Category Archives: Joan’s Quotes
Midwinter Solstice Song by Joan Aiken
It may be the darkest time of year, but let’s light the lights, and share good cheer!
A Solstice Song from Joan Aiken’s Play Winterthing
music by her son John Sebastian Brown
Many Thanks to all who have visited this year ~
Please do come again
Wishing for Silver Linings…
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Read more in Plays by Joan Aiken
“The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters” – Joan Aiken’s timely warning.
This haunting picture by Goya and its resonant title quoted above, was often taken as the Spanish painter’s manifesto, and was the inspiration for Joan Aiken’s science fiction fantasy novel The Cockatrice Boys. Her magpie mind was ever alert to the news of the day, about scientific discoveries or impending disasters, and she followed the work of other artists and writers, past and present, who shared her concern about our ever changing world, and our inability to keep up with it.
Goya’s picture shows the sleeping artist, surrounded by creatures of the dark, as a commentary on the corrupt state of his country before the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth century. Joan Aiken took the idea, and the imagery of the picture, and used the theme to write about one of the disasters of her day – the sensational discovery of the hole in the ozone layer above earth, twenty-five years ago.
In her fantasy novel, it is the dereliction of human awareness that creates this threat to life on our planet and leads to an invasion of monsters – the Cockatrices of her story – who are descending on the earth through the ozone hole as the embodiment of evil, the personification of all our weakest impulses.
These days the popularity of the Dystopian novel shows that there is an ongoing will to imagine, and thereby possibly prevent the destructive forces of dissonant societies who are carelessly, or even consciously depleting the riches of the earth and destroying the future for our children. Joan Aiken, like Goya, and a current trend of fantasy writers, believed that the power of the imagination, used alongside reason and enlightenment, could save us from our own folly, or even the power of evil.
But she also believed that the opposite was true – that our failure to remain alert to dark forces, in reality, as much as in our imagination – falling into Goya’s ‘Sleep of Reason’ could be equally harmful.
Sauna, the young heroine of the novel, is sent on the train with The Cockatrice Boys a raggle taggle army of survivors, to fight the invaders because of her mind-reading abilities. Here, she asks her fellow traveller, the archbishop, Dr Wren, whether there has always been evil:
It is up to all of us to maintain that delicate balance –
not lend our power to forces created by greed and wickedness
all we have to do is stay awake….
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Joan Aiken’s own manifesto, The Way to Write for Children is a guide to the importance of children’s writing, in which she emphasises the need for every child to have access to books, stories and myths to stimulate their imagination. She writes:
“A myth or fairy tale interprets and resolves the contradictions which the child sees all around him, and gives him confidence in his power to deal with reality. We don’t have angels and devils any more, but we are still stuck with good and evil.”
Now out as an EBook, click to find this gripping Y.A.Fantasy novel
Giving a voice to women – Joan Aiken’s folk tales for the next generation.
Old ladies, browbeaten wives, silent mothers, unhappy daughters – all are given a chance to speak their thoughts, and even practise a little magic in Joan Aiken’s modern folk tales, particularly in a late collection called Mooncake.
Dark and modern these tales may be, dealing with the evils of our own current society, but they call up the voices of the past in order to pass on their wisdom.
With her usual prescience, and wry understanding of the ways of the world, Joan Aiken imagined a now rather familiar sounding bully – a golf playing millionaire property developer as the villain of one of her stories:
But the aptly named Mrs Quill has her resources; after the destruction of her orchard, her house and her livelihood, she moves into the world next door, from where she haunts Sir Groby until he repents of his greed and the despoiling of his own world, and realises he must try to put back what was lost. You will notice that Mrs Quill has inherited her wisdom, and her orchard from her mother and her grandmother and so is trebly unwilling to break the chain.
However, what is interesting in these socially resonant folk tales with their mysterious women bringing messages to the world, is that in almost all cases, the recipient of this wisdom is a boy – a son, or grandson, a protester who goes to live in the woods, a young man who appears and is prepared to tune in to the wisdom of his elders, and specifically to women. The boy who arrives to pass a message from Mrs Quill to Sir Groby from the apple orchard in the other world, is called Pip.
In another story, Wheelbarrow Castle, Colum has to believe in and understand his Aunt’s magic powers to save his medieval island castle suddenly threatened by invaders:
In Hot Water Paul inherits some ‘speaking’ presents from his grandmother (one of them is a parrot!) and learns what they mean in true folk tradition, by making his own mistakes – even literally getting into hot water…
The Furious Tree in the illustration above is of course an angry wise woman who must bide her time in disguise until Johnnie, the great-great-grandson of the earlier villain comes to live in the tree in order to stop it being cut down.
“The only way to deal with guilt or grief is to share it” the tree tells him. ” Let the wind carry it away.”
And that is what these stories do, pass on the wisdom, or the grievances, the speaking experience, of the older generations, the words of those who came before so that the young who come after can learn, use that experience and move on.
In one story that particularly touches me, a grieving boy called Tim who was sent out of the room, and so missed his mother’s last words when she died, visits her grave and enacts a charm so he can hear her speak; at last he hears her voice. telling him what to do:
And in my case, lots of books, and things are always falling out of them…
In one poem she wrote:
‘Listen for my voice if for no other, when you are all alone.’
With all these voices to listen for, we are never alone.
Illustrations from Joan Aiken’s Mooncake by Wayne Anderson
Joan Aiken 