In 1977, the novelist Diana Wynne Jones finished a children’s fantasy novel and posted off the manuscript of the final draft to her publishers. There, an editor asked her to make further changes to the book – which she had no intention of doing. But rather than say so, Jones took her carbon copy of the draft and chopped some of the pages up into sections, pasting them back together – exactly the same words in the same order – to look as though the book had been heavily revised. She sent it back to her publishers; the book was now perfect, they declared. That was the thing: it had been all along. The book was Charmed Life, one of the wittiest, sharpest children’s fantasies ever written. There are some writers whose voices are so vividly their own that you can detect the distinctive ring of it 10 miles off in a headwind: Jones is one of them.
Jones, who died in 2011, was a true original. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Wilkins’ Tooth, her first children’s book: it would be a good year to begin reading her. You could start young, at six or seven, with Wild Robert, a book about a courteous ghost who is half magician on his mother’s side. As you get older, there is Howl’s Moving Castle, which was adapted into a film by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli; I know many women who cite the wizard Howl as their first love. The brilliant Archer’s Goon features seven wizard siblings and time travel. For teens, there is Fire and Hemlock; based on the Scottish ballads of Tam Lin, who was stolen away by the fairies, it has a structure modelled on TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. But the jewel in the collection, I think, is the Chrestomanci series, made up of six novels and a book of stories about a nine-lived enchanter who controls the magic of the many known worlds. They feature a magical castle, where children learn their powers: Harry Potter owes them a great debt.
