Fire and Hemlock
Encyclopedia
Fire and Hemlock is a modern fantasy by British author Diana Wynne Jones
based largely on the Scottish ballads "Tam Lin
" and "Thomas the Rhymer
."
It was first published in 1985 in Great Britain
by Methuen Children's Books and in the United States
by Greenwillow Books. It has been republished several times since then in paperback, by various publishers. In-print versions are published by Collins in Britain and by HarperTeen in the United States, both divisions of HarperCollins. The book is scheduled to be reprinted in the spring of 2012.
Fire and Hemlock was a Phoenix Award
Honor Book in 2005.
As Polly thinks back to this "second set" of memories, the point where they seem to diverge is when she stumbled into a funeral in an old mansion, Hunsdon House, when she was ten and playing with her best friend, Nina. There, she was approached by a man named Thomas Lynn who took her back outside and kept her company. He takes her back inside to help him select six pictures from a large pile, his share of the estate of the deceased; one of them is a photograph called "Fire and Hemlock" (hence the name of the novel), which he gave to her. He then takes her back to her grandmother's house, where she is living.
Over the following years Tom and Polly continue a friendship largely through correspondence, with occasional visits. Tom sends her books and letters with stories in them, many of which tie into the general theme of his predicament. Together, the two come up with stories about a hero named Tan Coul and his assistant Hero, who are Mr. Lynn's and Polly's alter ego
s, respectively. These stories all eventually come true, after a fashion. For instance, after discussing Tan Coul's horse, they encounter an identical horse disrupting traffic in the streets of London, having escaped from a nearby circus. An invented town and hardware store later turn out to be real, the proprietor being the spitting image of Tom, and his nephew Leslie falling into the story much later as a possible victim of Laurel's. Tom and Polly's story features three other heroes; later on, Tom gives Polly a photograph of all the members of his orchestra
, and asks her to identify them. She immediately finds the other three heroes. These three are exactly the ones with whom Tom was considering setting up an independent string quartet
.
All the while, Polly encounters members of Tom's ex-wife's family, all of whom seem to be threatening her and trying to break off her relationship with Tom. These include Seb, who is a few years older than Polly. Polly understands the threats as Laurel (Tom's ex-wife) having some sort of power over him. Tom refuses to talk about it.
This friendship develops against the background of Polly's growing up in her own disintegrating family life: her father Reg leaves, and a new lodger moves in and begins a relationship with her mother, Ivy. When Ivy sends her to live with her father in Bristol, it soon becomes apparent that she was not wanted there, her father having neither told his girlfriend that she was coming nor that she was supposed to live with them permanently. Eventually Polly moves in with her grandmother, who acts as a strong, fierce, strict anchor in her life.
As Polly turns sixteen, she realises that she has always loved Tom, but when she is rejected by him (in part because of their age difference, but also for her own safety, as she later discovers) she sets out to discover the secret of his relationship with the sinister Laurel that is somehow connected to all the supernatural events that happen to Tom and her. To do this, she performs voodoo-like ceremony, and it partly succeeds - she is summoned to Hunsdon House, where it all started. Laurel is there, but humiliates Polly and tells her (untruthfully) that Tom is dying of cancer
, and wants to be left alone by her. Mortified, Polly agrees to forget him, and leaves. Her second set of memories ends here.
Three years later, sitting in front of the picture (that she now realizes was a gift from Tom) Polly decides to start investigating, and finds out that all memory of Tom has been erased from her life, and that he has been eradicated from the memories of anyone who should have known him. As well as this, other people that she met in connection with Tom have no idea who she is, her friend Nina believes that Polly stopped talking to her years ago, and friends that she met through Tom have apparently never met her. She becomes frustrated, and is determined to find Tom, the man she knew and still loves.
In this she is aided by reading two ballads, Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, which help her figure out the truth. In reality, Tom has entered into a deal with the so-called Queen of the Fairies - Laurel. The time has now come when he must give his life to prolong that of her husband, the sinister Morton Leroy, the King of the Fairies.
Using the information in the ballads as an instruction, she arrives at the ceremony over which Laurel is presiding, and manages to outwit her and secure Tom's life, and, depending on the way you interpret the strange happenings of the ending, his love.
