book #10

I've had difficulty reading books by Joan Aiken before -- I find her writing very jerky and jumbled and in general hard to get hold of -- so it was with some nervousness that I pulled her novel Castle Barebane (1976) down from the Guilt Shelves. I almost put it back up there again within a few minutes, but one of the advantages of blethering on LJ about the books I read is, I've found, that I'm readier to persevere where before I might have balked.

For the first 30-40 pages of Castle Barebane I thought I'd made the wrong decision, as our central character, Valla Montgomery, endures an 1880s social scene in New York that can only with difficulty have been duller to live in than I found it to read about. Thereafter, though, things begin to pick up, and soon I was enjoying this completely chaotic novel really quite a lot.

Briefly, Valla is a journalist in NYC. Years ago, her mother deserted her father there and sailed for Britain with Valla's nasty elder half-brother, Nils. Now Nils turns up on Valla's doorstep asking if she'd come to London to look after his two children while he and wife Kirstie go on a cruise. Enticed by the thought of being able to take a breather from her stuffy engagement to a stuffy fiance and his ghastly, toffee-nosed family, she agrees to follow Nils across the Atlantic. But when she gets to London she finds that he and Kirstie have vanished leaving the kids lodged in a slum. Rescuing the kids, Valla goes with them to the family pile in Scotland, nicknamed Castle Barebane because it's been allowed to run to rack and ruin.

Especially so far from London, she has no reason to believe the Bermondsey Beast, the serial killer who's been murdering prostitutes in London, will ever affect her life. But she should have read the flap copy of this novel, because he's mentioned there and so, obviously, he's going to.

The narrative bears multiple signs of having been made up largely as Aiken went along. Aside from a few very obvious last-minute fixes of continuity errors ("It was just a mercy that you had been working so hard on your boat, and got it finished," says Valla at one dramatic climax, having just been rescued in a boat that a few pages earlier was in no condition to do any rescuing whatsoever), there are sudden dizzying shifts in perspective: we're about halfway through when Valla abruptly announces she hates and has always hated her half-brother, despite having shown no earlier signs of doing so; similarly, there's a character who appears rather peripheral to both the story and Valla on his first few appearances, yet out of the blue we're told, as if we already should have known this, that she's deeply in love with him.

Yet, oddly, all of these blatant storytelling errors are part of the book's charm -- as is its bizarre mixture of emotional burden: Castle Barebane is often gloriously funny (the description of a long train journey with a puking, puling, incontinent child had me giggling, as did a lot of the cod Scots dialect, such as "tinkler" for "tinker" [gypsy]), yet it has moments of astonishingly coldblooded cruelty as well. In the long final confrontation with the arch-baddy there's a real sense of ruthless evil that makes the ersatz attempts of most modern serial-killer chillers seem pretty pathetic by contrast.

Overall, then, a book I'm glad I read. A good book? Probably not -- melodramas have countless hurdles to negotiate if they're going to approach that, and a book as wildly inconsistent as this one in terms of plot and mood is hampered before it even starts. And yet, and yet . . . I might even see if I can find my copy of Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to give it another try.