Hexwood (1993)

There's so much going on in Hexwood that I don't even know how to begin reviewing it. It surprised me, several times, without making such leaps that I couldn't see how it got there. It's a complex book, jumping around in time a lot, and with lots of cases of mistaken identity (including people mistaking their own identities). It took me a while to put it all together, but despite that it was also an engaging read, and also not too much of a long one (according to my log, it took me three hours total, five reading sessions -- and two of those were at a concert where I was quite distracted). So it's impressive how much of it there is.

To my eyes, the main source is the Arthurian mythos: the court, the Grail quest, the Fisher King, Morgan Le Fay by any other name, Arthur, Merlin... There's other stuff too, including Beowulf, but it's fascinating what Diana Wynne Jones did with the material that's so familiar to me.

The basic story is that an old machine intended to select the right rulers of the universe, the Reigners, is turned on again. The current Reigner One cheated, and since then has wrongfully held power. The machine lures people into its field so it can finally fulfil its intended purpose, and continues to run scenarios until it has things the way it wants it.

I found the characters interesting, and guessing who they really were was also fun. I was wrong several times, and right once or twice, and totally missed one or two more. I got to love them quite a bit, especially Mordion, and I actually think they were probably better fleshed out and their connections better explored than, say, Howl and Sophie in Howl's Moving Castle. While I love that book, this satisfied more. ( )

Woah, this book is trippy!

DWJ is quite ambitious in this one. A Bannus has accidentally been activated at Hexwood Farm. It's a machine that manipulates time and reality in order to act out solutions to a problem, and it co-opts any people that cross into its field.

Because most of our characters are at the mercy of the Bannus, their perception of reality is highly altered. They never know quite what has happened to them, and events occur out of order, especially at first. So, yeah, it's all a bit postmodern, which Jones uses to talk about some important postmodern topics: power, agency, and injustice.

As the controlling element of the plot, the Bannus is an author figure in its little world. So it's quite appropriate that this is one incredibly intertextual novel. First of all, much of the plot is quietly adapted from The Tempest. Not just any version of the Tempest, mind you, but a post-colonial reading of the Tempest overlaid with Forbidden Planet and with a splash of As You Like It for good measure (because As You Like It is after all The Tempest with less plot and more jokes.) Prospero and Ariel/Caliban are everywhere you look, Antonio is Reigner One, Miranda has become young Hume, and the island becomes Hexwood (or the Forbidden Planet Earth, rather interestingly.) I don't imagine Jones expects very many readers to notice the similarities, but she does draw her source material from the best.

There are also explicit references: a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Grail Quest, some Arthur and Beowulf, a couple Hamlet references, and an Alice in Wonderland bit, for those of us keeping track at home. The Bannus, we learn, has had a library at its disposal, so it too uses the best. Basically it gets a big A from a English major's standpoint.

From a reader's standpoint, it's also quite a good book. Jones for the most part handles all this wackiness quite deftly. The plot requires a bit of patience at first, but by the end it's a page-turner. Most of the characters are pretty strong and likable, which is impressive because the surreal mechanism of the plot is between us and them all the time, and because we jump around between brains quite a lot in order to keep abreast of what is happening. I did feel, nevertheless, a bit distanced at times from the heart of the novel, because the characters' identities and motivations kept coming into question - Hume especially was perplexing. Then there is the usual Jonesian expanse of elaborate minor b-plot, which was occasionally WTF-ish, although still entertaining.

What did really like was how clear the themes were by the end - it made a really strong statement about the misuse of power and how it affects both disenfranchised individuals and those who try to restore a balance of power.

A strong and ambitious novel! ( )

I always feel like I ought to appreciate Diana Wynne Jones' books more than I do. I do love the complexity of the situation and the sinister atmosphere - she does a fantastic sinister atmosphere, and here she also does brilliant segues from 'reality' to 'fantasy', especially on the dragon's introduction.

