Posted on by TracyC

Conrad’s Fate

Chrestomanci

Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones, 2005.

This is the fifth book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different dimensions, and in each of those different dimensions, there is a copy of every person.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history across the dimensions, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the dimensions. There is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other dimensions.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other dimensions are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course.

Conrad lives in the 7 series of worlds in Chrestomanci’s universe. His family owns a bookshop. Well, technically, his Uncle Alfred owns the bookshop. He started it with Conrad’s father, but he says that Conrad’s father needed a large amount of money before his death, so he sold Alfred his half. When he was young, Conrad and his older sister, Anthea, imagined that their father probably lost a large amount of money at the casino. Conrad likes that idea because he’s a bit of a risk-taker himself and likes doing adventurous things, like rock climbing. Uncle Alfred tells them that they’re wrong about their father gambling. He says that he thinks that the aristocrats at the mysterious Stallery Mansion stole a large amount of money from their father. He doesn’t explain any more about how that happened, but he cautions Conrad not to be such a risk-taker because he has bad karma.

Conrad doesn’t understand what karma is, and his sister explains that karma is sort of like fate, but it’s the consequences of good or bad deeds committed in previous lives coming back to affect the present life. She thinks that the only way to clear bad karma is to correct for the misdeeds of the past. Conrad is intrigued and asks if it’s really possible for people to live more than once, but everybody else is busy with things they’re trying to do, and nobody will give him a straight answer. Conrad can’t help but wonder what this could all mean for his karma and his fate.

One day, while Conrad is looking for a book in the shop that is part of a series he’s been reading, he realizes that the books in the series have changed titles, and although he can tell that the basic stories are the same, some of the details are different. When Conrad asks his uncle about it, Uncle Alfred is very angry. He says that it’s the fault of the aristocrats at Stallery Mansion. Uncle Alfred explains that the aristocrats at Stallery Mansion make themselves richer by very literally playing the possibilities. They use powerful magic to evaluate different possible realities and make little shifts in the nature of reality itself to make things go the way they want them to go for their business interests, so they can turn bigger profits. The problem is that any little change in reality can have a ripple effect, changing many other details of life around them, from the titles of books to the color of everyone’s mailboxes. Not everyone notices these magical changes in reality because they use mind games to fool people into thinking that whatever changes they made were always like that. (It’s a weird combination of gaslighting and the Mandela Effect.) They also use powerful enchantments around their area to stop people from sensing what they’re doing, so powerful that they disrupt computers and television sets. Uncle Alfred is a magician himself, so he can tell what they’re doing, and he despises them for their manipulations.

However, Uncle Alfred is greedy and manipulative, too. Conrad discovers how greedy and manipulative he is after his sister leaves home to go to university. Both his mother and uncle are angry at her for leaving because she had been doing much of the work around the house and bookshop, and they had never had to pay her to do it. Anthea knows they’ve been taking advantage of her, and that’s the reason why she knows that she needs to leave and build a life of her own. Conrad misses her after she goes, and his uncle has to actually hire another girl and (gasp!) pay her to work for him. He frets constantly about how much it costs to actually pay someone wages in exchange for work. The other girl, Daisy, tells Conrad that his uncle isn’t hard up for money at all. The bookshop is very successful, and with what it brings in, Uncle Alfred could afford to pay her much better than he does. He just doesn’t want to do it because he’s so stingy. All of the money he brings in, he spends on himself. For the first time, Conrad becomes aware of how much money his uncle spends on fine port and tailored clothes. His mother is also two-faced, spending all of her time writing books about the oppression and subjugation of women while making Conrad do all the cooking in Anthea’s place. Conrad’s not very good at cooking, but his mother won’t cook anymore because she doesn’t want to be subjugated as a woman. She’s not above subjugating her own children for her benefit, though.

Conrad realizes that he has to use the techniques that Daisy uses to get his mother and uncle to stop exploiting him as badly as Anthea. He stops cooking and refuses to make any more food until his uncle agrees to give him things he wants as payment, like a bicycle. He notices that other kids at school get presents from parents without having to work for them or bargain for them, like he does, but he supposes that it’s all part of his bad karma.

Uncle Alfred has been blaming all of the changes that have taken place since Anthea left on Conrad’s bad karma. Conrad isn’t sure whether he lived a past life or not, since Anthea said that she didn’t believe in past lives, but since he keeps getting into trouble in various ways, he suspects that his karma might really be bad. He also starts blaming his bad karma for any accident he has (which all sound like perfectly ordinary accidents that could happen to anybody, really), and he starts feeling like maybe he deserves it all somehow for past sins. He asks his uncle what he could have done that could cause his karma to be bad. His uncle says he doesn’t know and that he’ll try to figure it out with magic.

