Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

And so I've finally arrived at The Witch of Clatteringshaws, Joan Aiken's very last Willoughby Chase novel published after her death in 2004. The tone of the book is closer to its immediate predecessor, Midwinter Nightingales, than anything else in the series. From Aiken's afterword it is clear that she was aware of her failing strength and unwilling to risk embarking on a book that might get left unfinished, but that she still wanted to tidy up the last few loose ends of Simon & Dido and their adventures.

Simon, now the king, is extremely keen to try find a way to renounce his throne. Dido, eager to get Simon back, sets off for Clatteringshaws in search of a claimant said to be concealed in the village. On the way past Willoughby Chase she picks up Piers Ivanhoe le Guichet Crackenthrope, a former pupil of Fogrum Hall School who'd been staying with the Greens since surviving the events of Midwinter Nightingale. On their arrival in Scotland the pair find themselves required to work in Mrs McClan's dubious boarding house, where the landlady's principal method of enriching herself seems to involve bumping off her elderly residents, in order to discover whether their hosts' foster son really is in line to inherit the throne of England.

Horrified by the prospect of being married off to an eight foot Finnish princess with a passion for Egyptian antiquities, Simon seizes the chance to head north with his tiny army to confront a force of invading Wends. Instead of fighting Simon agrees to play the Wendish king at Hnefatefl and sees the raiders safely exiled to a valley where they plan to settle down and make cheese. With the intermittent help of the Witch of Clatteringshaws, who just happens to be the cousin of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the long-standing mystery of the last words St Arfish, St Ardust, and St Arling is finally cleared up, an heir is found, Simon gets off the hook, and the story ends with an army singing the songs of Abednego Twite.

While it's nice to have our heroes tales completed, there are a number of jumps in plot — such as the casual resolution of the problem of the invading Wends — that Aiken admits in her afterword were necessary to keep the story short enough to finish:

The end came too quickly, said the editors. Yes, it did, and I apologize. But a speedy end is better than a half-finished story.

Amen to that.

The second of Is Twite's adventures, Joan Aiken's Cold Shoulder Road follows closely on from the events of Is and the destruction of the chthonic town of New Blastburn in a tsunami.

Having returned to Blackheath from Blastburn, Is Twite sets out to reunite her cousin Arun with his mother. Together the pair travel to Cold Shoulder Road in Folkestone, where Ruth Twite was last known to be living, only to find the house empty but for a large number of paintings. After putting the paintings in the care of a retired admiral, the pair follow the trail of Silent Sect — the selectively mute group of zealots to which Hosiah and Ruth belonged — to their new home in Seagate. Here they encounter the sinister Elder, Dominic de la Twite — who may or may not be a distant relation — and discover that Arun's mother has vanished along with the child held hostage by the local band of smugglers, Merry Gentry, to prevent the locals from tattling.

In Cold Shoulder Road, Aiken returns to the Silent Sect, briefly established an almost mute religious group in Is, expanding on it and showing just what can happen to a group of believers when things go bad. It creates the character of Ruth Twite, whose artistic sensibilities were oppressed by her religion and her husband, and greatly expands the role of Penelope Twite, finally giving her a chance to step beyond the brief supporting parts she plays in the previous books. The plot, with definite echoes of Russell Thorndike, is complex with crosses and double crosses and people hunted down on the basis of misinformation and exaggerated rumour.

As ever, Aiken's sharp eye for detail makes even the strangest locations seem real: the titular Cold Shoulder Road, it's run-down shacks with walls so thin you can hear the domestic abuse from next-door; the wreck of the frigate Throstle, firmly embedded in a tree by the tidal wave that destroyed Holderness in Is; a child hung kept in a cage over the channel tunnel railway line to ensure the good behaviour of the locals. Then there's the eccentric Admiral Fishskin, with his cluttered house patrolled by over-sized spiders and his cantilevered garden projecting out over the edge of the cliff, who has somehow also found the time to experiment with kites and to invent something that sounds a lot like a bicycle.

An enjoyable late addition to the canon.

I've finally arrived at Joan Aiken's Dido and Pa, my very favourite of the Willoughby Chase novels and the point at which I stopped reading the series.

