The Merlin Conspiracy and Mixed Magics - Diana Wynne Jones

I've got a lot to catch up on, so things are going to be out of order for a bit. I find myself putting off blogging about the most interesting books I'm reading, simply because I want to give them more than my usual "eh, it was ok" summary.

In her little book jacket bio, it claims Ms. Jones tries to say something different in each of her books, and it shows. Thematically and structurally, there's little that's formulaic in her writings. It's both good and bad - there's so much variety in her writings, that even though she has certain tendencies that pop up (such as giving her characters romantic relationships without doing much more than hinting at them), you can never be sure what you're getting into with one of her books.

The Merlin Conspiracy has dual narrators, telling what at first seem to be unrelated tales, in alternating sections. I think I see what she was going for, as she gradually intertwines the two plots and character sets, but it does leave the beginning quite disjointed. Aspects felt a little weak, but as always the world she created was fantastical and realistic at the same time. In some fantasies, everything is neat and clean and the magic is easy once you've got the hang of it, and I enjoy her realism and complexity. For example, in one of her worlds, the king of England travels constantly with his entire court and the Merlin (the head magical honcho). The result of this is that there are hundreds of people who live in an enormous caravan. One of the narrators is the child of a couple of magical courtiers and lives with the busloads of other children trailing the busloads and limosines of the important people trailing the king, and you get a view of all the behind the scenes dust. Overall, I think most of what she did worked.

Mixed Magics is an anthology of short stories with one of her early, previously unpublished novellas. Some of the stories were entertaining and fun, but the greater value of the book was the insight it gave into her writing process. The novella was especially interesting, because her writing style was very similar to her later work, but the characters were less dimensional and real and the story wasn't fleshed out the way it would have been in other of her works.