shimotsuki | Book discussion: Fire and Hemlock, Parts Three and Four (and Coda)

Here is the second of two discussion posts for Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones. This post is currently public, so that anyone interested can read and join in the discussion, but if any of my f-listers would prefer that I f-lock the post instead, let me know and I will do that.

What became blindingly obvious to me in the course of the first discussion post :) is that much of the fun of discussing this book will come from trying to figure out how the story builds up to the climax -- what all the stuff in the first half (and Part Three) means in the context of what we find out in the end. I will start things off with just one discussion topic, because this is the one that is driving me the most to distraction in trying to figure it out: ;)

Why Polly? What is it that gives Polly the potential to spring Tom from Laurel and the Fairy Court? I have to admit that I'm still working on my reread, so I haven't made it all the way through Parts Three and Four a second time and may therefore be missing clues that are obvious answers to this question. But some ideas I had about this are:

Tom definitely latches onto Polly as if she is his only hope. We are reminded several times that even before Laurel's intervention, Polly would sometimes almost forget about her Mr. Lynn and the Hero Business, but Tom would always keep writing to her and sending her books; clearly he doesn't want her to forget about him, even before he starts sending books that are actually clues to his own situation.
If Polly is Tom's only hope, why is it her? Is it because she is the only outsider to show up at Hunsdon House on the first Halloween? Or is it because she is the one who first brings up the idea of Being Things to Tom? When she and Tom both see the water in the empty pond, is that a sign that she is the one who can help him, or is it that event that makes her be able to help him? What role do the Nowhere Vases play in this, since (here I go beating a dead horse) Seb definitely accuses Polly of "working the vases" (even though she didn't really touch them herself)? -- and yet, the incident with the water in the pool happens before the vases, and may even be what causes Tom to show Polly the vases at all.
Does Granny, or Granny's past, have anything to do with Polly being the one who can help Tom? Probably not; indeed, we know that Granny sends Tom packing at the point where he's about to go to Australia. But, still, how much does Granny know all along? I think right away she knows or suspects that Tom is the current young man in Laurel's clutches; she seems to relax when he tells her that he is a musician in London (so perhaps she understands that he is trying to extricate himself), and before the outing to Stow-on-the-Water, she tells Polly, "I'm not sure I like it, Polly, but if he's free to ask, I suppose he must want to see you." And yet, when Granny and Polly are working out what Polly has to do to try to save Tom, Granny says she wishes she'd known all that in time to save her own husband -- so when Polly was young and Tom was starting to befriend her, did Granny already know he would need a girl to help him break free (even if she hadn't known that in her own youth)? And if not, why was she willing to let Polly see Tom, despite her unease about him being from That House? (Pity is another possibility, I suppose.)
What role do the two photos play in the magic that connects Polly with Tom? If I understood the ending correctly, the "Fire and Hemlock" photo is part of the magic that originally enslaved Tom to Laurel, so it must be significant that he gets it out of Hunsdon House and gives it to Polly. It also seems important that Polly is looking at that photo when she begins to recover the memories that Laurel, or Mr. Leroy, had taken away; is that (along with the changed version of the quartet's book?) part of why she is suddenly able to remember? Then there's the photo of Tom; some kind of magic let Polly see it in the mirror at Hunsdon House. Is that another consequence of the fact that she is the one who can save Tom? Or is some benign magic in Hunsdon House deliberately showing her that to help out? Surely it's significant that she takes the photo out of the house, even though Laurel or Mr. Leroy apparently steal it back later.

Now that I've started, it's hard to stop, heh. I have so many more questions, too, but I guess I'll raise those in a comment below, later tonight or tomorrow sometime.

So there are some questions to possibly start the discussion going, but don't feel you have to address those in order to post. Anything at all is fair game. What did you like or not like about the book? Are there any cool things you figured out about how the magic worked or about how the threads of the story came together? What questions do you still have about what happened? (I'm really hoping that as a group we can figure some stuff out.)

Finally, here are some extra links for fun and more information:

Here's a link that gilpin25 found to an essay by DWJ about what her influences were in writing Fire and Hemlock (scroll down to links at bottom of that page). [I haven't had time to read this yet, so it's possible that I have just embarrassed myself completely and all the questions I tried to raise in this post have been neatly answered by DWJ already, heh.]
I really wanted to post a link to the Steeleye Span version of the "Tam Lin" ballad (from "Tonight's the Night Live"), but it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. :( Here are a couple of other versions:
- Tam Lin - Fairport Convention (classic folk-rock version)
- The Tale of Tam Lin - Bill Jones (vocal and piano; reminds me of Kate Rusby, or a less-lushly-produced Loreena McKennitt)
- Bonus extra link -- there's also an instrumental Irish/Scottish trad reel called "Tam Lin," which my Irish session group plays, and I found a version on cello ;) (it takes her a little while to get the tune up to "normal" speed; start listening at 1:30 to get a taste)

Let me close by saying that I really enjoyed reading this book, and that would have been fun on its own, but it made it even more fun to have a bunch of people on LJ to read and discuss it with. Thanks, all. ♥
.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Notice anything trivial, but cool? Here's a place to put it. :)

I just got to the beginning of Part Three on my reread last night, and noticed something that I had missed on my first read, when I didn't yet know whose photo Polly had stolen from Hunsdon House. (Though maybe I'm just obtuse and DWJ expected me to have figured out about the photo already, heh.)

Anyway: It must have been Polly who gave that other string quartet the flu!

