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The Alternate Lavender Island: Jack Tindale.
- Thread starter David Flin
- Start date
heraclius
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- Location
- New Forest, Hampshire, England, UK
Three cheers for another Joan Aiken fan; I started reading her unusual 'Alt History' novels as a teenager and found them mildly weird but incredibly imaginative and thought-provoking. The 'Jacobite not Hanoverian dynasty' idea was one I'd had myself and developed, cf my own Alt Hist ebooks with Sealion on how this could have started off by Charles II lasting longer or Queen Anne having surviving children. I wished that JA had done an earlier novel on an eighteenth century England that explored the 'pre-history' of her world in more detail and gave some idea of the reasoning (or was it just a fun fantasy idea not thought out fully?) of how England could be seemingly less 'developed' industrially by the 1830s but have a visually splendid Baroque London ie plenty of wealth, and still have an engineered Channel Tunnel! I have re-imagined London in a similar way myself - what if it was as 'planned' and designed for 'grandeur not commerce' as Paris or Vienna? 'Whitehall Palace survives and no ugly concrete lumps like the 1930s 'Ministry of Defence' , which is an architectural disgrace? And what about the Joan Aiken vision of a 'supergun' set up by the Hanoverian plotters in Nantucket - a sort of 'steampunk' version of Saddam Hussein's alleged 'weapons of mass destruction that can hit the Brits in 45 minutes'?
You can see the influence of Dickens and the Brontes on Joan Aiken's world too - the waifs and strays of the poor quarters of London, Dido Twite, the cranky and eccentric adults. My favourite Joan Aiken however is the little known 'The Cuckoo Tree', set later on in the timeline where Dido and the Captain return to the UK from Nantucket with an urgent report on a Hanoverian plot to blow up King Richard IV at his coronation and are intercepted in West Sussex by plotters. This then gets mixed up with a Dickensian 'Gothic' plot to have the teenage heir to a local estate disinherited and kidnapped and replaced by his missing twin sister, who's been brought up by the local witch/ wise-woman disguised as a boy - and a sympathetic view of the 'victimised' as well as 'greedy and ruthless' witch and her probably mixed-race elderly West Indian friend, a minor relative of the family at the local estate, who just wants to get back home to the sun and so joins up with the Hanoverian plotters to get some cash. At her best, JA is as 'humane' and acute if quirky as Dickens and she has sympathetic characters from all classes, 'outsiders' especially; Dido is one of my favourites and was when I was a teenager.
There's a solid geographical setting in the real life town of Petworth and real bits of the local countryside which I know well from living nearby in my teens, and I could work out where the action too place more or less yard by yard at times. JA and her sisters grew up in Rye, E Sussex, with an ex-pat US author father, and she lived near the earlier homes of Henry James, E F Benson (creator of Mapp and Lucia, as seen on UK TV), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), and 1920s 'scandalous' lesbian author Radclyffe Hall; she knew Sussex very well and I think at the time she wrote her later Dido Twite books she was living in or near Petworth. An under-rated author, if one whose Alt Hist ideas were not fully developed and at times turn into a mixture of 'fairy story' fantasy (eg The Stolen Lake) and plausible 'alternative nineteenth century' history.
You can see the influence of Dickens and the Brontes on Joan Aiken's world too - the waifs and strays of the poor quarters of London, Dido Twite, the cranky and eccentric adults. My favourite Joan Aiken however is the little known 'The Cuckoo Tree', set later on in the timeline where Dido and the Captain return to the UK from Nantucket with an urgent report on a Hanoverian plot to blow up King Richard IV at his coronation and are intercepted in West Sussex by plotters. This then gets mixed up with a Dickensian 'Gothic' plot to have the teenage heir to a local estate disinherited and kidnapped and replaced by his missing twin sister, who's been brought up by the local witch/ wise-woman disguised as a boy - and a sympathetic view of the 'victimised' as well as 'greedy and ruthless' witch and her probably mixed-race elderly West Indian friend, a minor relative of the family at the local estate, who just wants to get back home to the sun and so joins up with the Hanoverian plotters to get some cash. At her best, JA is as 'humane' and acute if quirky as Dickens and she has sympathetic characters from all classes, 'outsiders' especially; Dido is one of my favourites and was when I was a teenager.
There's a solid geographical setting in the real life town of Petworth and real bits of the local countryside which I know well from living nearby in my teens, and I could work out where the action too place more or less yard by yard at times. JA and her sisters grew up in Rye, E Sussex, with an ex-pat US author father, and she lived near the earlier homes of Henry James, E F Benson (creator of Mapp and Lucia, as seen on UK TV), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), and 1920s 'scandalous' lesbian author Radclyffe Hall; she knew Sussex very well and I think at the time she wrote her later Dido Twite books she was living in or near Petworth. An under-rated author, if one whose Alt Hist ideas were not fully developed and at times turn into a mixture of 'fairy story' fantasy (eg The Stolen Lake) and plausible 'alternative nineteenth century' history.
Thank you for the "Look to the West" shout-out Jack; I fear sometimes I do fall into the category of 'lots of sources but they all sound the same' despite my best efforts though 
+1
I read Aiken when I was so young I'd no idea of genres, let alone AH, and am now realising now that she, and not Brunner, was my introduction to AH. I read all the Wolves books, at least as far as Cuckoo Tree, and of course
Night's winged horses
No one can outpace
But midnight is no moment
Midnight is a place
To return to the original topic, very nice to hear @Lord Roem in his usual self-deprecating style, well translated and unpicked by our fearless editor!