Hexwood

I always feel like I ought to appreciate Diana Wynne Jones' books more than I do. I do love the complexity of the situation and the sinister atmosphere - she does a fantastic sinister atmosphere, and here she also does brilliant segues from 'reality' to 'fantasy', especially on the dragon's

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introduction.

But things get wrapped up so very tidily, every piece of the jigsaw clicked into place; and with a touch of the style that she has in some books, which I think of as her "I'm writing in small words for the kids" style (not that I think she actually writes in small words in the slightest, but for some reason I can never define I feel like I'm being patronised somehow).

All terribly subjective and clearly something other readers have no problem with, which is why I feel like there must be something wrong with my reading, but IDIC and all that.

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This was a better book than either its horribly designed cover or badly written blurb would indicate. In fact, it was a great book. Diana Wynne Jones is a wonderful author - why didn't I hear about her until I was 25?

It is difficult to say what Hexwood is about without revealing too much – the plot undergoes a number of paradigm shifts, each time apparently bringing the reader closer to the reality of the story. The narrative progresses vertiginously, making blurry distinctions between the real and the

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possible, and fluidly mixing timelines and causalities. The wood is at the centre of things; its field of influence is explored, but never completely understood. Though it may sound as though this story must be incoherent or inconclusive, the narrative threads gain form and substance as the book progresses, and are successfully resolved in the end.

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I sought out and purchased Hexwood after finding it suggested as a good example of a story that unfolds like a puzzle. I enjoy unconventional literature that requires nontrivial effort in piecing together the narrative. Unfortunately, while Hexwood definitely falls into this category of fiction, it

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is a poor effort that I would not recommend either to the young-adult audience for which it was written or to adults looking for an interesting labyrinth of a plot.

Hexwood's central conceit is that a machine whose purpose is to repeatedly test the outcomes of running a given set of elements through an infinite variety of scenarios has run amuck and threatens to engulf more and more of the world in its expanding game space. Although this could be a somewhat entertaining (if thinly veiled) metafictional allegory for authorship, the book has no such intention but instead plays the premise straight. In fact, for the longest time, the idea of the machine seems to serve merely as a license to depict whatever arbitrary events the author desires—a license of which she takes little imaginative advantage, mostly retreading clichéd fantasy tropes that, in fact, do not become subversive or more interesting in any way from the knowledge that they are illusory.

The first hundred pages are a chore, a series of time-skipped scenes vaguely designed to provide purposefully unrevealing glimpses of strange phenomena with inadequately clued rules surrounding carefully ill-defined characters in a terribly bland forest setting. The reader is insufficiently tantalized by the mysteries of the book's first third because the actors, setting, and circumstances lack for compelling detail and momentum.

There is a cartoonish aspect to the vague sci-fi wizardry; this may be appropriate to the young-adult audience, but it is not much to my taste. The characters act like they are concerned with the rules of performing magic, but the story's premise essentially provides an unlimited source of supernatural creation that undermines the restrictions which some characters impose upon themselves for reasons that are never entirely clear. The prose itself is nothing special; depictions of characters' thoughts and feelings are nakedly and coldly expository most of the time. The author's approach to characterization is generally not engaging.

When the story's science-fiction frame finally begins to disclose the identities of these people, the effect is not one of grasping newfound comprehension but rather simple relief that something is, at long last, actually happening. After the turn, the field of the story rapidly telescopes, but this payoff accomplishes nothing that is worth the cold, wasted space of the long first act.

Hexwood is indeed the narrative puzzlebox that I was promised, but—and I am loath to say this as an admirer of books featuring experimental narrative structures—it is a failure of storytelling due to the omniscient narrator's capricious lack of interest in engaging the reader for so long. The book is not so much ill-conceived as it is poorly designed; the mysteries of the story neither require nor are improved by keeping the reader in the dark for so long.

