Sarah Pinborough - 13 Minutes (2016)

My review of '13 Minutes' by Sarah Pinborough is up now at Fantasy Faction. This is a wonderful book. Containing barely any speculative or fantastic elements, it tells a compelling and disturbing story about the perils of social life as a teenager that reflects on the nature of the truth, our real identities, and to what extent it is possible to really know other people. Read more at the link. 

Diana Wynne Jones - Archer's Goon (1984)

"But there was this about families, Howard thought, obediently turning to the orchestra's next piece of music. Families might hate one another, but something nevertheless made them stick together."

'Archer's Goon' is a pleasingly complex story about a family of seven power-hungry wizards who run a town, involving time travel and secret identities. It's also a farce of the first order, with Diana Wynne Jones demonstrating her keen talent for comedy. But at its heart, 'Archer's Goon' is about family, and how central our families our to who we are, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.
   Howard Sykes gets home from school to find a Goon in his kitchen, demanding his father produce the two thousand words he owes Archer and refusing to leave until he gets it. As Howard and his sister investigate, they discover that their town is run by Archer and his siblings, seven wizards who want to control the world, and his father's words, which he pays each month to the mayor in lieu of council tax, may be the only thing restricting them to this town. The conspiracy is slowly revealed, with Howard meeting all of the wizards one by one, and soon the Sykes family has the attention of all the wizards, each pressing their own specific field of influence to try to coerce Howard's father into producing the two thousand words from them.
   Diana Wynne Jones plays what could be terrifying and paranoia inducing as comedy.It's an approach that suits her tone, and she manages to wring an almost Terry Gilliam-esque wry humour out of the absurdities of the Sykes family's plight. Archer is in charge of power and so cuts the power to the house, which is bad enough, but Hathaway, who is in charge of transport, sends workmen to dig up their entire street, whilst Torquil, who is in charge of education and music, sends round  an endless parade of street musicians to torment them. The impact of the humour is sharpened by the very real sense of threat the book sometimes crosses over into. Shine, who is in charge of crime, plans to hold Howard and his sister hostage, whilst the Goon's secret identity leads to a moment of genuine fear and doubt over his motivations. Much of the rest of the book's humour stems from its sharply observed comedy about family life. The Sykes family are all well drawn, the jokes coming from keenly-observed family interactions on Jones' behalf. In particular, Howard's little sister Anthea, nick-named Awful because of her temper tantrums, is a vehicle for much humour.
   However, while all the family provide plenty of laughs, the book manages to achieve genuine emotional pathos because it takes these character's relationships seriously. Awful may be bratty and badly behaved, but she and Howard clearly care for each other deeply, and she proves on many occasions to be very shrewd and perceptive, spotting the wizards' characteristics and places in the various schemes long before the other characters. Similarly their father, for all his bumbling pomposity, and the opportunity he provides Jones to make wry jokes about authors and writer's block, has a clear sense of right and wrong and acts as a moral compass for the rest of the family. While they all have their flaws, and on more than one occasion have a flaming row with each other, Jones demonstrates that these are people who love each other and provide a complimentary network of support for each other, which is what being a family is all about.
   This is reflected in Archer's family as well. Though Archer and his brothers and sisters may be scheming against each other for power, they all live in the same small area of the town, living by choice close to each other. And despite their antagonistic behaviour, Awful is quick to suss that not all of them are evil, and she finds that she can easily empathise with why they act out. While Archer, Shine and Dillian are all dangerous, Torquil, Hathaway and Erskine are eventually able to put their grudges aside to team up with Howard and his family to stop them. Their volatile personalities, and the way the family of wizards ties up with the Sykes family, mean that Howard can never fully trust that he won't have to stop them from trying to take over the world later, but they do force Howard to consider how both he and Awful are going to grow up, and what kind of people he'd like them to be.

Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle (1986)

"In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes."

