Defence Against the Dark Arts XXXII: Anthony Horowitz’s Diamond Brothers at Christmas

A few books with a Christmas theme have inspired posts in the past. 

I wanted to produce something similar for this year; I remembered that the seventh book in Anthony Horowitz’s Diamond Brothers series is called The Greek Who Stole Christmas so I decided to renew my acquaintance with these very amusing little stories. 

I found enough suitable material for another seasonal article.

Christmas for the Diamond Brothers 
Christmas is not a good time of year for Nick the clever boy detective and his big – and dim - brother Herbert, who prefers to be known as Tim, as they are always very short of money and are often in danger from their enemies.

The action in The Falcon's Malteser, which is the first book in the series, takes place during the holiday season. These words from Nick Diamond set the tone:

“...the grey December sky. The Christmas decorations had gone up in Regent Street – it seemed that they’d been up since July – and the stores were wrapped in tinsel and holly. Somewhere, a Salvation Army band was playing “Away in a Manger.” I felt a funeral march would have been more appropriate.“

Things get worse: Tim and Nick are arrested by the police and held in a freezing cold interrogation room. They are released, only to be rearrested and held overnight in a cell in the police station. 

The police decide to let Nick go; he rises to the occasion with a typical witty remark:

“You can go, laddy,” Snape said. “It’s only big brother we want.”

“How long are you going to keep him for?” I asked. “It’s only five days to Christmas.”

“So?”

“He hasn’t had time to buy my present yet.” 

The Polar Express: a controversial Christmas film

The Polar Express (2004) is a film about some children who take a ride on a magical train to the North Pole to visit Santa Claus and his elves.

It was the first film I ever saw in an IMAX cinema. I went to the drum-shaped BFI one at Waterloo, which has the biggest screen in Britain. This was my Christmas treat for 2004.

I think that this was the first time I ever saw  'uncanny valley' CGI characters too, so there were three new experiences in one outing.

The snowy landscapes in The Polar Express were beautiful, but the film as a whole was rather eerie; it had a weird and dreamlike atmosphere that made me feel uneasy. I did not like the hybrid animated/human characters either: they gave me the uncomfortable, something isn't right, feelings that some robotic people in this world do, people who seem neither dead nor fully alive, people who seem more like ghosts or zombies than real people.

The film was in 3-D; the roller-coaster swoops of the camera made me dizzy!

The friend who came to see the film with me had much the same opinion of it: the IMAX experience was great apart from the times when we had to close our eyes because the vertical drops made us feel seasick, but parts of the film were rather disturbing.

With hindsight, even the 'normal' scenes in The Polar Express, children in their homes for example, seem like fantasy; they look like an alternate version of reality similar to the one in the film Coraline (2009). 

John Masefield’s Box of Delights & Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather

This time last year, John Masefield’s Box of Delights was featured.  The story ends on Christmas Eve, which makes it very suitable reading for the holiday season.

Now it is the turn of Terry Pratchett’s festive fairytale Hogfather (1996). 

The Hogfather is a Discworld character. He is similar to Father Christmas: he is a mythical fat and jolly bearded man who wears red and white and brings presents for the good children of Discworld on Hogswatchnight (December 32nd). He travels by sleigh; it is drawn by pigs rather than reindeer though. 

Although some readers say that Hogfather is Terry Pratchett’s best book, it is not at the top of my list: that place is occupied by his books about the Discworld witches!

There is not much in Hogfather that inspires commentary, however I noticed some interesting similarities and common themes and elements in these two very different seasonal stories and decided to list a few of them.

A few common features
A big metaphysical battle is a major theme in both books.

In The Box of Delights the battle is between good and evil; in Hogfather it is between rationality and belief. It is about logic and rules versus magic and mythology.

Cults and John Masefield’s Box of Delights

I have recently been re-reading John Masefield's children’s fantasy novel The Box of Delights.

I wanted to have another look at the references to Christmas Eve. I was also hoping to find some previously overlooked material about witches, but instead I noticed for the first time that a conversation between two of the characters has relevance to what I now know about cults.

This dialogue was written in 1935. It is uncanny how relevant and significant it is when we look at the methods cults use to recruit their victims and what constitutes an effective resistance to these techniques. I missed all this in past readings of the book but can see it now.

Maria Jones and the evil witch

One of the characters in the book is a girl called Maria Jones. She is a friend of Kay Harker, the young hero.

She is just a small child; she is known to everyone as ‘little Maria’. She is blunt, tough and fearless, rather like Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite in The Cuckoo Tree. She loves guns and has gangsters on the brain.

