The Games People Play

DIANA WYNNE JONES'S 2007 NOVELLA THE GAME REVISITS THEMES THAT seasoned Jones readers may have come to expect from earlier books, yet it provides a fresh, original story. It is one of the many wonders of Jones's work that she can return time and again to the same themes without becoming obvious or repetitive. Regular readers may feel they have footholds of familiar ground while looking forward to the surprises of new plots and characters. The Game is a perfect example in this respect. Family relationships very important--practically everyone belongs to one extended family. We find the bad female caregiver in the shape of the grandmother who gives the protagonist Hayley a lot of rules but no love. As in so many of Jones's books, secret identities prevail; people not what they seem. Hayley might be considered a sacrificed child, sacrificed on the altar of her Uncle Jolyon's power games. Imprisonment and release apply most notably to Hayley's parents, but to some extent to all the other members of her family who in exile. There many allusions to other tales, and there is complex time travel. Finally, we witness a crowd scene climax where the antagonist is vanquished. (For a fuller list of such themes, see the Diana Wynne Jones Wiki.) One can add the question of age in the young/old protagonists that Deborah Kaplan explores elsewhere in this issue. Jones also returns to the tried-and-tested strategy of setting the story in one particular mythological context and using the associated characters and storylines for her own devices. One could go so far as to say none of the characters is invented by her; they all familiar from, or at least can be found in, other, older stories. Indeed, one of the traits that sets The Game apart from other Jones books is the fact that every character in the story (with the exception of two shopkeepers, a taxi driver, and some airport personnel, who merely necessary props) is a mythological or story character. I will argue below that all of them are, however, very much of this world and that Jones uses her skills, not just in telling a story but in manipulating the possibilities of other stories, to situate The Game squarely here on Earth (23) instead of in one of her parallel worlds. We will investigate the consequences of this for the interplay of fantasy, reality, and history in the text. In particular, I will argue that Jones's device of the mythosphere (discussed below) provides her with a new and flexible multi-dimensional means to consider readers' relationships with stories from different times and places as well as those stories' relationships with each other. Characteristically, Jones brings the complexities of intertextuality to the foreground, rather than leaving them unspoken. What Charles Butler observes of her use of time paradoxes is also true here: the difficulties involved are incorporated into the plot rather than being bracketed as aspects of an unfathomable mystery (Four 68). The great invention of the book is the mythosphere. This is made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that generated on Earth, and it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe (23). This is one of the loveliest definitions of a library I have heard (and incidentally highly reminiscent of Borges's Library of Babel). It is very possible that child readers, especially the kind of smart readers required by Jones books, (1) will recognize the mythosphere as a repository of stories that they themselves can enter through reading and that this will heighten their enjoyment of a story that is to a large extent about story. Hayley and her family can move through the mythosphere because they belong there; we can make it our own through reading. The Game initially takes us, not to the mythosphere, but to a house in the Irish countryside (complete with stereotypical lashing rain) at which Hayley arrives from the large victorian-style house on the edge of London where she has been living with her grandparents. …