DIANA WYNNE JONES INTERVIEW

It’s not often that you find yourself in a city which resembles the world of somebody’s imagination, but as my taxi got lost on the slopes of Clifton in Bristol, searching for Diana Wynne-Jones’s home it felt just like slipping into one of her fantasies. With the Severn estuary gliding dreamily on one side and a patchwork of delicate, brightly coloured Regency houses and eclectic gardens tumbling down the hill on the other, I expected to see her god-like magician, Chrestomanci, striding along a narrow lane and disappearing into a parallel universe.

The world of one of our most original and fertile fantasists is about to become a lot more famous this year thanks to a film of her novel, Howl’s Moving Castle. The great anime director, Hayao Miyazaki, whose Spirited Away became the international hit of 2003 has just released it in Japan where it is breaking all box-office records. Anyone familiar with the works of both can see that here is a marriage made in heaven, for the world of Wynne-Jones and that of Spirited Away are uncannily close. The mysterious enchanter Howl not only has a castle that moves but doors that open onto four different towns in the land of Ingary, a captive demon and a bewitched crone of a servant who is in fact a pretty young girl called Sophie Hatter. Miyazaki is a long-term fan of Wynne-Jones’s work, and when he made a secret visit to her house to discuss the film discovered that she, too, loved his earlier fantasies, such as Castle in the Air.

“I think he’s a genius,” Wynne-Jones says. “He’s short, like many Japanese people, but he seems twice the size of anybody else in the room. We had the most marvellous conversation, while sitting round eating a huge cake which the poor interpreter never got a bite of. It’s rare to find someone who thinks like you do.”

The quality of Wynne-Jones’s imagination is often compared to that of JK Rowling, to the detriment of the latter in the case of a notorious attack by AS Byatt when the fifth Harry Potter novel was published. Although both feature worlds in which the mundane mixes with the magical, they could not be more different. Where Rowling’s plots are highly controlled thrillers, Wynne-Jones’s often come to her in a dream and retain the organic strangeness, comic unpredictability, dread and sense of wonder that a volcanic subconscious can throw up. (She also has the uncanny knack of predicting future events in her own life, including breaking her neck last year.) The first children’s author to explore the implications and ramifications of the multiverse theory (as Philip Pullman acknowledged in His Dark Materials) Wynne-Jones has at least nine universes which need to be kept in order by a special order of enchanters called Chrestomanci. Her latest book, Conrad’s Fate, is about a young boy who, though good, clever and bold, suffers from appalling luck due to his bad karma. Sent  to work as a servant in a magical fortress, he meets an elegant, mysterious friend called Christopher, and discovers that his own family are not all that he believed.

Wynne-Jones, who wrote the satirical Tough Guide to Fantasy is a mistress of manipulating the expectations of the genre, which in her hands becomes disturbingly dark before good triumphs. Children are put in mortal danger from family members; they are not only lost and starved but in novels such as Hexwood, tortured and killed. Writing such scenes almost “broke my brain”, but seeing life “from the ground up” gives her a strong sense of the cruelty and injustice of adults. The young Diana and her sisters hated what they called “Goddy books” like What Katy Did, both for their tedious virtue and because their own childhood was startlingly unhappy.

“My books are about people learning to be themselves,” she says. “I don’t have any truck with the notion of growing up, so tiresome, there’s no profit in talking about what time and nature will do. But most people do start off with no self-image, and that makes a child terribly vulnerable. They don’t know themselves enough to say, ‘I’d never do that.’ Nobody knows how everyone else seems to be managing – of course it’s by imitation and invention.”

She grew up during World War Two, in Thaxted, Essex, “where every other person was mad, and there were more eccentrics per square yard than anywhere I’ve been.” The loony old wizards and witches who people her books are drawn from life, but Wynne-Jones’s parents, both teachers, have seeded their presence in a darker form. Her father was remote but her mother, an Oxford graduate, not only subjected her three daughters to years of verbal abuse but was relentlessly cruel.

“If we grew out of our shoes – really grew out, so that our heels were coming out of the back, she would blame us and make our lives hell. She kept all the clothing coupons for herself, and the only time we ever got new clothes was when our grandmother used her coupons to buy us some. I was incredibly busy trying to rescue my sisters, making them clothes, looking after them. If ever we were ill, we were told it was only psychological, so we knew that we had to tell them we were sick in front of other people. I think she was part of a very dreadful generation of women who struggled like mad for academic success then found it didn’t lead anywhere. I’ve tried for years to understand why she behaved as she did, and when she died last year had some psychotherapy before deciding that some people are just made like that.”

The elegant, dandyish Christopher Chant was her ultimate risposte to this, but it is Wynne-Jones’s dark side, as well as her playful intelligence, which gives her work a characteristic bite. Sometimes, as in novels like Witch Week (where everyone in a school turns out to have magical powers, for which they will be burnt at the stake) the fantasy comes very close to nightmare; in others, such as The Magicians of Caprona or Power of Three, a spirit of ebullient comedy and kindliness keeps it at bay.

“Children think they are unique in their misfortunes, and I want to tell them they aren’t alone. I thought my childhood was normal, and was terribly angry and miserable when I discovered it wasn’t. It took me years to find my equilibrium, but I gradually worked it out – I suppose, writing books.”

The mother of three boys, she and her husband John moved from Oxford when he got a job as English professor at Bristol, and one of their sons is now a distinguished English academic, like Diana’s sister Isobel Armstrong. Her heroes are often boys simply because, she says, she knows how boys think; she started to write for children when her youngest went off to school and “couldn’t seem to stop.” With five Chrestomanci books and over twenty others to her name, she has more than a million copies in print but missed the fantasy boom of this decade. Yet as her editor, Stella Paskins, who rediscovered and reissued her books after having loved them as a child remarked, “One of the things about fantasy is that it doesn’t date. Only reality gets old-fashioned.”
The Times, March 2005