I heard about The Homeward Bounders thanks to this post during this summer’s Diana Wynne Jones Week over at Jenny’s Books, and decided to pick it up at the library.
Jamie Hamilton, the narrator of this book, looks thirteen but isn’t really. He should be thirteen. His life is quite ordinary until he’s twelve: he lives in a “really big, dirty, slummy city,” with parents who own a grocery, and has a usual kind of British-ish life, school and home and football in the back courtyard with his sister and the neighbors. School is dull, and the grocery is dull, but Jamie likes football, and he likes exploring the city, which he describes in a great passage early in the book:
That year I was taking a new bit of the city every week and going round it till I knew it. Then I’d move on. I told you a city is Home to me. Most of it was just like it was round our court, crowded and cheery and grimy. But I used to love the market. Everyone shouting like mad, and oranges to nick off every barrow, and big gas flares over all the stalls. I saw one catch fire one time. Then there was the canal and the railway. They used to go out of their way to criss-cross one another, it always seemed to me. Trains were clanking over the water every hundred yards, or else barges were getting dragged under iron bridges—except for one bit, where the canal went over the railway for a change on a line of high arches like stilts, with houses packed underneath the arches. Near that was the smart bit with the good shops. I used to love the smart bit in winter in the dark, when there were lights all wriggling down into the wet road, and posh people in carriages going up and down. Then there were the quiet bits. You’d come upon them suddenly, round a corner—gray, quiet parts that everyone seemed to have forgotten. (5-6)
And then, in his wanderings, Jamie finds a strange place, a weirdly quiet park and a castle-like building. There’s a plaque on the front that says it’s “The Old Fort,” and also says “Masters of the Real and Ancient Game,” and Jamie wonders what that might mean. He spies and sees two cloaked figures, who he just calls Them. But these two aren’t the only two, and Jamie realizes They are playing a huge war game, with Jamie and everyone else in his world and others as the pawns. Because of his spying, Jamie’s banished to the “Bounder circuits,” tossed from world to world, though he is allowed to go home again, if he can figure out how.
Which, as you might guess, is not an easy thing. Jamie bounces from one world to the next, learning patterns as he goes, figuring out some of the rules of Their game, and eventually meeting other Homeward Bounders, plus/including some characters from myth and legend, like the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, and Prometheus. One of the people he meets is a girl called Helen, who is a Homeward Bounder but a bit different: her world knows more about the Boundaries than other worlds seem to, and she can turn her right arm into anything she wants; the two of them also join up with a boy called Joris, who Jamie dislikes at first for being both “competent” and “posh,” but Joris is friendly and well-provisioned, so Jamie can’t dislike him for long. Jamie and Helen and Joris move along together, amidst adventures and perils, and, well, without saying much more I will say this book was pretty unputdownable for me. Oh Diana Wynne Jones! So good.
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