Is & Cold Shoulder Road

Joan Aiken was one of the most gifted and original children’s authors ever. These two novels are part of her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, which is a very long fantasy/historical series set in an alternate Jacobean era. I have a vague feeling I’d either read or skimmed the first one, but the second was completely new to me. They were both excellent, however. The storytelling, characterisation and language is impeccable. I loved them.

Is Dwite lives with her sister Penny in the forest of Willoughby Chase. A man is chased by wolves through the forest and they rescue him. He dies, but as he does so they discover he’s their uncle, searching for his missing son. Is promises to find him. She searches through London and then up North, where Northumberland has been declared a separate kingdom. It’s actually a town where children work in the mines and die like flies. Is finds her cousin and frees the children.

In the second book, she returns south with her cousin to find the rest of his family. They’re part of an odd group called the Silent Sect – they never speak and use signs rarely. The children sneak out and rebel by playing word-games. The south is under siege by a mafia smuggling group. Is manages to reunite her cousin with his mother and free the south from the smugglers.

It’s the brilliant details in the books which make it so original. Spiders the size of dogs who are lulled by pipe-music; people living in boats trapped in trees after a storm; the Channel Tunnel through which wolves travel to warmer climes; secret messages written on pancakes with sugar. The characters have their own language, a mix of English dialect and rhyming slang, and people really do die and really do suffer, without sentimentality. It’s almost a better Dickens, and it certainly never, ever underestimates children’s abilities to enjoy real, well-written literature. You don’t get depth and richness like this anymore, and you never got it in Australian lit. It’s British and it’s gold-quality and it’s Aiken’s own, from the first word to the last.

Out of the Dust

This is a novel in verse for young adults by Karen Hesse. It’s only the second novel in verse for YA that I’ve come across, and interestingly enough this is also historical fiction. It’s set during the thirties when half of America turned to dust and blew away, and it’s written in free verse, through the eyes of a young girl who endures some pretty horrific stuff. Considering the media, it’s an easily followed story-line, well-told.

An aspiring pianist, the young girl loses her mother and unborn brother when there’s an accident involving kerosene. She also damages her hands. At the same time poverty is overtaking their rural community because of the world-wide depression and the long-term degradation of the land. It’s a simply structured story – hopefulness followed by hopelessness followed by new hope once again. The resolution is not too easy and yet it does provide closure to a fairly horrific story.

The use of verse (while innovative) does tend to distance the reader from the action. Verse novels are a difficult thing because generally what a novel is trying to do is different from a poem. It’s fairly effective, but it’s not a genre that’s going to take off any time soon.

Stephen Fry’s Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music

This is a bit of a whirlwind tour through western art music from earliest days to basically the end of the twentieth century, written in collaboration between Stephen Fry and Tim Lihoreau. Apparently it was initially a radio show and was put down on paper after that. It’s full of the usual British jokes, sans the kind of filth Stephen Fry prefers (see The Ode Less Travelled) because of radio censorship rules I guess. And it does a pretty good job of covering the major trends of western art music, making you want to go listen to some stuff that you hadn’t heard before – which, I suppose, is the point. Some of the jokes are fairly lame, and you can tell Stephen Fry isn’t as keen on Baroque as, say, I am, but then it’s kind of interesting having the whole thing written from the perspective of a devout Wagnerian. He does put up the argument that modern music – e.g film music – is today’s “classical”, while not really recognising that at the same time Beethoven was composing, all sorts of folk music was going on which I think is a better equivalency to the popular music of our day. This is a small part of the whole, however, and basically it’s a fairly good overview which is good to dip into, a little heavy to swallow in one go.