The Stolen Lake

[sawyl]

The fourth in the internal chronology of the Willoughby Chase series, Joan Aiken's The Stolen Lake was actually written a decade after The Cuckoo Tree to flesh out some of Dido Twite's adventures in South America. The story, which borrows heavily from Arthurian myth, is the first in the series to include out-and-out fantastic elements and to include one Aiken's characterful cats.

Instead of returning to London, Dido Twite has stayed aboard HMS Thrush and finds herself carried along when Captain Hughes receives orders to divert to New Cumbria in South America to lend assistance to Britain's oldest ally. Upon learning that Queen Ginevra is partial to children, Captain Hughes orders his steward, the refined Mr Holystone, to give Dido a crash course in deportment and elocution — something that results in Dido's abduction shortly after the party arrive in the scruffy port of Tenby. Escaping with the help of Bran, a travelling storyteller, Dido rejoins a small party of crewmen to travel up the Severn river deep into the New Cumbrian interior.

After an eventful river voyage complete with snakes and piranhas, the crew travel up a rack-and-pinion railway line to the cold, dismal capital of Bath where Mr Holystone promptly succumbs to altitude sickness. Summoned to meet with the Queen in her rotating palace, Dido and Captain Hughes are amazed when she calmly informs them that one of her neighbours has stolen her sacred lake and that she must get it back because her soothsayer has told her that her husband, Arthur rex quondam, rexques furturus for whom she has been waiting since he was injured in the Battle of Dyrham in AD 577, is due to return across it. With Captain Hughes struggling to take this in, the Queen pressurises Dido into a agreeing to a desperate fraud to deceive Lyonesse into returning the stolen water.

Although the early sections in Tenby and on the Severn river have a slight whiff of Conrad's Heart of Darkness about them, the story really settles into its own with the party's arrival in Bath and the Arthurian elements come to the fore. The Queen is the original Guinevere, waiting faithfully for over a millenium for her lost Arthur to recover from his battle wounds, becoming vast and amoral and inhuman in her waiting; Bran, with his stories and wisdom and ability to manage the others, is Merlin escaped from his supposedly perpetual imprisonment while Nynevie Vavasour is his wife and jailer. But the story of the return of the once and future king is cleverly confounded by the New Cumbrians who stand outside the mythos, who have much to lose should their increasingly crazy queen re-acquire her husband, and who are determined to go to great lengths to retain the status quo.

New Cumbria itself is cunningly wrought from a combination of Welsh and Roman American cultures, reflecting the wholesale migration of a group of Ancient Britons to South American sometime in sixth century. This merger manifests itself in the names of some of the locals, such as Juan Jones and Daffyd Gomez, the casual injection of classical Latin into everyday speech, and the Aztec-like sacrifices to the Celtic goddess Sul. New Cumbria's neighbours are also something mythic: from Mr Holystone's home of Hy Brazil to Princess Elen's Lyonesse.

The injection of a new story into the gap between Night Birds on Nantucket and The Cuckoo Tree requires Aiken to make a few adjustments to the established history. Thus, Captain Osbaldestone of the Thrush is promoted to make way for Captain Hughes; Hughes is noticeably prickly and less amenable to Dido than he is in the later book, although his manner begins to thaw when he starts to recognise her heroism; and Able Seaman Noah Gusset is inserted to provide a link back to the Tegleazes' butler.

An enjoyable & quirky addition to the series with a memorable setting and some wonderfully strange ideas — where else would you find someone holding a lake hostage?