![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Verdigris Deep, by Frances Hardinge
Jun. 9th, 2019 02:30 pmHaving stranded themselves in a mildly shady part of town in such a way that they're all going to get into trouble with their families, three children take some coins out of a wishing well to pay for a bus home. But those coins are the property of the entity which lives in the well, and since the children have stolen the coins, they've also stolen the responsibility of granting the wishes attached to them.
In some ways this makes me think of Edward Eager -- I haven't read any of his Tales of Magic since I was a child, and I have no idea how they'd hold up, but the group of English children acquiring limited magical powers, travelling domestic-scale distances in order to help people, and running into the complications of those powers, matches up. (Eager even has a book called The Well-Wishers). But if Hardinge was inspired by Eager at all, I imagine her giving a small evil chortle and saying, "Well, I can work with this." On her website she says she's writing for herself at twelve. Verdigris Deep... is a book I would give to a twelve year old, but only a carefully vetted twelve year old. Portions of it work as horror. You wouldn't want to run into the well-spirit on a dark night, or in fact at any other time, and some of the people whose lives have been altered by poorly-judged wishes are, in a more mundane way, even worse. Granting wishes may begin by seeming like a good idea, but what do you do for someone who wishes malicious vengeance -- or who wished and then changed their mind afterwards?
This is the third Frances Hardinge book I've read, after Gullstruck Island and A Face Like Glass. Neither of those left me fully satisfied, nor running to find another one -- although the ideas and images were amazing. I still don't know what it is about Hardinge's books that doesn't deeply resonate with me. This is my favourite of the three, possibly because of its smaller scale, and I stayed up late into the night finishing it, but I still had that same feeling, and I still can't work out why. Everything I suggest to myself I can refute. (Plot element X? No, it serves this function and I don't know what I'd replace it with. Something that didn't happen with character Y? I mean, the book could have done that, but it's not a fault that it didn't and I don't know why I didn't like what it did instead. She isn't Diana Wynne Jones, despite being often compared to her and rather like her? That's a fair point, which also applies to everyone else other than Diana Wynne Jones, and you like many of them very much. Not enough complicated or dark consequences? ...I assume you're joking, did you not read what just happened?) I think the one of those that comes closest is the not-Diana-Wynne-Jones one -- I am in awe of Diana Wynne Jones's ability to turn around three quarters of the way through a book and say 'Oh, and also there's this whole other wing of the story which you didn't notice but which has been happening all along, and the unobtrusive teapot was the antagonist', and I do think it's something about how Hardinge puts plots together, or the details of how she works them through, that I don't like. [Edit, having mulled: I suppose where I was going with that is, Hardinge's plots are good and sufficient workings out of her very interesting premises and characters, and I mean that as great praise -- but there isn't the kind of leap Jones does where there's suddenly more than I thought there would be or could be.]
Even so, I could enthuse about bits and pieces of Hardinge-writing all afternoon. Here's the start of Verdigris Deep:
'For a wonderful moment Ryan thought Josh was going to make it. When they had turned the corner to find the bus already at the stop Josh had burst into a run, scattering starlings and shattering puddles. The bus's engine gave a long, exasperated sigh and shrugged its weight forward as if hulking its shoulders against the rain, but Ryan still believed Josh would snatch success at the last minute, as always. Then, just as Josh drew level with its tail lights, the bus roared sulkily away, its tires leaving long streaks of dull against the shiny wet tarmac.'
I like that description so much. And that's before you add in the well-spirit, or the underground city of magic artisans, perfumiers, and cheese-makers, or the people who can detach their senses from their bodies and hold a conversation with you while they're seeing from a vantage point twenty feet above your head and they're tasting the cut fruit sitting on the table two townships over... Or the characters themselves, who I haven't talked about at all but are complicated and interesting.
In some ways this makes me think of Edward Eager -- I haven't read any of his Tales of Magic since I was a child, and I have no idea how they'd hold up, but the group of English children acquiring limited magical powers, travelling domestic-scale distances in order to help people, and running into the complications of those powers, matches up. (Eager even has a book called The Well-Wishers). But if Hardinge was inspired by Eager at all, I imagine her giving a small evil chortle and saying, "Well, I can work with this." On her website she says she's writing for herself at twelve. Verdigris Deep... is a book I would give to a twelve year old, but only a carefully vetted twelve year old. Portions of it work as horror. You wouldn't want to run into the well-spirit on a dark night, or in fact at any other time, and some of the people whose lives have been altered by poorly-judged wishes are, in a more mundane way, even worse. Granting wishes may begin by seeming like a good idea, but what do you do for someone who wishes malicious vengeance -- or who wished and then changed their mind afterwards?
This is the third Frances Hardinge book I've read, after Gullstruck Island and A Face Like Glass. Neither of those left me fully satisfied, nor running to find another one -- although the ideas and images were amazing. I still don't know what it is about Hardinge's books that doesn't deeply resonate with me. This is my favourite of the three, possibly because of its smaller scale, and I stayed up late into the night finishing it, but I still had that same feeling, and I still can't work out why. Everything I suggest to myself I can refute. (Plot element X? No, it serves this function and I don't know what I'd replace it with. Something that didn't happen with character Y? I mean, the book could have done that, but it's not a fault that it didn't and I don't know why I didn't like what it did instead. She isn't Diana Wynne Jones, despite being often compared to her and rather like her? That's a fair point, which also applies to everyone else other than Diana Wynne Jones, and you like many of them very much. Not enough complicated or dark consequences? ...I assume you're joking, did you not read what just happened?) I think the one of those that comes closest is the not-Diana-Wynne-Jones one -- I am in awe of Diana Wynne Jones's ability to turn around three quarters of the way through a book and say 'Oh, and also there's this whole other wing of the story which you didn't notice but which has been happening all along, and the unobtrusive teapot was the antagonist', and I do think it's something about how Hardinge puts plots together, or the details of how she works them through, that I don't like. [Edit, having mulled: I suppose where I was going with that is, Hardinge's plots are good and sufficient workings out of her very interesting premises and characters, and I mean that as great praise -- but there isn't the kind of leap Jones does where there's suddenly more than I thought there would be or could be.]
Even so, I could enthuse about bits and pieces of Hardinge-writing all afternoon. Here's the start of Verdigris Deep:
'For a wonderful moment Ryan thought Josh was going to make it. When they had turned the corner to find the bus already at the stop Josh had burst into a run, scattering starlings and shattering puddles. The bus's engine gave a long, exasperated sigh and shrugged its weight forward as if hulking its shoulders against the rain, but Ryan still believed Josh would snatch success at the last minute, as always. Then, just as Josh drew level with its tail lights, the bus roared sulkily away, its tires leaving long streaks of dull against the shiny wet tarmac.'
I like that description so much. And that's before you add in the well-spirit, or the underground city of magic artisans, perfumiers, and cheese-makers, or the people who can detach their senses from their bodies and hold a conversation with you while they're seeing from a vantage point twenty feet above your head and they're tasting the cut fruit sitting on the table two townships over... Or the characters themselves, who I haven't talked about at all but are complicated and interesting.
