Review: The Ogre Downstairs - Diana Wynne Jones

[guppiecat]

As requested by tesla_aldrich, here is another negative review. Well, it's somewhat negative. It's not quite bad enough to be completely horrible, so it's half negative and half bleh, but I did the best I could with it.



I've enjoyed Diana Wynne Jones's work for years. When I got this book, I thought it would be nice to take a peek into her earlier work. Sometimes you can get hints of how an author evolves her style over time. Sometimes it gives you hints for appreciating her other work. Sometimes it gives you a backstory to characters that you already know.

Sometimes.

Not this time.

The book opens with two young boys, Caspar and Johnny. They're pretty much interchangeable except that one is older than the other. It doesn't really matter who. Their mother has recently married, horror of horrors, a man with (pause for dramatic effect) two similarly interchangeable sons. Oh, the mom also has a daughter who is effectively a plot device.

Basically, the step-father (step parents are inherently evil, as you'll remember from your fairy tales) knows that the two boys (not his) don't like him, so he tries to bribe them into liking them by buying them a chemistry set. Now, this book was published in 1974, and I assume that the chemistry sets that you could get back then had all sorts of fun stuff in it. Based on the stories that I'm hearing, kids today don't even get magnesium to light on fire, get scared by the bright light, drop it on the carpet, freak out over the smoke, attempt to smother it with a pillow, eventually remember the fire extinguisher, and then solve the "how do I not tell my parents?" problem by rearranging the furniture in their room and put the pillow in the trash. . . but I digress. This chemistry set is magic.

You can, of course, tell that it's magic because the strange chemicals have italicized Latin-esque names. That's a dead giveaway.

So, when the mom and step-father are downstairs, and the step-father is shouting for quiet so he can watch TV (a certain indicator of deep, soul destroying evil, of course), the mother's boys are playing with the chemistry set in their room, and the plot device wanders in and is stereotypically annoying. Then, she spills the chemicals on herself and gains the magical power of flight.

Such powers are less than effective indoors.

It dawns on me, at this point, that the novel might be intended to teach children the importance of conserving our natural resources, because the rest of the book is primarily focused on trying to not run out of the limited quantity of magical Latinates. Conveniently, there are sufficient amounts of the various magical chemicals for both sets of interchangeable youths to experiment with their mutual chemistry sets and more or less determine what they do... yet have small enough amounts yet to place them in jeopardy when they have their trivial adventures due to them not playing together.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the step-father's boys also have a chemistry set of their own, but that's OK, Jones forgets to make that clear too. Apparently, in England in the early 70s, one gets two sets of children to play together by putting them in separate rooms with separate toys.

*shrug*

Anyway, things move forward. The parents squabble because raising five children is difficult when they don't get to meet one another until after you get married. It's also difficult when you don't bother to introduce the new parents to the children until after the wedding. Apparently causes stress. Who knew? Oh, it's also a good idea to discuss how finances might change when you go from a three person household to having to support seven people. . . I'm just saying is all.

The children have a series of tedious adventures whereby:

• They fly and almost run out of the magic chemical that keeps them in the air.


• They shrink and almost get caught by the oh-so horrendous step father... who is yelling in italics by now.


• They switch bodies and almost have a learning experience by living one another's lives for a day.


• They bring their toys to life, including their step-father's pipe, which almost gets them in trouble. (This one was actually kinda cool, except that you have to know what toffee bars and construction sets are. Toys have changed a lot since this book was published. Oh, and you can't say "Lego", so you have to say "brightly coloured plastic building brick" instead... gotta stay legal ya know.)


• They turn invisible, which is apparently the same as turning into a wrathful murderous ghost. I tell you, you learn something new every day. Oh, they almost murder their step-father, but they don't


• They create a group of angry mushroom people that only speak Greek, and fight for their lives against them... almost bonding in the process.

The step-father also tries to bribe the mother's kids by giving them footballs (which, since this story is English, I chose to interpret as soccer balls), but, given that he is the antichrist, the footballs are pink and the boys lives are ruined forever.

The mother can't take the stress and goes to stay with her sister... and doesn't bother to tell her kids that she's going. The step-father also doesn't see a need to tell them where she want, preferring to tell the kids that "she's gone away". Of course, the kids assume that their step-father murdered their mother, thereby creating an excuse for the plot device to try to poison him and for the afore-mentioned murderous ghost incident.

However, in a shocking twist, it turns out that the step-father isn't evil, but just stressed, and when the kids find a way to turn base metals into gold, the money problems are magically resolved, the mother and step-father suddenly become attentive and caring parents, and all of the children magically get along. Oh, and the magic toy store, from whence the chemistry sets originated, mysteriously vanishes for no reason at all.

By the way, this book advocates splashing chemicals on your siblings as well as eating the strange-looking ones. I have absolutely no idea why it didn't catch on.

Oh, and the coolest thing in the book - the living toffee bars which eat sweaters and carpeting - die horribly. Just a little warning.

I will leave you with the one really good exchange in the book, because it's not worth reading the book to get this part, but it's damn good. This is right after Gwinny (the plot device) decides to kill the Ogre's (the kids' name for the step-father) with a poisoned cupcake, feels guilty about it and confesses:


"I put," she sobbed, "I put Noct. Vest. out of Malcolm's chemistry set."

"Well, that's supposed to be nontoxic," said the Ogre. "Maybe there's no harm done."

"But I put six of Mummy's sleeping pills squashed-up in it," continued Gwinny, "and detergent and the bottle from the cupboard that says Poison and some firelighter and ammonia, and then I rolled it on the floor to get germs and spat on it for more germs, and instead of sugar on the outside I put the burning kind of soda. And I think it ended up awfully poisonous."

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Man, do we find the Nields unlistenable and annoying.

K.

[guppiecat]

I have that response to some of their songs, and they are certainly not my favorites. Largely, I find it is a mixing and tonality thing. Like many musicians who aren't terribly strong vocally (or lyrically), they tend to make up for it by making the music part louder.

However, all of my CDs have long-since been turned into MP3s and put on my file server. In my office (where I type LJ entries), my folk directory is playing 24x7, so it's somewhat random as to who is playing when I'm posting.

I rarely listen to one artist straight through, as I find it boring.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

We've done that. We call it Radio Free Minnehaha.

B