Blackground

by Joan Aiken

Actress Cat (short for Catherine) Conwil has landed a juicy role in a period TV drama being filmed by Pyramid Television on location at Knoyle Court. The estate's owner, Lord James Tybold Fortuneswell (a mysterious media mogul who is also a big noise at Pyramid), turns up, and is smitten by Cat--who has been transformed into a silver blonde for the part. Sweeping Cat off her feet, he soon has them honeymooning in Venice, even though they barely know each other. When they begin to exchange notes about their pasts, Cat fails to connect Ty's sudden migraine attack and ensuing coldness toward her with her revelation that she had met him years before when she was a trainee nurse and he was at the bedside of a dying patient. Blackground turns, almost imperceptibly, from a chatty, albeit sensitive, first-person narrative into a witty murder mystery. Cat's meditations on life and the death of her Welsh-Russian mother gradually are overridden by her growing awareness that several unexplained accidents have threatened her life.

Genres: Thriller, Fiction, British Literature, Romance, Crime, Gothic, Novels

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Joan Aiken was a much loved English writer who received the MBE for services to Children's Literature. She was known as a writer of wild fantasy, Gothic novels and short stories.

She was born in Rye, East Sussex, into a family of writers, including her father, Conrad Aiken (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry), and her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge. She worked for the United Nations Information Office during the second world war, and then as an editor and freelance on Argosy magazine before she started writing full time, mainly children's books and thrillers. For her books she received the Guardian Award (1969) and the Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972).

Her most popular series, the "Wolves Chronicles" which began with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, was set in an elaborate alternate period of history in a Britain in which James II was never deposed in the Glorious Revolution,and so supporters of the House of Hanover continually plot to overthrow the Stuart Kings. These books also feature cockney urchin heroine Dido Twite and her adventures and travels all over the world.

Another series of children's books about Arabel and her raven Mortimer are illustrated by Quentin Blake, and have been shown on the BBC as Jackanory and drama series. Others including the much loved Necklace of Raindrops and award winning Kingdom Under the Sea are illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski.

Her many novels for adults include several that continue or complement novels by Jane Austen. These include Mansfield Revisited and Jane Fairfax.

Aiken was a lifelong fan of ghost stories. She set her adult supernatural novel The Haunting of Lamb House at Lamb House in Rye (now a National Trust property). This ghost story recounts in fictional form an alleged haunting experienced by two former residents of the house, Henry James and E. F. Benson, both of whom also wrote ghost stories. Aiken's father, Conrad Aiken, also authored a small number of notable ghost stories.

Reviews

[Eilonwy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I zoomed through this completely breathlessly, but I'm not entirely sure everyone's motivations made sense at the end ... plus one plot twist was completely obvious to me from the beginning, so it didn't work at taking me by surprise later. Still, I really enjoyed this, and will probably reread it sometime.

Sorry for the very sketchy review, but it's a suspense novel with a not-entirely-reliable narrator, so the less known about it, the better!

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actress Cat Conwil has landed a leading role in a new miniseries ("Dodo and Rosy", based on a book whose title is "a place name that was imaginary, and not interesting anyway" -- sound familiar?). Through this job, she meets James Tybold, Lord Fortuneswell, who pursues her relentlessly until she agrees to marry him. But during their romantic Venetian honeymoon, Cat suddenly realizes that she's met Ty before...and this revelation changes their relationship utterly.

Like Foul Matter, much of Blackground is an exploration of the heroine's past, though here the present drama is more important (and past and present are not very well balanced). The plot is on crack, as usual, but I found neurotic, hypochondriac Cat compelling, so I enjoyed it anyway.

[Alex Ankarr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useta love this. Still great.

[MB (What she read) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really really enjoy this book. It's so quirky. So glad I managed to find a copy for myself.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourites. An old friend to be re-read every now and again.

[MB (What she read) · Rating 4 out of 5]

...that last climactic scene! So much ott authorial creativity...and definitely impossible to forget.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘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.

‘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.

[Rachelreads · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't wait to finish this book. The best parts were the last 40 pages or so.

[Dolores Jefferson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always love Joan Aiken.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting elements about identity and how we create it. As ever a gripping plot, but I did not find the management of genre as competently playful as usual for Joan Aiken.

[Louise Culmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cat, an actress, has landed a major part in a period Tv drama. While working on the series she meets and marries the wealthy Lord Fortuneswell, and they go off to Venice for a romantic honeymoon which takes a very strange turn.. the narrative veers between the present and the past, we go back a lot to Cat’s childhood with her rather tiresome parents. We also get to meet the people who live in the Greek village that Lord Fortuneswell has built in Dorset. I thought there was too much about the past and not enough about the present. There are some interesting characters but we don’t see enough of them. It is not an entirely satisfactory story.

[A.J.]

ISBN: 0-385-26021-0 (hc) ©1989
13 chapters/290pp

Review to come