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It's just a matter of time
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schreibergasse set me a meme: choose five fictional characters whose names begin with a given letter and comment on them. It was never posted because, unsurprisingly, one of the comments turned into a miniature essay, after which I felt obliged to produce similar wordcounts for the other characters and while I was stalling, my laptop bit the dust in August and I thought the file was lost. I just ran across a backup copy. (I was looking, of course, for something completely different.) So I am going to post the semi-essay, and then I can feel like marginally less of an LJ deadbeat and go back to writing up George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and considering a post for Memorial Day. The letter was R; the character Ranjit Walker, from Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1987).4
If someday I should meet Diana Wynne Jones, I hope it goes well, because one way or another she is probably responsible for a lot of my brain. Howl's Moving Castle (1986) and The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) are two of the earliest novels I can remember reading and I have not finished sorting out all the ways in which I did not notice, at the time, how strange both of them are; Fire and Hemlock (1985) is the best version of Tam Lin I know and Eight Days of Luke (1975) the rare modern take on Norse myth that doesn't annoy me. Her magic is thought out sideways. She is the reason I am almost never surprised by revelations of identity in a novel. I came somewhat later to A Tale of Time City, which I cannot remember reading before middle school, but it nonetheless furnished one of my earliest identified favorite characters.
Ranjit Walker is the thousandth Sempitern of Time City—"the head of Time Council in Chronologue," which in the absence of Faber John, the city's mythical founder, makes him something like a combination prime minister and ritual king. After bureaucracy, his chief duties are in performance of the elaborate ceremonies1 by which the endlessly repeating days of Time City are measured; these tend toward the solemn, stately, and deadly dull, all of which may explain why it is the Sempitern's regular habit to throw spectacular panic attacks before every ceremony, generally characterized by lots of running about in states of chaotic undress and yelling.
Sempitern Walker came bursting out of a door by the stairs and went flying past them down the hall. He was wearing a stiff red robe and a gold embroidered cloak, but the robe was undone and streaming on both sides of him, and Vivian saw a suit of white underclothes underneath and a lot of thin, hairy leg. She stared after him as he dashed away, unable to believe her eyes.
"Gold bands!" Sempitern Walker roared. "Where in Time's name are my gold bands?"
Elio came racing out of the door too, carrying a red silk hat. Jenny rushed out after him with a huge gold necklace like a Mayor's chain. After her, Petula came running, followed by the ladies who served at dinner and five other people Vivian had not seen before, and behind them pelted the men who polished the stairs. They were all carrying bundles of robe, or hats, or golden boots, or different sorts of gold chain, and Petula was waving a pair of wide gold ribbons. Vivian watched, fascinated, as they all tore after Sempitern Walker and managed to corner him at the end of the hall.
"No, you stupid android!" Sempitern Walker shouted out of the midst of them. "The other hat! And I said the gold bands, you stupid woman! Find them, can't you! The ceremony's starting in twenty minutes!" He came bursting out of the crowd and sped toward Jonathan and Vivian again.
This is marvelous! Vivian thought, as the others all turned themselves hastily around and raced after the Sempitern. Sempitern Walker swung himself nimbly around on the end of the banisters and went flying up the stairs two at a time. "And I have to find the carnelian studs!" he bellowed. "Can't anyone find anything in this place?"
A giggle began to rise up in Vivian's throat as everyone else went streaming up the stairs after him. "You're all useless!" she heard him shout. "Gold bands!" They all went running around the railed landing overhead, tripping over mats and getting in one another's way. Vivian nearly laughed outright. This is as good as a film! she thought, turning to see what Jonathan thought of it.
Jonathan swung haughtily away. "This happens every time there's a ceremony," he said wearily. "Come on. We'd better get breakfast."
The giggle was sitting right behind Vivian's teeth, fighting to get out. She swallowed it down. "Do you have ceremonies very often?" she asked, trying to stop her voice from shaking.
"About every two days," Jonathan said dourly.
Otherwise the Sempitern is variously described by the text as "storming," "anguished-looking," "alarming," and "very boring. Perhaps it was his job to be boring, Vivian thought, in which case he was very good at his job." Thanks to the gravity of his position, his eccentric behavior is taken with the utmost seriousness by the denizens of the Annuate Palace—the sympathetic android Elio even makes a point of misplacing at least one piece of regalia in advance of every ceremony lest the Sempitern be unable to find something to freak out over. But in consequence of all this respect and the Sempitern's usual stressed/standoffish affect, it's impossible to tell whether the man possesses any sense of humor himself, until the morning Vivian disastrously fails to keep a straight face when shouted at by a half-clad Sempitern and rather to his own astonishment, Ranjit Walker discovers that he likes being able to make people laugh. He's been a first-rate clown for years and never, perhaps, allowed himself to notice.2 His performance before the next ceremony so exceeds his usual standards, it practically cries out for undercranking and the accompaniment of "Yakety Sax." You will have to trust me and read it. It still makes me smile. And yet with all of this antic weirdness, Sempitern Walker is the adult character at the end of A Tale of Time City who most firmly stands up for Vivian when it looks as though she will be exiled to the stars by Faber John and the Time Lady: "My wife and I demand that Vivian Smith stays in Time City and lives with us in the palace. If our demand is not met, I resign from office . . . And one of you will have to do the job, because you won't find anyone else in the city who's fool enough to try." Like Fflewddur of the Prydain Chronicles, then, he was an early reinforcement that comic does not disqualify real. And perfectly in consonance with the book's theme of instability: as time and technologies and what tomorrow looks like from minute to minute all slide out from underneath the characters' feet, why shouldn't self-images? Jones' protagonists are never what they believe. Sempitern Walker is merely a less cosmic example than usual.