, which existed since at least the mid-sixteenth century. Diana Wynne Jones wrote that her goal was "to write a book in which modern life and heroic mythical events approached one another so closely that they were nearly impossible to separate." The funeral building represents Carterhaugh. Tom Lynn is Tam Lin, who is being used as a tithe to Hell. His ex-wife Laurel represents the Queen of the Faeries. Polly directly identifies herself with Janet, after reading the Oxford Book of Ballads, and thinks she "can only hope she might manage to do what Janet had done".
The overall structure of the book is modeled after T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets
, which in Jones' words "combines static meditation with movement in an extraordinary way, to become a quest of the mind away from the Nothing of spiritual death (Hemlock), towards the Fire which is imagination and redemption - the Nowhere."
Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones was a British writer, principally of fantasy novels for children and adults, as well as a small amount of non-fiction...
based largely on the Scottish ballads "Tam Lin
Tam Lin
Tam Lin is the hero of a legendary ballad originating from the Scottish Borders. The story revolves around the rescue of Tam Lin by his true love from the Queen of the Fairies...
" and "Thomas the Rhymer
Thomas the Rhymer
Thomas Learmonth , better known as Thomas the Rhymer or True Thomas, was a 13th century Scottish laird and reputed prophet from Earlston . He is also the protagonist of the ballad "Thomas the Rhymer"...
."
It was first published in 1985 in Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
by Methuen Children's Books and in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
by Greenwillow Books. It has been republished several times since then in paperback, by various publishers. In-print versions are published by Collins in Britain and by HarperTeen in the United States, both divisions of HarperCollins. The book is scheduled to be reprinted in the spring of 2012.
Fire and Hemlock was a Phoenix Award
Phoenix Award
The Phoenix Award is awarded annually to a book originally published in English twenty years previously which did not receive a major award at the time of its publication....
Honor Book in 2005.
Plot summary
As she clears out her old bedroom, Polly discovers that below her memories, in which she led an entirely normal and unremarkable life, there is a second set of memories, which are rather unusual.As Polly thinks back to this "second set" of memories, the point where they seem to diverge is when she stumbled into a funeral in an old mansion, Hunsdon House, when she was ten and playing with her best friend, Nina. There, she was approached by a man named Thomas Lynn who took her back outside and kept her company. He takes her back inside to help him select six pictures from a large pile, his share of the estate of the deceased; one of them is a photograph called "Fire and Hemlock" (hence the name of the novel), which he gave to her. He then takes her back to her grandmother's house, where she is living.
Over the following years Tom and Polly continue a friendship largely through correspondence, with occasional visits. Tom sends her books and letters with stories in them, many of which tie into the general theme of his predicament. Together, the two come up with stories about a hero named Tan Coul and his assistant Hero, who are Mr. Lynn's and Polly's alter ego
Alter ego
An alter ego is a second self, which is believe to be distinct from a person's normal or original personality. The term was coined in the early nineteenth century when dissociative identity disorder was first described by psychologists...
s, respectively. These stories all eventually come true, after a fashion. For instance, after discussing Tan Coul's horse, they encounter an identical horse disrupting traffic in the streets of London, having escaped from a nearby circus. An invented town and hardware store later turn out to be real, the proprietor being the spitting image of Tom, and his nephew Leslie falling into the story much later as a possible victim of Laurel's. Tom and Polly's story features three other heroes; later on, Tom gives Polly a photograph of all the members of his orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
, and asks her to identify them. She immediately finds the other three heroes. These three are exactly the ones with whom Tom was considering setting up an independent string quartet
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
.
All the while, Polly encounters members of Tom's ex-wife's family, all of whom seem to be threatening her and trying to break off her relationship with Tom. These include Seb, who is a few years older than Polly. Polly understands the threats as Laurel (Tom's ex-wife) having some sort of power over him. Tom refuses to talk about it.
This friendship develops against the background of Polly's growing up in her own disintegrating family life: her father Reg leaves, and a new lodger moves in and begins a relationship with her mother, Ivy. When Ivy sends her to live with her father in Bristol, it soon becomes apparent that she was not wanted there, her father having neither told his girlfriend that she was coming nor that she was supposed to live with them permanently. Eventually Polly moves in with her grandmother, who acts as a strong, fierce, strict anchor in her life.