When Conrad is getting old enough to go to high school, Conrad realizes that he’s going to have to use some kind of persuasion or negotiation to get his uncle to let him go on with his education. He wants to learn magic himself, but he knows that his uncle will probably want him to work in the bookshop for free, like Anthea did. His plan is to offer to work part time for his uncle in exchange for the money to attend high school with his friends when word spreads that Count Rudolph of Stallery Mansion has died. His heir is a 21-year-old man, and he only has a younger sister. People speculate that both of them will have to marry soon to ensure that their family line will continue. Sure enough, there is an announcement that the new count, Robert, will marry soon. People say that the old count’s wife is a controlling person and that she will control her son and his new wife, too. For some reason, the news upsets Uncle Alfred and his group of magicians.

Then, when it’s time for Conrad to leave his school and declare whether or not he’s going on to high school, his mother shocks him by telling him that he can’t go to high school because he already has a job at Stallery Mansion. Conrad demands that his Uncle Alfred explain what this job at Stallery Mansion is and why he signed him up for it. His Uncle Alfred says that he has learned through his magic that, in Conrad’s previous life, he was supposed to kill a wicked person, and he failed to do it, so this person continued their wickedness and has been reborn as an equally wicked person. Uncle Alfred says that this person’s current incarnation is someone at Stallery Mansion and that he got Conrad a job as a servant there so he can take care of the mission he failed to do in his previous life … to kill the person he is supposed to kill. Uncle Alfred says that this is the only way that Conrad can clear his bad karma and go on to live his own life. If he doesn’t, fate will take retribution on him by killing him before the year is out. Conrad isn’t sure whether to believe Uncle Alfred or not, but Uncle Alfred’s magician friends all say the same thing to Conrad, that they can read his bad karma and that it will hang over him and may kill him soon if he doesn’t clear it. As horrible as it is, twelve-year-old Conrad resigns himself to going to Stallery Mansion as a servant with a mission to kill some unknown evil person to save his own life.

When he goes for his interview at Stallery Mansion, Conrad is hired on as a page boy along with another boy, who is taller, handsomer, and very well-dressed. This other boy calls himself Christopher Smith, although Conrad is sure that “Smith” isn’t really his last name. At first, Conrad regards Christopher as a professional rival, but Christopher assures him that he isn’t interested in competing to move up the ranks of the servants. In fact, he admits that he is here for another purpose, and as soon as he’s found what he’s looking for, he will leave. Both Conrad and Christopher have their own intrigues.

Of course, Christopher is really Christopher Chant, who is currently in training to be the next Chrestomanci in his world. He is in Conrad’s world to find Millie, who has run away from boarding school because the other girls there were bullying her, and she didn’t feel like she was learning anything. Christopher had tried to tell their guardian, Gabriel DeWitt, who is the current Chrestomanci, that Millie was miserable, but he wouldn’t listen. After Millie disappeared, DeWitt still wouldn’t listen when Christopher tried to tell him that Millie was no longer in their world, so he went in search of her himself. He knows that she’s somewhere close, somewhere in Stallery Mansion, but he can’t find her, and he’s very worried. It feels like she’s trapped somewhere, but Christopher isn’t sure where.

Conrad is moved by Christopher’s story and offers to help him find Millie. Then, Christopher also witnesses the changes in reality that Conrad has seen and sees how someone at Stallery has been playing with probabilities. When Conrad confides in Christopher about his bad karma from a previous life, Christopher is sure that what his uncle told him isn’t true, no matter what his uncle and his uncle’s friends said. Together, Conrad and Christopher must confront the mysteries of Stallery: who is changing the nature of reality at Stallery and how, where is Millie and why can’t they find her, what is the truth about Conrad’s fate?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

I really liked seeing young Christopher Chant in this adventure, while he’s still learning how to be the Chrestomanci. As an adult, Christopher is always very sure of himself and able to handle just about anything, but here, he’s still young and not always sure of himself. He has high self-confidence from knowing that he’s a powerful, nine-lived enchanter, but in this story, he runs up against things that he doesn’t completely know how to handle. He puts on a show of knowing what he’s doing, but both Conrad and Millie know that there are times when he’s just bluffing or muddling his way through.

