I picked up a couple of Joan Aiken juveniles a month or so ago; the first was
The Shadow Guests. This is the second, and it’s different
from the first in every way but one–like the first, I’m not going to
read it to my kids any time soon. The reason is different as well, as I
shall explain later.

It so happens that The Whispering Mountain takes place in the
same world as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its sequels.
It’s not a fantasy world, so much as an alternate history in which
James II of England wasn’t driven from his throne and James Edward Stuart
(the “Old Pretender”) took the English throne as James III. Just why
Aiken chose this particular counterfactual I’ve no idea, as it rarely
seems to play a significant role; but it does serve to relate a number of
books that otherwise would seem to be unrelated.

In any event, the present volume takes place toward the end of James
III’s reign and is set entirely in Wales, beginning in the small Welsh
town of Pennygaff. Owen Hughes, the curator of the town museum, has
found an aged gold harp; he believes it to be the Harp of Teirtu which
figures in many local legends. The local lord collects gold artifacts,
and has demanded that Hughes give him the harp, as all found property in
the lands surrounding Pennygaff are rightfully is. Hughes refuses;
the harp was found on the site of a ruined monastery once used by the
monks of the order of St. Ennodawg, and so legally belongs to the
order–provided that any monks of the order yet live.

But the story’s not really about Hughes the Museum, as the villagers call
him, but about his grandson, also called Owen, who is kidnapped by the
thieves Lord Malyn sends to steal the harp, and about Young Owen’s
friends Tom Dando the poet and his daughter Arabis who help him to
recover it, and about the fairy folk who inhabit the Whispering Mountain
of the title, the mountain on which Lord Malyn’s castle is built.

Fairy folk–but didn’t I say that this isn’t a fantasy? It isn’t.

Aiken has here crafted an entertaining if not entirely convincing tale,
and a host of memorable characters, not least of whom is His Royal
Highness Davie Jamie Charlie Neddie Geordie Harry Dick Tudor-Stuart, the
Prince of Wales (Davie to his friends); but what stands out most for me
is the richness of the many dialects that appear. For example,
there’s a Levantine potentate, the Seljuk of Rum, who has the
most delightful habit of speaking like a thesaurus:

“Well, well,” cried the Seljuk impatiently when the gates stood open
wide enough to admit the carriage, “what are you waiting for? Drive on,
my good chap, fellow, old boy!”

“Two sides to that, I am thinking,” said the driver. “Hired to drive
you to Caer Malyn I was, not right into the castle. Sooner put you down
here, I would.”

“Tush! Pshaw! Odds Bodikins! In fact, fudge, my good man. Pray
continue!”

Grumbling, the coachman climbed back on the box and drove the chaise
across a paved courtyard. But when they came to an inner archway he
stopped again.

“Come, come, come?” cried the Seljuk. “Proceed, my dear crony, I beg.
There is yet another court, campus, quadrangle beyond that archway,
can you not perceive, remark?

Then there are the two thieves, Bilk and Prigman. They hail from London,
and speak what I suppose must be a sort of proto-cockey thieve’s cant.
Arabis sees them hiding the harp in a cave, and overhears the following
conversation:

“All rug?” said one of the voices at length.

“I reckon she could lay there till Doomiesday, no one would twig. Back
to the bousing-ken, eh? Us could do with a dram of hot stingo.”

“You go on then, cully, and lay on a dram for me; I’m going to give my
napper a rinsing in yonder freshet.”

“Tol-lol; I’ll meet you at the bousing-ken then.”

And then later, having moved the harp to a different place, Prigman
says,

“Oh, won’t old Bilk-o be set back on his pantofles when he finds the
bandore’s not there any more. Ho, ho, I can’t wait to see his nab!”

And then Prince Davie speaks the braid Scots tongue, and the Welshmen
all speak an English with a decidedly Welsh flavor and lots of Welsh
words which I cannot pronounce.

And that’s why I’m not going to read it to my boys–I’m afraid that the
very linguistic richness that made the story so delightful for me would
make it nearly unintelligible to my kids, even assuming that I could do
justice to the pronunciation. Maybe in a few years I’ll give it a try.

Or, why I might not be posting much for a few days.

Ian Hamet introduced me to Nevil
Shute by encouraging me to read A Town Like Alice. I read it
and loved it, and looked for more, and discovered that Shute is mostly
out of print. So while I was scouting about the many used bookstores in
New Orleans’ French Quarter some while back, it occurred to me to look
for some Shute, and this is what I found. It’s an early novel, and it
shows, a little; it’s clearly intended to be something of a spy novel,
and yet more than anything else it turns out to be a romance.

The book is set in England in the late 1920’s, and (having been published
in 1932) belongs to that small set of books that can look back to the Great
War without any conscious overtones of the greater war to come. We think
of them as the years between the Wars, but Shute and his characters do not.

