garran | What gets explained (Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary)

Diana Wynne Jones has this thing she does at the end of a lot of her books where she resolves everything. Formerly inexplicable, half-forgotten side plots resurface to become a crucial part of the shape of the final revelations; the whole book seems to have become a machine for collapsing smoothly and comfortably into this climax, these understandings. Of course I don't mean to imply, to anyone that hasn't read her, that the main appeal of a Diana Wynne Jones novel is that it's a sort of puzzle box -- for one thing, she writes magic that is simultaneously sensible and wondrous better than probably anyone else. But I've always admired this, and the precision and clarity that it seems to suggest goes into her plotting.

It's interesting that Pamela Dean doesn't do this at all; her (two) books (that I've read) are filled with strange and sometimes unsettling scenes that stick strongly in the mind as part of the shape of the book, but are never afterwards referred to or explained specifically, or made clear in retrospect in any straightforward way by the things we eventually learn. This is a different kind of impressive writing, in that she's able to pull it off without the book's feeling incomplete or the reader (at least in my case) feeling cheated. I've read Tam Lin sufficiently many times that I've lost track of the number, and I still, each time I do, come across some places where I'm really not sure what's actually going on, underneath. I can remember, on the first few readings, the strong suspicion that in fact nothing consistent was going on; that there was no way, or at least that we didn't have enough information, to ever make rational sense of the events in the book. I just didn't mind, because the emotional sense that they made was so compelling.

This is a little harder to take in Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, in part because the book hurts more. I tend to finish Tam Lin with a pleased, fond feeling, but some of the elements in JGR left me angry -- not at the book or at the author, but generally, on the main character's behalf -- and a little more resolution, or at least recovery, might have made that easier to deal with. (Although being made sad or upset by a story is a very clean feeling -- not unpleasant, the way it tends to be messy and unpleasant to have those feelings inspired by something in one's own life.) Perhaps rereading it, and starting to understand a little more of the underlying, will help, though I think I'll need to wait at least a little while before I do that. On the other hand, it was really good.