ENCHANTED GLASS
OH GODS I ADORE DIANA WYNNE JONES.
Misleading blog entries notwithstanding* it’s been kind of a ratbag of a week** and today has been a real sod. The ME has mostly been winning anyway and today I have a stomach-ache too. I made it through my piano lesson this afternoon chiefly by virtue of taking my computer with me, calling up Finale and Poor Wolfgang and thrusting it/them under Oisin’s nose as proof that I’ve been doing something.*** I did not go to bell practise tonight. † So you know I feel like faecal matter.
I Facebooked about this the beginning of the week, I think, that I’ve been following writer links on frelling Twitter and getting myself in trouble. The results of that pursuit of trouble have started pouring in through the mail-slot in my door this week. Most of these are authors I don’t know†† but as I was racing past in pursuit of some other vampire or were-something or fairy tale I noticed that Diana Wynne Jones has a new one out so I ordered it too. Well, haven’t you? No one on this blog, I assume, needs to be told to read Diana Wynne Jones?
I do, however, have strict rules about DWJ, which include that I don’t read the last one till the next one comes out. Or anyway that I’m not allowed to read a new one the MOMENT it crashes through the mail-slot and whangs on the floor.††† But I’m having a bad week. I need comfort and cheer. So the hellhounds and I plus my shiny new copy of ENCHANTED GLASS retired to the sofa this evening‡. . . .OH GODS I ADORE DIANA WYNNE JONES. Do you even need to know what this one’s about? Andrew Hope teaches at a university, but when his magician grandfather dies, Andrew inherits not only his house but his field-of-care, which is a complicated enough business at best, but a good deal worse when it turns out that your ancestor some generations back got jiggery-pokeried into protecting an evil magician whose estate squats in what should be part of yours. And who probably has wicked plans for the boy who turns up on your doorstep saying that his gran, before she died, told him that if he got in trouble after she was no longer there to protect him, to ask your grandfather for help. And there are things after the boy, which are probably to do with your unsavoury neighbour. Oh, and did you know that it’s silly folklore about weres and the full moon? They don’t need the full moon to change, of course.
Only in Diana Wynne Jones do doorbells go pongle-pongle.
And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have about fifty pages left. . . .
* * *
* I don’t lie. But if there were a Tour de France or an Olympic Game in lying by omission, I’d be the one to beat. Ladbrokes would refuse to make book on me.
** Not that there haven’t been bright spots. Blondel was a bright spot. Cambridge minor was a bright spot, in spite of the audience on Wednesday. And this was a bright spot:
‘You have nothing to pay.’ Are there sweeter words in the language. I’m not sure even ‘your new box of Green & Black’s has come in’ is any sweeter.^ And the drawback to ‘you have just won £1,000,000,000 in the lottery’ is that you would almost immediately have to pay most of it back to HM Revenue. I even got a quite significant refund. I’m trying not to enjoy it too much however because I’m going to have to turn around and return it to them in a few months.^^ I would quite like to return it literally: rip it in half and send it back to them in an envelope. But HM Revenue has no sense of humour so I don’t suppose I will.
^ And ‘here is your exciting new book jacket/editor/marketing plan’ is far too terrifying to be sweet. Okay, ‘New York Times Best Seller’ is sweet. Hellhounds ate all their dinner without fuss is very sweet indeed. Sigh.
^^ And, speaking of taxes, there’s also the major bright spot that Obamacare did get through. It got through. It got through as a beat-up chopped-down staggering half blind version of itself but it got through. And I still pay taxes in America, so I get to say yaay if I want to. And I’m stopping myself from saying anything mmmmphgrtch provocative rrrrrrrmmmgggh. I hate, hate, hate politics, and they depress the hell out of me—the sixty-seven ring circus that passing this health care bill has been depresses the hell out of me—so I don’t really want to get into an argument about it. Acknowledge and keep moving.
*** I’d also been working on Evening Hymn and Fear No More but . . . this was not the Friday I’m going to tear down that barricade.
And the second part of Poor Wolfgang is trying to get away from me. I think I’ve come to the end of it so I can jump into the comparative safety of part three before Britten and Sondheim take me over.^ I’m aware of the Britten effect because he’s mostly been creeping up on me the last twenty years, since I moved to England; I’m still conscious of his influence. Sondheim has been such an essential fact of my life for so long it’s been quite a shock to pay attention this week, listening to him and his music on Radio Three and think, whoops, this is where that comes from. And I was tempted and I fell: I asked Oisin to see if he can do me any kind of deal on the complete score to Sweeney Todd, which I haven’t bought ere now because it costs a bomb.
^ And Messiaen, but Messiaen is still seriously beyond me. Like JS Bach. Golly, that man.
† Whiiiiiiine.
†† And one was bought on the title alone: Must Love Hellhounds.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/charlaine-harris/must-love-hellhounds.htm
Pity about the jacket. Jeez.
††† See, actually it’s a good thing that the floor beside the door is carpeted in All Stars. It softens the landing for anything coming through the mail-slot.
‡ And just to maintain the theme of Ratbag Week, after about an hour, there was a strange throbbing vibration between me and the back of the sofa and Darkness was trying to be sick. No, no, that’s my job! —So in a tangle of long legs and screaming all three of us fell off the sofa and I managed to drag poor Darkness not only to the edge of the carpet but to fold said edge back so that he could throw up on the nice washable bare floor. Which was fine as far as it went, but that then left me holding a piece of folded-back carpet with no way of keeping it folded back while I went for the paper towels, while the hellhounds wandered back to the sofa and looked at me expectantly.
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