I also enjoyed seeing Christopher’s relationship with Millie develop more. They were both children in The Lives of Christopher Chant, but they have known each other for years now. It’s pretty clear that Christopher has strong feelings for Millie from the way he desperately searches for her when she’s lost. Millie knows that he’s powerful, but she also knows his faults from growing up with him. She knows that there are times when he’s lazy and doesn’t want to bother learning something, so he just bluffs his way through. He’s also grown accustomed to getting his way with things. When Millie first told him that she was unhappy at school, he wanted to run away with her so they could live alone on an island together, and Millie realized that was a terrible idea. She likes Christopher, but she doesn’t want to live alone on an island or have him constantly dictating what they’re going to do. That was why she took matters into her own hands and ran away on her own. Since Christopher is a teenage boy, I can guess why he wants to be alone on an island with the girl he likes, and even Conrad realizes that Christopher is trying to be like a knight errant to Millie by single-handedly charging to her rescue. Christopher really does love Millie, and he’s trying to be her hero and help her in romantic ways.

Christopher is a little full of himself and still has some growing up to do, but both Conrad and Millie admit that they like him in spite of his faults. The fact that they know both his good and bad points and still like him makes their relationships with him stronger. Christopher’s faults, like his superior attitude and fussiness about his clothes are minor in the face of bigger issues. He’s on the side of good, where other people in the story definitely aren’t, and although he is powerful, he never abuses those powers. Millie respects Christopher, and he does his best to look after her. At the end of the story, Conrad says that Christopher and Millie are engaged to be married, and Christopher trusts Millie with the ring that contains one of his extra lives.

When Conrad and Christopher start working at Stallery Mansion, they both learn about the divided world of a wealthy mansion with servants, with areas where the family lives and the areas where the servants live, like that shown in Upstairs Downstairs, Gosford Park, and Downtown Abbey. The boys have to learn to make themselves unobtrusive, like they’re pieces of furniture, except when they’re needed to do something for the family. They also learn to be observant and to anticipate the needs of the people they serve. Conrad has some experience with housework and cooking from home, but when Christopher arrives, he has little or no idea how to do certain things because there are staff at Chrestomanci Castle to take care of the chores. Christopher isn’t exactly humbled by his time as a servant, but he does gain the experience of working a regular job and doing menial chores, like polishing shoes. It is a learning experience for him.

I thought it was pretty obvious from the beginning that Uncle Alfred and his friends were villains and that they made up the idea of Conrad’s bad karma to manipulate him into doing their bidding. Fortunately, both Christopher and Anthea help to convince Conrad of the truth before he does anything horrible. Anthea has also discovered that her father was the real owner of the bookshop, not their uncle, even has a half partner. When he died, he left it to their mother and to his children after her. Uncle Alfred has been using memory spells of his own to manipulate everyone into believing that he owns the bookshop. Anthea only realizes it after being away from his influence for a few years and meeting Conrad again at Stallery.

What Christopher realizes about Stallery Mansion is that it’s built on a probability fault, a place where several different probabilities happen to meet. The mansion keeps shifting between different probabilities, and the reason why they have trouble finding Millie is that she has gotten trapped in one particular probability. They can’t reach her until the mansion is in her particular probability. Part of the peculiar shifting of the mansion through probabilities seems to happen naturally because of its location, but both Christopher and Anthea realize that someone is helping it along. Unraveling the mystery of who is responsible reveals some further secrets about Conrad’s family and Conrad himself. Conrad has magical abilities and ends up receiving training from de Witt along with Christopher.

While Christopher and Millie learn a few things from their experiences, Gabriel de Witt also admits at the end of story that he has learned a few things about the way he was treating both of them. As their guardian, he takes his job of educating them and preparing them for the future seriously, something that he berates Conrad’s mother for neglecting for her own children. However, he confesses that he has neglected the emotional well-being of his wards and that he is partly responsible for them running away. When Millie complained about her school and Christopher told him off for ignoring Millie’s unhappiness, Gabriel brushed it off as teenage melodrama, but he later admits that he should have taken their complaints more seriously. After Millie ran away, he did what he should have done in the first place and went to the school to see the conditions there for himself, and he admits that Millie was right that it wasn’t a good school. He promises Millie that he will find her a better school where she can finish her education. He still makes it clear to Christopher that he was behaving like a hothead by running off himself and taking unnecessary risks, but the two of them eventually forgive one another. Later books show that Christopher and Millie still have respect and affection for Gabriel as adults. Gabriel de Witt isn’t always a perfect guardian and he doesn’t always understand young people, but he does care about his young wards and wants the best for them, which contrasts with the way Conrad’s mother and uncle were just using him and his sister with no thought to their well-being or future.