As Polly turns sixteen, she realises that she has always loved Tom, but when she is rejected by him (in part because of their age difference, but also for her own safety, as she later discovers) she sets out to discover the secret of his relationship with the sinister Laurel that is somehow connected to all the supernatural events that happen to Tom and her. To do this, she performs voodoo-like ceremony, and it partly succeeds - she is summoned to Hunsdon House, where it all started. Laurel is there, but humiliates Polly and tells her (untruthfully) that Tom is dying of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
, and wants to be left alone by her. Mortified, Polly agrees to forget him, and leaves. Her second set of memories ends here.
Three years later, sitting in front of the picture (that she now realizes was a gift from Tom) Polly decides to start investigating, and finds out that all memory of Tom has been erased from her life, and that he has been eradicated from the memories of anyone who should have known him. As well as this, other people that she met in connection with Tom have no idea who she is, her friend Nina believes that Polly stopped talking to her years ago, and friends that she met through Tom have apparently never met her. She becomes frustrated, and is determined to find Tom, the man she knew and still loves.
In this she is aided by reading two ballads, Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer, which help her figure out the truth. In reality, Tom has entered into a deal with the so-called Queen of the Fairies - Laurel. The time has now come when he must give his life to prolong that of her husband, the sinister Morton Leroy, the King of the Fairies.
Using the information in the ballads as an instruction, she arrives at the ceremony over which Laurel is presiding, and manages to outwit her and secure Tom's life, and, depending on the way you interpret the strange happenings of the ending, his love.
Characters
- Polly Whittacker is the main protagonistProtagonistA protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
. - Thomas Lynn who shares a special relationship with Polly, and whom Polly must rescue from Laurel.
- Granny is Polly's paternal grandmother whom Polly goes to live with at the age of ten.
- Laurel is the antagonistAntagonistAn antagonist is a character, group of characters, or institution, that represents the opposition against which the protagonist must contend...
, or the "Queen of the Faeries" in this retelling. - Ivy is Polly's mother.
- Nina is Polly's childhood friend. In Polly's "revised" set of memories, her friendship with Nina was erased.
- Fiona Perks who becomes Polly's good friend and later her flatmate, and is instrumental in verifying the existence of Tom later on.
Major themes
Feminism - The original story of Tam Lin is one of a resourceful and brave young girl named Janet who rescues her lover from the faeries. When Jones was writing this novel, she knew that she needed "a narrative structure which did not simply put a female in a male's place". However, through most of the book Polly is a tomboy. In the stories she and Tom tell, she casts herself in the role of "Hero", Tom Lynn's girl assistant, who must disguise herself as a boy.Allusions to other works
This story explicitly mirrors the folktale of Tam LinTam Lin
Tam Lin is the hero of a legendary ballad originating from the Scottish Borders. The story revolves around the rescue of Tam Lin by his true love from the Queen of the Fairies...
, which existed since at least the mid-sixteenth century. Diana Wynne Jones wrote that her goal was "to write a book in which modern life and heroic mythical events approached one another so closely that they were nearly impossible to separate." The funeral building represents Carterhaugh. Tom Lynn is Tam Lin, who is being used as a tithe to Hell. His ex-wife Laurel represents the Queen of the Faeries. Polly directly identifies herself with Janet, after reading the Oxford Book of Ballads, and thinks she "can only hope she might manage to do what Janet had done".
The overall structure of the book is modeled after T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets
Four Quartets
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a six-year period. The first poem, "Burnt Norton", was written and published with a collection of his early works following the production of Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral...
, which in Jones' words "combines static meditation with movement in an extraordinary way, to become a quest of the mind away from the Nothing of spiritual death (Hemlock), towards the Fire which is imagination and redemption - the Nowhere."
See also
- Diana Wynne JonesDiana Wynne JonesDiana Wynne Jones was a British writer, principally of fantasy novels for children and adults, as well as a small amount of non-fiction...
- Tam LinTam LinTam Lin is the hero of a legendary ballad originating from the Scottish Borders. The story revolves around the rescue of Tam Lin by his true love from the Queen of the Fairies...
- Thomas the RhymerThomas the RhymerThomas Learmonth , better known as Thomas the Rhymer or True Thomas, was a 13th century Scottish laird and reputed prophet from Earlston . He is also the protagonist of the ballad "Thomas the Rhymer"...
- List of fiction works about Halloween