Great but sadly neglected (by me at least)
I have long thought of Joan Aiken as one of the greats of children’s literature. To be honest, though, it is a long time since I read any of her books. She wrote a lot of children’s novels, I mean a lot. Many I have not read since they first came out, and some not at all. In fact, the only one I would claim to remember in any detail is her classic, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and that largely because it was an often-shared favourite of our children when they were growing up.
A chance find in an independent book shop of a (rather tatty) first edition of her Midnight is a Place has now set me off on a twofold quest: to read (or reread) as many of her older children’s books as I can, at the same time collecting their first editions, if I can manage to find them at not too exorbitant a price.
As I go through, I will record my Aiken journey here. However, as I do not wish to abandon my reading and reviewing of contemporary children’s fiction either, and as the physical copies could be hard to ferret out, it may well be a fairly long-term undertaking.
Midnight is a Place
‘Meet me, meet me at Midnight,
Among the Queen Anne’s lace.
Midnight is not a moment,
Midnight is a place.’ (p 237)
I seem to have started my revisiting of Joan Aiken with a slightly untypical book. Her work is often described as having Dickensian elements, but this one goes much further. I think it could fairly be described as full-on ‘Joan Aiken does Dickens’. It does not have anything much of the whimsical fantasy, or the witty humour of much of her other work. Although her northern town location, Blastburn, also crops up in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, she also moves away here from here from her typical ‘reinvented’ early Ninteenth Century, to a more realistic Victorian, industrial milieu of grime, poverty and child exploitation in ‘dark satanic mills’. Not one but two disinherited orphans (you get your full money’s worth of orphans) stoically endure the worst degradations, and very real mortal danger, working one down the sewers, the other in one of the said mills, before remarkable coincidences of ‘fate’ finally improve their lot. For all its lack of originality this is a gripping story, grippingly told. As a historical piece it has not dated in the way of some writing from this era, and remains wonderfully accessible for young readers. I think they will get far more out of this than trying to read Dickens himself whilst still too young. Joan Aiken’s skilful command of English prose is an object lesson for aspiring writers. It provides so much richer a reading experience than many of the trendy present tense narratives currently so ubiquitous. This is a book that most certainly doesn’t deserve to be neglected. (And what a wonderful title!)