Malcolm Stevenson is a war hero, having served in the Royal Navy, and consequently
is now given the courtesy title of Commander. He owns a shipyard and a
small fleet of merchant ships, and he spends most of his time designing
ships and boats. He’s unmarried, and not by choice; he has asked many
women to marry him, and all have turned him down. It’s not clear why,
mind you; he’s wealthy, good-looking, well-mannered, and friendly. In
any event, he remains an essentially lonely man, buryied in his
work.

Early in the book Stevenson is asked to help with a police investigation–
some group, probably Communist, is running guns into England in order to
foment an uprising. During the course of things, Stevenson
becomes acquainted with a hired dancer at a Palais de Danse in Leeds.
Her name is Mollie, and she turns out to be the key to the investigation;
her brother has been driving a lorry for the gun-runners. But as he
comes to know her, things change between them.

And as I say, the romance between Stevenson and Mollie becomes the
centerpiece of the book. She’s a smart, capable girl from a lower class
family, doing the best she can; he’s a smart capable older man of means.
Each of them have expectations about the other that turn out to be wrong;
and amazingly, these differences are allowed to unfold naturally rather
than being turned into dramatic plot contrivances. It’s touching, and
ultimately heartbreaking, and well worth the trip.

Oh, and they find the gun-runners too.

I suppose I’ve been stood up a time or two in my life, but never for such a reason as this.

Every Friday, I and a couple of other folks get together at lunchtime to play recorder music. (If you don’t know what a recorder is, go here.) There used to be four of us, and then Mo decided to move up to the Bay Area. (Shame on her!) Every once in a while, though, she comes down to Los Angeles, and when she does she tries to join us on Friday so that we can play quartets. And she was supposed to come last Friday.

So last Friday morning, I get a call from Mo. She’s not going to make it. She’s still in town, but she’s about to leave; she has to get home before it gets dark. And why? She says, “I have to give a koi an injection. (If you don’t know what a koi is, go here. Oh what marvels there are in this bright world!) I haven’t heard anything so exotic in daily conversation since a co-worker casually said, “I was at this hookah lounge in the Egyptian section of Bangkok…” I stopped him right there, just to marvel. (So happens, we were sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Canberra at the time.) But I digress.

Apparently she’s got a sick koi, and although usually when the koi is sick you can give it medicine in its food, this time the koi needs an injection, and her husband can’t do it alone–it takes two people.

Now, I don’t want to minimize the fish’s illness. And no doubt the fish has great sentimental value for Mo. Koi live a long time; perhaps she raised it from a tiny goldfish. Perhaps it is, in fact, a family heirloom koi, a prize potato-fed koi from a line of champions raised in the peat-bogs of the Emerald Isle and handed down through the generations like a batch of sour-dough starter. Or perhaps Mo simply paid an arm-and-a-leg for it. I don’t know. But one thing is clear.

I’ve been stood up for a fish.

Despite not having read all that much of her work, I have a fondness for Joan Aiken. It goes back to reading The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (one of my sister’s books, I do believe), and then discovering some of her grown-up fiction later on; I particular like her short stories “Dead Language Master” and “Sonata for Harp and Bicycle”. Every so often I stumble across another of her books, and buy it, and sometimes I like it. Black Hearts in Battersea and Nightbirds in Nantucket are in some sense sequels to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase; I read them many, many years ago now, and at the time didn’t think they quite measured up to their predecessor. (I shall have to read all three of them again and see what I think now.) On the other hand, I rather enjoyed The Cockatrice Boys. So when I saw a couple of juveniles by Aiken that I hadn’t seen before, I bought them, with an eye toward perhaps reading them aloud to David.

With regard to this one, at least, I think perhaps I won’t. But before I explain that, let me say a few words about the story.

Young Cosmo Curtoys (pronounced “Curtis”) has just returned to England from Australia, where he had been living with his family in the desert until his mother and brother mysteriously disappeared. He’ll be living in the old Curtoys family home with his father’s cousin Eunice Doom, an Oxford professor. On the weekends, that is; during the week, he’ll be attending a boarding school in Oxford. Cosmo takes to life on the old homestead with relish, but the situation at school is not so rosy. And then there are the ghosts, and the old family curse….

The Shadow Guests is essentially a rite-of-passage novel, with ghosts. Cosmo must learn to deal with his mother’s death, and must learn to fit in at his school; he must also deal with the family curse, but that plot thread is given no more prominence than his progress at school.

I actually enjoyed the story well enough. So why don’t I want to read it to David? There are two reasons, really. One has to do with the school story, and the other has to do with Cousin Eunice.

When Cosmo shows up at the school, he’s shy, and feels out of place, and naturally keeps pretty much to himself. He’s also the New Boy, coming to the school in the middle of the term. And the other kids put him through hell. He’s fairly stoic about it, though he hates it, and though he doesn’t complain several older people remark to him that it happens to all of the new kids, he has to show the right spirit by putting up with it, and eventually he’ll be accepted and it will stop.

Now, this might be very good advice in the context of an English boarding school circa 1980; but I find the casual acceptance of cruelty by the older folks rather appalling. (I will say that the hazing is mild compared to other school stories I’ve read.) Anyway, I’d rather my boys learned to stand up for themselves a little more than Curtis does.

