Midwinter Nightingale

With the abundance of planned trilogies and other sequences now being published, this novel reminds us that there is also great reading pleasure to be found in following the kind of saga where the author does not declare his or her intentions, if he/she has any, and surprises the reader with further instalments which have been simmering in his/her mind for years. Such is Rosemary Sutcliff’s ‘dolphin ring’ saga set in Roman and post-Roman Britain, each with a different hero, members of the same family; and such is Antonia Forest’s Marlow saga, each book taking the family onward by a few months. To these authors, their lives’ work over, we add the late Joan Aiken, who has published at least ten novels set in an alternative 19th century where the Stuarts remained kings of England, beginning with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962) and then developing the character of the Dickensian, resourceful Dido Twite and her friend Simon, who became the Duke of Battersea, but always treated Dido as an equal and wished to be more than a friend. In later books Dido travelled to an alternative America and prevented disaster at Richard the Fourth’s coronation.

Now Richard is prematurely dying, his son and heir already dead, as told in Is (1992), and Simon is the next heir. The king’s unpleasant step-son Lothar by his wife’s first husband plots with his father to seize the throne. It is this father, Baron Magnus Rudh, who traces his descent from Vortigern ‘as well as a very ancient European family’, who is the leading villain. He is probably a werewolf, and his son is likely to inherit the condition, as well as his daughter Jorinda who sets her cap at Simon (making Dido jealous, a good sign).

The story whizzes along with the usual Aiken touches including Dido’s colourful vocabulary. Dido is kidnapped by the Baron, threatened with torture, and witnesses several horrible deaths. Here is the problem: as noted by other reviewers, there are so many deaths in this book. The usual children’s book conventions that the deaths of supporting Good characters should be meaningful, and the death of the Chief Baddy should be climactic, spectacular and well-deserved (see James Bond and Tolkien), have been flouted. However, Aiken must have wanted to save her heroes from having to kill the baddies themselves, which would have been even more difficult if both Magnus and Jorinda had transformed into werewolves as Lothar does, an outcome which readers are expecting, and will be disappointed not to see. The sad explanation for this unconventional treatment is that Aiken was nursing her sick husband, who has since deceased, and was striving to finish not only this novel but to follow it with the final book of the sequence, which she left in typescript. Since Simon is now king of a disunited England, perhaps Dido will be discovered to be of noble, even royal blood…

Librarians who already stock the rest of the series will want this: the publishers have recently reprinted most of them, but I would only recommend this to readers who have read the others, both because of the amount of back-story which you need to appreciate it, and because of all the on- and off-stage deaths. I suggest newcomers to the saga should start with an earlier title, such as The Cuckoo Tree.