FOURTH ANNIVERSARY special guest: Amanda Craig, with THE FELIX TRILOGY by Joan Aiken

"Joan Aiken was not only a prolific author for adults as well as children, she was also a uniquely gifted one"

Amanda Craig is a novelist, short-story writer and critic. After a brief time in advertising and PR, she became a journalist for newspapers including The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent, winning both the Young Journalist of the Year and the Catherine Pakenham Award. She still reviews children’s books for New Statesman and literary fiction for The Observer, but is mostly a full-time novelist. Her seventh novel, Hearts And Minds, was long-listed for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction, and her eighth, The Lie of the Land, was a Radio 4 Book At Bedtime. Her new novel, The Golden Rule, is inspired by both Patricia Highsmith’s classic Strangers on a Train and the fairy-tale of Beauty and the Beast.

When a writer becomes famous for one book, it’s a kind of curse. Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is so well-known that its publication in 1962 has tended to overshadow the over 100 other books she wrote in her lifetime.

Yes, Joan Aiken was not only a prolific author for adults as well as children, she was also a uniquely gifted one, writing ghost stories, fairy-tales, romances and thrillers. The TLS praised her “wild imagination”, which is a rather double-edged compliment and not, in fact, correct. Though deeply influenced by the Gothic, Aiken was a formidably disciplined and inspired story-teller whose elegant prose is as instantly recognisable as it is witty and beautiful. The daughter of the Pulitzer prize-winning American poet Conrad Aiken she had a poet’s eye, but also a dry sense of humour and a rare common sense.

Although the twelve-volume ‘Wolves’ sequence takes place in an alternative eighteenth century in which James the Third is the King, the Felix trilogy is set after the Peninsular War of 1807–1814 and sticks to our own history. The first book, Go Saddle the Sea, is narrated by a boy who is, as far as he knows, the illegitimate son of a British officer in Wellington’s army and a Spanish noblewoman, both deceased.

When we first meet Felix, he is running away from his cold, rigid grandfather in Castille. His spiteful aunt Isadora makes his life a misery, he hates his boring lessons and the only people who have given him love and warmth, Bob the crippled English groom and Bernadina the cook, are dead. He determines to go to England and, with nothing more than an indecipherable letter and a battered copy of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to help him, seek out his father’s family.

The idea of a small, blond twelve-year-old boy crossing the gigantic mountainous Picos de Europa with just an obstinate mule and his own wits to aid him is irresistible, and so is Felix himself. Small and repeatedly told that he looks “like a day-old chick,” his only gift is for music and making friends. Humorous, unswervingly courageous and kind he changes the fortunes of everyone else he encounters. He stumbles on a lethal feud between two mountain villages, and by helping a poor man in his desperate pilgrimage to ask for a saint’s help to cure his paralysed little daughter, both cures the child and prevents murder. Escaping corrupt officials and superstitious villagers, rescuing pigs in a flood, avoiding bandits and shipwreck are all part of his adventures. Throughout, his odyssey is as much internal as external as the mischievous child becomes a man; in Go Bridle the Wind, he rescues a girl disguised as a boy who becomes the love of his life. Felix’s fictional DNA seems to be in every boy hero one encounters in contemporary authors of the quality of Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Anthony McGowan, Tanya Landman and Cressida Cowell, but his charm is unique. You can see something of it when, told by a priest that he has been brought by God’s will to a place, Felix says,

“I thought he was probably right, and I felt very friendly disposed towards God, Who had put this notion of scaring off the murderers into my head, and Who must have enjoyed the joke as much as I had. It now struck me that Father Tomas, who had so often told me so often that God hated my wicked ways, very likely had the wrong notion of God altogether, and I wondered this had not occurred to me before since Father Tomas had been wrong on so many other points, and it struck me, too, how often a dark, dismal, and frightening idea is believed above a cheerful and hopeful one.”

Who can resist such ebullience? He eventually discovers he is both an English Duke and a Spanish nobleman, but the real treasures are those of love and honour.

Set in the same period as Sharpe’s War and Poldark, it seems inexplicable that nobody has turned The Felix Trilogy into a TV series. Packed with drama, high emotion and great characters, it would make an outstanding television drama for adults as well as children. But above all, it should be reissued and read by a new generation.

It is simply too good to lose.

The Felix Trilogy is published by Puffin.

See also: The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig, reviewed by Adele Geras

Jane Fairfax by Joan Aiken, reviewed by Linda Newbery

JANE FAIRFAX by Joan Aiken, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"This was an unexpected treat, and now I'm eager to see what Joan Aiken has made of Mansfield Revisited."