I would be interested in reading a story that seeks to manipulate the reader through layered and hidden roles and events, but, because the content here fails to justify or make good use of that kind of form, Hexwood comes off seeming vapid, pretentious, and even sadistic. It is confusing for confusion's sake; a pointless book that pretends to be more clever than it is and that does not respect the reader's time.

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All is not well at Hexwood Farm, and Sector Controller Boranus is not happy. The Reigners won't be happy if they realize some underling awoke the Bannus, a machine that can create theta space and cause real people to go through somewhat manufactured events in order to see the best course of action.

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Meanwhile, on Earth, Ann Stavely has been sick and, the first day she feels better, she enters a wood where she meets Mordion, a strange man who says he has been in stasis for years and Hume, a boy she seems to have some responsibility for. But odd things seem to be happening with time and the sequence of events when she goes in the wood...

If that sounds confusing, well, let's just say this is the sort of complex story that doesn't sound at all right when I try to sum it up without spoilers. It's got a little bit of everything: complex storyline, sympathetic characters, and a dash of humor. I've been making my way through Diana Wynne Jones' oeuvre, and thought I'd found my favorites already, but this book surprised me by turning out to be one of the contenders.

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An entirely too convoluted story. I like to have reliable clues as to where the plot is going and this storyline kept changing so much. I felt DWJ herself lost the thread of the story. Perhaps just not my choice in writing style, but it came across as being confusing for confusion's sake.

Ann Stavely is sick in bed when she notices strange happening near the woods by her house. Soon she is embroiled in a plot of theta fields, robots named Yam, and a strange man who seems as if he came alive as a corpse. Little does she know that Earth has already been taken advantaged by the

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Reigners and she might be part of the solution to fix the world.

It's an odd sort of book, with fake time travel, incredible revelations, and character manifestations. I came into this book not knowing anything about it because the review said that saying anything would give the book away. Which made me incredibly curious. So I picked up the book. And yes, that review was true. Almost any full review will have deadly spoilers because the whole book is about unreliable narrators and development of plot in nonchronological order.

I think I do not quite appreciate this book for what it is because I got fairly annoyed with the characters and seemingly meaningless subplots. It all tied together quite neatly at the end, but that doesn't lessen my annoyance or my boredom from the first 75% of the book. I just wanted to know more about Ann and the wood scenes because reading about the Reigners was so incredibly dull. I didn't feel like any of the 5 had enough personality to make me hate than as a villain of love them as an antagonist enough. This probably needs a reread in order to completely appreciate the intricacies of balancing different timelines and possibilities of encounters, but ugh that ain't happening. It's just too dull to warrant a reread.

I'm also disappointed because it turns out the Hume really isn't a child of Ann and Mordion's blood. Instead, he's a fantastical character in his own right. Meh. This book relied heavily on King Arthur and his lore. But bah, I really just wasn't feeling it. It was like playing with fake knights and fake dragons and fake quests. Nothing ever seemed truly important in this book.

My favorite part was the reveal of the Bannus. That was particularly fun because I did not see that coming. Good stuff.

Two stars because I thought it was okay. Not sure if I would recommend to anyone besides this author's fans.

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After having read it a couple of times, I decided Hexwood is good. While it is terribly confusing - it's a mixture of fantasy, science-fiction, timeslip/time travel with a very strong Arthurian element, it's very clever. Due to the Bannus messing around with how the characters perceive their

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reality, and the main character Ann having a telepathic connection with four people she only knows by her own names for them, characters have a habit of appearing in more than one guise.
It's not as real and moving as Fire and Hemlock (one of my favourite Diana Wynne Jones novels) - it's less about relationships than identity, responsibility and rulership - but it's equally thought-provoking. I just had to read it more than once to understand it.

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This is one I just don't get on with. I've tried and tried, and I just don't like it. Hey, I understand 'Fire and Hemlock', give me a break!

Very confusing. After two readings, several years apart, I'm still not sure what's going on.

This book starts out confusing, then gets more confusing, then when you think you maybe have a handle on the whole thing it branches out, then unbranches, and at the end you are probably still sorta confused but you're used to it now so you just kinda go with it. Good book!

