Conrad's Fate (original 2005; edition 2005)

Fun book, though the pacing is a little odd, I think. It suddenly gets frantic at the end, so many events cramped into the space that would've gone to describe less than a day earlier in the book. That didn't quite work for me -- sedate to breakneck in five seconds flat. But then, that happens a lot in Diana Wynne Jones' work, to a greater or lesser extent, for me.

Besides, it's another one of those where the answers are right in front of the main character the whole time and he just doesn't get it.

Still a fun read. It's fun to see Christopher from Conrad's point of view, and learn all over again how insufferable he can be. Did keep expecting to see Howl at any minute. ( )

I liked parts of this very much. Don't know if it was just that I was in a mood or if it was the book, but I lost interest in the last couple of chapters and felt bored by the rather ex machina conclusion. Chrestomanci shows up out of nowhere and saves the day, rewards and punishes everyone according to their just deserts and sets everyone straight. Yeah, maybe I was just in a mood. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1887962.html

typical Diana Wynne Jones setting of the Chrestomanci nested worlds (this time with the interesting wrinkle that the English Channel never happened) with peculiar family secrets, ancient stately homes that are not even slightly what they seem, and a central character who comes to realise that his place in the world is what he makes of it rather than what other people tell him it should be. It's not perhaps as subversive or heartfelt as some of her other work but it's still very good. ( )

A solid Wynne Jones book, with her usual resourceful children, neglectful and self-centred parental figures, neat plotting and ever-present sharp humour. Marred only slightly by a too-pat ending, I think. ( )

Conrad’s Fate is a first-person narrative by the eponymous Conrad Tesdinic, a boy who lives in a world where England is geologically still attached to continental Europe, in an alpine town called Stallery dominated by the slightly sinister Stallery Mansion. Ironic, really, when it’s possible that the author may have derived the name via St Allery (of possible French origin, a variant of St Hilaire) from Latin hilaris meaning cheerful: Stallery is anything but a happy place.

Like many a traditional fairytale hero Conrad is thrust into a magical adventure where he has to balance his innate gifts with the usual resourcefulness required of such a hero. These gifts aren’t really identified till the end, but his other talents seem to include getting into trouble. When he goes to Stallery Mansion to try to resolve what is said to be his “fate”, his troubles are compounded by meeting the 15-year-old Christopher, who has his own problems to solve, not least in trying to find his young lost friend Millie.

I liked the underlying idea that, while a lot of fantasy is reliant on the fulfillment of predictions, prophecies and “fate”, Conrad has to come to terms with whether such a fate is predetermined (because everybody says it is so) or whether he is indeed master of his own fate and therefore able to change the future that has been expected to happen.

Though sixth in publishing order, the appearance of the young Christopher Chant, the future Chrestomanci, makes this the second in chronological order. In fact this was the first of the Chrestomanci sequence that I read, and it is testament to its standalone qualities that the story was intelligible without previous familiarity with the others in the series. Its claustrophobic atmosphere is amply reinforced by being set in the upstairs-downstairs world of a large country house, and the strange world of the master-servant relationship is not only conveyed well but subverted in the usual Jones fashion.

There is also a very classic crime novel feel to the denouement in the library, like something out of an Agatha Christie or a Cluedo board game, which I suspect Jones may have been consciously evoking. I wonder too if the final sequence involving a demon was indebted to the climactic scene of the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon: adapted from the M R James story Casting the Runes and released in the States as Curse of the Demon, it featured an impressive stop-motion creature which I nevertheless feel destroyed the sense of ambiguity about the original conclusion of James’ short story. No such ambiguity exists in Conrad’s Fate however, and none is needed.

http://wp.me/s2oNj1-fate ( )