Wilkins' Tooth

Diana Wynne Jones's first novel, Changeover (1970), was aimed at adults. Her career as a children's novelist began with Wilkins’ Tooth, a curiously hybrid novel that resonates with the conscientious multiculturalism of the 1970s and the concern to focus children's fiction on relevant issues, ¹ yet which is placed alongside a fairy-tale and fantasy structure whose tropes intensify the metaphorical understanding of the text. Parallel to this dual structure runs a third strand that subverts the expectations nourished by both traditions. The result is an astonishingly complex novel that almost collapses under the weight of meaning it is intended to carry. This might well explain its almost complete invisibility. Although Wilkins’ Tooth has recently been reprinted (Collins 2001), the novel had only limited availability (there was a 1984 Puffin edition) for almost twenty years. It is omitted from the entry on Jones in the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, and, perhaps more significant, Jones glosses over it. Jones has written that Wilkins’ Tooth was a very deliberately contrived novel designed to break into the children's market. Eight Days of Luke was still being considered but was regarded as too radical: “While they ummed and ahhed, I decided I would write a book with all the current shibboleths accounted for … [but] … would slide in doing my own thing.” The consequence was that Jones “never, for this reason, regarded WT as really one of my books.” ² But Wilkins’ Tooth is flawed in very precise ways that suggest that from the very beginning of her career Jones's writing was as much an act of genre criticism as any academic paper. In this context Wilkins’ Tooth, although a minor and marginalized work, demands close attention.