The book opens at the very end of The Cuckoo Tree with Dido Twite and her old friend Simon, now Duke of Battersea, retreating to an inn in Petworth to catch up on everything that has happened since Blackhearts in Battersea. But when Simon briefly leaves Dido alone, she finds herself all-but abducted by her unscrupulous father Abednego and dragged off to Wapping to meet his new patron: Wolfgang von Eisengrim, the Margrave of Nordmark and the Hanoverian ambassador to London. Hustled off to Mrs Bloodvessel's grotty boarding house, Dido decides to go along with her shifty father's scheme, part of which involves caring for a heavily bandaged Dutchman, in the hope of putting a spoke in his wheel.

Simon, meanwhile, returns to London and to his duties: arranging a ceremony to mark the opening of a new tunnel under the Thames and combatting the ravenous wolf packs troubling the home counties. To his surprise Simon finds that he has caught the attention of the Margrave, who has various suggestions for the tunnel ceremony including the use of chapelmaster — Abednego Twite in a thin disguise. Unable to take the time to attend to the Margrave, Simon persuades his twin sister Sophie to disguise herself in his stead only for Twite to see through the ploy, causing the Margrave to advance his plans to deal with King Richard IV.

Dido and Pa is probably the best novel of the entire series, with its excellent plot, liminal magic, and strong cast of characters. The setting is also excellent: a version of London that owes more to the 18th century than the 19th, especially when the Thames freezes over, with the Margrave's salons and Twite's Eisengrim Concertos deliberately invoking Bach's Brandenburg Concertos as shorthand for their quality.

The Margrave, cold-hearted and ruthless, is an excellent villain who is saved from cliche by his great love of music and his desire to share the apparent healing properties of his chapelmaster with the widest possible audience. But it is Abednego Twite who is the amoral heart of the book. Despite his brilliance as a composer, he only seems to value people in as much as the forward his own interests and he treats those who can't help him with a monstrous indifference. Thus his new-found paternal affection for Dido appears to be entirely down her familiarity with the King and her potential to make an advantageous marriage, whereas Penelope seems to have fallen out of favour following her elopement in Black Hearts and Is, Mrs Bloodvessel's scullion and, it's strongly implied, the Twite and Mrs B's illegitimate daughter, is beaten & starved & kept locked in a cellar for most of the time. In fact Twite comes across as no-one quite so much as an evil version of George Frideric Handel!

The plot is strong and resolves an number of plot threads from Black Hearts in Battersea, including the great Hanoverian conspiracy to put one of the Georges on the throne. Thus Simon and Sophie reappear and we get to see just how the discovery that they're both aristocrats has complicated their lives; what happened to Penelope Twite following her disappearance with a traveller in button hooks; and just how Abednego Twite has been spending his time since his wife died — and presumably before, judging by Is's age.

It is this sense of completeness that probably explains why I stopped the series at this point when I was a child. Because Dido and Pa closes the story and resolves most of the character trajectories in such a satisfactory way — I like the way it ends with Simon's proposal and Dido's rejection — that I didn't feel a need for more. And by the time Is came out in 1992, I was content with the resolution of the books and my attention had moved on to other things.

Another relatively late insertion into Aiken's Wolves series, Limbo Lodge wasn't written until the late 90s even though it exists in the gap between The Stolen Lake and The Cuckoo Tree. The story is set on Aratu, a hidden island in the Pacific, where magic abounds and there are colonial tensions between the original inhabitants and a later group of plantation owners.

The story opens with Dido Twite and Second Lieutenant Frank Multiple on board a local ship bound for Aratu with orders to locate Lord Herodsfoot, one of Britain's roving ambassadors. Just as they are about dock, Mr Multiple is knocked out by a dropped good-luck charm. Fortunately their fellow passenger Talisman van Linde is a skilled doctor, capable of carrying out the necessary brain surgery at the local hospital. With Mr Multiple out of it for the duration Dido and Doc Tally come up with a plan to travel into the interior forest in search of Herodsfoot. Their scheme is stymied by Manoel Roy, King John's brother, who has designs on the throne and who holds a grudge against the doctor, who he manages to get imprisoned for performing illegal surgery.