I do not ordinarily cast actors for characters I like, but since discovering the gloriously attenuated and anxiety-prone Bill Nighy in 2006, I have come to the conclusion that I would like very much to see him as Sempitern Walker; he's got the deadpan anguish down cold and he's more than lanky enough to storm properly (if someone could persuade a man who doesn't even wear shorts to take a role that requires, well, the excerpt above is a well-dressed day).3 And if, given the first name, you would prefer to see the Sempitern played by someone a little more chromatic, I'll gladly hear suggestions.
1. I do not believe Time City is intertextual with Gormenghast, but it really should be.
2. For this reason I associate the Sempitern with Roddy's Grandfather Gwyn from The Merlin Conspiracy (2003) in that both characters have forbidding exteriors and secret natures in which the viewpoint protagonists become complicit, although I will admit that lordship of the dead and physical comedy are somewhat different talents.nineweaving associates him with "Mr. Beveridge's Magot," a tune that belonged originally to a character in her novel Cloud & Ashes: "And given its air of somewhat distracted self-importance, it has a touch of Sempitern Walker as well, I think. It discovers itself as comic."
3. [ETA] Hans Conried would have knocked the role out of the park, but only if you get me a time machine, alas.
4. For the record, the other four characters were Raederle of An, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976—1979); Captain Louis Renault, from Casablanca (1942); Reverdy Anacreon Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca, from Ysabeau Wilce's Flora Segunda (2007) and Flora's Dare (2008); and Patera Remora, from Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993—1996) and The Book of the Short Sun (1999—2001). If anyone does want to read about one of these, tell me now. Remus Lupin, Arnold Judas Rimmer, and the Lord Redlady did not make the final cut.
schreibergasse set me a meme: choose five fictional characters whose names begin with a given letter and comment on them. It was never posted because, unsurprisingly, one of the comments turned into a miniature essay, after which I felt obliged to produce similar wordcounts for the other characters and while I was stalling, my laptop bit the dust in August and I thought the file was lost. I just ran across a backup copy. (I was looking, of course, for something completely different.) So I am going to post the semi-essay, and then I can feel like marginally less of an LJ deadbeat and go back to writing up George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and considering a post for Memorial Day. The letter was R; the character Ranjit Walker, from Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1987).4If someday I should meet Diana Wynne Jones, I hope it goes well, because one way or another she is probably responsible for a lot of my brain. Howl's Moving Castle (1986) and The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) are two of the earliest novels I can remember reading and I have not finished sorting out all the ways in which I did not notice, at the time, how strange both of them are; Fire and Hemlock (1985) is the best version of Tam Lin I know and Eight Days of Luke (1975) the rare modern take on Norse myth that doesn't annoy me. Her magic is thought out sideways. She is the reason I am almost never surprised by revelations of identity in a novel. I came somewhat later to A Tale of Time City, which I cannot remember reading before middle school, but it nonetheless furnished one of my earliest identified favorite characters.
Ranjit Walker is the thousandth Sempitern of Time City—"the head of Time Council in Chronologue," which in the absence of Faber John, the city's mythical founder, makes him something like a combination prime minister and ritual king. After bureaucracy, his chief duties are in performance of the elaborate ceremonies1 by which the endlessly repeating days of Time City are measured; these tend toward the solemn, stately, and deadly dull, all of which may explain why it is the Sempitern's regular habit to throw spectacular panic attacks before every ceremony, generally characterized by lots of running about in states of chaotic undress and yelling.
Sempitern Walker came bursting out of a door by the stairs and went flying past them down the hall. He was wearing a stiff red robe and a gold embroidered cloak, but the robe was undone and streaming on both sides of him, and Vivian saw a suit of white underclothes underneath and a lot of thin, hairy leg. She stared after him as he dashed away, unable to believe her eyes.
"Gold bands!" Sempitern Walker roared. "Where in Time's name are my gold bands?"
Elio came racing out of the door too, carrying a red silk hat. Jenny rushed out after him with a huge gold necklace like a Mayor's chain. After her, Petula came running, followed by the ladies who served at dinner and five other people Vivian had not seen before, and behind them pelted the men who polished the stairs. They were all carrying bundles of robe, or hats, or golden boots, or different sorts of gold chain, and Petula was waving a pair of wide gold ribbons. Vivian watched, fascinated, as they all tore after Sempitern Walker and managed to corner him at the end of the hall.
