Diana Wynne Jones's Charmed Life

[cimorene]

I remember disliking Charmed Life from my childhood (that is, compared to other Diana Wynne Jones books), because I thought it was scary, and maybe a bit hard to follow. I was certainly too young to follow it when Mom first read it to me, but of course I've read it ample times since I was old enough. Still, somehow I didn't notice till I read it today that the source of all the irritation is how incredibly stupid the protagonists are. I mean, yeah, children - in fact, most people - are stupid, but there's a certain threshold of stupidity where reading about people doing it just makes me irritated and headachy. (Harry Potter is usually way, way past it, but that's kind of its schtick, so I won't compare.) And even though DWJ's child protagonists are almost always going through things cluelessly and finding out about them later, they're rarely this stupid and usually they're sympathetic and not irritating about it. Cat is sympathetic in her usual way, but he's over in Harry Potter or Nancy Drew levels of wrongheadedness, making every single choice obviously stupidly wrong. Why?

I see now that he's meant to be younger than I realised when I was younger, and that he's got a serious blind spot where his elder sister is concerned, not to mention a very dodgy upbringing, and no reason to trust authority figures in general, which probably believably accounts for this behaviour more or less. But it doesn't make it any less irritating to me, nor, I think, at all reasonable. I've never had sympathy for children who are too stupid to seek help from the proper authority figures when they obviously need it.

Comments

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

I thought Charmed Life was scary too. I don't remember any particular sense of frustration, but I do find totally clueless protagonists annoying.

Btw, will be bringing the rest of your DWJ books back, um, soonish? Which is to say I can drop them off whenever, really.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Well, hindsight is 20/20 - it's more frustrating the more often you've read it, probably. :) Maybe you could bring them over next Saturday on Passover.

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

I loved Charmed life when I was a kid. It's the only Diana Wynne Jones book that was translated back then. I didn't see anything remarkably stupid in Cat's behavior because in my mind, he was like ,eight or nine, and because the world was wierdly victorian one with rules that didn't apply in my world so it was not my place to try to figure out if his decisions were stupid in *his* world. A perfect book for about a nine year old, since it's all about a kid's trust towards parental figures.

Anyway, I was truly fashcinated with the end scene, with people in power being striped from their powers and chained up and attempted to be killed and sacrificed. This later became my "striped out of power"-kink...

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Chi's told me that she loved Archer's Goon in translation as a child.

[emmuzka.livejournal.com]

Oh? And I thought that it was the only translated. I must have mixed her up with Joan D. Vinge, who's works I tries to desperately locate at some point.