2018 read #5: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones.

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
342 pages
Published 1985
Read from February 1 to February 9
Rating: 4 out of 5

In subject matter, Fire and Hemlock fits with the trends of its time, when urban fairy tales like Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and modern retellings of old fairy ballads like Charles de Lint's Jack the Giant-Killer, helped reinvent urban fantasy. Yet the comparison I kept coming back to as I read it is an urban fantasy from another era entirely: Jo Walton's Among Others. Which is not to say that Fire and Hemlock is ahead of its time. Wynne Jones repeatedly and appallingly has her adolescent protagonist Polly worry about her weight, even having her muse about starving herself to look thinner for an older male admirer; Polly is subjected to casual harassment from nearly every man in her life, ranging from her mother's new boyfriend to the bookie on the street corner; she mentally takes responsibility for "tempting" them all with her charms. The lechery of the men, and Polly's feelings of provoking their behavior through her temptations, is given scarcely any commentary in-text -- rendering it to all appearances normalized. Especially when you consider that this is (based on its publication history more than anything else) a work of juvenile fiction, it makes for some cringe-inducing reading in the #MeToo era.

Those unpleasant details date the book firmly in its era (or possibly even earlier, to the late 1970s adolescence much of the book describes). Yet much of Fire and Hemlock feels like a prequel to Among Others, which is to my mind quite the au courant post-fantasy. Both novels follow bookish protagonists from the wreckage of broken homes; both devote many pages to the solace of reading books and finding one's own place within their pages, listing formative titles with evident tenderness and reverence. Both books expertly balance their sense of unreality, remaining ambiguous for much of their length about whether anything "fantastic" has actually occurred. Far more so than its urban fantasy contemporaries, Hemlock integrates the fairy story seamlessly with Polly's quotidian adolescence. The Queen of the Fairies appears to be merely a rich, beautiful woman who lives in a mansion, her curses dealt out in phone calls and train stations, their sting found in the barbed words of an abusive parent. The flashy fae of War for the Oaks are largely supplanted by unseen machinations beneath the surface of the everyday world, and Hemlock is all the better for it.

Hemlock is far from perfect; aside from the aforementioned problematic elements, I found that certain chapters ran a bit overlong with at times tedious verisimilitude. (As with other young adult works, I might be less bothered by this if I were within the target demographic.) But I found it absorbing, moving, and at times edge-of-my-seat tense all the same. Definitely among my new favorites.