Fire and Hemlock starts with Polly in the present, struck suddenly by the sense that she has replaced her past with another set of memories. She then sets about recollecting what she thought actually happened, back from a decade ago at the age of ten. While playing pretend with her childhood friend and climbing fences illegally into people’s homes, she finds herself mistaken as a guest at a funeral, where she meets Thomas Lynn, who will feature significantly in her process of coming-of-age.
The book took a while to get into — the perspective of a ten-year-old girl thinking up stories about heroes killing dragons does not make for the most appealing hook. I don’t think it’s because of the made-up stories, but more due to a lack of trust in where the narrative was going (inherent suspicion of a [non-introspective] child’s perspective?).
Yet in weaving Polly’s day-to-day life (school, troubles at home with divorced parents and resentful mother, the on-off nature of her friendship with Nina, a harbour of a home with her grandmother who provides a steady, reliable guardianship) with the more bizzare elements of her meetings with Thomas, where their imagined stories start happening in what has been an ordinary universe thus far and a pervasive feeling of vague danger or dread creeps in, Jones does a solid job in making the fantastical accepted. I mean this in the sense that you are pulled along in a certain surreality — as in a dream there is no question of it making sense or not (hence not just a matter of a suspension of disbelief); you take events as they are. It reminded me of the way I felt while reading Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.
Having said that, I really didn’t get a good grasp of the events during the climax; the solution of the riddle, if you will, the way to out-maneuver a malevolent entity’s traps, as in a (non-Disney) fairy tale. Some level of vagueness is necessary to create that dream-like mood, but I felt that the balance could have been pushed a little further towards clarity. I wish I understood better what the sacrifices Laurel desired were for, and how the negotiation worked in terms of exchanging one soul for another. I also didn’t feel that there was enough to go on for Polly’s supposed infatuation; did not feel the gravity of the act of betrayal she committed — rendered in mystical terms of a ritual, with no real sense on the part of the reader of the implications/intentions/wrongness of the act (and it must be grave, because the whole venture of saving almost collapsed from it). These factors undermined for me the catharsis that should have been wrought from Polly’s process of realisation and going forth on her heroine’s journey. On top of that, there is that sense of discomfort at having a romance of sorts inserted at the end between our main protagonist, whom we’ve begun knowing as a child, and Thomas, whom we’ve been seeing through Polly’s eyes as someone significantly older.
I wonder if the stakes could have been raised higher to strengthen the sense of a mythic tale and deepen the process of growth for the characters, while still retaining that delicious sense of a fantastical reality.
Rating: 3.5/5
— Fire and Hemlock (Diana Wynne Jones, 1985)
Melody stays a child 