlock Readalong: Chapter 1

...in which we meet a girl, a painting, and a book.

Someone pointed out that this novel just. Ends. It also just. Begins. Partially why I spent so long on the front matter in yesterday's post was to point out that DWJ offers such a large threshold because once you commit to reading, you fall directly into the story, an in medias res of the mind.

Immediately, we arrive in a story enmeshed in time: Polly thinks she has read the book Times out of Mind "some time ago," and, "some years ago," she thought the painting above her bed had clear figures in it. Clearly, the years have altered something for Polly, and though we don't realize this fully until the end of the chapter, DWJ is dropping hints about it left and right.

We also learn certain things about Polly, little details that build a subtle portrait of this character whose thoughts and feelings we will intensely share through the novel: we learn she is nineteen and about to return to college, we learn that she lives with Granny who has opinions about shoes on the bedspread (me too, Granny), we learn that she likes "supposing things," we learn that she's a little cynical about growing up, we learn she once stole a picture--and can no longer remember why.

I've always been a little delighted, too, by what sets off Polly's "heroic act of memory," as DWJ termed it: a book. On the one hand, it establishes the importance of storytelling for truthtelling and how narrative shapes the order of the world--probably the biggest theme of the book. It is metanarrative in the sense that the particular story she's in the middle of is about a man with two sets of memories, as she ends up possessing, though she points out that it "wasn't worked out well." Here's a Polly-as-Dr-Doof meme:

(This will be relevant again in a few weeks).