Escaping into the forest with her guide Tylo, Dido finds Herodsfoot learning the local history from one of the Forest People's elders. Travelling across the island, eventually reconnecting with the recently escaped Doc Tally, they have a number of strange encounters in unhappy plantation houses, all the while trying to stay ahead of Manoel Roy, who seems to stepped up his campaign to replace the sickly king. Realising that only the king can help them, the party set off for Limbo Lodge, the house to which the king has retreated following the death of his wife and the disappearance of his child many years before.

Of all the novels in series, Limbo Lodge is the most difficult to sum up. The story contains a number of threads, taking in colonialism, the myth of the noble savage, and even pulling in elements of the Fisher King to explain the trajectory of John's return to health. There is a romance that works all the better for being bittersweet & unfulfilled and the overt magic makes more sense in context of Is and Cold Shoulder Road.

I can't quite decide what to make of the book: I suspect it may be one of the best in the series, but the density of detail makes it difficult to get into and some of the noble savage stuff feels a bit uncomfortable even though it's obviously intended to point up the materialism of Dido's memories of London.

The third of Joan Aiken's Willoughby Chase novels, Night Birds on Nantucket, follows Dido Twite, lost at sea towards the end of Black Hearts in Battersea as she sails all over the world before eventually getting caught up in a plot on the island of Nantucket.

The story opens with Dido Twite waking ten months after the whaler Sarah Casket plucked her out of the sea. After witnessing a whale hunt, Dido is taken aside by Captain Jabez Casket and charged with a secret mission: to coax his daughter out of the tiny cabin she has been hiding in since the death of her mother. Using a series of games and diversions, Dido manages to win the trust of the girl, who turns out to be burdened with the name Dutiful Penitence, and the pair become firm friends.

While Dido is below desks with Pen Casket, the Captain sights his nemesis — a great pink whale — and immediately gives chase. The pursuit of the whale draws the ship back to New Bedfort, where the Captain puts Pen and Dido ashore before resuming his hunt. After a brief stop over with Cousin Anne, the pair are sent to the Casket family home on Nantucket to be cared for by the formidable Aunt Tribulation, who with her cap and dark glasses initially looks more like the wolf from Red Riding Hood than anybody's aunt. While enduring life with Aunt Trib — Pen with quiet fear, Dido with insolence and rebellion — the girls bump into a strange ornithologist who has apparently built a giant iron telescope in order to study the island's nightbirds. But it soon becomes clear that the ornithologist and his friends aren't what they seem and their telescope might be something else entirely.

Clearly the opening sections of the book aboard the Sarah Casket are intended to parody Moby Dick. The gloomy Captain Casket, complete with Quakerish thee's and thou's, mourning the death of his wife and obsessed with the notion of finding the pink whale, is a lighter version of Ahab. The crew, both friendly and sinister, may be sketched lightly but they're familiar types who don't really need greater embellishment, and more time is spent on the details whale hunting and sailing.

The second part of the book owes more to a gothic thriller, with the two young girls stuck in a remote farmhouse with a sinister relative who doesn't seem to have their best interests at heart. In contrast to Pen, whose nervous disposition and reluctance to challenge authority makes her a solid gothic heroine, Dido is a girls-own adventure type and spends a lot of the book standing up to Aunt Trib and gradually working on Pen to do the same. It's one of Dido's most consistent and enjoyable traits across the novels she appears in that she never accepts things as they are, no matter how grim, but always looks about for a way to improve her lot and often, in the process, manages to rescue herself from her predicament.

A solid adventure novel that has a lot of fun subverting the tropes it has adopted — the ending manages to undermine both Melvillian and gothic expectations in an enjoyably satisfying way — and proves that girls are just as good at being action heroes as boys.

Joan Aiken is the first writer whose name really stuck in my mind. I remember falling in love with A Necklace of Raindrops, with its beautiful Jan Pienkowski illustrations, when it was read to me as a child. And I remember adoring the The Wolves of Willoughby Chase when I first read it and on every subsequent reading. But, not having it read it since junior school, I was more than a little worried about how it would stand up to a re-reading. Happily it only took a handful of pages for me to realise that it was even better than I remembered, especially with 30+ years of reading to help me pick out some of the literary featured that had passed me by as a child.

