Published 50 years ago this month and now available in a new anniversary edition, Joan Aiken’s “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” may well be the most quietly influential children’s fantasy novel of its time.
Although she’d been writing articles and stories for nearly two decades, it was Aiken’s first novel, and she incorporated into its plot every element she could think of from her favorite childhood reading. Here are abused orphans and a Dickensian workhouse; ravenous wolves (human as well as animal) worthy of John Masefield’s “The Box of Delights”; an omnicompetent gooseboy who recalls both Peter Pan and Dickon from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden”; an idyllic village, where the geraniums are blue, that could be part of Tolkien’s Lothlorien. There’s also a sprawling country house with a secret passage, an evil governess, loyal servants, forged documents, a shipwreck, and what Lemony Snicket would call “a series of unfortunate events.” Not least, the book ends with the promise of more to come as Simon the gooseboy heads to London.
(Delacorte) - ’The Wolves of Willoughby Chase’ by Joan Aiken (Yearling. 192 pp. Paperback, $6.99).
That promise was abundantly fulfilled, as every properly brought-up child and grownup knows. For in the sequel, “Black Hearts in Battersea,” Simon encounters the unstoppable, irrepressible, unforgettable street urchin Dido Twite. In that second installment of the Wolves Chronicles, Aiken makes clear that the action takes place in an alternate 1830s, with a Stuart king, James III, on the throne of England and Hanoverians conspiring to seize power. Dido’s Pa is, in fact, a principal agent of these terrorists, who, in various books, aim to blow up Parliament, slide St. Paul’s Cathedral into the Thames and eventually plant their own man on the throne.
Gusto, in language, plotting and general outrageousness, characterizes all these wonderful novels. Lugubrious Captain Casket hunts a legendary pink whale (and has a rebellious daughter named Dutiful Penitence). South America was settled by ancient Britons, so Latin is still spoken in New Cumbria. Queen Ginevra sacrifices virgins to remain young for a thousand years. There are lost races in the South Pacific and a mysterious cult known as the Silent Sect. Dido’s sister Is — short for Isolde — even possesses telepathic powers. Aiken’s invention never flags, and while the early books are generally comic, albeit with serious undertones, the later novels often grow very dark indeed. I am sure that “Is Underground” must have been a partial inspiration for Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass.”
Influence can be hard to judge, but I would also argue that the Dido Twite novels are the fons et origo of the popular fantasy subgenre known as steampunk. Here, after all, is an alternate Victorian England, where a channel tunnel has allowed wolves to cross over from Europe, where a giant cannon in North America can barrage London, where one aristocrat collects games from around the world and another is actually a werewolf, and where the very air is full of skulduggery and foreboding and hot-air balloons.
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