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odd and whimsical pleasures
Thursday, 30 November 2006 03:26 pmYesterday I picked up the last in Joan Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series at the cheap book place (currently No. 1 on my Credit Card Assault And Battery Suspect List). The Witch of Clatteringshaws is notable for a sort of friendly giant dragony creature with the body and face of an otter. I want one. Also Hobyahs, a word I remember from childhood to describe a naughty, goblinoid monster. Here they cheerfully eat people. I was saddened, though, to see that this is the last book in the series, as I somehow missed the news that the author died in 2004.
In a biblophilic life notable for sudden mad and comprehensive enthusiasms for particular authors, it has always disappointed me that I never actually managed to infect anyone else with my love of Joan Aiken. Part of the problem, I think, is that she's really a kids' author, although she also writes amazingly self-conscious fairy tales and rather pleasantly shiversome ghost stories. Despite their label, however, I find the pleasures of the Wolves series to be unexpectedly sophisticated. For a start, they're nineteenth-century alternate histories: in the 1830s the British throne is taken by King James rather than King George, relegating the Hanoverians to the status of evil spies plotting to depose the rightful king. I really enjoy the Hanoverian plotters, who tend to the unsavoury, callous and generally inept, with a particularly grandiloquent and unlikely approach to overthrowing the monarchy. My favourite plot is the one where they mount Saint Paul's Cathedral on giant rollers and attempt to roll it into the Thames during the Coronation (The Cuckoo Tree). In another book they build a giant cannon on Nantucket Island, and aim it at the Royal Palace in London (Night Birds on Nantucket). The Nantucketers, salty individualists all, refuse to intervene on the grounds that British succession squabbles are none of their business, until it's pointed out that the recoil from the gun will push the island back against the tacky and undesirable mainland. The South American Celtic kingdom-in-exile, with an obese and unnaturally-immortal Guinivere waiting for the return of Arthur, is also particularly bizarre (The Stolen Lake).
I suppose the quality I enjoy in these books is one of whimsy: they are anything but clichéd, with a quality of amiable, witty and off-the-wall weirdness which renders them both unpredictable and charming, and which at times gives their plots a pleasant but slightly unwieldy randomness. At the same time they're also pretty dark, with a definitely Gothic edge: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has a perfectly wonderful Gothic villainess who throws innocent orphans out into the wolf-infested snow in order to steal their inheritance. At various points in the series characters are eaten by wolves, Hobyahs or giant eagles, burned to death, blown up or shot. Like Dickens, Aiken also has a fondness for really awful institutions, and for the richly horrible eccentrics who control them and their starving, hapless inhabitants.
The recurring hero and heroine of the series are at completely opposite poles: Dido, tough but good-hearted Cockney urchin, and Simon, Duke of Battersea, a dreamy painter and for a time reluctant King of England; but both come from backgrounds of deprivation, alienation and other nineteenth-century unpleasantness. Dido's father is a brilliant musician whose songs infuse the series, but he is also a monstrous, amiable sociopath whose Hanoverian plotting regularly sacrifices his daughter. Both heroes nonetheless set about their often bewilderingly odd problems with a refreshingly logical directness.
Sigh. Joan Aiken is a very specific pleasure, and reading this back I'm not entirely surprised I don't know any other affictionados - or at least any who've admitted it in my hearing. Nonetheless, I launch this slight paean hopefully into the blogsphere. May it catch a curious squid or two.
Other notable events of the week: isn't it amazing how you can show your favourite hairdresser a picture of the cut you want, and after an hour of hacking have them produce something that is almost but not quite entirely unlike the image? I think it must be because of quantum.
Off to book club tonight, to drown various sorrows (mostly academic, book revisionary, non-achieving, for the use of) in wine and literary chitchat. Darn.
P.S. No mole has transpired, despite four hours of furniture removal and leopard-crawling along the floor with a torch. I fear it may be dead in an inaccessible corner. You'd think four cats in the house could lay paws on it, but no. Damned dilettentes.
In a biblophilic life notable for sudden mad and comprehensive enthusiasms for particular authors, it has always disappointed me that I never actually managed to infect anyone else with my love of Joan Aiken. Part of the problem, I think, is that she's really a kids' author, although she also writes amazingly self-conscious fairy tales and rather pleasantly shiversome ghost stories. Despite their label, however, I find the pleasures of the Wolves series to be unexpectedly sophisticated. For a start, they're nineteenth-century alternate histories: in the 1830s the British throne is taken by King James rather than King George, relegating the Hanoverians to the status of evil spies plotting to depose the rightful king. I really enjoy the Hanoverian plotters, who tend to the unsavoury, callous and generally inept, with a particularly grandiloquent and unlikely approach to overthrowing the monarchy. My favourite plot is the one where they mount Saint Paul's Cathedral on giant rollers and attempt to roll it into the Thames during the Coronation (The Cuckoo Tree). In another book they build a giant cannon on Nantucket Island, and aim it at the Royal Palace in London (Night Birds on Nantucket). The Nantucketers, salty individualists all, refuse to intervene on the grounds that British succession squabbles are none of their business, until it's pointed out that the recoil from the gun will push the island back against the tacky and undesirable mainland. The South American Celtic kingdom-in-exile, with an obese and unnaturally-immortal Guinivere waiting for the return of Arthur, is also particularly bizarre (The Stolen Lake).
I suppose the quality I enjoy in these books is one of whimsy: they are anything but clichéd, with a quality of amiable, witty and off-the-wall weirdness which renders them both unpredictable and charming, and which at times gives their plots a pleasant but slightly unwieldy randomness. At the same time they're also pretty dark, with a definitely Gothic edge: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has a perfectly wonderful Gothic villainess who throws innocent orphans out into the wolf-infested snow in order to steal their inheritance. At various points in the series characters are eaten by wolves, Hobyahs or giant eagles, burned to death, blown up or shot. Like Dickens, Aiken also has a fondness for really awful institutions, and for the richly horrible eccentrics who control them and their starving, hapless inhabitants.
The recurring hero and heroine of the series are at completely opposite poles: Dido, tough but good-hearted Cockney urchin, and Simon, Duke of Battersea, a dreamy painter and for a time reluctant King of England; but both come from backgrounds of deprivation, alienation and other nineteenth-century unpleasantness. Dido's father is a brilliant musician whose songs infuse the series, but he is also a monstrous, amiable sociopath whose Hanoverian plotting regularly sacrifices his daughter. Both heroes nonetheless set about their often bewilderingly odd problems with a refreshingly logical directness.
Sigh. Joan Aiken is a very specific pleasure, and reading this back I'm not entirely surprised I don't know any other affictionados - or at least any who've admitted it in my hearing. Nonetheless, I launch this slight paean hopefully into the blogsphere. May it catch a curious squid or two.
Other notable events of the week: isn't it amazing how you can show your favourite hairdresser a picture of the cut you want, and after an hour of hacking have them produce something that is almost but not quite entirely unlike the image? I think it must be because of quantum.
Off to book club tonight, to drown various sorrows (mostly academic, book revisionary, non-achieving, for the use of) in wine and literary chitchat. Darn.
P.S. No mole has transpired, despite four hours of furniture removal and leopard-crawling along the floor with a torch. I fear it may be dead in an inaccessible corner. You'd think four cats in the house could lay paws on it, but no. Damned dilettentes.