She was at Reg and Joanna's, and couldn't sleep, so she got out the stolen photo and fell asleep holding it. And then, lo and behold, those poor unknown musicians are felled by the flu, and the Dumas Quartet stays in town one day longer than planned, and they are there when Polly needs help.

I suspect this is why Mr. Leroy found Polly in Bristol, too, that he knew that some magic had been worked there on Polly's behalf.

Anyway: It must have been Polly who gave that other string quartet the flu!

She was at Reg and Joanna's, and couldn't sleep, so she got out the stolen photo and fell asleep holding it. And then, lo and behold, those poor unknown musicians are felled by the flu, and the Dumas Quartet stays in town one day longer than planned, and they are there when Polly needs help.

That's... kind of awesome.

She was at Reg and Joanna's, and couldn't sleep, so she got out the stolen photo and fell asleep holding it. And then, lo and behold, those poor unknown musicians are felled by the flu, and the Dumas Quartet stays in town one day longer than planned, and they are there when Polly needs help.

Oh my. That's one heck of a catch. :D

Hit me over the head, it did. This is why rereads are fun.

THANK YOU for getting things going around here again! I'd been hoping someone might start a discussion about the end of the story. I stopped in my reread just about at the start of Part Four, so I need to pick that up again, but I'll be back with thoughts in another day or so.

I'd hoped to get back sooner, but fitting a proper reread in and marshalling my thoughts took longer than planned.

I've thought of a couple of other things I forgot to mention. The ending I find vaguely dissatisfying, but it's hard to pinpoint quite why. On my first read, I assumed it was because I was simply trying to work out what on earth was going on; on the second (and third and fourth, lol) the climatic scene and resolution all seems a bit...quick? I'm not sure that's the right summing up either, but I do feel it's the romantic/love side of things that suffers from the speed. Though they're grasping hands at the end in a committed fashion, reminiscent of some other couple. ;)

One of my favourite things about the book - and I'd have DEVOURED this as a child - was the idea that you can let your own imagination take flight, and basically create the narrative of your own life. And that there is no reason why girls can't be heroes.

I'll be back later with more time to spend here and comment, because reading the thread is as good as the book. :)

Leroy is from the old French form of Le roy. Modern French translates as le roi, which is the king.

Interesting info towards the end of the DWJ essay about some of the other name choices, especially Polly's own. And how the characters are arranged in groups of 3. Most of those went straight over my reading head at the time, but I did see Laurel, Ivy and Joanna. Ivy is the paranoid, clinging side of Laurel, who confuses fact with fiction and see betrayal. Joanna manages Reg with a strict set of rules, which he cannot deviate from. (The part where he's not allowed home till she's recovered from work makes me snort like mad!)

Edited 2013-08-16 14:20 (UTC)

Leroy is from the old French form of Le roy. Modern French translates as le roi, which is the king.

You're quicker than I am! ;) I didn't think of the name that way until the very end, when I realized how very Golden Bough-ish things were getting...

Interesting info towards the end of the DWJ essay about some of the other name choices, especially Polly's own.

That is interesting! And not what I was expecting -- I was thinking more along the lines of Terry Pratchett in Monstrous Regiment, about how Polly is sometimes the name of the girl in the old folk-songs who's been wronged. (On the same Steeleye Span album that was where I'd heard the Ballad of Tam Lin, there's also a song called "Gentleman Soldier" in which a young girl called Polly is indeed loved and left, heh.)

(The part where he's not allowed home till she's recovered from work makes me snort like mad!)

Yes! As if he were a troublesome puppy, or child... I almost feel sorry for Reg. But, not quite. ;)

Not so much trivial and cool, this one, as tangential but interesting.

In the book where I have the 'Heroic Ideal' essay is also a piece written by one of DWJ's sons after her death. One of the several things he talks about is DWJ's difficult relationship with her own mother and how this informed some of the darkness in DWJ's books.

He describes his grandmother as "a formidable woman", a scholarship girl who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and did not particularly want to be a parent. "She certainly could be cruel", he writes, "and very much liked to be admired by men". He goes on to describe how she seems to have informed a number of DWJ villains and then writes this about himself:

"I liked my grandmother, and I got punished for this in several of my mother's books. When I was a teenager I listened to The Doors and did a lot of photography. No doubt in my mother's eyes I was a chilly kind of thing. In Fire and Hemlock there is a chilly public schoolboy called Sebastian who likes The Doors and photography. He also happens to be in league with the glamorous and un-ageing Queen of the Fairies, with whom he tries to erase the heroine's memories and perform a human sacrifice.

"Well, thanks, Mum."

And then my heart breaks.

BTW, while we're on the subject, did anyone else flinch slightly whenever the book referred to "Doors" rather than "The Doors"?

two things!

One of my favourite tiny details is while deciding on an outfit to meet the quartet in (this is when they've come back from Australia), Polly rejects a green shirt on the grounds of bad luck - when she sees Tom a few pages later however, the narrative notes he looks tanned in his green shirt, and we all know how well that trip to the carnival went.

Another is the paintings Polly helps Tom pick out in the beginning, not only do their subjects correspond to encounters Tom and Polly have but the reclaiming of some of the paintings by the Leroy's matches up with which situations they had the upper hand in. (I've thought that the Harlequin picture is what helped Mr Leroy get at Polly the night of the pantomime)

Book discussion: Fire and Hemlock, Parts Three and Four (and Coda)

Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details

Re: Comment thread for cool minor details