They were worse than anything in my books." The village was home to two witches, a man who howled at the moon and a communist vicar.Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese director of acclaimed animation Spirited Away, has just made a film of Wynne Jones's novel Howl's Floating Castle. Mind you, the only thing I saw by way of corporate jollity was a wild-eyed man in shorts, who looked like an escaped convict, and whose notion of mass entertainment was to change hats and bellow "Are you happy?" at a startled queue. A question that invariably invites the reply: "No, what little remains of my supposedly immortal soul is shrivelling up and dying inside here."Standing by a modest pile of books on a table to the rear of the store, I saw a notice informing customers that, at 2.30pm in the afternoon, Diana Wynne Jones would be signing books. And I would bet my last magic bean that I was the only person there to note the irony of these two female writers being f?d - if on vastly different scales - that same day. Wynne Jones is the author of more than 30 outstanding children's titles, of which the best known are the Chrestomanci quintet.I picked up the first in the series, Charmed Life, in my school's mobile library when I was nine and was transfixed by the story of the awkward, orphaned Cat, who is sent to learn magic at the enchanter Chrestomanci's castle with its mysterious garden that seems to provide a link to other worlds: "No witchcraft of any kind is to be practised by children without supervision." Sounds familiar? But Charmed Life was written in 1977, and Wynne Jones will be 71 this August. Not that any wise reader should expect thematic originality in children's fiction, which readily acknowledges its debt to fairy-tale, Arthurian legend, and Norse and Greek mythology.
But even Wynne Jones has noticed the parallels, although her writing has a wit, verve and elegance that Rowling's lacks.She attributes the way she writes to surviving the war and a spectacularly bizarre rural Essex childhood, where she and her two sisters were housed in a damp shack and left to run wild, while her parents lived in comfort over the way "As a child, I had parents. A vast horde of Muggles queued to get their bargain-priced copy from killjoy WH Smith, which laid on no diversions for the frazzled children. But by far the largest crowd had assembled at Borders, where several thousand people snaked through the store, lured by utterly resistible offers of "face-painting, a quiz, potion mixing" and "reptile experience" (most women get enough of the last in any Cambridge pub). Had any of the eavesdroppers been at all familiar with the arcane customs of fantasy writing for children, they would instantly have recognised the sound of two worlds colliding - parallel universes, you might even say. One realm rather like ours, but its citizens include wizards and witches who learnt their craft at boarding school and oppose the forces of darkness. The other world our own dear university town, but its people include men and women in flowing robes and silly hats who learnt their craft at boarding school and oppose, er ...
Ruth Kelly, state-school chavs clogging up their oak-pannelled dining-rooms, tour guides, split infinitives, Big Brother and the spotty, little rat-finks who demand tutorials. More than 4,000 assorted townsfolk forwent their beds and descended on the streets around Market Square to secure the first available copies of The Half-Blood Prince, sixth novel in JK Rowling's Harry Potter series. A gaggle of university types (mostly male, no children) were lurking in the gloom of Trinity Street to buy a surreptitious copy from Heffers. Sturdier souls progressed calmly through Waterstone's, where the reassuringly bookish manager had donned a green cloak. The result was that various actors turned an honest penny pretending to be Mr Gerry Adams, Mr Martin McGuinness or whoever it might be.
