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

[shimotsuki]

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. ♥
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Comments

[katyhasclogs.livejournal.com]

Right, so here's my answers, such as they are, your very excellent 'Why Polly?' questions.

(Apologies if I'm repeating anything anyone else has said as I've not quite read it all yet and also suspect I'll get myself in a fearful muddle if I attempt anything more than just getting my interpretation down on the pagesorry! screen.)

If Polly is Tom's only hope, why is it her?

The way I see it, Polly is Tom's only hope in the sense that she is the only opportunity that has presented itself to him, rather than being the only person who could help. I think what happens is that she is the right sort of person in the right place at the right time, and that provides a chance that she can be Tom's salvation if all goes well. To my mind, it's a bit like the way that the divine intervention/free will thing works in The Curse of Chalion.

Now, I think several factors in that first meeting indicate and/or set up Polly as a person that can help Tom. I suspect it's hugely important that Polly even finds her way into Hunsdon House, while Nina didn't, and I think there's a twisty thing going on whereby her act of trespass enables her to help and she was able to trespass because she's the sort of person who can help. I see the house as existing both in the 'real' world (here now?) where Nina just walked up the drive back to the road, and elsewhere (nowhere?) where Polly gatecrashed the funeral and it all began.

I do rather think that it pretty much had to be a child that ended up in the position to save Tom. There's a suggestion of children=clever, adults=stupid running through the book (and the DWJ essays I've read) and one point that does seem to be made fairly clearly is that the "penalty of being grown-up" is that your thinking becomes rather muggle-ish when it comes to magical, otherworldly, nowhere stuff. Polly as a child well practiced in imagination and making things up was well placed to perceive the elsewhere part/layer of Hunsdon, and had skills that worked well with Tom's 'gift' to provide a way of helping him.

I see the water in the pond as an indication and/or confirmation that Polly can perceive the nowhere/faerieland layer of Hunsdon. And I've wondered whether the vases indicate something about what layer of reality you're in, but I've not really managed to form that idea into any kind of coherent theory yet...

The photo stuff...I don't really understand. Except to say that when Polly sees Tom's photo in the mirror, I think the prefect's mirror superstition is working for real and it's a demonstration that in the world of the book superstitions do work for real rather than just being nonsense (says Katy the grown-up, lol).

As for Granny, I pretty much had the same thoughts as you about how much she knows, though I think some of it is probably not certain knowledge (since she wasn't in-the-know enough to save her chap). I don't know whether she's even very sure that the young men can be saved, and her sending Tom away suggests she doesn't think it ought to be Polly's job to do any saving, so perhaps she's reassured at him living in London and being "free to ask" because it indicates he's not quite under the thumb, or no longer entranced by That House and its occupants, which makes him less threatening? Maybe she thinks there isn't much she can do about it all?

(As a sideline, how is she ok with Seb, who *is* from That House?)

Ooh! I've just read this bit from towards the end:

"It's laid on them not to say, nor me to remember, but I keep what I can in my head by living where I do. She likes them young, she likes them handsome, and musical when she can get them."

So perhaps what she knows is a bit fluid or unreliable? Perhaps a lot of it is subconscious or instinctive?