★★★☆☆ This is becoming needlessly messianic

High Wizardry

Diane Duane

In the previous two novels of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series we got to know the titular young wizards, Nita and Kit. Nita's specialty is living things and Kit's is inanimate objects such as stone and earth (which, it turns out, in the hands of a wizard such as Kit are not really inanimate at all). It was also broadly hinted that Nita's prodigy kid sister Dairine would become a wizard in the next novel. Dairine's expertise, it turns out, is computers. This was a very forward-looking idea in 1990, when personal computers were just becoming a thing. (I started a new job in 1990 and had an IBM PC XT running Windoze 2 at work.) In her acknowledgments Duane makes it clear that she was a leading-edge computer warrior.

This is a pretty exciting story. Dairine is a VERY young wizard, indeed, eleven years old, and since younger wizards are more powerful, she is a very powerful wizard. She is also, we quickly learn, extremely bright, but she has about the maturity and capacity for forethought you would expect of an eleven-year-old. When the brand new Apple IIIc+ her parents just bought arrives at the Callahan home Nita discovers that it comes with a digital copy of the Wizard's Manual preinstalled. And she's off on her ordeal.

Book 2 of the series, Deep Wizardry, was something very like a Passion Play, that is, a dramatic depiction of the suffering of Jesus Christ in the days before his crucifixion, with Nita standing in for Christ. In fact, when Dairine reads about it in her Wizard's Manuals, she refers to it as "a sort of underwater passion play". Actually, what it's really like is C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Although I'm a fan of the Chronicles of Narnia, I was not and am not sure I'm up for a repeat performance.

High Wizardry doubles down on the religious allegory. Although it is not explicitly Christian, "the One", the old evil that is the principle antagonist of wizards, is clearly identified with Satan here, and one of the "higher powers" with an angel.

So, as far as I'm concerned, Young Wizards is now on probation. I'll probably read one more novel, but if it continues to go down the proselytizing route, that'll be it for me.

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