Before I started on Time of the Ghost I had told my friend Kit that the next three novels in my DWJ reread are “the depressing ones”. Witch Week is the third of these, and had been my least favourite Chrestomanci novel for the first few times I read it. I’m not sure if I have a “least favourite” now, because they’re all my favourites. Anyway, I wasn’t well most of last week which is part of why I didn’t post this then. The other reason is because I can’t seem to organize my thoughts for this one, so I’m going to write in point form.
* Witch Week is the third published Chrestomanci book and is set in a boarding school for witch-orphans in a world where magic exists, but is punishable by burning. It has three main narrators – Charles Morgan, Nan Pilgrim and Brian Wentworth, who become the main suspects when their teacher receives an anonymous note saying that someone in their class is a witch. Have I mentioned that being a witch can get a person – even a child – burned? Dark stuff.
* When I was reading Jo Walton’s Among Others I was struck by how it resembled school life more closely than all the boarding school books I had loved as a kid. I hadn’t reread Witch Week in a long time so I didn’t think of it, but then last year I read Emma Falconer’s zine on Diana Wynne Jones and it included an essay about how Witch Week is an anti-Harry Potter, and all the memories came rushing back – the horrible food, the bullying and general unhappiness of all the children, the fear.
I did love reading the Malory Towers and Chalet School books when I was younger, and I think there was a time when I wanted to go to Hogwarts. At the same time I knew that boarding schools aren’t for people like me (I’m definitely more Nan Pilgrim than Theresa Mullett). So while I don’t have a preference for “realistic” school stories, I do appreciate them.
* Speaking of HP comparisons – one of the things that bugged me about the Harry Potter books was that it used the whole “tormented orphan becomes a hero” thing without explaining how Harry could have grown up so comparatively normal when he had been treated the way he was his whole life. In Witch Week, most of the children are orphans, and they’re treated horribly and they treat each other worse, and one of the things that made the book hard for me to read then, and appreciate now, is that it shows just how this affects and warps their personalities. I had read an article that mentions this very thing recently, and I’m still trying to remember where, but it talked about this trope of orphan children protagonists and how they either start out noble and heroic despite bad treatment thanks to a good influence in their life (A Little Princess), or they start out selfish and horrible and the sort of person that may grow up bad because they didn’t have that good influence and were neglected/treated badly (The Secret Garden). Orphan heroes of the second type have to grow and learn to become good, which makes for a far more interesting story to me.
Diana Wynne Jones have always created characters that are complex and real, whether or not one found them likable. And they’re usually not likable, at least not at first. She also uses the second trope more than the first, and she never completely “cures” her characters of their flaws, because they’re an intrinsic part of their personality.
* The use of witch-burning/hunting as a metaphor for oppression. This much is obvious, of course, and Diana Wynne Jones had brought up racism in Wilkin’s Tooth and Dogsbody, and Power of Three discusses stereotypes and misunderstandings, but the invisible quality of the oppression in Witch Week (after all, one can’t tell who’s a witch and who isn’t from appearance) makes me think of homophobia and neurodivergence. I think this is also mentioned in Charles Butler’s Four British Fantasists, and in one of my favourite DWJ headcanon posts on tumblr four of the Witch Week characters start a club for queer neurodivergent students. I don’t think DWJ was thinking of any specific sort of oppression when writing the book, but this is what I connect it to.
* Chrestomanci in Witch Week. Being unfamiliar with the world of Witch Week, Chrestomanci is more vague than usual, and funnier, too. The world in Witch Week is an anomaly, not-completely-split-off from ours, taking all the magic from our world with it.
So far in my reread, Chrestomanci sweeps in at the end of the day to save everyone but he doesn’t really. Cat and the others had to help when he was tied in silver in Charmed Life. He just tells Tonino and Angelica how they might save Caprona. And in “The Sage of Theare”, he helped Thasper see that asking questions are important, but he never truly interferes. (Is Theare in our world series? It’s so different!) And so in Witch Week he asks questions and makes the children see what’s wrong, what needs changing, and how – and is them that set things to action.
* I love the part where Nan describes the food, it’s one of the ones I remember very well. And the parts where she’s bullied by the other girls, during PE and when she’s cornered in the washroom, they both make me think of The Time of the Ghost in the sense that they’re so true, in that so-horrible-it-can’t-be-true kind of way. I shall never be nostalgic about being twelve, that’s for sure.
* Nirupam Singh is my favourite. He’s just so cool and I like the way he keeps his head in bad situations, and tries to help the others whenever it’s possible. I like that he’s not a stereotypical Asian, and that he’s an “unreal” boy. Estelle Green would’ve been my favourite too if she appeared more in the book, I think.
* This was mentioned on Book Smugglers before – this book is quite negative about fatness. I don’t think the treatment of Nan Pilgrim to be fat-phobic exactly, but Diana Wynne Jones usually do have these awkward fat characters, and their fatness is usually described as one of their failings. And there’s one moment where Charles Morgan observes a couple, one of them fat, and was disgusted by her fatness. I hope this attitude isn’t one that I’d encounter again in the upcoming rereads.
* I like that the different students’ POVs are told through the journals they’re required to keep to write their “secret thoughts.” This might come off as gimmicky to some but I think Diana Wynne Jones did well in creating the students’ individual voices. Nan Pilgrim and Charles Morgan’s journals in particular were fun to read. Nan would ramble and forget (or just not care) that their journals are being read, and there’s this one part where she makes an astute observation about the social hierarchies in her class, dividing the “real” and “unreal” boys and girls, and what makes them so. Charles Morgan, on the other hand, develops a code in which he could write about seemingly banal (and untrue) things when he’s really writing about his secret feelings. Brilliant.
I think I’m nowhere near spitting out all the stuff that went through my head while rereading Witch Week, but I’ve probably rambled long enough. Also – it’s #DWJMarch! Go to We Be Reading to know more 🙂
Other (way more coherent) views:
Book Smugglers | Read in a Single Sitting | Readers By Night | Reading the End | The Rhubosphere
DWJ RE-READ no.19 | Witch Week (1982)
previous story: “The Sage of Theare”
next story: “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight”
ghostgrrrl reads 
Excellent points, all, and enlightening, as always — and so very different from my own! Just goes to show how much depth in what could be dismissed as ‘just another kids book’.
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