'Howl's Moving Castle' is a fairy tale that plays with the conventions and tropes of fairy tales. Diana Wynne Jones goes for broke, creating the wonderful land of Ingary, a world rich in wizards, evil witches, fire demons, mermaids, animated scarecrows, people who turn into dogs and magical castles. It is clearly a book that comes from a deep love and understanding of fairy tales and what makes them appealing. However it isn't afraid to play with these tropes and turn them on their heads. From its choice of protagonist, the eldest daughter, usually doomed to fail in order to set up the success of the more usual youngest daughter heroine, to its deconstruction of its male romantic lead and the inversion of the damsel in distress rescued by the dashing prince, Jones takes joy in questioning the assumptions and generalisations that fairy tales tend to be built on. 'Howl's Moving Castle' still respects the structural demands of the fairy tale; indeed it is so elegantly designed that every thing that happens in the book ties up with that meticulous tidy logic only found in fairy tales. But it is a mature enough tale to leave its characters emotional space at the end, even as it satisfyingly concludes their character arcs.
   'Howl's Moving Castle' tells the story of Sophie Hatter, who works in her mother's hat shop in the town of Market Chipping until one day she is cursed by the Witch of the Waste and turned into an old woman. Compelled to seek her fortune, she takes shelter in the magical moving castle which roams the hills above the town and belongs to the wizard Howl, who is rumoured to devour the hearts of pretty young maidens. Once there she strikes up a bargain with Calcifer, Howl's fire demon, who says he will release Sophie from the Witch's spell if she breaks the contract binding Calcifer to Howl. The nature of magical curses being what they are, neither Sophie nor Calcifer and Howl are able to tell the other what the curse they are under is.
   'Howl's Moving Castle' sets up all these resonant, comfortable fairy tale elements only to joyously subvert them. Many stories flirt with the idea that nothing is ever as it seems, while providing us with characters and situations that fold out in a tired and predictable way. Jones gleefully inverts all the Fantasy tropes she can get her hands on. Sophie, instead of being rescued by the dashing male hero, rescues Howl and winds up freeing herself from her curse in the process. Calcifer, despite being a demon, is not evil, and Sophie's bargain with him is not a Faustian pact that dooms her, but allows her to save Howl and Calcifer and release herself from her curse. Ingary and its surrounding lands exist in a separate dimension to ours, but rather than showing it to us through the eyes of a protagonist from our world, as would happen in your standard portal Fantasy, we experience the world through Sophie, who has lived in Ingary all her life. Later on it is revealed that one of the doors of the moving castle opens on to Howl's hometown in Wales, and there's a fantastic sequence in which Sophie visits Howl's family, and we see what would be normal and mundane distorted into something Fantastical and mysterious through her eyes.
   One of the things that makes 'Howl's Moving Castle' so compelling is how well-drawn and fully-realised its characters are. The ending only works as well as it does because, while all the loose ends are nicely tied up and various character pairings are implied, all of those characters have been given enough depth and agency to show that they have an existence outside of their pairings. But while it has a wealth of memorable supporting characters, the book truly belongs to Howl and Sophie. The two leads work so well because they are drawn with believable flaws, and their relationship feels all the more well earned because neither character idealises the other. Howl may be dashing and charming, but he is also a cad, a skirt chaser, vain, sulky, selfish and prone to 'slithering out' of things. The nature of his contract with Calcifer has made it impossible for him to truly love someone until he meets Sophie, and the horrific fate of the Witch of the Waste, her will and life essence almost entirely consumed by her demon, is a chilling reminder of where he could have ended up without Sophie's involvement.Yet despite all his flaws, underneath his blustery front Howl does genuinely care for other people and about doing the right thing. He always helps the people who come to him asking for spells or charms, for free if they can't afford to pay, and despite his protestations he was planning all along to rescue Prince Justin and Wizard Suliman from the Witch of the Waste. Indeed, he has the strength of character to find Sophie attractive from the force of her personality alone.
   Sophie is no less complex. Aside from her nosiness, which gets her into trouble often enough, her main flaw is being utterly unable to see things clearly where she herself is concerned. Her journey over the course of the book is her slowly starting to realise that she is a powerful young woman with agency who is able to influence the world and the people around her, and her taking control of that power. Because of her position as the eldest child, and staying at home and being put upon by her stepmother, she has no real sense of self-worth, and 'Howl's Moving Castle' is ultimately the story of how she comes to gain this. Her appearance as an old woman is not so much a metaphor as her coping mechanism; being prematurely old allows Sophie to forego the social niceties expected of her as a young woman and to ask the perceptive and probing questions that cause so much trouble. In this it is a reflection of Howl's desire to appear bad. Getting Sophie to blacken his name to the King, or having Michael spread the rumours about him eating young girls' hearts, is Howl's way of ducking out of society's expectations of him. Sophie discovers that she is a powerful witch in her own right. and that much of the curse is her holding onto the appearance of an old woman because it's convenient for her. Her major blindspot is her feelings for Howl, which lead to her misreading the situation and putting herself and him in danger. But part of what makes her so well suited to him is that she is one of the only characters who doesn't put up with his nonsense.
   Beyond its fine character work and subversion of fairy tale tropes, 'Howl's Moving Castle' has moments of pure wonder and marvelous humour. From its inventive and compelling description of the use of seven-league boots, to the wondrous manifestations of the Witch of the Waste's curse on Howl, which features catching falling stars, mermaids and mandrakes right out of a John Donne poem, to the formalised ritual of the King's palace, Ingary is suffused with Jones' vivid imagination. But it's Jones' humour that provides many of my favourite moments. There is a particularly wonderful scene in which Howl goes into a massive sulk by oozing green slime everywhere, and another one where he kicks up a ridiculous fuss over having a cold. These touches demonstrate just how good Jones is at writing books that are both complex and thought-provoking art and loads of fun.
 

