Book Review: If I Were You (a.k.a. Deception)

Title: If I Were You (US), Deception (UK)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1987

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 978-0385239646

Length: 337 pages

Quote: "Good heavens, Alvey thought, what kind of establishment am I proposing to enter?"

(Partial spoilers appear in this review. No worries, I've not given away how the murder, the elopements (more than one), the medical cases of the 1810s, or any of the really "plotty" plot elements end.)

Alvey Clements and Louisa Winship met for the first time at boarding school, where everyone noticed how much they resembled each other. Rather than being intrigued by the idea that they were cousins, they tended to resent each other: Alvey was an introvert from the fledgling US, Louisa was an extrovert from the British border country. Nevertheless, Louisa wanted to be a missionary in India rather than just go home and marry a neighbor as expected. Alvey wanted to write books. So Louisa pushed upon Alvey the idea of going to the border country and impersonating Louisa, whom nobody had seen for four years or, Louisa guessed, missed very much.

This is a literary novel with elements of Regency and a faint whiff of Gothic. It's not a romance; Louisa will of course find somebody unsuitable to fall in love with, but we see Alvey having a fancy for Louisa's brother, which of course never goes anywhere, and Louisa's brother's friend having a crush on Alvey, which of course is not returned, and Louisa's sister having a crush on the brother's friend. There might have been a sequel in which all this doomed Teen Romance was resolved. There never was. The story ends, to my delight but some readers' resentment, with all four young people dutifully suppressing their feelings.

So what happens? According to the resentful review Amazon has chosen to feature, the novel lacks a plot, presumably meaning that Alvey doesn't have a romance (though other characters do). I disagree. On careful reading it has a lot of plot. In fact part of what happens is that Alvey, who has written a clever, plotty novel (readers of Jane Austen's biography will recognize many plot elements in this novel), discovers that a family story can be even more interesting than a romance. In a quiet way, typical of what happens when an introvert replaces an extrovert, a lot of things happen. Some of them are very bad; when Alvey comes home, people don't stare into her face and realize she's a different girl because they're distracted by an accidental death. Most of the things that happen work out for the good of everyone involved. 

Alvey knows better than to talk to Louisa's immediate family (except for one of the sisters, who becomes her best friend) so she listens politely to them. (Luckily for Alvey it was fashionable for young adults to call older relatives "Sir" and "Ma'am" instead of, say, "Father" or "Grandmother"; if Alvey's grandmother thinks this is an affectation, she doesn't complain.) Having someone to talk to helps each of Louisa's relatives resolve a private problem the others didn't seem to understand. By the time Louisa decides to come back to her own home, everyone has noticed that Alvey is a different person, but they're carrying on with the deception because they like having her around. Alvey never realized that she had any personal charm, any gift for anything but writing witty genre fiction; she discovers that she has. Her brother's friend, a medical student, would want to be a research psychologist if the specialty existed yet, and Alvey would have been an excellent therapist. 

I say this is a splendid coming-of-age novel, no less than The Color Purple, and much easier for sensitive readers to take. Alvey wanted a writing retreat because she'd lost her elders in the US, so her story ends brilliantly with the Winships affirming that of course she's a long-lost cousin and she "ain't drinking out of my cup but of her own." She has a home. Readers may overlook that, in Regency England, she couldn't have had a legitimate romance without one. Maybe she'll stay in her home and be the heir, as everyone else marries or dies; maybe she'll find a man and move out. But there never was a sequel to tell us which.

Let's just say that the attention to a new e-book called Deception made me wonder whether people were looking for the review of this book. I searched the web site. I'd never posted a full-length review of Joan Aiken's 1987 novel here. I thought I had because I'd mentioned it favorably in several other posts. It is in fact one of my all-time favorite novels. I would have loved it in high school or college; I loved it in 1988 when it reached US libraries, and I love it still.