In Memoriam: Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones:  1934-2011

Funny how Death always comes in waves. 

This one, at least, I was expecting.  She had cancer for a few years, and knowing I was in the midst of a deathwave, I already somewhat expected it to happen about now.  That doesn't make it any easier.  I have read quite literally every one of her books (except maybe one or two obscure ones)

If Jacques was my gateway to fantasy, Jones was my addiction.  She taught me how magic works, and how cats talk, and about parallel dimensions, and how to blend science fiction and fantasy until one isn't sure what the difference is any more.  And more than any of that, her characters are more like people than any other writer I know of can manage.  The children are children and are sometimes selfish, the adults are sometimes helpful, sometimes well-meaning but useless, sometimes merely useless.  Yet you still have to love all of them. 

Sarah Monette (another one of my literary heros) says it best here.

In my own writing, I would have to say that Jones is my top influence.  I want to build a world that is whimsical yet plausible, with large parts unexplained but that somehow makes sense.  Nor are any but the most plot relevant aspects of magic ever explained - after all, it's freaking MAGIC. 

Howl's Moving Castle made her if not popular, at least somewhat known in mainstream.  I have to point out that I was a fan long before that.  And then, the way Harry Potter took my private love of fantasy and made it mainstream, the movie made Howl's Castle known to more than a select few.  It feels something like a betrayal when that happens.  You were once mine, and now I must share you.  Even though a private love is lonely.  I once fell in love based solely on an association with a book, but that is a topic for another time.

Diana Wynne Jones wrote in a way that I will never be able to, and I'm okay with that.  That does not mean I am going to give up writing.  It just means that I am going to try harder than ever to write MY book.  And it will be for Jones, and Jacques, and Lloyd Alexander, and every single author whose books I have read, the good and the bad, and every single person who has ever given me a story.  But Jones will not be able to read it.  She won't even know that I loved her so much, or that she had more than passing resemblence to an English teacher of mine.

So what is the moral of this story?  Meet your heros before they die?  A generation of greats must pass to make room for new ones?  In the face of death, carry on so that the lost ones did not live/die in vain?  I don't know.  All I know is that I love her books and I could not stop writing if I tried.