The story opens with a series of arrivals and departures at Willoughby Chase: Sir Willoughby and Lady Green are about to depart on a trip round the world to restore Lady Green's health; Sylvia, Sir Willoughby's niece, has left her elderly aunt in London to keep her headstrong cousin Bonnie company at the Chase; and Miss Slighcarp, a distant cousin of the family, has arrived to act as governess to the children while Bonnie's parents are away.

But no sooner has the Green's ship sailed and promptly been wreaked leaving Bonnie an orphan, than Miss Slighcarp and her dubious assistant Mr Grimshaw pay discharge most of the Chase's servants and dispatch the children off to Mrs Brisket's harsh school in nearby Blastburn. Unwilling to tolerate the appalling conditions Bonnie hatches a plan with Simon, a young goose keeper who lives in a cave in the grounds of the Chase, to escape and travel to London to regain control of her inheritance with the help of her Aunt Jane and Sir Willoughby's man of business.

Re-reading the book, I was struck by Aiken's great skill and economy. The book is short — less than two hundred pages — and action packed, but at the same time, it doesn't lack for characterisation or world-building. Most of this, I suspect, is due to Aiken's deft ability to create scenes that manage to achieve all three aims at once.

Thus the unpleasantness of Miss Slighcarp is immediately established when she hits the loyal Pattern with a hairbrush; Bonnie's impulsiveness and temper are apparent in her response — she throws the brush out of the window and dashes a pitcher of water in her new governess' face; and we're shown that some greater villainy may be afoot in Miss Slighcarp's over-reaction to Pattern's attempt to unpack her letter case — because who overreacts to the handling of their papers except someone with something to hide?

Similarly Sylvia's train journey north from London serves multiple roles: it establishes Sylvia's quiet character and the more conventional manners drilled into her by Aunt Jane; it introduces the shifty Josiah Grimshaw who, despite saving Sylvia when a wolf breaks the window, clearly spends much of the journey trying to butter her up in the hope of getting himself invited to the Chase; and it also does a lot of world building, making it clear just how far Willoughby Chase is from London — a day and a half — while the relatively crude train serves to fix the period of the piece in the early- to mid- 19th century.

Returning to the book again after reading Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu in the intervening period, it's clear that Aiken is working within a framework that borrows heavily from 19th century gothic and sensation novels. Thus both the young heroines are orphans — Sylvia from the outset; Bonnie from almost immediately after her parents departure — and find themselves quickly stuck with a sinister guardian in the vein of Silas Ruthyn or Percival Glyde, who wants nothing quite so much as to separate them from their rightful inheritance.

It's interesting how Aiken's heroines mirror Wilkie Collins' two leads in The Woman in White. Bonnie is dark, active, and tomboyish just as Marion Halcombe is is, while Sylvia mirrors Laura Fairlie by being fair, feminine, and elegant — and also by catching cold in the school, but this is more a consequence of being forced to work in the laundry than anything else. But unlike Collins' heroines, they don't need a hero look after them for all Simon's

I was also struck by the sheer sadness of Aunt Jane's character — something I hadn't entirely noticed before. From the very outset, as she cuts up their flat's precious draperies to convert them into a new wardrobe for Sylvia, it's clear that Jane thinks that she hasn't got much to live for now that she no longer has to care for her beloved niece and that she's handing on her dearest possessions to the next generation. And where, when the children arrive in London to find her almost dead, I'd previously assumed that her malnutrition was due to poverty, it's now painfully clear that she has chosen to starve herself to death — because, logically, without Sylvia to feed and with the same income available to her, she actually have more to spend on food rather than less. But at least Jane recovers well enough from her ordeal — inspired as much by seeing her nieces as by Dr Field's champagne — to take charge of the former pupils of Mrs Brisket's school even, as an aside points out, managing to reform Mrs Brisket's lying and bullying daughter Diana.

In summary: a nostalgic treat that is as much of a delight now as it was all those years ago.