skygiants | (no subject)

Last time I went to the library, I happened to stumble across The Weeping Ash, a Joan Aiken regency romance I had never seen nor heard of before!

I generally make it a habit to acquire any Joan Aikens I can get my hands on because she is usually very very enjoyably bonkers, so I brought it home with me as good fluff reading for a sunny weekend.

It was, uh ... not what I expected.

The back cover of The Weeping Ash:

New bride Fanny Paget experiences shame and torment in her loveless arranged marriage, finding solace only in her budding friendship with estate gardener Andrew Talgarth. He never seems too busy to listen and sympathize. But Fanny is trapped, until her husband's cousins arrive from India and a series of explosive events unfold that change the lives of all involved. Andrew is there through it all, strong and steadfast, awaiting Fanny's greatest self-discovery -- no matter how long it takes.

This, indeed, is the A-plot and it is largely realist and EXTREMELY GRIM. Fanny's husband is a monster with no redeeming qualities; Fanny spends most of the book Patient Griselda-ing her way through extensive emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Fanny does have one pleasant conversation with Andrew the nice gardener and then her terrible husband fires him, after which Andrew mostly exits the book except for very brief cameo appearances, so I'm not really sure where the back cover writer got 'listening' and 'sympathizing' or indeed the 'there through it all'.

Fanny herself is a very sympathetic character, but if the only plot were her hundreds of pages of misery, I quite likely would not have finished the book.

HOWEVER: there is also a B-plot, in which Fanny's half-Indian mildly telepathic twin cousins Scylla and Carloman end up fleeing a regime change with their unflappable adoptive mother, a Bold English Adventurer, and a maharajah's endangered infant heir! Elephants! Quicksand! Poisoned dresses! Hair-raising escapes across aging rope bridges!

Let me be clear: the B-plot is also not good. It is exactly the sort of deeply Orientalist Romancing-the-Stone style adventure one would expect of a book written in 1980 in which a plucky group of Western adventurers make their way across the Indian subcontinent. I did like the twins, especially Carloman, a cheerfully lazy poet with a seizure disorder and an airy confidence in his own talent. I did not like Colonel Cameron the Bold English Adventurer, who is Scylla's Designated Love Interest, which means that he spends the entire book being an asshole to her for absolutely no reason. Come back, kindly gardener Andrew! I'm sorry for making fun of you for mostly not appearing in the book!!

Roundabout the middle of the book, while the whole party is hanging out in some caves with a religious hermit, she overhears him having a conversation with her adopted mother:

COLONEL CAMERON: Ma'am, I am extremely concerned about Scylla's welfare!
SCYLLA'S ADOPTED MOTHER: Oh?
COLONEL CAMERON: Honestly, I'm fairly sure she'll never make it all the way through this adventure without being captured and seduced by somebody, so I think the best solution is for me to just seduce her now instead? That way at least if she gets pregnant the baby will be mostly European!
MISS MUSSON: um??
SCYLLA: um???
ME: UM???????

SCYLLA'S ADOPTED MOTHER: anyway that's ... a very kind offer ...... but I think I'm going to say no thank you on Scylla's behalf .........
SCYLLA: alas, from overhearing this conversation, I have realized that I love the Colonel and he will never love me back, since he only wants to bang me out of racist duty!

ME: That -- that's what you got from that conversation?? THAT IS WHAT MADE YOU REALIZE YOU ARE IN LOVE WITH THIS EXTREMELY HORRIBLE MAN.

Scylla returns, desolate, to her own portion of the cave ... then wakes up in the middle of the night to find someone embracing her! Assuming this is Colonel Cameron, she enthusiastically participates in a bout of silent cave sex.

Unfortunately, she is mistaken; it is not Colonel Cameron. Instead, it turns out she has accidentally banged her twin brother Carloman, who wandered over in a haze of narcolust while sleepwalking. Whoops!

This plot twist came so out of left field to me that at this point I had to read the entire rest of the book -- ALL SIX HUNDRED PAGES OF IT -- to find out where the surprise incest was going.

Chekhov's twincest gun never goes off! Scylla is like "Carloman must never know" and, indeed, he never does; they return to their perfectly normal sibling relationship and the accidental incest is never mentioned again. This is surely a great relief to Scylla on the personal level, but it leaves me, the reader, a confused and tormented soul. Why did you spring one scene of pointless accidental incest on me, Joan Aiken? I don't understand??

Anyway, ninety pages from the end of this six hundred page book -- after some extremely unpleasant adventures on a ship of the line in which Scylla is raped by a royal officer, after which Carloman and some friends promptly murder that officer, followed by unrelated poetic success for Carloman -- Scylla, Carloman, and the maharajah's endangered infant heir FINALLY make it to England to stay with their cousin Fanny, her horrible husband, the horrible husband's useless stepdaughters, and Fanny's developmentally delayed baby.

Fanny and Scylla immediately become best friends and bond over how the various awful things that have happened to them are not their fault no matter who might try to victim-blame, so that's nice! Then Carloman and Fanny then take ten pages to fall into restrained and pining love, after which Carloman heads back out to sea, Fanny's baby turns up MURDERED, and the last fifty pages take an abrupt left turn into a recreation of the Saville Kent case??

In the last ten pages of the book:
- Fanny's husband (obviously) turns out to be the murderer and commits suicide
- Fanny's husband ALSO murders Carloman when he turns back up to accuse him
- Scylla is pretty sad, but not so sad that when horrible Colonel Cameron turns back up she can't throw himself into his arms for a glorious reunion!
- Fanny is also pretty sad, but in the very last line of the book she does get to look up and smile at her nice gardener, who's back in the text at last!
- so that's ... fine ......?

And that was The Weeping Ash! Possibly my least favorite Joan Aiken to date, would not recommend, but ... as always with Joan Aiken ... it was certainly An Experience .......

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From:

castiron

This is clearly the kind of book that the term "epic WTFery" was invented for.

From:

skygiants

It was stealth WTF-ery! It lulled me into a false sense of security with several hundred pages of relatively standard if oddly combined plots and then BAM.