MIDNIGHT IS A PLACE

Dickens would enjoy this book, and so will Aiken fans who have been waiting for a full-scale 19th century novel ever since The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its successors. Here Joan Aiken follows all the conventions of Dickensian fiction with just a little extra to satisfy jaded contemporary tastes. The Grimsby mansion at Midnight Court houses not one, but two unjustly disinherited orphans, Lucas Bell and the French-speaking Anna-Marie (she a daughter of Midnight Court's talented, but improvident former owner, Sir Denzil Murgatroyd who "while still at college. . . constructed a scientific instrument for measuring the depth of potholes"). And the source of Grimsby's fortune, the Midnight Mill boasts, in addition to the usual horrors of child labor and workers' oppression, a peculiarly nasty feature known as the pressing room, where a giant press sticks wool to inferior grade carpets and occasionally crushes children too slow to get out of its way. Of course, after Midnight Court and the churlish Sir Randolph Grimsby go up in flames one night, Anna-Marie is reduced to working in the mill where she clashes with the extortion ring leader Bludward (who gets around in a steam driven wheelchair). Lucas is forced to muck about in the Blastburn sewers scavenging for valuables. The kindly tutor Mr. Oakapple (who has a mysterious history and two fingers missing from his violin-playing hand) is incapacitated in the town infirmary. Lady Murgatroyd is discovered living incognito in the icehouse where she has been overlooked by everyone for the past ten years. And Grimsby's henchmen are on the loose hoping to line their own pockets. Lucas and Anna-Marie are two innocents in a world grotesquely distorted by greed, and while the evil get their comeuppance, the riches the children were due to inherit have already been squandered by Grimsby and his ilk. It must be admitted that Ms. Aiken's staging of the human comedy ("this great dark town". . . "a m-moocky old place but he loved it") owes a lot to her literary predecessors and, perhaps, more to the modern reader's need to approach innocence with tongue in cheek. But it works beautifully on more than one level, and Midnight Court earns its place in the landscape of humorous fiction.