Book Review: Castle Barebane

Title: Castle Barebane

(Amazon is trying to steer you to a paperback book that doesn't look like this one. No worries.)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1976

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: none

Length: 277 pages

Quote: “When they die...all their cash comes to Kirstie and a devilish great barracks of a place up in the wilds of Lammermuir called Ardnasomething. Castle Barebane, the locals call it—it’s falling to bits.”

Thus Nils Hansen introduces to half-sister Val Montgomery the house where he’s about to send her to look after his children, just in time for a lot of other people’s personal drama to run together into an action-adventure story.

British fiction for adults, Margaret Atwood once observed, tends to reflect ideas of “class.” Nils’ wife Kirstie, and Val’s fiancé Benet, belong to the lower upper classes of Victorian society in Edinburgh and New York respectively. Nils and Val are upper working class. Both write for newspapers; their parents were divorced, and the place Nils has rented for his family in the city is dreadful. Kirstie’s relatives weren’t happy about her marriage to Nils; Benet’s relatives want to prevent his marriage to Val, and rather early in the story Val begins to agree with them. Benet’s relatives want Benet to marry his cousin, and although that seems like a sufficient reason for Benet to persist in pursuing Val, to me, it doesn’t to Val.

So, to give Benet’s cousin another chance to alienate his affections, Val sells her editors on the idea of her writing a travel series, goes to Scotland...and can’t find Kirstie. Come to that, she can’t find Nils where she was told to meet him, either. The children have moved in with some not very nice neighbors. Val takes them up to Castle Barebane, where she has some qualms about leaving them with (their unacknowledged great-aunt) Elspie, and makes some new friends while looking for clues to where Nils and Kirstie might be. We don’t read the story we’re told she’s publishing in New York , writing a few pages every night about her study of Scotland, but that we’re told it’s being published and paid for while we see what Val is actually doing each day makes a withering comment on Victorian travel writing. Her real itinerary includes no visits to tourist attractions and no research...

The “they” whose heirs Kirstie is are her great-aunts, Lady Stroma and Lady Honoria. In his later years Kirstie’s great-grandfather had a secondary relationship, not recognized as a proper marriage, whose product was Elspie; as a result Elspie is paid for living in Castle Barebane as “housekeeper,” but not paid enough to maintain it in good condition. Elspie lacks her older half-sisters’ polish and education, but to Val she seems strangely free from resentment. This is because Elspie, “wintry,” “auld and snell,” but only “approaching her seventies,” is the Real Romantic Heroine.

Both the local doctor, who helps Val see that her niece is not stupid but merely brain-damaged, and a friendly Scottish editor, appeal to Val more than Benet ever did. Val likes having three men friends and will pick one to marry at the end of the book, but Elspie is the one who’s “in love” and has been for longer than Val’s been alive. Val is not the romantic type. She’s what the 1976 blurb writer called neurotic; though not anxious or phobic Val likes her job and feels no urgent need to resign and become a full-time nanny until she can have a baby of her own...yes, even in 1976, women were being told that “normal” mental health meant thinking of our jobs as just ways to pass the time until we could become full-time baby factories...Val doesn’t think she even likes children—but all novels by Joan Aiken contain at least two particularly likable children, and in this one readers get to watch Nils’ children winning the affections of their standoffish aunt.

The blurb writer failed to count Val’s nephew among the “four men destined to change [Val’s] life.” Nephew Pieter is only a little boy, after all. Neither did the blurb writer count Nils. Besides the doctor and the editor, the other two are Elspie’s lover and Nils’s friend, Nuggie Reydon, who seems like an ordinary jerk at first but quickly shows himself to be even worse.

Aiken’s writing style is extraordinary, more appealing even than her famous father’s. Conrad Aiken was a very serious writer of capital-L Literature, which hasn’t worn well but was considered great in its time. Joan and her sister Jane wrote mere genre fiction, avoiding competition with their father, but both wrote their genre novels in ways that both met and transcended their genres. Joan Aiken’s historical romances display and usually exceed the requirements for history, romance, and suspense, while also featuring generous amounts of topophilia, irony, insight, wit, adorable children, and an English stiff-upper-lip version of what I like to call Irish cheerfulness. It’s hard to like fiction and not like hers.

Even some of Joan Aiken’s mystery/suspense novels qualified as gentle fiction—but Castle Barebane does not. It rates PG-13 for violence, with a serial murderer who, Val cheerfully assures Benet’s worried relatives, targets “a particular class of women,” but that class includes “the actress...the friend of Nils” and Val’s association with Nils is enough, all by itself, to get her mistaken for one of that class. In addition to the Fallen Women three sympathetic characters are murdered, one “onstage,” and a whole gang of thugs are steered into fatal misadventures (as per Hollywood convention that really nice characters mustn’t soil their hands by killing even baddies who are trying to kill them).

The blurb accurately describes the novel as “outrageously cheerful improbability”; though the quick humane ends for the murderers are even more improbable than the wholesome middle-aged romance, the cheerfulness amidst bleak realities is credible. After all...the cities are dark, grim, polluted, and full of crime, but Val and friends move quickly to the country. Castle Barebane’s “air of neglect and decay” is boosted by its “smell of damp and mould, and the bitter cold,” “uneven floors,” “warped woodwork,” and “aged towels and tablecloth...of the very finest woven damask but in so tattered and frail a state that every prick of the needle seemed likely to start a new rent,” even before the thugs start “wrecking” the furniture, but the coast and hills are beautiful even in winter. And Val, while losing a few relatives she’s never liked much, is a young writer with three boyfriends and two publishers—how can she keep from singing?

I only wish Joan Aiken still had a use for the dollar she'd get if this one were a Fair Trade Book, but it can be added to a $5 package with at least one and probably more books of comparable size. To buy it here, send $5 for the book, $5 for the package, plus $1 for online payment, to the e-mail address you get from salolianigodagewi @ yahoo, or send $10 by U.S. postal order to P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322 (the post office will collect its own surcharge).

(When will I get back to the job of adding Paypal buttons to this site? It may take a while; I prefer to shut down other web sites and applications when I open Paypal. Buttons will come, though.)