Ten of the Best: Books by Joan Aiken
Neil Philip chooses ten of the best books by one of our finest writers for children, Joan Aiken.
Few writers have the range, invention, and sheer productivity of Joan Aiken. Born into a writing family (her father was the poet Conrad Aiken) she published over 100 books, many though not all for children. She also published a helpful guide full of wise advice for would-be writers, The Way to Write for Children (1982). She wrote, ‘I don’t really think there is such a thing as ‘a born storyteller’, especially when it is applied to me! Storytellers aren’t born, they have to learn. It is a craft.’
She believed that ‘children’s reading needs richness and mystery, and a sense of intense pleasure, and dedication, and powerful emotion, and an intricate story, and fine language, and humour’, and this is exactly what she provides. Aiken is one of the most original and enjoyable, inexhaustibly inventive children’s authors – accidental inventor, for instance, of the whole steampunk genre.
By the 1960s, the Dickensian idea of the novel, rejected by writers for adults, had filtered down to the children’s list. Both Leon Garfield and Joan Aiken revelled in the Dickensian model of pin-sharp characters with expressive dialogue, twist-and-turning stories that encompass the whole of society, and intertwining comedy and tragedy.
All You’ve Ever Wanted (1953)
O/P
This was Aiken’s first published book, a collection of short stories, later combined with its 1955 successor More Than You Bargain For as All and More (1971). What a sparkling, confident debut! The first line of the title story has the reader hooked: ‘Matilda, you will agree, was a most unfortunate child.’ Besieged by well-meaning but interfering aunts, poor Matilda gets birthday gifts from her seventh aunt Gertie of wishes that always come true, with unintended consequences. When she grows up, Matilda takes a job at the Ministry of Alarm and Despondency, but the unwanted wishes pursue her even there. Many of Aiken’s best stories are now collected in The Gift Giving (2016).
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962)
Puffin, 978-0099456636, £6.99 pbk
A kind of parody of Victorian Gothic novels such as Uncle Silas, this is the first book in the Wolves Chronicles, a loose-limbed series of 
twelve books. Though it takes place ‘in a period of English history that never happened’ this opener is less fully-immersed in the helter-skelter alternative history of the others, but it has every element to keep the reader gripped – ravening wolves, persecuted orphans, a wicked governess, and a beguiling saviour in the gooseboy Simon.
Black Hearts in Battersea (1965)
Vintage Children’s Classics, 978-0099573661, £6.99 pbk
Simon reappears in Black Hearts, but Aiken may have decided her Wolves heroines Bonnie and Sylvia were too goody-goody, because they are replaced in this and many subsequent books by the effervescent, irrepressible Dido Twite, and her family of eccentrics. Croopus! Dido is a one-off creation of comic genius. This is how we first make her acquaintance: ‘She was a shrewish-looking little creature of perhaps eight or nine, with sharp eyes of a pale washed-out blue and no eyebrows or eyelashes to speak of. Her straw-coloured hair was stringy and sticky with jam and she wore a dirty satin dress two sizes too small for her.’ Written in ‘one happy rush’, Black Hearts is a whirlwind of dastardly Hanoverian plots. It’s Dido who captivates, and she comes even more into her own in later books such as Nightbirds on Nantucket, The Cuckoo Tree, and Dido and Pa.
A Necklace of Raindrops (1968)
Illus Jan Pienkowski, Jonathan Cape, 978-0224083805, £12.99 hbk
The first in a series of magical collaborations with the artist Jan Pienkowski, this collection of fairy tales shows how Joan Aiken used this 
form, like Hans Christian Andersen before her, to express the poetry that naturally flowed through her. Written for younger readers than most of her work, these stories, perfect for bedtime as titles such as ‘A Bed for the Night’ and ‘The Patchwork Quilt’ suggest, still thrum with imagination and joy in language.
