Book Review: The Whispering Mountain

[osprey_archer]

littlerhymes and I polished off our romp through Joan Aiken’s Wolves sequence with The Whispering Mountain, a side story to the main series focusing on Owen Hughes, son of the captain of the ship which takes Dido home to England (with incidental stops along the way to restore a reincarnated Arthur to his throne, etc.).

When The Whispering Mountain takes place, Captain Hughes is still lost at sea dealing with the etc. Meanwhile, his son Owen is living unhappily with his grandfather, who manages a museum in a small village in Wales. Said museum has just come into possession of the legendary golden Harp of Teirtu, which is coveted by the local lord Malyn, a wicked man who owns a vast collection of golden objects.

When Owen’s grandfather refuses to hand over the harp, Malyn sends a couple of thieves to steal it. They not only steal the harp, but kidnap Owen, and frame him for the theft in the process.

And we’re off! We gallop through a typical Aikenian melange of fierce wild animals (boars, wolves, a couple of tiger snakes), also a fiercely loyal pet falcon named Hawc who likes to ride around on the head of his owner Arabis, Arabis’s poet-father who is too absorbed in writing an epic poem of King Arthur to quite notice the Plot swirling all around him, and of course Prince Davie.

“We’re finally meeting Prince Davie!” I crowed, because we never did manage to catch up with him in Is Underground before his tragic death. But no, this is a different Prince Davie: Davie Jamie Charlie Needie Geordie Harry Dick Tudor-Stuart, known in The Cuckoo Tree as King Dick, the father of the Prince Davie of Is Underground, who will remain forever a golden shadow.

We also meet a bunch of small furry people who live under the Whispering Mountain, who I believe are drawn from the same substrate as Sutcliff’s Little Dark People: the theory that Britain’s fairies are in fact memories of an older race that was driven underground by successive waves of invasion.

Except Aiken being Aiken, she takes this in a wildly new direction: the little dark people are not the original Britons at all, but were in fact kidnapped by the Romans from their original homeland for their gold-working skills. After the Romans left Britain, the goldworkers hid under the mountains for two thousand years, becoming small and furry as a result of environmental pressures, making beautiful golden objects (including, for instance, harps), and longing for their warm sunny homeland.

Do they make it back to their warm sunny homeland? Of course they’re on their way by the end of the book. This is Aiken! The good are rewarded, the bad are punished, and sometimes one of the good ones dies too just to add a bit of spice to the proceedings.

And here, for now, we come to the end of the Aikens. She wrote many, many more, and we may swing back around someday to read some of them, but right now we are on to our next adventure: a reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Hurray! Now I know the story of The Whispering Mountain! and I didn't have to read it! I live happily ever after thanks to you guys!

[osprey_archer]

Glad to be of service!

[littlerhymes]

Owen and Arabis were not quite as compelling as Dido but this was good fun. A nice way to conclude our read through!

[osprey_archer]

Dido just has that certain special something. Not many characters can match it!

[skygiants]

As so often with Aiken, I have never been able to decide if she was really earnestly trying to jump in on the Welsh Fantasy train or if this book is parody.

[osprey_archer]

"How serious is this?" is always a difficult question to answer with Aiken tbh. You look at the plot summaries and they look like they're going to be zany adventures - she put St. Paul's Cathedral on rollers, for God's sake! - but then you have very serious things like Dido's dad looking at a building full of burning children and walking away whistling, and then later on being eaten by wolves.