Dark Lord of Derkholm Book

Just over six years ago I met the person I want to spend my entire life with, in that time I was very quickly made aware of her affection towards the fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones and regularly told to give her a try. Being such a considerate husband I finally relented on the proviso that she choose me one that wasn't for kids, wasn't too massive and was one of her better novels. Apparently the first two choices are already lent to a friend of ours and so I was provided with a well loved copy of this Derkholm book. I quite enjoyed it, not that I'm surprised by this fact, she's a highly awarded and regarded author in the genre by all those in the know, and those that don't know are quite probably the type to gush over something interminably "epic".

The Dark Lord of Derkholm is actually just the wizard Derk, prophesied by an oracle to be the chosen one, the wizard who would finally bring the world peace and free it from an evil overlord who holds the world in his vice-like grip via a portal from Earth. Derk is an outcast in the wizard community, a man who prefers to invent interesting new creatures rather than focus on more every day spells such as conjuring feasts and enchantment. Every year a wizard is chosen to be the Dark Lord for a series of tourist parties from Earth arranged by the villainous bean counter Mr Chesney, a position of great importance as you're responsible for keeping the entire planet organised to service the tourists or face death by Chesney's pocket demon. How the hell did she come up with this stuff? Derk has help from his loving family of wizards in training and magical creatures adopted as children, even the genetically altered flying pigs are dragged in to things despite their only real desire in life to nuzzle their father, Derk.

The plot is labyrinthine, the characters plentiful, the prose incredibly playful, but it is the interraction between the many members of Derk's family that provide the real pleasure of this novel, they're all interesting and unique creations and they all have their own relationships with each other, factions and favourites etc, but as it's still technically a novel aimed at the teenage market they're all very loving towards each other when all is said and done. The other great skill displayed is that of world building without info dumps, the information is provided in short bursts as it naturally comes up in each chapter, sometimes only obliquely referenced and other times actually experienced by a character, in direct contrast to one of the major issues I have with most other books in the fantasy genre, "epic" books that take six pages to discuss the history of a valley that you'll never come across again in an entire sixteen novel sequence type of thing.

I won't be reading more of this stuff I'm sure but I had a great time discovering Diana Wynne Jones all the same.