birds on the wing

Over Memorial Day weekend genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in ( huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.