When he’s around eight, Conrad Tesdinic’s Uncle Alfred tells him he has a lot of bad karma and needs to be careful. When he’s twelve and it’s time either to continue his education or to leave school and get a job, Uncle Alfred gives him very bad news: “I’ve been doing a lot of divining about you,” he says, “and it’s even worse than I realized. Unless you put right what you did wrong in your previous life—and put it right now—you are going to be horribly and painfully dead before the year’s out” (33). Conrad’s mother is a writer, and his sister went to university; all his friends are continuing their schooling, and he assumed he’d be doing the same. But his uncle explains that things have to be different: he tells Conrad that in his past life, he was meant to stop someone who was up to no good, but didn’t; he needs, therefore, to stop that person’s current incarnation from continuing in his or her evil ways. The good news, according to Alfred, is that it’ll be easy: he’s used magic to figure out that the person Conrad needs to stop is up at Stallery Mansion, in the mountains above the town where Conrad grew up, and he promises Conrad will know the person when he encounters him or her. The person is apparently “pulling the possibilities,” enriching himself or herself by changing reality (or, really, a series of realities) to suit his or her needs. Alfred will put a spell on Conrad to make sure he gets a job at the mansion, and his magician friends will equip Conrad with a magic charm to summon something called a Walker, who will give Conrad what he needs when the moment comes.
All this is terrifying, but Conrad can’t see any way around it, so up to Stallery he goes. When he gets there, he meets another job candidate, one Christopher Smith, who he guesses is also there for some not entirely ordinary reason: Christopher shows up in a gypsy caravan, but is impeccably dressed and doesn’t actually seem to know why he’s there, unlike the rest of the kids, who are school leavers expecting to be gardeners or maids. Christopher Smith, of course, is actually Christopher Chant, and from another world entirely, and when he and Conrad are both hired at the mansion as Improvers, or valets-in-training, things get really fun. They’re worked from dawn ’til midnight and there are some hilarious scenes, like when they try to learn how to iron but end up singeing everything, or when Christopher is told to pick out the best vegetables for the Mansion’s mistress, and we get this:
From the look on Christopher’s face, I was fairly sure he had never seen a raw vegetable in his life before this. But he made a confident pounce toward a basket of gooseberries. “Here,” he said, “are some splendid peas, really big ones. Oh no, they’re hairy. It can’t be good for peas to have bristles, can it?”(123-124)
There is lots and lots of plot in this book: Christopher is in this world only because he’s trying to find someone else (Millie) who has run away to it; Conrad finds out his sister is in love with the young master of the house (and he swears he’ll marry her, though his mother wants him to marry for money); Conrad and Christopher find themselves in someplace other than the mansion entirely as the possibilities get pulled and the world temporarily shifts, etc. This is all great fun, right up until the deus-ex-machina ending, but what I really love is the writing, whether it’s the humorous scenes like the ironing or the vegetable-picking, or just totally great passages like this, in which a dog happily greets its master:
Christopher let go of the neckcloth. It was an ex-neckcloth, really, more of a dirty string by this time. Champ immediately sprang to his hind legs and attempted to put both paws on the shoulders of the Count’s evening jacket. The Count caught the paws just in time, in a way that showed he had had a lot of practice, and said, “No, down, Champ! I love you, too, but there’s a time and a place for everything.” (198)
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