Because the heroes change, what binds these three books together is the shared purpose of the villains: they are all Hanoverians, bent on overthrowing the King and putting a pretender in his place. This is where the element of fantasy comes in as Aiken explores an alternate history for England, in which King James, rather than King George, succeeds to the throne. This is a classic ‘science fiction/fantasy’ twist to add to the story, and one that I find myself enjoying even more as an adult, with some knowledge of English history, than I did as a pre-teen. When I was eleven, I hadn’t yet studied this period of English history at school, and hence was completely unaware of the discrepancies with actual history.
After I’d finished re-reading all three books, I immediately turned to the web to find out if Aiken had ever written anything more in this alternate world and about any of the characters. I was quite surprised to find a very long list of books, some newer than others, and I am seriously considering picking up the rest of the sequence, so that I, and my future children, can enjoy these books as much as I have.
Joan Aiken successfully combines suspense, mystery, adventure, an element of fantasy, likable and utterly despicable characters, in these alternate history tales, which are sure to delight both children and older persons for many years to come.
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Editor’s Note: The later books in the series focus increasingly on Dido and her peculiar, sometimes sinister family. Some of the volumes share the tone of tough, ebullient whimsy of the three volumes reviewed here, while some are much darker in tone and subject matter. Aiken’s talents as a horror writer are evident in them. The Stolen Lake tells of an adventure Dido has in South America as she makes her way home to England; in The Cuckoo Tree she gets back to England, only to find more mysteries with Hanoverians at the root of them; Dido and Pa reunites her with her unsavory musician father and introduces her younger half-sister, Is. The tone of the series, which had become somewhat darker in The Cuckoo Tree, becomes very dark here. Is becomes the main character of the later books, Is Underground and Cold Shoulder Road. In the first of these books (which is as far as I have read in the series), she journeys back to the industrial north of England to rescue children enslaved to work in the coal mines there; in the second book, she searches for family members in an England devastated by the disasters of the previous book. The latest book in the series, Dangerous Games, once again features Dido, who journeys overseas on a mission from the king. Dido and Pa and Is Underground are out of print in the U.S., but both are available in the UK, where Is Underground is titled simply Is. One other Aiken novel, The Whispering Mountain is set in the world of the Wolves series, but it features an entirely different set of characters, though the Hanoverians are still causing trouble in it. Unfortunately, it’s not in print on either side of the Atlantic.—Christopher Cobb
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Beth Kelleher is a die-hard science-fiction and fantasy fan with a passion for European history. She has a degree in French Language and Literature from Smith College but makes her living as a web designer/developer. She shares her Bay Area home with her husband and seven cats. Visit her Web site for more.
Interesting and Unusual Things, and Not Only on Mondays: Joan Aiken’s Short Fiction
Reviewed by Jed Hartman
10/29/01
Joan Aiken has written about thirty collections of short stories. Some of these books are full of horror stories; some are for very young children; some focus on a particular set of characters; some are just miscellaneous assortments. It can be a little bewildering to keep track of which stories are in which collections, especially since many of the stories are reprinted in multiple collections, both British and American.
My two favorite books by Aiken are both short-story collections; unfortunately, both are long out of print. I spent over ten years poking around in used bookstores and signing up for book search services before I found a used copy of Not What You Expected; it didn’t take as long to find Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home, but still, the copy I own is the only copy I’ve ever seen.
Many of the stories in those two volumes appeared earlier in two British collections: A Harp of Fishbones and A Small Pinch of Weather. Fortunately, Harp and Weather have recently been reprinted in the U.K. You can obtain them from Amazon.co.uk even if you live elsewhere; I ordered them on the Web and received them in California a couple of weeks later.
However, this review is going to focus on Not What You Expected and Armitage so you’ll know what you’re missing; maybe you too will start frequenting used bookstores looking for these. For precise details on what you’re missing, see the table of stories that shows which stories are in which of the four collections.