Linda Newbery has written for young readers of all ages, and won the Costa Children's Book Prize for her young adult novel Set in Stone. She currently has two works in progress: one for David Fickling Books to be published in July, the other an adult novel.

Recently I learned on Facebook the term 'joyreading': taking a book from a friend's shelves and becoming immersed. This was just such a find, on a recent stay with a good friend. I dipped in, was soon hooked and asked to bring the copy home when I left.

Till then I'd had no idea that the admirable Joan Aiken - famed for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and many other highly-acclaimed children's titles - had produced a group of books based on Jane Austen novels. This one, subtitled A Novel to Complement EMMA by Jane Austen, published in 1990, fills in and elaborates on the life of the young woman described in some editions as 'the second heroine' of Emma. 

In the first and much longer of the two sections we follow Jane Fairfax through childhood and adolescence, to her prolonged stay in London with Colonel Campbell and his family, briefly to the West Indies and back, to the point where she returns to Highbury and we join the well-known events of Emma. The seeds of resentment between Emma Woodhouse and her less privileged companion are sown early: the two girls share a piano tutor who finds Jane far superior in both talent and application. Jane - dressed in hand-me-downs from Emma and her sister Isabella - becomes a favourite of Emma's mother (who soon dies in childbirth) and also of Mr Knightley. However, while Emma looks forward to a life of comfort and indulgence, Jane will be expected - as we know - to earn her living as a governess.

In Emma, Jane is often seen as frail and nervous, susceptible to sore throats and chills as well as frequent headaches (in Aiken's hands she's clearly a migraine sufferer); but here she is spirited and often outspoken during her time with the Campbells, taking a protective role towards the Colonel's anxious daughter, Rachel. In London and during an extended trip to Weymouth we meet character types familiar in Jane Austen: vapid young men, spoilt and coquettish young women, elderly grande dames and brusque military men. Less typically, Mrs Campbell is a social reformer, much preoccupied with campaigns for penal reform and against the slave trade. Like most of the authors now drawing on Austen, Joan Aiken gives a wider sense of England's social gradations and its colonial transactions than we find in the originals.

Aiken cleverly embellishes Jane Austen's details of Frank Churchill's circumstances and those of the Campbells and their Irish friends the Dixons - supplying plausible reasons for Jane's embarrassment when she returns to the limited Highbury circle and is taunted by both Emma and Frank about her association with Mr Dixon and the gift of a piano. Along the way, readers familiar with Jane Austen will appreciate echoes not only from Emma but from other novels too. Jane receives a proposal of marriage from a boorish young man convinced that he has only to ask to be instantly and gratefully accepted, recalling both Mr Elton and Pride and Prejudice's Mr Collins. Dreaming that Mr Knightley will one day notice her, Jane imagines him finding her with a sprained ankle on a hillside, like Willoughby and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. 

When we reach Part Two, readers of Emma will feel thoroughly at home at Highbury as we move through a series of social occasions: the dance at the Crown, strawberry-picking at Donwell Abbey, the disastrous picnic at Box Hill. To Jane, Highbury and its endless gossip are dull and parochial, something the full-of-herself Emma doesn't realise. We bustle through this section rather quickly, but Aiken focuses our attention on Frank Churchill and his flirtation with Emma - is he taking deception too far, and enjoying it too much? The reticence of the formerly livelier Jane is made plausible by her dislike of concealment and her resentment of Emma, now a rival, which she tries to suppress.

I've recently read Jo Baker's Longbourn* which similarly takes a sideways look at a Jane Austen work rather than continuing the main character's story. Both are in their different ways highly enjoyable. While Jo Baker  favours a sensuous, descriptive vein more reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte, Joan Aiken imitates Jane Austen's style with considerable success. Punctuation, cadences, vocabulary and speech patterns are so skilfully emulated that for much (though not all) of the book it's possible to imagine that this really is Jane Austen. She is particularly good at the condensed, character-revealing monologues that typify Mrs Elton, Miss Bates and, here, her own invention, the snobbish Mrs Fitzroy: "So very odd to bring in a child from outside - such an atrocious mistake! - unknown origins, probably no better than they should be - Fairfax all very well, but Bates - what sort of a name was Bates? - child just what might be expected from such a mongrel background - encouraging Rachel to insubordination and all manner of foolish nonsense - music? of what importance, pray, was music?"

This was an unexpected treat, and now I'm eager to see what Joan Aiken has made of Mansfield Revisited. 

Jane Fairfax is published by Gollancz.

(Update. For our review of Longbourn,  click here.)