The Homeward Bounders

By -

The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones
"You are now a discard. We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are.  The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can.  If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner."
This is one of DWJ's older and lesser-known books, but I wish it would come back into print again; it's a great story.  Jamie is a tough Victorian city kid who likes to explore, and he pokes around a little too much.  He finds Them, who play his world as a game and impose rules on it, and They discard Jamie, telling him that he must wander the Bounds forever, unless he can find his way home.  He finds himself an exile, thrown from world to world.  He meets other wanderers--some of them legendary.  Jamie eventually teams up with Helen, who has been raised in the temple of Uquar in her particularly horrible world.  They meet Joris, a slave and a demon-hunter, and they start to realize that together they might be able to fight Them.
"There are no rules--only principles and natural laws." 
Because it is DWJ Month, I'll try to tell you why I think this book is so great, but I always find it hard to describe why DWJ is so cool.   First, the concept is a great idea, and it's developed in the signature DWJ style where she makes you work to understand what's going on.  Then she throws a bunch of different people into the mix; all the characters have very definite personalities (another trademark) and they come at the situation from--literally--different angles to solve it.  And the thing about DWJ is how she used straightforward, fairly simple language (I think I've seen it called deceptively simple) to evoke a lot of very different, very intense feelings and reactions.  There is always a surprising amount of insight packed into a small space, in a format you might not expect.

This image I've used for the cover is one of the better Homeward Bounders covers--it's the one I own, which I picked up in the UK in 1996.  Most of them are hideous.  DWJ did seem to suffer from rotten covers more than her fair share of the time--I suspect a mixture of the era (a lot of her books were published in the 1980s) and the inherent difficulty of producing a really good illustration of stories as unusual and weird as hers usually were.  The more recent covers are often much better, and that might be partly because they tend to be more decoratively abstract instead of trying to illustrate a scene.  We should have a post on covers!
"But you wouldn't believe how lonely you get."

Comments

  1. jrleekMarch 5, 2013 at 9:40 PM

    I need to reread this one. I remember it affecting me quite a bit.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more