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The stories in Not What You Expected range from fairy tales (“A Harp of Fishbones,” “The Boy Who Read Aloud,” “The Cost of Night”) to charmingly quirky light fantasy pieces (“The Lost Five Minutes,” “Don’t Pay the Postman”) to Armitage-family stories (“Doll’s House to Let, Mod. Con.,” “Mrs. Nutti’s Fireplace”—see below for more about the Armitages) to a sort of magic realism (“The Dark Streets of Kimball’s Green,” in which a girl makes telephone calls to the ancient King Cunobel, “A Room Full of Leaves,” “Hope”).
But I’m applying those categorizations a bit arbitrarily. Really, “charmingly quirky” describes a great many of Aiken’s stories. Her character names provide a taste of her style: some of them are perfectly normal, but then there’s a “retired enchantress” named Miss Hooting; a woman named Mrs. Mildew; “the Assistant Principal, Madame Legume”; “Sam Inkfellow, editor of the Wormley Observer”; the town genius Marcantonio Smith-to-the-power-Nine; another town genius in a different story, Albert Einstein Shakespeare Smith; and “the village witch, Mrs. Murky.”
But it’s not just names and odd details that give Aiken’s stories their distinctive charm, it’s their development. Ever since the first collection of hers that I read, The Last Slice of Rainbow, I’ve been struck by her ability to write stories that go in unexpected directions: a story might start out with a BBC man visiting a village in the country, as in “The Rose of Puddle Fratrum,” and end up with an intelligent computer, a cursed ballet, and a mysterious recluse. You can never quite be sure where an Aiken story will end up; you can only be sure that the journey will be worthwhile. In the Postscript to the current edition of Weather, she describes how she writes short stories: “Stories are like butterflies, which come fluttering out of nowhere, touch down for a brief instant, may be captured—may not—and then vanish into nowhere again.” That’s a pretty accurate description of the experience of reading some of her stories as well.
There are, nonetheless, certain recurring elements in her stories. There are slightly scattered but independent-minded young women who, in certain types of stories, end up marrying slightly scattered but charming young men. Houses often figure prominently (particularly haunted ones), along with various locations (real and imagined) around the U.K. There are a great many ghosts, though more in her horror collections than in the volumes under consideration here, as well as a variety of curses and enchantments. There are other fairy-tale elements as well, though often not arranged in the ways you might expect. And most of her characters have a certain matter-of-fact attitude about magic.
Another recurring aspect in Aiken’s stories is a prose style that draws heavily from fairy tales and oral traditions. Sometimes the stories include song lyrics and rhymes; sometimes characters speak in various British dialects, or parodies thereof. (As in “Losh, to be sure, yon mountain’s unco wampish.”) There are passages that read like transcripts of a storyteller telling a story, as in the opening to “A Long Day Without Water” (in Not What You Expected):
This story is all about tears—tears locked inside a heart, heart lost in a river, river shut inside a house, house in a village that didn’t want it. Better get out your handkerchiefs, then, for it sounds like a whole sky full of cloud coming along, doesn’t it? And yet the ending, when we get there, isn’t solid sad.
Not all of her stories are written like that; her style varies considerably across the range of her stories. But the stories that read like storytelling have the narrative voice that I think of as most distinctively Aiken’s. It makes many of her stories sound like children’s stories, even when she’s treating somewhat more adult topics.
Her stories are often presented as children’s stories, and indeed some of her collections appear to be solidly aimed at children. The Arabel and Mortimer books, for instance, are charming, but read much more like kids’ stories than like adults’ stories. (Arabel is a pragmatic little girl; Mortimer is her pet raven, who goes about saying “Nevermore!” and eating everything in sight, from pastries to clocks to staircases.) And she’s written several collections of stories more or less aimed at rather young children, with illustrations by Polish artist Jan Pienkowski. (One of these, A Necklace of Raindrops, has just been reprinted, without the Pienkowski illustrations; you might as well buy it, since otherwise you’ll eventually have to go search used bookstores for it too.) But in general, Aiken doesn’t much distinguish between stories for children and stories for grown-ups; in the Weather Postscript, she says, “[T]he truthful answer to the question, ‘Do you prefer writing for adults or children?’ would be, ‘I prefer writing short stories.’”