Posted on by TracyC

The Magicians of Caprona

The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones, 1980.

This is the second book in the Chrestomanci series.  In this series, there are many different dimensions with different worlds, and in each of those different worlds, there is a copy of every person.  Different versions of our world can differ dramatically in their history across the dimensions, and individual people’s lives can differ dramatically between the worlds. There is one person in each generation who has no duplicates in any of the other worlds.  This person is called the Chrestomanci.  All of the talents, abilities, and lives that would have been spread across the other worlds are now centered on that one person, giving that person, literally, nine lives.  The Chrestomanci fills an important role, being better able than anyone else to travel across the dimensions, and he acts to keep a balance between them and make sure that the different worlds keep their proper course. This book begins with a brief explanation, although most of this was established in the first book in the series, Charmed Life.

In the world where the Chrestomanci lives, magic not only exists but is a known and accepted profession, and society is a little more old-fashioned than in our world. Also, there is a kind of alternate history, and some of the countries are organized differently. This story is set in Italy, which is not a unified country in this world, but a series of small dukedoms. The Chrestomanci series is a somewhat loose series, meaning that, while Chrestomanci appears in the different books and always plays some kind of role, he is not always one of the main characters. This story sets up a Shakespearean kind of feud between two families.

The dukedom of Caprona is known to having the best spell-makers in the world. The problem is that the best spell-makers belong to two particular families, the Montanas and the Petrocchis, who have a long-standing feud. The adults in the families never explain how, exactly, the feud started. They just warn the children to avoid to avoid the children of the other family. When members of the two families meet in public, they usually ignore each other, although sometimes fights break out. The fights are particularly bad when they use magic. Locals and tourists alike are alarmed by these fights and get out of the way to avoid being caught up in them.

Because the adults don’t talk about the cause of the feud, the children of the two families tell each other stories about it. In the Montana family, the children say that it started because the Duke of Caprona favored their family over the Petrocchis. The children also tell each other stories about the other family’s atrocious habits. Young Rosa Montana particularly likes telling her siblings and cousins scandalous stories about how the Petrocchis never bathe and sometimes kill their unwanted babies or eat their own family members. Because the members of the two families almost never see each other, the other Montana children can only suppose that the stories they hear about the Petrocchis are true.

When young Tonino Montana starts school, he is very upset. Things don’t seem to come as easily to him as they do to his siblings and cousins, and he feels awkward when the teacher tells him to do things differently from the way he’s always been taught to do them or repeats things that he’s already learned. When Tonino runs off into the city by himself because he’s upset, the rest of his family worries about him. Old Niccolo, the head of the family, talks to Benvenuto, the head cat in the Montana household, about Tonino. The Montana family keeps cats, who help them at their spell-making, but not everyone in the family has the ability to talk to the cats and understand them. Old Niccolo can communicate with the cats, but even Tonino’s father, Antonio, can’t. Benvenuto tells Niccolo that he will look after Tonino and not to worry about him. Tonino, like Niccolo, can talk to cats, and he hasn’t fully appreciated the talent yet.

Benvenuto becomes Tonino’s special friend. He helps Tonino to understand that, like the kittens he talks to, he’s still young and learning. Tonino needs to give himself time to develop. Benvenuto also tells Tonino that it’s fine to tell his teachers what he already knows, and Tonino comes to realize that he is far ahead of the other students in some ways, having already learned to read. His talent for talking to the cats also gives him a special place in his family. Benvenuto also allows Tonino to give him brushings, which he would never allow from any other family member before, so he becomes more well-cared for.

As time goes on, however, Tonino comes to realize that the adults in the Montana family are worried about the state of their family and the state of Caprona itself. Other dukedoms around them are becoming more powerful, and some of the old spells that the two families made to protect Caprona are breaking down. Of course, the Montanas blame the Petrocchis for the weakness of the spells and for not maintaining them properly, but Tonino realizes that the old Montana spells are breaking down as well. It’s not, as the older Montanas said, that they have had to bear the weight of making up for the weak Petrocchi spells.

