Mr. Chesney operates a yearly tour where he takes tourists from our world into a magical world where they embark on the full hero experience: a wizard guide, monster attacks, thwarting an evil army, and finally defeating the Dark Lord. The problem is the residents of that magical world hate these tours; the tours deplete food, ruin farmland, kill locals, destroy towns, , and otherwise disrupt the world. Unfortunately, Mr. Chesney has a very powerful demon he is more than willing to unleash on any of the world’s inhabitants who try to disobey him. This year, the most powerful wizards, thieves, priests, and nobility have called a meeting to do something about it. They consult with the Oracles, who give them one instruction: if they want the tours to stop, they need to appoint the first person they see as Dark Lord this year. That person ends up to be Derk, a middling mage who would rather be creating new creatures than pretending to be a Dark Lord.
Thus begins The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones’s satire of fantasy novels. While a fully featured story in its own right, it pokes a great deal of fun at the fantasy novel genre. The popular clichés of the genre are taken on: prideful dragons, aloof elves, greedy dwarves, bard colleges, and of course wizards. Showing them as fully fleshed out people rather than one-sidedcharacters shows their strengths and flaws. Seeing them stumble over themselves to make sure planning for well-staged and totally faked tours across their realms shows more of the lunacy of some of the more common fantasy tropes. What Jones does effectively is give a certain loveable humanity to the characters, even while poking holes on our favorite cliches and illusions.
Derk is not a hermit wizard. He has a large family: a beautiful wife who is also a wizard, a son who is beginning to learn magic, a daughter about to go to Bard College, and five griffin children. The griffins tend to be the most interesting aspect. Each griffin was born and grew up as another child in the household. So while they may have cat bodies and feathers, they talk and have fully-fleshed out personalities like another other character. They are so much more people than pets, unlike Derk’s other inventions: talking dogs, a winged horse, carnivorous sheep, and sarcastic geese. Derk’s family and menagerie alone could carry this book even if the plot was uninteresting.
Luckily, the plot is quite interesting. The nature of Jones’s style is that her stories are dense. She can pack so much more into three hundred or so pages than the typical writer, as she doesn’t dwell on small events, simply saying they happened and moving on to other things. Rather than making the reader feel like they missed out, this gives a greater breadth to the characters involved. The reader really begins to know the characters and know who they are; something that can happen in other novels, particularly ones with as large a cast as this one.
If there are any criticisms to be made of the novel it is that certain themes and plot points seem undeveloped. The ending seems to come quick. Events lead up to the end, but the actual climax feels like there was no warning or build up; it almost feels like the characters got lucky. There are some reveals of things near the end, while clearly bad, don’t seem to feed back into the events of the ending. Granted this novel is intended for a YA audience, so things can’t be too complex, it still feels like those ends were somehow important and should have been tied up.
Criticisms aside, fans of the late Jones’s work will love this novel, as it brings many of the things they enjoy her novels for, as well as a few new things. Those who have never read her work may find this a good starting point, particularly if they are coming from the traditional fantasy story background, even moreso if they’re coming from the Modern Person Stuck in Fantasy World trope. I’d say this novel pales compared to her Chrestomanci work or Howl’s Moving Castle, but it is still a very worthwhile and enjoyable read.
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