Picking a quarrel

Portmeirion (image: Aderixon).

Blackground by Joan Aiken.
Gollancz Crime, 1990 (1989).

‘Most people, I suppose, have a public persona and a private one. […] Nearly everybody must have some secret self, removed, if only by a marginal distance, from the one offered to society.’ —XIII

Like pretty much every crime drama or murder mystery Joan Aiken’s novel is about masks – the visage one presents to the world, sometimes even to oneself, somewhat at variance to the individual beneath. And when murder is involved it’s a given that the fiction asks us readers to try and penetrate such disguises to seek out the perpetrator.

Our principal narrator, Catherine, has a variety of identities. As Cathy Smith she has been a student nurse but her mother, with both Welsh and Russian ancestry, calls her Katya; as Cat Conwil she is an actor in a television drama, playing Rosamund Vincy from Middlemarch, “the blonde minx who, by selfishness, snobbery and extravagance, utterly wrecks the life of her handsome, idealistic doctor husband.”

But Cat is not our only narrator: we have an omniscient storyteller who provides an alternative point of view. And, given that the murder doesn’t happen for quite a while, we are deliberately left floundering in a welter of clues, hints, digressions and diversions. Needless to say – this being by Aiken – it’s all extremely entertaining.

Dogana da Mar, Grand Canal, Venice.

‘Venice in February? What folly! The climate is like an aspirin sucked slowly: harsh enough to make you shudder. The damp eats into you; you feel like an etching under construction.’ — III.

Cat has been filming at Knoyle Court in Dorset, leased out by the mysterious Lord Fortuneswell. Although at first acquaintance he comes over as disagreeable he woos her, and within a short time they are on an early spring honeymoon in a wet and misty Venice. However tension suddenly arises from the seemingly inconsequential use of names: after picking a quarrel James Tybold, Lord Fortuneswell, disappears off to Paris while Cat, who has unfortunately fallen and injured herself, is despatched off to stay at an ersatz Greek village still under construction on the Dorset coast, near Knoyle Court. Here, yet more misfortunes occur and it starts to look as though Cat is being targeted – but why?

If you’ve read other novels by Aiken you’ll know she loves to pack no end of detail in her narrative: some of these are relevant to plot and characterisation, others stem from her love of words, suggest parallels with literary works, or are inserted for the sheer fun of invention. Aiken’s approach is possibly well summed up in a review quote on the paperback’s cover suggesting it’s “as though Iris Murdoch had gone into partnership with Agatha Christie.”

Rather than go into further details of the tricksy convoluted plot – because you may, like me, resort to taking notes like a detective – I’d like to draw attention to the fun with names. First there’s a rash of feline labels, obviously Cat herself but also James Tybold (Tybalt was “the prince of cats” in the medieval Reynard the Fox fables, as both Shakespeare and Aiken knew well). There’s also a character known as Odd Tom plus his pet cat called Arkwright, the latter name perhaps chosen with a nod to the inventor Richard Arkwright who devised machinery aimed at spinning yarns.

We may also note that the fictional Dorset fishing village of Caundle Quay, in its transformation from the site of a dilapidated caravan park to a Portmeirion-like bijou artists community, is being renamed Glifonis: this may allude to the Greek word γλῠφή (‘glyph’, a visible cipher or symbol) or simply be ironic since Greek γλυφός (‘glyphos’) means brackish, salty water.

But Blackground is first and foremost a mystery thriller: riddled with secrets, lies, blackmail, mental abuse and violence the reader may well spend the time wondering whom to invest their sympathy in or to alternatively suspect of psychopathy. Although the hypochondriac Cat is not an altogether reliable narrator – she does rather portray herself as a passive victim while disclaiming responsibility – we do discover that while one quarrel sets off a chain of events another kind of quarrel ends it, a rather neat ending to a story I found engaging, even if not all the threads were neatly tied up.

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Joan Aiken, 1924—2004

Read to mark the centenary of Joan Aiken, born 4th September 1924. The second of my 20 Books of Summer, the cat theme anticipates Reading the Meow week which starts on Monday 10th June.