"No, you stupid android!" Sempitern Walker shouted out of the midst of them. "The other hat! And I said the gold bands, you stupid woman! Find them, can't you! The ceremony's starting in twenty minutes!" He came bursting out of the crowd and sped toward Jonathan and Vivian again.
This is marvelous! Vivian thought, as the others all turned themselves hastily around and raced after the Sempitern. Sempitern Walker swung himself nimbly around on the end of the banisters and went flying up the stairs two at a time. "And I have to find the carnelian studs!" he bellowed. "Can't anyone find anything in this place?"
A giggle began to rise up in Vivian's throat as everyone else went streaming up the stairs after him. "You're all useless!" she heard him shout. "Gold bands!" They all went running around the railed landing overhead, tripping over mats and getting in one another's way. Vivian nearly laughed outright. This is as good as a film! she thought, turning to see what Jonathan thought of it.
Jonathan swung haughtily away. "This happens every time there's a ceremony," he said wearily. "Come on. We'd better get breakfast."
The giggle was sitting right behind Vivian's teeth, fighting to get out. She swallowed it down. "Do you have ceremonies very often?" she asked, trying to stop her voice from shaking.
"About every two days," Jonathan said dourly.
Otherwise the Sempitern is variously described by the text as "storming," "anguished-looking," "alarming," and "very boring. Perhaps it was his job to be boring, Vivian thought, in which case he was very good at his job." Thanks to the gravity of his position, his eccentric behavior is taken with the utmost seriousness by the denizens of the Annuate Palace—the sympathetic android Elio even makes a point of misplacing at least one piece of regalia in advance of every ceremony lest the Sempitern be unable to find something to freak out over. But in consequence of all this respect and the Sempitern's usual stressed/standoffish affect, it's impossible to tell whether the man possesses any sense of humor himself, until the morning Vivian disastrously fails to keep a straight face when shouted at by a half-clad Sempitern and rather to his own astonishment, Ranjit Walker discovers that he likes being able to make people laugh. He's been a first-rate clown for years and never, perhaps, allowed himself to notice.2 His performance before the next ceremony so exceeds his usual standards, it practically cries out for undercranking and the accompaniment of "Yakety Sax." You will have to trust me and read it. It still makes me smile. And yet with all of this antic weirdness, Sempitern Walker is the adult character at the end of A Tale of Time City who most firmly stands up for Vivian when it looks as though she will be exiled to the stars by Faber John and the Time Lady: "My wife and I demand that Vivian Smith stays in Time City and lives with us in the palace. If our demand is not met, I resign from office . . . And one of you will have to do the job, because you won't find anyone else in the city who's fool enough to try." Like Fflewddur of the Prydain Chronicles, then, he was an early reinforcement that comic does not disqualify real. And perfectly in consonance with the book's theme of instability: as time and technologies and what tomorrow looks like from minute to minute all slide out from underneath the characters' feet, why shouldn't self-images? Jones' protagonists are never what they believe. Sempitern Walker is merely a less cosmic example than usual.
I do not ordinarily cast actors for characters I like, but since discovering the gloriously attenuated and anxiety-prone Bill Nighy in 2006, I have come to the conclusion that I would like very much to see him as Sempitern Walker; he's got the deadpan anguish down cold and he's more than lanky enough to storm properly (if someone could persuade a man who doesn't even wear shorts to take a role that requires, well, the excerpt above is a well-dressed day).3 And if, given the first name, you would prefer to see the Sempitern played by someone a little more chromatic, I'll gladly hear suggestions.
1. I do not believe Time City is intertextual with Gormenghast, but it really should be.
2. For this reason I associate the Sempitern with Roddy's Grandfather Gwyn from The Merlin Conspiracy (2003) in that both characters have forbidding exteriors and secret natures in which the viewpoint protagonists become complicit, although I will admit that lordship of the dead and physical comedy are somewhat different talents.
nineweaving associates him with "Mr. Beveridge's Magot," a tune that belonged originally to a character in her novel Cloud & Ashes: "And given its air of somewhat distracted self-importance, it has a touch of Sempitern Walker as well, I think. It discovers itself as comic." 3. [ETA] Hans Conried would have knocked the role out of the park, but only if you get me a time machine, alas.
4. For the record, the other four characters were Raederle of An, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976—1979); Captain Louis Renault, from Casablanca (1942); Reverdy Anacreon Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca, from Ysabeau Wilce's Flora Segunda (2007) and Flora's Dare (2008); and Patera Remora, from Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993—1996) and The Book of the Short Sun (1999—2001). If anyone does want to read about one of these, tell me now. Remus Lupin, Arnold Judas Rimmer, and the Lord Redlady did not make the final cut.