”Midnight is not a moment, Midnight is a place.”
Don’t get me wrong, I love Dickens. His books are fascinating and well-written, and chock full of “things everyone should read,” but I wouldn’t categorize them as fun. Joan Aiken, however, takes a Dickensian world and gives it a slight twist so it is England, but an alternate history England where James II was never deposed. Aiken deftly adds layers of fun and the magical sense of wonderment that all the best kids’ books have without losing the bleakness of her created England. It’s fascinating and masterful and that’s one of the attributes that make her worth appreciating and reading.
Born in 1924, Joan Aiken is the daughter of well-known poet, Conrad Aiken. For a bit of /r/fantasy trivia, one of his most famous poems has a character named Senlin, and u/JosiahBancroft confirmed for me that the titular character in Senlin Ascends takes his name from the poem. I do highly recommend Conrad Aiken’s poetry (and his life is fascinating as well) but since this isn’t a Conrad appreciation post, let’s move on. Onwards and upwards! Novelist Martin Armstrong was Joan Aiken’s stepfather, and he too had a large influence on her life. However, Joan has stated that her mother was the greatest influence on her future career. Joan started young, writing a story for the BBC Children’s Hour when she was 16 or 17, and she just kept on writing. My guess is that her most well-known work would be The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its subsequent sequels. However, she also wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice and numerous other books for adults and children.
Joan Aiken responded well to her fans and young readers, and we have one unknown 12-year-old to thank for the continuation of her Wolves books. She received a plaintive letter from a fan upset with the ending to Black Hearts in Battersea and one particular character’s fate. The child wanted to know why it had happened, and Aiken was unable to respond personally as was her wont because the publisher sent on the letter without an envelope. It prompted Aiken to rescue said character in the next book and that impacted the series right up until the end. I love this anecdote! I hope somewhere there’s a 50-something who wrote Aiken back in the day reading that interview who was all “omg, that was me!”
My first Aiken was A Necklace of Raindrops, a collection of short stories for young readers, given to me by my parents around the third grade (so back in the 70s if you’re counting, which I am not!). To young me, the stories were varied and magical, each one transporting me to a different world – a whimsical house on a chicken leg, a necklace with raindrops on it gifted by the North Wind, characters in books that come alive at night and take a girl on adventures, etc. I reread it in preparation for this appreciation (I still have my original copy), and I wish I had remembered 20 years ago how much I loved it, so I could have read it to my kids too. (They wouldn’t be allowed to touch it, of course, not even my mother gets to lay her grubby hands on my books.) It is definitely a great foray into the magical and fantastical, so if you have young kids, what are you waiting for?
Fast forward a couple years, and I found The Wolves of Willoughby Chase in my elementary school library (also known as the place I wanted to live – until I discovered massive libraries – just bury me in Suzzallo please). This was the children’s book that kickstarted a bunch of sequels and her alternate history England. If you’re looking at getting a kid interested in reading different styles, this is a great bridge between something weighty like Dickens and something totally fluffy. Like I mentioned earlier – Dickensian but fun and magical!
My favourite Aiken is Midnight is a Place. It takes place in the same world as Wolves but is a standalone with different characters. The phrase “midnight is not a moment, midnight is a place” just reverberated in my young soul and even though it was meant to be more prosaic and literal, it opened my mind to looking at things differently – what if time were places, or at least special times, like something as eerie and mystical as midnight? I went way more into a rabbit hole about that simple two liner at the front of the book than was intended as a kid, but that’s what you do when faced with good literature, right? It’s my first memory of something making me really think about what was meant by it and what could it mean and what was it supposed to mean and so on, so I may have her to thank for kicking my critical thinking into gear, even if, as I must emphasize, the book didn’t go into the mystical forays my mind did.
I read a few more of her books but then largely forgot to find more, which is a shame, because her catalogue is impressive with a book set in the Wolves’ world published mere months after her passing in 2004. And I didn’t even know until recently that she wrote books for grown-ups too. So I read one – I picked up Lady Catherine’s Necklace, her sequel to Pride & Prejudice and gave it a whirl. It was definitely Austenian in style and the side characters that she chose to follow were true to their roots, but that also meant they were fairly unlikeable so it was not my favourite book ever. It was fun though, and well-written, especially if you like Austen’s style, but I would have been fine if all of the cast had just sort of been kicked where it hurts most if you know what I mean.
One of the things I love most about her writing is something best articulated in her Guardian obituary, as they said it better than I could: “She had an unusual ability to write for all ages with such a fine sense of the differences between her audiences that she could match the content and the style exactly to the reader. Her stories for the very young are lucid, but with no apparent sacrifice of her hallmark use of language, or the apparently effortless invention which allowed her to heap one adventure on top of another without anything toppling over.”
Yep, what they said.
The common theme throughout all of Aiken’s books to me is that they are, as the Guardian said, tailored to her audiences and filled with great language and style. She’s worth reading for that alone. She’s worth reading for fantasy readers because she does have a touch of magic and wonder in her books even when they are not explicitly “fantasy”. In short, she’s just worth reading.
Let me just end on her words taken from a Locus interview in 1998:
Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it. Therefore, if you write about something, hopefully you write about something that's better or more interesting than circumstances as they now are, and that way you hope to make a step towards it.
People need stories. I was on a panel at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention, and I started describing the scene in the railway carriage in which I came up to London, and noticed the quality of the audience's attention instantly changed and sharpened. Everyone was listening, to hear what was going to happen next, because it was a story.
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