Book Review: The Embroidered Sunset

Title: The Embroidered Sunset

(This first edition is getting rare; Amazon may try to take you to the first paperback edition, first.)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1970

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 240 pages

Quote: “If it had not been a pleasure it would have been a duty to hate Uncle Wilbie.”

The problem with this ambitious early novel was that Aiken called it a “light romance.” It's a chaste, cheerful novel of lightly comic suspense,but it doesn't end with the kiss readers of a “light romance” expect. Only in cheap genre fiction does “romance” presuppose a happy ending; Gone with the Wind is mixed at best; Wuthering Heights is tragic. But if it's advertised as light romance...

The main plot is not romantic at all. It's better described, as in the paperback edition, as a "thriller" or Novel of Suspense. Lucy, an orphan, has an uncle she hates, an aunt-by-marriage she pities, two first cousins for whom she doesn't really care, and a purely sentimental attachment to a few fading early-childhood memories of her parents. When she leaves the pricey prep school she's also hated, Uncle Wilbie takes sadistic pleasure in telling her that the prep school took up all of her father's money, so now not only lessons with the great pianist who wants to teach her, but even public university is out of the question.

Then Lucy discovers some quirky collages up attic and learns that she also has a great-aunt, in England, who's always lived with another woman; they always looked somewhat alike and by now neighbors aren't sure which one's which. One of the old ladies has died, and since Wilbie's firm has been sending monthly payments to his aunt he's interested in finding out for sure which one. Lucy and her pianist friend think the collage pictures ought to be worth more than Wilbie's firm has been paying the great-aunt. So deals are struck: Lucy can have piano lessons if she finds out for sure which of the old ladies is dead.

What follows are some of the most delightful landscapes and aunt-niece scenes in all of English literature, undercut by a nastier element in the plot.Lucy has yet another first cousin she didn't know about, and he, his mother, and his partners in crime have a more active way of hating Wilbie than Lucy has. If it had ever been made into a movie, The Embroidered Sunset would have excelled in chase scenes. More characters get hurt or killed than is usual in Joan Aiken's fiction. The old lady's demise was not a real accident, and will be avenged by one of the plot twists.

The comedy revolves around a bit of improbable silly wordplay: Wilbie's aunt's real name was Fennel or Fenella, originally. The housemates nicknamed themselves Fennel and Dill, which became Daffy and Dilly. Their last cat was called Taffy. Adults are confused by this. People who enjoy the story at least laugh. A more fact-based piece of comic suspense is that the action is set in two or three small, remote English towns where most residents who belong to the same generation do look alike, which probably explains Lucy's attraction to outsiders and incomers rather than the old family friends who either think she looks just like, or thinks she really is, some distant relative of theirs. (A later novel by Joan Aiken featured two young, cute, narcissistic lesbians who were attracted to their physical resemblance to each other, but Fennel and Dill seem more like cousins.) Lucy doesn't exactly try to climb the social ladder in her father's ancestral town. She was brought up transatlantic and probably intends to live in the United States.

That romance? Lucy meets another young man, a doctor, in addition to the pianist. Neither is English or American, though both speak English. Lucy is so busy with her own concerns that it's hard to guess which one she'll choose...until the end. You saw the end coming, you knew which man was headed in the same direction Lucy was, you knew how they'd end up together...but you didn't want to see it, because this was supposed to have been a light romance.

Finding that readers actually cared about her fictional characters, Aiken proceeded to write Last Movement, another mix of suspense, romance, and comedy with the emphasis on the suspense, in which the disappointed young man meets his match and lives happily ever after.

The copy I own was discarded by a library after one of those disappointed readers scribbled her complaint in pencil on page 240, beginning “No she didn't, she married...” Sorry, Harlequin fans. She would have married him if this had been a Harlequin Romance. It's not, and Aiken was saving him for an equally likable, but prettier, heroine in any case.

I'll say this for The Embroidered Sunset. Even people who usually like novels of suspense do not usually go back and reread them every few years, after they know how the plot goes, for the pleasure of the characters' company. I've reread The Embroidered Sunset at approximately five-year intervals and, in the complete absence of any suspense at all, I still enjoy the company of Lucy and her friends as much as ever. And I don't usually even like novels. You may like Lucy and her great-aunt (or whatever) that much, too.

Although prices for early editions are entering the collector range, several editions of this novel have been printed. If you don't specify one you'll get whichever seems the best bargain on Amazon at the time of ordering, at the usual rate of $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. Four books the size of the first hardcover edition, or eight the size of the paperback edition, will fit into one $5 package. Although Joan Aiken no longer has any use for $1 you're encouraged to make some of those books Fair Trade Books, for which we can send the authors 10% of the total price (typically $1).