Book Review: Blackground

Title: Blackground

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1989

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385-26021-0

Length: 293 pages

Quote: “The first thing I noticed was his eyes...Did they look slightly mad? Or just wholly detached?”

The speaker is Cat Conwil, a young actress whose big break into a TV series has coincided with her chance to marry "up." Cat—or Cathy or Katya—is English, although her mother and her son's father were Russian, and like all good characters in English fiction she's eager for the chance to climb up a rung of the old feudal hierarchy, or what's left of it. From a surgeon's daughter she's been promoted to a lord's bride.

But is Lord Fortuneswell such a prize? He inherited money and title only as an adult. He grew up a policeman's son...and his parents were the nastiest kind of stereotypical Seventh-Day Adventists, only more so, the type who actually blamed him when his best friend died because his friend made up stories. He's capable of having mutually satisfactory sex with a woman (Blackground may be the most erotic story Joan Aiken ever wrote); it's his deep distrust of love and loved ones, his inability to bond, that caused friends to think he was “gay.” He needed a wife for his own social-climbing purposes, and a youthful blonde TV star seems a good choice for his primary purpose of impressing other men. And he believes in the classic “sexual double standard”: it's far from being all right, in his mind, that he wasn't able to save his old girlfriend Lilias, the drug experimenter whom he still loves after his fashion, from dying insane, but if his wife had any similar disreputable incident in her past, that would be utterly unacceptable.

In the interest of avoiding pain, Cat hasn't let herself think much about being unable to save her old boyfriend Alexei from the Bad Old Soviet Union, about having left their son for her parents to bring up; at “nearly thirty” she's only starting to process the grief and guilt she feels about her parents' death. This son is the male half of the pair of gifted children that became an Aiken trademark. His way of dealing with having been reared by grandparents rather than parents, and lost those grandparents, has been to win a merit scholarship to Harvard. When Cat does talk about him, she feels that she's bragging.

We meet the female gifted child earlier than the male. In this book they're not siblings (as they are in most of Aiken's books), nor does the story span enough years for them to become a couple (like Dido Twite and Simon the Earl of Battersea) and we're not immediately told how the girl is connected with Cat. 

Blackground is A Novel Of Suspense, as advertised, but Aiken's genre fiction always reached beyond the limits of the genre; Blackground is really more of a family story, despite the mysterious bad things that happen to people Cat knows during the chaotic winter after the wedding. “Cat is plunged into a drama...And the curtain will come down only with her death,” the blurb on the jacket promises. So, will the story end with Cat dead, or with her (for the moment) ahead of a game that’s not nearly over? What readers will know for sure, well before page 293, is that if Cat survives this adventure, the rest of her life will be fraught with similar adventures. It's as easy to love a reasonably well-to-do person as it is to love a poor person, but old money is always nicer, and billionnaires...one could have settled for a nice millionnaire, but if one settled for less than a million, it could be worse. One could have married some horrid billionnaire.

I'm not sure about the adventures in the more melodramatic scenes, which seem the sort of thing that may happen occasionally in real life (likely to make “News of the Weird”) but are not traditionally allowed in fiction. The strength of Blackground is, I think, the family story. Cat's tough, sorely missed mother scores far ahead of most fictional characters on plausibility and likability, in addition to the gifted little girl and the two old ladies who are bringing her up (who aren't lesbians, we're told, but don't care if people think they are). Then there's Joel, Cat's old buddy who is generally believed to be "gay" (he knows Fortuneswell isn't that, because "Believe me, I'd know if he were"), but just might make an exception in Cat's case.

If the acceptance of overt homosexuality hasn't made it obvious, this is also a story about social change in England and Europe generally. Cat and her friends are young in the 1990s, believably accepting the European Union and "village planning" and the fad for U.S. speech patterns, but sometimes Aiken can't resist letting someone remind them how different everything is from the 1960s England and 1970s Greece of Aiken' earlier novels...or the real or alternative nineteenth centuries in her historical novels, in one of which a character recalls having been beaten up at school for having a U.S. accent.

Conrad Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodges were also gifted writers; Joan Aiken was one of my all-time favorites. I've liked all of her books--some better than others--and expect that anyone who can tolerate my fiction will thoroughly enjoy hers. So I wish Blackground were a Fair Trade Book. It's not. It'll still cost $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, here; three more books the size of the hardcover edition will fit into the package, at which point this price will become competitive with what's currently showing on Amazon. As regular readers already know, you may send a U.S. postal money order for $10 (for this book alone) or $25 (for four books of similar size and price) to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, as shown at the very bottom of the screen, or else e-mail salolianigodagewi, as shown at the very bottom of the screen, for the working Paypal address to which to send $11 or $26.