"Limbo Lodge", Joan Aiken
2 September 2019 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI was surprised to find an ex-library book by Joan Aiken, with a title I'd never heard of, advertising itself as being in the 'Wolves of Willoughby Chase series' (which is, effectively, the Dido Twite series, since only one supporting character from "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase" made it as far as the second book, where Dido first appears, and the rest of the books are about her and her family).
It's fairly clearly an 'infill' book, added into the existing plot to provide yet more adventures for Dido on her journey back to London, and checking the publication dates reveals that it was written about thirty years later (which is presumably why I'd never heard of it). It's not as good as "The Stolen Lake", which I discovered was also written out of order to be inserted between the first Dido-point-of-view novel, "Nightbirds on Nantucket", and "The Cuckoo Tree", and in fact I wasn't very impressed by the beginning at all. It felt very stilted and ethnographic, and Dido's mannerisms start to grate; the excuse for yet another deviation also feels pretty thin and contrived.
But it does improve with the arrival of the scatterbrained Lord Herodsfoot into the story. (Oddly, he tells Dido to call him 'Frankie', but the narrative, purportedly from her viewpoint, never does.) I'm not sure if it's a matter of cause and effect, or whether Aiken just gets into the swing of actually telling a story in her carefully-researched jungle setting around this point, instead of lecturing the reader about it. (The Nantucket of "Nightbirds in Nantucket" is treated with far less deference to native sensibilities, to the degree that I didn't even realise for years that it was a real place; Aratu is clearly fictional, but the European settlers are Sexist and Bad and the aboriginal forest-dwellers are happy, feminist and Good.)
At this point all the laboriously set up backstory starts to pay off into a quest/chase plot with characters who are actually established enough to care about. This backfires a bit, since one of them is randomly murdered and the killer then disposed of -- a shock in a children's book, since preceding volumes have adhered to the convention that the heroes always survive in the nick of time, and the villains perish by accident when their own schemes backfire -- and the hopeless romance remains actually hopeless rather than being resolved into a happy ending, as in the case of Elen and Mr Holystone in "The Stolen Lake". There is also a jolt when one of the minor characters goes off and commits suicide despite having her life saved earlier by the protagonists. I suspect that none of these would have been the case if the book had been written in sequence thirty years earlier, but I'm not sure if it's a case of the author being daring and modern or just of a somewhat unsatisfactory sequel.
I'm not sure I can honestly recommend it as an addition to the series, and I suspect there's a reason why it's not as well known. 'For completists'; it's interesting, but not the first book you'd give someone if you wanted to convert them to Aiken's work.
It's fairly clearly an 'infill' book, added into the existing plot to provide yet more adventures for Dido on her journey back to London, and checking the publication dates reveals that it was written about thirty years later (which is presumably why I'd never heard of it). It's not as good as "The Stolen Lake", which I discovered was also written out of order to be inserted between the first Dido-point-of-view novel, "Nightbirds on Nantucket", and "The Cuckoo Tree", and in fact I wasn't very impressed by the beginning at all. It felt very stilted and ethnographic, and Dido's mannerisms start to grate; the excuse for yet another deviation also feels pretty thin and contrived.
But it does improve with the arrival of the scatterbrained Lord Herodsfoot into the story. (Oddly, he tells Dido to call him 'Frankie', but the narrative, purportedly from her viewpoint, never does.) I'm not sure if it's a matter of cause and effect, or whether Aiken just gets into the swing of actually telling a story in her carefully-researched jungle setting around this point, instead of lecturing the reader about it. (The Nantucket of "Nightbirds in Nantucket" is treated with far less deference to native sensibilities, to the degree that I didn't even realise for years that it was a real place; Aratu is clearly fictional, but the European settlers are Sexist and Bad and the aboriginal forest-dwellers are happy, feminist and Good.)
At this point all the laboriously set up backstory starts to pay off into a quest/chase plot with characters who are actually established enough to care about. This backfires a bit, since one of them is randomly murdered and the killer then disposed of -- a shock in a children's book, since preceding volumes have adhered to the convention that the heroes always survive in the nick of time, and the villains perish by accident when their own schemes backfire -- and the hopeless romance remains actually hopeless rather than being resolved into a happy ending, as in the case of Elen and Mr Holystone in "The Stolen Lake". There is also a jolt when one of the minor characters goes off and commits suicide despite having her life saved earlier by the protagonists. I suspect that none of these would have been the case if the book had been written in sequence thirty years earlier, but I'm not sure if it's a case of the author being daring and modern or just of a somewhat unsatisfactory sequel.
I'm not sure I can honestly recommend it as an addition to the series, and I suspect there's a reason why it's not as well known. 'For completists'; it's interesting, but not the first book you'd give someone if you wanted to convert them to Aiken's work.