But things get wrapped up so very tidily, every piece of the jigsaw clicked into place; and with a touch of the style that she has in some books, which I think of as her "I'm writing in small words for the kids" style (not that I think she actually writes in small words in the slightest, but for some reason I can never define I feel like I'm being patronised somehow).

All terribly subjective and clearly something other readers have no problem with, which is why I feel like there must be something wrong with my reading, but IDIC and all that. ( )

All is not well at Hexwood Farm, and Sector Controller Boranus is not happy. The Reigners won't be happy if they realize some underling awoke the Bannus, a machine that can create theta space and cause real people to go through somewhat manufactured events in order to see the best course of action. Meanwhile, on Earth, Ann Stavely has been sick and, the first day she feels better, she enters a wood where she meets Mordion, a strange man who says he has been in stasis for years and Hume, a boy she seems to have some responsibility for. But odd things seem to be happening with time and the sequence of events when she goes in the wood...

If that sounds confusing, well, let's just say this is the sort of complex story that doesn't sound at all right when I try to sum it up without spoilers. It's got a little bit of everything: complex storyline, sympathetic characters, and a dash of humor. I've been making my way through Diana Wynne Jones' oeuvre, and thought I'd found my favorites already, but this book surprised me by turning out to be one of the contenders. ( )

I sought out and purchased Hexwood after finding it suggested as a good example of a story that unfolds like a puzzle. I enjoy unconventional literature that requires nontrivial effort in piecing together the narrative. Unfortunately, while Hexwood definitely falls into this category of fiction, it is a poor effort that I would not recommend either to the young-adult audience for which it was written or to adults looking for an interesting labyrinth of a plot.

Hexwood's central conceit is that a machine whose purpose is to repeatedly test the outcomes of running a given set of elements through an infinite variety of scenarios has run amuck and threatens to engulf more and more of the world in its expanding game space. Although this could be a somewhat entertaining (if thinly veiled) metafictional allegory for authorship, the book has no such intention but instead plays the premise straight. In fact, for the longest time, the idea of the machine seems to serve merely as a license to depict whatever arbitrary events the author desires—a license of which she takes little imaginative advantage, mostly retreading clichéd fantasy tropes that, in fact, do not become subversive or more interesting in any way from the knowledge that they are illusory.

The first hundred pages are a chore, a series of time-skipped scenes vaguely designed to provide purposefully unrevealing glimpses of strange phenomena with inadequately clued rules surrounding carefully ill-defined characters in a terribly bland forest setting. The reader is insufficiently tantalized by the mysteries of the book's first third because the actors, setting, and circumstances lack for compelling detail and momentum.

There is a cartoonish aspect to the vague sci-fi wizardry; this may be appropriate to the young-adult audience, but it is not much to my taste. The characters act like they are concerned with the rules of performing magic, but the story's premise essentially provides an unlimited source of supernatural creation that undermines the restrictions which some characters impose upon themselves for reasons that are never entirely clear. The prose itself is nothing special; depictions of characters' thoughts and feelings are nakedly and coldly expository most of the time. The author's approach to characterization is generally not engaging.

When the story's science-fiction frame finally begins to disclose the identities of these people, the effect is not one of grasping newfound comprehension but rather simple relief that something is, at long last, actually happening. After the turn, the field of the story rapidly telescopes, but this payoff accomplishes nothing that is worth the cold, wasted space of the long first act.

Hexwood is indeed the narrative puzzlebox that I was promised, but—and I am loath to say this as an admirer of books featuring experimental narrative structures—it is a failure of storytelling due to the omniscient narrator's capricious lack of interest in engaging the reader for so long. The book is not so much ill-conceived as it is poorly designed; the mysteries of the story neither require nor are improved by keeping the reader in the dark for so long.

I would be interested in reading a story that seeks to manipulate the reader through layered and hidden roles and events, but, because the content here fails to justify or make good use of that kind of form, Hexwood comes off seeming vapid, pretentious, and even sadistic. It is confusing for confusion's sake; a pointless book that pretends to be more clever than it is and that does not respect the reader's time. ( )