But the more important reason is Cousin Eunice and the absurd nonsense she spouts. Eunice plays a role in this book similar to that of Professor Kirke in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; she’s the benevolent grown-up who listens to the kid’s wild tales with an open mind. Kirke gives creedence to Lucy’s stories of Narnia because of Occam’s Razor–Lucy is either mad, or lying, or telling the truth, and as she’s clearly not mad, and as she’s known to be trustworthy he assumes that she must be telling the truth. It’s simple logic, based on common sense. I could cope with Cousin Eunice if she dealt with the story of the family curse in just the same way. She starts there, indeed, but then goes on about the plausibility of telepathy, ghosts, and a variety of other phenomena using bad mathematical metaphors that prove nothing and sound remarkably silly if you know what she’s talking about but which might sound convincing if you don’t.

I want my kids to appreciate good fantasy, but at the same time I want them to always be clear on the difference between fantasy and real life, and Cousin Eunice muddles the two a little too much for my taste.

All that said, this isn’t a bad book; it’s not a great book, either, but it’s not bad. I’ll be keeping it, and if David wants to read it to himself in a few years, that will be OK.

The procedure followed in this book is rather unusual, even for lateral-thinking Sergeant Cribb. A man has been murdered along the Thames near Oxford, and Cribb’s only lead is a young woman named Harriet Shaw, a student at the Elfrida College for the Training of Female Elementary Teachers. Harriet and two of her classmates had crept out of College after midnight for a clandestine swim in the Thames, and been disturbed by a boat containing three men and a fox terrier. As they were in the buff (this adding spice to their scandalous behavior), consternation ensued, and what with one thing and another Harriet was lucky to return to College undetected by the steely-eyed Miss Plummer. Indeed, had it not been for the help of a kindly police constable Miss Shaw would have been packed home in disgrace.

Now Cribb wants to locate those three men and their boat (to say nothing of the dog) for he suspects them of the murder. And he requires the aid of Miss Shaw to identify them. And the only way to find them, he reasons, is to proceed by boat down river in the guise of pleasure-seekers.

By now some fraction of you are nodding your heads, and you are quite right to do so. Swing, Swing Together is Lovesey’s homage to Jerome K. Jerome’s delightful book, Three Men in a Boat. If it’s not much of a mystery, it’s nevertheless quite a lot of fun–though you should really read Jerome’s book first.

But then, you should read Jerome’s book anyway.

All I knew about this movie before I saw it was that it was made by Pixar and that it involved superheroes. (I’ve not even seen any of the TV commercials. I assume that there have been some, but I’ve not seen them.)

And that was a very good state in which to see it. And so I don’t want to relieve your ignorance if you haven’t seen it. And so I’m not going to say anything but vague generalities.

Wow! Terrific! Biff! Bam! Boom!

Plus, the plot was surprisingly deep–this is not a kid’s movie made to be fun for grown-ups, it’s a grown-up’s movie made to be fun for kids. David and James both enjoyed it, but I know that at least half of it went right over their heads.

Anyway, go see it. The story is a delight, the visuals are stunning (as usual), and all in all I loved it.

This is yet another Sergeant Cribb mystery, and yet it’s entirely different than the two I’ve reviewed previously. The quirky Lovesey style, absent in the previous two books, is here clearly present, and wonder of wonders the book has nothing to do with the world of sport.

Instead, it concerns one Albert Moscrop, purveyor of fine optical instruments, as he begins his holiday in the English beach resort town of Brighton. With him he has brought a small collection of fine optical instruments, which he intends to use to view the beachgoers from the remote safety of one of Brighton’s two piers. This, evidently, is how he usually spends his holidays, spying on people through binoculars or telescopes, though he tells himself he’s really just comparing the resolving capabilities of different instruments.

And then, completely against his normal inclinations, he finds himself striking up an acquaintance with an elegant young woman he first sees from the pier–an elegant young woman who, sadly, turns out to be married to a philanderer. And as his objectivity lies in tatters, the young woman turns up missing, and a body is found buried in the Brighton sand….

Sergeant Cribb is actually a relatively minor character, given that he doesn’t even appear until the book is approximately halfway through, and even then much of the action is told from Moscrop’s point of view. But he remains the cheerfully sadistic fellow we’ve met before, and is just as willing to be a little unconventional if it gets him his man.

All in all, I liked this book much better than the two previous Sergeant Cribb mysteries I’ve read.

These are the second and third books in Fforde’s Thursday Next series, and they are just as delightfully literate and goofy as the first–perhaps even more so. Thursday spends even more time in the BookWorld, and finds out quite a lot about how the BookWorld operates, and what characters do when they’re offstage. Lenny, for example, likes to visit Watership Down, and the Red Queen has a taste for trashy romances.

I hesitate to say much more about them, because I don’t want to spoil the jokes; but I enjoyed them quite a bit, and I have every intention of getting the next in the series when it comes out in paperback.