Yasutaka Tsutsui - The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1967)

Listen: Kazuko Yoshiyama has come unstuck in time. Kazuko is exposed to a strange chemical while cleaning up the school lab with her friends Goro and Kazuo. Which winds up being fortunate. The next day, an earthquake and a fire wind up making Kazuko and Goro late for school and in their hurry they get hit by a truck. Just before the impact, Kazuko wakes up in her bed two mornings earlier. Kazuko has to convince herself and her friends that she really did travel through time, prevent the accident from occurring  and stop herself from travelling through time. Will she manage? Spoilers to follow!

Yasutaka Tsutsui is a Japanese SF author who I was initially familiar with through his short story collection 'Salmonella Men On Planet Porno'. This is an excellent collection of bizarre, sardonic and somewhat Ballardian dissections of modern culture in an SF framework. Most feature unpleasant or unreliable protagonists and a sadistic twist at the end. 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' could not be more different in tone. It's a sweet, nostalgic YA novella with a bittersweet ending, both breezily engaging and moving. However, bubbling underneath is just enough of a sinister undercurrent to remind you that this is Tsutsui we're dealing with.

The story's short length means that it moves along at a good pace. When faced with evidence, rather than sitting around hand-wringing, Kazuko's friends and teacher opt to believe her and help her find the solution to the problem. She manages to leap back in time to just before she encountered the chemical in the lab, where she finds out that all this was caused by Kazuo, who is actually a time traveler from the far future trying to get home. He confesses that he has developed feelings for her, but has to return to his own time. Kazuko loses the ability to time travel, Kazuo erases everyone's memories of him, and he returns to the future, promising that they will meet again some day, but that she won't remember who he is.

There's a lot to like about how this all plays out. On the surface, you have a deceptively simple story arc - two young people just realise they have feelings for each other when circumstances force them apart - which is both poignant and relatable. The mechanics of the time travel is never explained, but it all works out in an intuitive and pleasing way that doesn't leave any unstable time loops or contradictions. The story is told simply, elegantly and straightforwardly, with no narrative flab.

However, there's a little more going on here than meets the eye. Kazuo winds up being a thoroughly ambiguous and mysterious character. He provides us with the big chunk of exposition towards the end which explains what's going on, but we only have his word for it. The future he describes is subtly dystopian. Tsutsui very neatly avoids any hysteria in describing it, but there are some nice parallels with Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' thrown into the central conceit. Kazuo hints that a violent war is looming, and the spectres of overpopulation, poor people exiled to colonies on Mars and the Moon and computerised ice-schools all rear their ugly heads. While Kazuo suggests that things do eventually improve, again we only have his word to go on, and he admits that he prefers Kazuko's present to his future, perhaps because in this time he is able to make friends and connect with people in a way that's no longer possible in the future.

And of course, there's the whole memory wipe. Kazuo created a false identity and implanted false memories of himself into all his classmates and teachers, as well as the childless old couple who are supposed to pass as his parents. He then proceeds to erase everyone's memories of him without a qualm, to save himself from being arrested by the temporal police when he returns to his present. This is both creepy and manipulative, however believable his arguments that this will be the safest course of action for everyone may be. It is this sinister undercurrent, part of the narrative but wisely left uncommented on by the author, that gives 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' both shade and depth as a story.

The Alma Books translation, which I have, also appends another Tsutsui YA novella, 'The Stuff That Nightmares Are Made Of', which is a welcome addition. While it is less haunting than 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' and has no SF trappings, 'Nightmares' is perhaps more in the vein of the 'Salmonella Men' short stories, with its vivid, horrifying and somewhat Freudian dream imagery. Its story, about a young girl overcoming her fears, is perhaps more typical YA fare, but the reveal at the end, with its trauma-induced amnesia, is typical Tsutsui territory, albeit with a more optimistic and uplifting outcome than is typical in 'Salmonella Men'.