skygiants | (no subject)

Over Memorial Day weekend

genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by

genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that

coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in a BIG CHASE SEQUENCE where the ESCAPED CONVICTS hold the old lady HOSTAGE in her OWN HOME, pursued by the EVIL UNCLE who is their OLD CONVICT COMRADE from DECADES AGO and his SECRET SON who has an INCEST NEAR-DODGE SIDE PLOT. But Lucy finds her! And rescues her! And navigates hair-raising geography to get her to safety!

... AND THEN LUCY KEELS OVER FROM A HEART ATTACK dfjkl;adklfjdsk;lfjd. I was actually genuinely sad about this because I liked Lucy very much but I do imagine Joan Aiken cackling at her writing desk about it. The Gothic!!

The evil uncle also dies. He is chased across the countryside by a bulldozer and is then drowned, as is heavily foreshadowed, in an underground parking lot when the waters rise over the World's Most Depressing Seaside Town. Max the tragically dying pianist is not confirmed to die on-page but given all the heavy emphasis on how the hope of teaching Lucy is the only thing keeping him alive one has to assume.

The old lady is fine and neither she nor the book ever confirm or deny which old lady she actually is.
(The possibly-fake Turkish doctor is fine and is never either confirmed or denied to be really Turkish.) Joan Aiken does NOT owe you any answers and she WILL not give them to you.

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.

Threaded | Flat

fur qvrf???? Nfgbavfuvat, erzvaqf zr bs, bs nyy guvatf, gur Nhag Erirny va Yvenry.

The evil uncle also dies. He is chased across the countryside by a bulldozer and is then drowned, as is heavily foreshadowed, in an underground parking lot when the waters rise over the World's Most Depressing Seaside Town.

Is he one of the Twites? This is exactly the twentieth-century version of the demise of one of Dido's and Is' horrible relatives.

The old lady is fine and neither she nor the book ever confirm or deny which old lady she actually is.

GOOD FOR HER MAY SHE MANAGE SOME HAPPINESS UNLIKE EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS BOOK EXCEPT THE DOCTOR I GUESS.

oh my god???? I was like, you know, this book seems like largely a good (weird) time, and could even get some thematically resonant second-gen lesbians going on with lucy if it really wanted to commit. and then. WHAM. lucy dies???? joan aiken!

What. How does the cat have bad vibes? Like. In a way distinct from "book is suspicious of entire category of cats." Generally if you like cats, you're like 'and then Princess ate my ring. We never did get it back, although she must have sicked it up somewhere, because she lived eight more years. She always was the cleverest.'

I thought I had read this many years ago (I am positive it was in my parents' house, almost certainly with this cover), but NONE of this sounds familiar, except a tiny bit about the folk paintings.

This book is just so... everything!

legionseagle suggested it for

girlmeetstrouble and then inconsiderately died before we actually read it, and I'm still so mad with her for not being around to justify inflicting it on us...

Wait - the protagonist dies? Bold move!

Sounds absolutely amazing tbh. Gothic but make it AIKEN.

A cat died in the Aiken I'm just reading now too. But we were SAD about that cat!

I'm sold. I'm going to read it. :)

Wowwww! As a kid, I drifted away from Aiken as the plots got more gonzo, and

osprey_archer's read-through, while breathtaking and hilarious (and DARK) has not made me think I want to revisit, but this kind of does! And going in forewarned about Lucy--yeah! Might have to give it a try. (Might.)

It was the 1970s, so I'm doubting the seaside towns were already drowning from climate change--or were they?

This is a JAWDROPPING plot. Mary Stewart wishes she could!!!

This book is WILD.

JOKINGLY REFERRED TO AS LUCY SNOWE??????????????

YEAH I was having SO MUCH FUN with this book except when I was being sad about the old lady (or the cat that Joan Aiken didn't want us to care about) but the ending was SUCH A WEIRD DOWNER???? One could see Joan Aiken cackling gleefully to herself about the rugpull of it all but as I said to you I don't think it actually... worked... very well... except as a rugpull. Ironically, perhaps killing Lucy was a darling that should have been killed? I was having a great time until then, though! Nobody's motivations or schemes really made tons of sense except in the land of Joan Aiken and Gothics, and I never did keep fully track of all the minor villains' minor schemes, but she was really being very restrained as Joan Aiken books go, and the fun bits were such fun.