Arabel’s Raven (1972)
Illus Quentin Blake, Puffin, 978-0241386576, £6.99pbk
The Arabel and Mortimer stories, originally written for Jackanory, and illustrated with characteristic sparkle by Quentin Blake, show Joan Aiken at her wittiest and sprightliest. The raucously accident-prone raven Mortimer is a wonderful character, and both plot and language share a wild slapstick verve. All the stories are now collected in two volumes, Arabel and Mortimer Stories (2019) and More Arabel and Mortimer (2019).
Midnight Is a Place (1974)
Hodder Children’s Books, 978-1444919028
Midnight revisits some of the themes of Wolves, with maltreated orphans and child labour, but also the industrial setting of Blastburn, 
described in Wolves as ‘a hideous town, all coal tips and ugly mills’. In Midnight this Victorian dystopia, distilled from Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong and Dickens’ Hard Times, brings the cruelties of child exploitation into the sharpest focus. Like Jill Paton Walsh’s A Chance Child it doesn’t shy away from the hardest truths. This book is truly midnight black, and unlike Wolves, there is no easy happy-ever-after ending. The hellish setting of Blastburn (based on Kingston-upon-Hull) reappears in Is (aka Is Underground), one of the Wolves Chronicles featuring Dido’s sister Is Twite.
The Skin Spinners (1976)
O/P
There are fine poems scattered through Aiken’s novels, but this is her only poetry collection. By turns lyrical, reflective, daft, and horrific, they reveal a finely-tuned poetic gift. Perhaps my favourite is ‘Palace Cook’s Tale’ about two princesses who have everything they need except love and human contact: ‘their smiles are like/thin thin slices of lemon.’ The palace cook’s parting words are heartbreaking: ‘Poor little things/when they grow up they will marry foreign kings.’
The Felix Trilogy (1978-1988)
Red Fox, 978-1849418294, £8.99 pbk
Go Saddle the Sea, Bridle the Wind, and The Teeth of the Gale are three edge-of-the-seat thrillers featuring Felix Brooke, half-
English but brought up among his mother’s Spanish family. All three are riveting reads, but Bridle the Wind is exceptional for the fearsome depiction of the monstrous Father Vespasian, and the touching figure of Felix’s Basque companion Juan, whose dream is to perform in one of the Basque bertsulari – oral poetry – contests. The climax when Felix and Juan confront the brigand Plumet, now inhabited by Father Vespasian’s unquiet spirit, is chilling: ‘The face, dead-white, was seared and scarred, as if the flesh and bone which formed it had been compressed, frozen, buried in quicklime, or subjected to other terrifyingly powerful forces.’
The Stolen Lake (1981)
Red Fox, 978-0099477396, £7.99 pbk
As they progressed, the Wolves Chronicles got wilder and stranger, with more supernatural elements, as in the mélange of Welsh mythology in The Whispering Mountain (1968) but most especially in the mock-Arthurian extravaganza The Stolen Lake, which finds Queen Guinevere (Ginevra) still alive in the South American colony of New Cumbria, awaiting her husband’s return. The thirteen-hundred-year-old cannibal queen, with skin ‘like white bread-dough’, is a marvellous grotesque. Particularly hilarious for those versed in Arthurian lore, it is ‘a fine skimble-skamble tale’ in which the true hero is the English language.
The Serial Garden (2015)
Virago, 978-0349005850, £9.99pbk
Her stories about the Armitage family, based on her own childhood but with a bucketload of magic thrown over 
it, was Joan Aiken’s longest fictional enterprise, but the tales were only collected posthumously in this volume. Unicorns, griffins, sea serpents, fairy godmothers, ghostly governesses, are all in a day’s play for the happy Armitages. The spirit of E. Nesbit can be detected in these stories in which the magical is everyday, and the everyday is magical.
Two excellent online resources tell more: the official Wonderful World of Joan Aiken website, and Chris Lovegrove’s Calmgrove blog—both well worth exploring.
Neil Philip is a writer and folklorist.