Maria shows that she has more sense than many adults who are manipulated into joining cults or other unethical organisations when the witch Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her villainous husband Abner Brown decide that Maria shows promise and would be a good acquisition for their gang.

They kidnap and imprison her. Sylvia Daisy tries to persuade her to join them. Maria is not fooled; she is defiant and not at all daunted and she stands up for herself very well.

John Masefield and the magic of Christmas Eve

The writer and poet John Masefield’s two children’s books The Midnight Folk (1927) and its sequel The Box of Delights (1935) have been previously mentioned on here because of the witch Sylvia Daisy Pouncer.

Sylvia Daisy plays a much larger part in The Midnight Folk than she does in The Box of Delights, but the latter book is of interest for other reasons. 

Masefield’s words create beautiful pictures in the imagination - the descriptions of winter and the Christmas season are particularly good - and invoke positive magical influences which are ideal for helping to counteract seasonal depression and the sinister forces that are active at this time of year. 

The story, which features magic, adventure, time travel, sinister wolves, brave children and the battle between good and evil, begins a few days before Christmas with the young hero Kay Harker returning from boarding school for the holidays; it ends on Christmas Eve with a joyful and triumphant midnight service in the Cathedral. 

It is interesting that Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her evil associates try to prevent this service from being held. As was mentioned in this article, disrupting the midnight service on Christmas Eve is a big coup for practitioners of black magic.

A six-episode BBC TV series was made in 1984. Although for me books are always best and many associated films make me feel furious, disappointed and disgusted, I have found this series to be worth watching. I like the theme music very much.

The Box of Delights series is available on DVD, and some kind person has loaded the episodes onto YouTube.

I may come back to John Masefield’s children’s book again. In the meantime, I hope that this brief description and strong recommendation will inspire people who haven’t already discovered The Box of Delights to investigate this wonderful book and its TV adaption. 

Depression at Christmas

Some of what I said in the article about depression at the autumnal equinox can also be applied to the Christmas holiday season: the winter solstice too may subtly affect us. 

There are obvious additional and external factors when Christmas is involved, however there is sometimes more to it than being overwhelmed and demoralised by practical problems: evil forces may be abroad!

I realised a while back that even if there are no energy vampires, emotional blackmailers and other undesirables in our lives, we can still be influenced negatively by people in general. 

I have found that Christmas is a time when this is particularly noticeable. There is a lot of stress, tension, misery and general bad energy in the air, in the big cities at least, and some sensitive people pick it all up. 

We may be badly affected by the cumulative inner states of both the large numbers of people who are rushing around with too much to do and too little time to do it in and the many unhappy, isolated people for whom this is the worst time of year. 

Then there are the intoxicated ones, people who have been celebrating - or trying to escape - the festive season. People who are under the influence of something are often frightening and dangerous because they are out of control; they may be also be surrounded, affected or even controlled by malign entities that their inner state has attracted.

During the run up to Christmas, the streets are filled with hordes of people moving like zombies on the march. I don’t get caught up in the spending frenzy and the Christmas madness myself; I find it all alarming and incomprehensible.  

I do usually go out to see the best Christmas lights and shop windows, but I try to go at relatively quiet times.

Unseen Influences at Christmas

I don’t enjoy this time of year very much. Seasonal depression prevents much enjoyment and turns necessary tasks into impositions; painful memories and feelings surface and thoughts of what might have been become overwhelming.

People are stressed and I pick up a lot of the tension and unhappiness that are in the air.

Even though I am not a Christian, I hate the way that consumerism and secularism have taken over what should be a religious festival. 

Despite not being religious, I did go to a Christmas service once. It was at the suggestion of a neighbour. One fateful Christmas Eve many years ago, I went for the first time ever to a Midnight Mass. It was held in Westminster Cathedral, and I went just for the carols and the spectacle.

The outing was pure delight from beginning to end. I felt very well, euphoric even; I had the feeling that something wonderful was on the horizon; the weather was very mild; we saw some happy looking policemen driving around in a car that was covered in Christmas decorations.

I enjoyed the lights, the surroundings and the music inside the Cathedral very much. Just as midnight was striking, I wished very hard for a good cause to support and a new and exciting interest in my life for the coming New Year. 

The expression “Be very careful what you wish for as you may well end up getting it” is becoming a platitude but is very relevant here. A ‘chance’ meeting with a stranger on New Year’s Eve brought me exactly what I had wished for. For good or evil? I still don’t know. It led to some of the best and some of the worst moments of my life, including a Christmas that I still can’t bear to think about.