Dazzling Wit and Painful Doubts

As a voracious teen reader, I was always on the hunt for books that scratched a particular itch. That itch was for a world that I wanted to live in, a world that felt bigger than the book I was holding. I was on the hunt for Donegality: a word invented by Lewis but given a new metonymic meaning by Michael Ward. I wanted the flavor of the place to be so strong I could taste it, and now, as I write my own stories, worldbuilding is of vital importance. If I can’t feel it, see it, taste it, then I quickly lose interest.

I also wanted to read about heroines navigating an immersive and dangerous world, and bonus points if they had a sense of humor. I like laughing at troubles, not because it trivializes them, but because it brings relief. Humor and sorrow are easy bedfellows.

My heritage on my mother’s side is entirely Scottish and Welsh, and naturally, I was drawn to the British authors. I can’t remember how I first stumbled upon Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett, but as soon as I did, I knew I was among friends. In the characters of Sophie Hatter and Tiffany Aching, in the landscapes of Market Chipping and the turtle-borne planet of Discworld, Jones and Pratchett served up what I was hungry for. My own magician, Mago Re, owes some of his personality to Howl Pendragon, specifically his exceptional magical skills paired with his utter domestic uselessness.

I like laughing at troubles, not because it trivializes them, but because it brings relief. Humor and sorrow are easy bedfellows.

Allow me a brief digression to spin a purely hypothetical tale. Parents bear the primary responsibility for teaching their child how to speak. Along the way, that child adopts unique words or phrases that are common parlance in her family. The child goes off to college, makes new friends, and casually drops one of those words in conversation. The chatter dies away. All eyes land on her. Someone asks her to repeat herself and, when she does, everyone has a good laugh.

For me, that word was ‘bumfle’. You will find it in the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and hardly anywhere else.

Humans are fundamentally imitative, and a deeper reason that I loved Pratchett and Jones is that I could hear in their words the parlance of two of their literary parents: Tolkien and Lewis. Pratchett was so affected by Smith of Wootton Major that he wrote Tolkien a letter thanking him for it, and Jones was a student of both Tolkien and Lewis at Oxford. I could feel the reverberations of those literary giants walking through the pages of their novels.

There is a shocking amount of thinness in modern literature, and I’m convinced this is because many authors don’t reach for a heritage any older than the last twenty years. Jones’ books are huge—not in page numbers, that’s an unhelpful way to gauge a book’s worth—but in depth. There are enormous books that say nothing and small books that contain multitudes, and Jones wrote the latter (although some of her books are also hefty enough to flatten a good-sized spider).

As a younger reader I was working my way through Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones when at some point I realized I was reading a variation of The Ballad of Tam Lin. But not quite. There was something else there, something richer and a little dizzying. What was it, I wondered, as I shut the book. Later, I came upon an article where Jones admitted to structuring this short and strange novel in part after Tam Lin (and Thomas the Rhymer), Eliot’s Four Quartets, and the spiraling flashback narrative of The Odyssey. Additionally, she added casually, she was working with allegorical categories she’d learned from Spenser’s The Fairy Queene.

There is a shocking amount of thinness in modern literature, and I’m convinced this is because many authors don’t reach for a heritage any older than the last twenty years.

Jones was too smart for her own good, and the result was that when I read her books as a teen, I had very little idea what she was saying, but I knew that I loved them. (As a sidenote, this is a strong argument for writing books that go above children’s heads. It gives them something to reach for.)

The comedy of Diana Wynne Jones, however, is inseparable from the tragedy. Jones’s childhood was marked by horrible neglect at the hands of hypocritical churchmen and abusive parents. As an adult, she, like Pratchett, became an atheist. For Jones, books didn’t tell the truth about the world, they gave you something more hopeful to cling to. Life is awful, she claimed, but books will help you bear up under the horrors.

Jones’ main characters are often children with remarkable resilience and skills despite receiving little help from the grownups. She wrote her mother into every story, and she was always the villain. She seemed unable to reconcile how there could be an omnipotent and sovereign God in a world filled with sorrow and pain. Her books are cluttered with gods and goddesses, with magic and wonders, but never with a sovereign Creator worthy of worship. The divine is always a bit of a joke. The gods can catch colds, and when they do, they’re even surlier than usual. Those whom the gods love die young.

There is an inescapable dialect of goodness and truth in Jones’ works because she was writing within the framework of a Christian heritage and because she loved the literary parents who taught her their language. And yet, the footprints left by Tolkien or Lewis are muddied by the rainfall of her doubts. Jones was determined to be cheerful despite the cards she’d been dealt, despite the chaos and unpredictability of life, but no amount of self-generated grit could ever lift her out of that despondent slough. For all her humor, it was never the easy laughter of those who walk with a swing and let their arms and shoulders go free. There was a sharpness to it that hinted at a deeper ache.

Humor and sorrow are easy bedfellows. I owe Jones and Pratchett an immense debt for my love of writing while also wishing they had both found solace in the God of all laughter and comfort.

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