Yessss. Hexwood feels like one of the awesome Tom Baker-era Doctor Who serials. King Arthur and robots and evil overlords and fancy tech and family and dream logic and secret identities and time jumps and theta-space and growing up.

I am going to read it again, for sure. I know there are probably a

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bunch of haters, but this is the first Diana Wynne Jones that I've absolutely loved and adored.

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Woah, this book is trippy!

DWJ is quite ambitious in this one. A Bannus has accidentally been activated at Hexwood Farm. It's a machine that manipulates time and reality in order to act out solutions to a problem, and it co-opts any people that cross into its field.

Because most of our characters are

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at the mercy of the Bannus, their perception of reality is highly altered. They never know quite what has happened to them, and events occur out of order, especially at first. So, yeah, it's all a bit postmodern, which Jones uses to talk about some important postmodern topics: power, agency, and injustice.

As the controlling element of the plot, the Bannus is an author figure in its little world. So it's quite appropriate that this is one incredibly intertextual novel. First of all, much of the plot is quietly adapted from The Tempest. Not just any version of the Tempest, mind you, but a post-colonial reading of the Tempest overlaid with Forbidden Planet and with a splash of As You Like It for good measure (because As You Like It is after all The Tempest with less plot and more jokes.) Prospero and Ariel/Caliban are everywhere you look, Antonio is Reigner One, Miranda has become young Hume, and the island becomes Hexwood (or the Forbidden Planet Earth, rather interestingly.) I don't imagine Jones expects very many readers to notice the similarities, but she does draw her source material from the best.

There are also explicit references: a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Grail Quest, some Arthur and Beowulf, a couple Hamlet references, and an Alice in Wonderland bit, for those of us keeping track at home. The Bannus, we learn, has had a library at its disposal, so it too uses the best. Basically it gets a big A from a English major's standpoint.

From a reader's standpoint, it's also quite a good book. Jones for the most part handles all this wackiness quite deftly. The plot requires a bit of patience at first, but by the end it's a page-turner. Most of the characters are pretty strong and likable, which is impressive because the surreal mechanism of the plot is between us and them all the time, and because we jump around between brains quite a lot in order to keep abreast of what is happening. I did feel, nevertheless, a bit distanced at times from the heart of the novel, because the characters' identities and motivations kept coming into question - Hume especially was perplexing. Then there is the usual Jonesian expanse of elaborate minor b-plot, which was occasionally WTF-ish, although still entertaining.

What did really like was how clear the themes were by the end - it made a really strong statement about the misuse of power and how it affects both disenfranchised individuals and those who try to restore a balance of power.

A strong and ambitious novel!

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Ann Stavely is a girl in England, who watches the gate of the Hexwood Farm housing estate from her bedroom window, and sees people enter and not return. Vierran is a young woman of a very different, and distant world, who's about to be dragged off by Reigner One, senior of the five rulers of her

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world, on a mission to a small world which is the source of the most valuable substance in existence, flint--a mission on which three of the five other reigners have already gone, and from which they have unaccountably not returned.

And Mordion is either the sinister servant of the not at all beneficient Reigners, or a conspirator against them who has been locked up in a stasis box on Hexwood Farm for several centuries. And while all the humans are pursuing their assorted and conflictin g purposes, the computer and the Wood are each plotting their own plots.

Nicely convoluted and absorbing, but not completely satisfying, in the end.

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Set in modern England, in which a young girl starts noticing odd goings on at a nearby farm, and a futuristic alien galaxy, where a power struggle between the Reigners and the ruled is just coming to a head. The stories collide in the most interesting way. As always with DWJ, I really loved the

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main characters.

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Reread, yeah, but I do so like this book. Wild fantasy/sci-fi/Arthurian legend mash-up with time travel and reality-warping mind games. What's not to like? I still haven't completely sorted out the details of how the events are ordered, but I don't doubt there is one (you can count on DWJ!), and

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you can enjoy it and make sense of it without having to go to that level of analysis.

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