Near the start of Enchanted Glass, Andrew Hope, a thirty-something-year-old academic, finds out his grandfather has died, which means he’s inherited the family home, Melstone, where he spent happy weeks on school holidays when he was a kid. Andrew Hope’s grandfather, Jocelyn Brandon, was a magician, so Andrew has also inherited his field-of-care—a magical area surrounding the house. As a neighbor puts it, “all round here, in a radius of ten miles or more, is strange. And special. And Jocelyn was in charge of it. And he was trying to hand the responsibility on to you” (56). But because his grandfather didn’t get a chance to explain this to him in person, Andrew doesn’t quite know what he’s meant to be doing: the magic things his grandfather taught him when he was a kid are distant, blurred, half forgotten; even when he remembers things, he’s out of practice. Having quit his job, Andrew thinks he’ll be able to use the space and quiet of Melstone to write a book. But then a twelve-year-old boy named Aidan Cain shows up on his doorstop, asking to see his grandfather: Aidan’s grandmother, also a magician, has just died, and she told Aidan to visit Jocelyn Brandon if he was in any trouble after her death. Which he is: there seem to be multiple competing factions of weird/supernatural beings who are after him, and they’ve been making a racket in the backyard of the London foster home where he was sent after his grandmother’s death. Andrew says Aidan can stay at Melstone while he tries to figure out what’s going on/what to do, and, meanwhile, he figures that he’d better not neglect his magical duties. So Andrew and Aidan set out to try to walk the boundary of Andrew’s field-of-care, and, as they do so, they have a run-in with Melstone’s nearest neighbor, Mr. Brown at Melstone Manor. It becomes clear who’s looking for Aidan and why, and things come to a head in an over-the-top scene at the annual Village Fête (which made me think of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit).
But the strengths of this book, for me, weren’t really in the plot or pacing, which felt imbalanced—it takes a long time for things to get going, and then once they do there’s a lot of plot all at once. What I liked about this book was the humor of it, and the usual kind of tender/lovely/insightful moments that can be found in Diana Wynne Jones’s books, and some of the descriptive passages. The humor mostly comes from the supporting characters: Andrew continues to employ his grandfather’s housekeeper and gardener, the former of whom is perpetually moving the furniture back to its original place when Andrew attempts to rearrange it, and cooks cauliflower cheese when she’s grumpy, and the latter of whom is focused on growing massive vegetables for the fête, the rejects of which he unloads on Andrew as a way of taking out his annoyance at having to do the rest of his job. The tenderness is centered mostly around how characters relate to one another: I love that when Aidan complains about his name, Andrew looks it up and tells him this:
Aidan is a diminutive—that means a smaller version or a pet name—of an Irish name that means ‘fire.’ You are ‘young fire.’ Think of yourself as crackling and throwing up long yellow flames. Sparks too. (91)
And oh, descriptive sentences like this:
Here the rain came down properly, white and pelting. The rushes bent and hissed with it, and the distant wood was almost canceled out by gray rods of rain. (114)
This book is not one I’ll keep coming back to, like the Chrestomanci books are, but I’m glad to have read it.
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