Dogsbody

The lost life of the Dog Star

Sirius remained in the yard, puzzled and unhappy, until long after sunset. He had never seen night fall before. He watched the red sun flaring down behind the roofs, leaving an orange stain behind it and a much darker blue sky. After a while, the sky was nearly black. And the stars came out. Wheeling overhead they came, tiny discs of white, green, and orange, pinpricks of bluish white, cold tingly red blobs, large orbs, small orbs, more and more, crowding and clustering away into the dark, while behind them wheeled the spangled smear of the Milky Way. Sirius stared upwards, dumbfounded. This was home. He should have been there, not tied up in a yard on the edge of things. They were his. And they were so far away. He had no way of reaching them.

He was filled with a vast green sense of loss. Out there, invisible, his lost Companion must be. She was probably too far away to hear. All the same, he threw up his head and howled. And howled. And howled. . . .

BOOKS BY DIANA WYNNE JONES

The Dalemark Quartet

Cart and Cwidder

Drowned Ammet

The Spellcoats

The Crown of Dalemark

The Chrestomanci Books

Charmed Life

The Magicians of Caprona

Witch Week

The Lives of Christopher Chant

Conrad’s Fate

The Pinhoe Egg

Other Books

Changeover

Wilkins’ Tooth
(USA:
Witch’s Business)

The Ogre Downstairs

Eight Days of Luke

Dogsbody

Power of Three

Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?

The Four Grannies

The Time of the Ghost

The Homeward Bounders

Archer’s Goon

Fire and Hemlock

Warlock at the Wheel (short stories)

The Skiver’s Guide

The Thirteenth Enchanter

Howl’s Moving Castle

A Tale of Time City

Chair Person

Wild Robert

Hidden Turnings
(editor)

Castle in the Air

Black Maria
(USA:
Aunt Maria)

A Sudden Wild Magic

Yes, Dear
(picture book)

Hexwood

Fantasy Stories
(editor)

Everard’s Ride
(short stories)

Stopping for a Spell
(short stories)

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland

Minor Arcana
(short stories)

Deep Secret

Believing is Seeing
(short stories)

Dark Lord of Derkholm

Puss in Boots
(retelling)

Mixed Magics
(short stories)

The Year of the Griffin

The Merlin Conspiracy

Unexpected Magics
(short stories)

The Game

House of Many Ways

Enchanted Glass

Earwig and the Witch

FIREBIRD

W
HERE
F
ANTASY
T
AKES
F
LIGHT
™

DIANA
WYNNE
JONES

Introduction by
Neil Gaiman

FIREBIRD

AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

For Caspian, who might really be Sirius

INTRODUCTION

Neil Gaiman

Don’t read this introduction.

Read the book first.

I’m going to talk, in general terms, about the end of this book, and I’m going to talk about Diana Wynne Jones, and they intertwine (one made the other, after all), and it’ll be better for all of us if you’ve read the book before you read my introduction. It’s out of order and jumbled-up, but that can’t be helped.

If you need an introduction before you start reading, here’s one: this is the story of the Dog Star, Sirius, who is punished for a crime by being incarnated as a real dog, here on Earth. It’s a detective story, and an adventure; it’s a fantasy, and sometimes it’s science fiction, and then it breaks all the rules by twining myth into the mix as well, and does it so well that you realize that really, there aren’t any rules. It’s an animal story for anyone who has ever had, or wanted, a pet—or a human story for any animal that has ever wanted a person. It’s funny, and it’s exciting and honest, and it has some sad bits too.

If you read it, you’ll like it.

Trust me. Come back when you’ve read the book.

Welcome back.

Diana Wynne Jones wrote some of the best children’s books that have ever been written. She started writing them with
Wilkins’ Tooth
(AKA
Witch’s Business
) in 1973, and she continued writing them until she died in March 2011. She wrote about people, and she wrote about magic, and she wrote both of them with perception and imagination, with humour and clearness of vision.

We met in 1985, at a British Fantasy Convention, and we met before the convention started because we had both got there early, so I introduced myself, and I told her that I loved her books, and we were friends that quickly and that easily, and we stayed friends for over a quarter of a century. She was a very easy person to stay friends with, smart and funny and wise and always sensible and honest.

At her best, Diana’s stories feel
real
. The people, with their follies and their dreams, feel as real as the magic does. In this book she takes you inside the head of someone learning to be a dog, and it is real, because the people are real, and the cats are real, and the voice of the sunlight feels real as well.

Her books are not easy. They don’t give everything up on first reading. If I am reading a novel by Diana Wynne Jones to myself, I expect to have to go back and reread bits to figure everything out. She expects you to be bright: she has given you all the pieces, and it is up to you to put them together.

Dogsbody
isn’t easy. (It’s not hard, either. But it’s not easy.) It
begins in the middle, at the end of a trial. Sirius, the Dog Star, is being tried by a court of his peers. It’s five pages of science fiction, and just as we’re getting used to it we are thrust, like Sirius, into the mind, what there is of it, of a newborn puppy, and we are in a dog’s-eye view look at the world.

The magic of
Dogsbody
is that it’s a book about being a dog. And it’s a book about being a star. It’s a love story, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote very few love stories, and normally in those she wrote, the love was flawed and imperfect. But the love of this dog for his girl, and of this girl for her dog, is a perfect and unconditional thing, and we know this is true as soon as we meet Kathleen. We learn about her life—the politics of the family she’s in, and the greater politics that put her there.

Had Diana simply written a story about Kathleen and her dog from the dog’s point of view, one that felt as right as this one does, that would have been an achievement, but she does so much more than that: she creates a whole cosmology of effulgences—creatures who inhabit stars, or, perhaps, who are stars. There is something called a Zoi that must be found before Sirius runs out of time. Then she adds the Wild Hunt, the hounds of Annwn, the Celtic underworld, to the tale, while never losing sight of the humanity at the heart of it.

I remember reading
Dogsbody
to my youngest daughter, almost ten years ago.

When I finished it she didn’t say very much. Then she looked at me and put her head on one side and said, “Daddy? Was that a happy end? Or a sad one?”

“Both,” I told her.

“Yes,” she said. “That was what I thought. I was really happy, but it made me want to cry.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Me too.”

It also made me try to figure out
why
and
how
Diana had made the ending work so well, triumphant and heartbreaking at the same time. I wanted to be able to do that.

Three weeks ago, I was in England, in Bristol, in a hospice, which is a place that provides care for people who are going to die. I sat beside Diana Wynne Jones’ bed.