Tonino gets his first look at the Petrocchis when both families are summoned to the duke’s palace to discuss the state of their spells and the rival states that are seeking to conquer Caprona. Speaking together for the first time in a long time, both families come to realize that, even though they have separately been working to make their spells stronger, each year, the protective spells they cast on Caprona have been getting weaker. There is a rumor that there is an evil enchanter who has been working against them on behalf of their enemies. Naturally, both Petrocchis and the Montanas secretly suspect each other of being involved. They also can’t help but notice that something is seriously wrong with the duke himself. He seems strangely childlike, and his wife seems to be running everything.

The Montana family offers a solution that even they aren’t sure they can fulfill. There is an old story that all of the children know about an angel who once protected Caprona with a magical song. Everyone thinks that, as along as the song is sung, Caprona will be safe. The children learn this song in school, but what they don’t know is that the words they learn to the song aren’t the original words to the song. The tune is original, but the original words were lost to time. The Montanas know that the song is a powerful spell, but it won’t function correctly until the original words to the song are restored. In their pride against the Petrocchis and their worry about the state of Caprona, the Montanas have pledged that they will find the original words to the song. Also, naturally, the Petrocchis have promised the same. Neither family knows exactly how they will do that, but they are each determined to somehow do it before the other family can.

There is only one person both of the families accept and who can work with either family without earning the resentment of the other: Chrestomanci. The situation is serious, war is pending, and Chrestomanci has also been summoned for help. As the most powerful enchanter in the world, he has the respect of all sides. Since Chrestomanci is British, he admits that he is somewhat limited in how far he can interfere in Italian affairs. His main interest is in the evil enchanter and their misuse of magic, although he will help Caprona and his friends in the magical families, if he can.

Chrestomanci notices that, aside from being able to talk to cats, Tonino also has an ability to tell when someone is an enchanter without being told. Chrestomanci says that he needs to go to Rome to make some inquiries, and he asks Tonino to stay close to his grandfather when his grandfather has to meet with anyone, to see if he can spot the evil enchanter. However, the evil enchanter already knows too much about the two families and about Tonino in particular.

When Tonino is kidnapped by the evil enchanter, his family immediately blames the Petroccis and sets out to confront them … only to be met halfway by the Petrocchi family, on their way to confront the Montanas about kidnapping one of their children, Angelica. The feud between the two families becomes worse than ever, but an accidental encounter between Tonino’s brother Paolo and Angelica’s sister Renata reveals that neither family has kidnapped anyone. The evil enchanter is playing both of the families against each other to distract them from what they really need to do: find the children and prepare to defend Caprona from its enemies. Paolo and Renata have trouble convincing either of their families of the truth because they are already too convinced that the other family is their real enemy, so they struggle to figure out how to save Tonino and Angelica themselves.

Meanwhile, Tonino and Angelica team up in captivity to find a way to escape and tell their families where to find the secret words to the angel’s song. While they are being held captive together, Tonino and Angelica argue about the nature of their families, but by talking together, they come to realize that each of their families has held half of the answer to the problem all along. If only the children can get together and reach their families to tell them the truth about the angel’s song and the identity of the evil enchanter!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including some in different languages).

My Reaction

During the course of the story, we never learn the original cause of the feud between the two families. It might have been something with one family thinking that the other was being favored by a past duke, or maybe it was some private quarrel between the heads of the two families. The cause is less important than the result. For generations, each family has been quietly maligning the other to the children of the family, who have continued to pass on the stories.

When the younger members of both families finally meet and talk to each other, they are initially offended that the other family has been saying the same horrible things about them that they’ve been saying about the other family, but it’s also an eye-opening experience. The two families are actually very similar to each other, both in their professional work and in their private family life. In fact, they live nearly identical lifestyles. The fact is that both families have been contributing to the spells maintaining their city for centuries, working together since before their feud began. Their spells were always intertwined and made to work together. Since the feud started and the families stopped working together, they have still had to work together in the service of their city and duke, but the feud has also served as a distraction from the real sources of danger.

As with other Chrestomanci stories, Chrestomanci doesn’t solve all of the problems of the story himself. Instead, he acts as a helper, revealing key information and providing guidance to help the other characters to solve their own problems. As a neutral observer, Chrestomanci sees both of the families and their quarrel for what they really are. He also helps to reveal the true villain of the story for who they really are.

Chrestomanci also points out the hidden talents of the children in the story. Although Tonino doesn’t think he’s as good as magic as others in his family, he does have other talents and magical abilities. At the end of the story, he goes to England with Chrestomanci to study for a while. His adventures in England are part of one of the short stories in Mixed Magics.