...here you can turn five corners and still not make a square. [p. 117]
Reread for Lockdown Book Club. I first read this fairly soon after it came out, in 1997: I recall enjoying it a lot, but I hadn't felt the urge to reread, and had (as usual) forgotten a lot of the details of plot and character. I'd also let some period-typical attitudes (most blatantly the fat-shaming) and dated technology (faxes! backup discs!) wash over me. The past is a foreign country...
Rupert Venables, 26, is a Magid, charged with urging Earth (and some other worlds in the multiverse) 'Ayewards', towards magic and good. It's a hefty task even before his mentor Stan dies: and when Rupert is left to find a replacement Magid, assisted only by Stan's disembodied voice -- and taste for Baroque choral music -- he begins to feel out of his depth. Politics and lost heirs in the Koryfonic Empire, also in Rupert's remit, complicate matters: so does his weird neighbour Andrew. And when it turns out that Fate has drawn all five of the possible Magid candidates to an SF convention, for ease of assessment, Rupert finds himself very definitely floundering.
One of the Magid candidates is Maree Mallory, to whom Rupert takes an instant dislike: Maree is adopted, does not get along with her stepmother Janine, and is plagued by dreams of a thornbush goddess -- who may be related to the deity worshipped by the assassinated emperor of the Koryfonic Empire ...
All of which sounds horribly tangled in summary, but -- as is so often the case with Diana Wynne Jones' books -- fits together like the gears of some intricate mechanism. Deep Secret was marketed as a novel for adults, and it's arguably more complex than many of her YA novels: there are multiple viewpoints, unevenly represented, and several of the major events of the novel happen off-page, reported (with variable reliability) by the characters. There are some familiar tropes, such as the wicked stepmother and the ancient, malevolent goddess.
But the joy of this novel, for me, was the depiction of SF fandom in its natural setting. The book club consensus recognises at least one of the characters as someone we know in real life, and we have all stayed in convention hotels which feel non-Euclidian, unmoored from reality, and prone to sudden shifts. Deep Secret is a delight, despite its sometimes unkind depiction of fandom ('vast bosoms', filkers, social ineptitude, general weirdness): I was immediately eager to reread the sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy ...
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