Just Jones

Totally Spoiler-Free Review of Dark Lord of Derkholm

To be completely spoiler free I won't even tell you the basic premise. Because I walked past this book for years, refusing to buy it, ashamed that Diana Wynne Jones could turn out a generic evil-overlord-slaying-adventure novel. But I was dead wrong. It is perfectly Jones in every way. The concept is totally original, but based off twisting a familiar concept into something absolutely nobody else could have thought of. The world is detailed, rich, and very real. Every character arc, though perhaps does not run perfectly, ends in the perfect spot. She has wonderful characters in incredible variety, and characters in any creature you can think of. Literally. It started to look a bit spotty near the end when the plot stretched into places it didn't seem necessary to go, but then in the very end, in one large beautifully orchestrated round up, she ties off every storyline and plot line and character arc in a neat little bow, with just a sprinkle of sugar on top.

Conclusion: It was excellent. It seemed a bit clunky in places but ended up making perfect sense in the end. It will probably improve on rereading, and it's definitely worth it.

(After having spent the last seven hours reading Dark Lord of Derkholm, I have realized that there is no way I can write a review that could cover all it's awesomeness in the amount of time I have remaining, so the rest will come tomorrow.)

Jones on Dark Lords

As a disclaimer, you should know that I am already a fan of Diana Wynne Jones. I enjoy clever magic systems and the use of traditional fairy tale elements to construct a quirky and fresh story. I also like comedy, and though that's not always what Diana Wynne Jones writes, it's definitely an apt description of The Dark Lord of Derkholm. 

Imagine that your planet is under the rule of a sinister, dark lord. His troops are moving against the kingdoms of good, pillaging villages and burning fields along the way. Scary, right? Makes you want to take up arms, get a mortgage on your house, join a group of travelers, and start out on an epic, six week quest, doesn't it? But what if the Dark Lord hasn't been selected yet, and you're in between cleaning up from  last year (and all the hundreds of adventurers who paid to have the chance to take him down) and trying to find out how to stop the whole cycle in the first place. That's where The Dark Lord of Derkholm starts. The wizards' counsel is exhausted from repairing the damages of last years pillaging and plundering, and the Kingdoms are broke. The villagers have made reducing their towns to ruins into an art form, and the farmers are wondering if they will ever again see a harvest that didn't have to be helped along by magic after at troop of soldiers trampled it. The genius of this book, like the genius of Jones in general, is in the realness. Realness here is a word that means detail. Small details, details you wouldn't really think of unless you happened to live there. You can tell this is one of Diana Jones' early books because some of these details don't match up. The evil plot revealed at the book's end was, well, evil – but no worse than the forty years of misery that lead up to its discovery. You find yourself wondering why the wizards don't fake casualties for the fake wars, or why they don't just carve out a good stretch of land to be maintained solely for the purpose of the tourists so that the rest of the world can go on uninterrupted. Yeah, the demon-enforced contract probably has something to do with this, but then who signed that thing in the first place?  This is why a lot of fantasy books just use "magic-wagick" to explain things, because once you start making rules everything else has to confirm to them and that takes a lot of work. Jones doesn't play any other was though, which is why we love her, and why I enjoyed reading this book – with it's logical world that really turns – even when the logic was a bit bumpy and forced.

 Most of  Diana Wynne Jones' characters were fun too, but here the inconstancies were worse because they seemed less the snapping of  very tautly drawn boundaries and more the mere requirements of plot. The whole thing with Mrs. Derkholm was barely believable  (luckily she wasn't around enough for us to have to try), and the way the geese were treated seemed outrageously stupid – and that's the kindest way  I can think of putting it. The Benedict Arnold in the group bugged me a little too, because I felt there wasn't enough stuff in the beginning to give the reader a feel for how long he had been betraying everyone. By the end of the book we're given the impression he'd turned coat years ago, but I would have liked some small proof of this imbedded throughout the book instead of the outright cupidity crammed into the last couple of chapters. 

Now, if you've made it this far, I want you to know that I liked the book. I thought it was clever and funny. Clumsier than I've come to expect from Diana Wynne Jones, yes, but definitely worth reading.* In fact, despite the long list of faults I have just rattled off, the only thing that really bothered me (okay, besides the unnecessary deaths) was the way Derk played around with genetics. I'm fine with mythical beasts, but I'm not fine with genetic manipulation. Here's one place where I like my magic to be magic. Griffins: awesome. Griffins made up with your own DNA: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm sure I have really good, well reasoned, arguments against genetic experimentation. Fairly sure. Probably. Certainly the geese make up one all by themselves, but to be honest, the thing the whole thing mostly just creeps me out. I blame Fullmetal Alchemist.**

But seriously, what if Derk had messed up on one of the griffins (and I love the griffins as a whole), and had made an ugly, deformed thing with a fully functioning mind? Wasn't he ever forced to analyze Frankenstein? It was off setting to have this really sweet, creative guy whose hobby was playing mad scientist wandering around the book wondering whether to do something with bugs next or make a mermaid for a daughter.

So,

Content: Potentially Graphic Fantasy Violence - meaning, things that would only happen in a fantasy novel almost happen, but then they don't. Well, okay, there are a few carnivorous sheep bites, which leads right into the ever so appalling genetic experiments. Baaaaaaaaad move, Derk. 

Plot: Pure mad genius. A little hazy on where its lunch is, but at least its inventions work (it's the bologna).

Characters: Pretty clearly defined as main, secondary, and shadowy, but without having a single person as it's focus. Which means the world itself gets to be a kind of character. Cool huh?

I can't help myself and must add, in an aside to the title of this post, that I think Jones makes a pretty clear point here. Dark Lords you can fight against are a pretty easy to defeat – high casualty count notwithstanding – it's the ones that you don't see as dark, or who seem off limits for fighting, that are really hard to depose. Which, of course, is why we like our fantasy with blacks and whites. Let us flounder against our gray lords in real life and overthrow obsidian kings in our spare time.

------------------------------- Footnotes ------------------------

*The sequel, on the other hand, was excruciating even only two chapters in - I never made it past chapter three.

** Actually, I could probably create a whole list of media that feed into my dislike of the topic (The Midnighters, Animorphs, Aliens 4 . . . . basically not many things I'd recommend or normally admit to consuming– though the first Midnighter book was awesome: maath and magic, together at last).