Not just Shadows (The Shadow Guests - Joan Aiken)

Member Name: Celandine

Product:	The Shadow Guests - Joan Aiken
Date:	30/05/01 (98 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: exciting, full of ideas, works on many levely

Disadvantages: quite complex, deals with some difficult issues

The book starts, as so many books do, with a journey. Cosmo Curtoys has just arrived from Australia. He’s waiting for his cousin Eunice to collect him from the airport, and she’s late. He’s had to leave his home because his mother and elder brother, Mark, have walked off together into the desert. They’re officially ‘missing’, but everyone knows that they can’t have survived.

Grim? Well, yes, this isn’t a book that deals wholly with ‘easy’ things, but "The Shadow Guests" is not a grim book. It is, however, quite a complicated one, certainly a good story, but a story that doesn’t just have actions. It has ideas as well, but ideas that are so closely interwoven with the plot that you don’t really realise they are there until you’ve finished reading, and then you realise that you’ve just learnt something about physics, mathematics, and history. And it’s all been so exciting that you haven’t even noticed.

Cosmo, you see, has to live with a family curse. I need to add here that The Shadow Guests isn’t at all Gothic. Rather, a family curse seems like one of the most natural things in the world to have. There are no deep and meaningful passages to imply foreboding, merely some hints of disquiet as strange things do begin to happen, but happen against a backdrop of farm horses, tree houses, and the difficulties of settling in to boarding school.

Back to the curse. When Cosmo arrives at the Mill House, with Cousin Eunice, who’s a professor of mathematics in nearby Oxford, she tells him about this unusual family trait. The family was cursed during the Roman occupation of Britain and throughout the intervening centuries the Cortoys family is doomed to lose it’s first born son in battle, and for their Mother to die of grief.

Family documents show that this has happened, down the ages, through the crusades to the Battle
of Britain. So Cosmo’s family left London for Australia, as far away as possible, to try to escape, and then, somehow, found out that they couldn’t. And Cosmo’s mother and older brother walked out into the desert to try to break the circle.

Eunice explains it like this: "I expect".."that it was a case of vibrations. Something we don’t understand much about yet, like radiation. Think about what a fearfully powerful force that is-one little piece of plutonium can change whole landscapes and generations. Well, this must be something similar."

That’s just one idea. During ‘The Shadow Guests’, Cosmo reads Flatlands, a satire on society shown through its portrayal of a wholly two dimensional world, which cannot bear ‘irregular shapes’ or the idea of a third dimension. Just as irregular shapes are outsiders in Flatlands, Cosmo is the outsider at school, and so we’ve got three stories in one here.

First is the story of the things that happen to Cosmo, and how he deals with these unusual occurrences, then we’ve the story which tries to explain these happenings, and on top of all this, we’ve a classic school story, as Cosmo first hates, and then starts to like his new school, going from outsider to accepted member of a community.

I’m worried that I’m making this book sound awfully dry and boring. It isn’t either of those things. It’s a fantastic read, honestly. It’s just that lots of things happen. And most of them are about what I call ‘proper’ history, history that’s real, about people, not just lists of dates and names.

I really don’t want to go into too many details as I’m trying to give as little away of the plot as possible, and everything is interlinked, but Cosmo meets, for want of a better word, ‘ghosts’. I don’t like using the word ghost, you see, as t
hey aren’t particularly ghostly figures. First he meets Con, a roman slave, and about-to-be gladiator using the trident and net. Cosmo helps him practise. Then he meets Sim, a gentle lad, but about to go to the crusades to fight the 'infidel'.

Finally, Cosmo meets Osmond Curtoys, member of the Hellfire Club. Osmond’s mother, a ‘striga’, or witch, is trying to save him from the curse in her own sinister way, and one which leads to a midnight rapier fight amid the ruins of the old mill.

Exciting stuff, yes. Interesting stuff, yes. A wonderful read, yes. And ‘The Shadow Guests’ is a funny book, too. Strange things happen, but the atmosphere isn’t constantly eerie, and if there is a message in the book, it’s one of how a single action can have a reaction that covers the centuries. And how actions that seem cowardly can be the bravest ones of all.

"The Shadow Guests" doesn’t get clogged up with grief, as it’s more about dealing with difficulties honestly, and coming out the other end. Neither does it shy away from difficult subjects, which I think is all to the good, in a children’s book. It’s aimed at nine years upwards, and I think this is about right. It isn’t too long, either, at 168 pages. I read this first when I was ten, and really enjoyed it, although I didn’t quite 'get' everything first time around.

I re-read it when heavily pregnant , after unearthing all my old books from my parent’s loft. I then gave birth, boxed them up and put them in my loft. Untill last week, when I read jillmurphy and frannyfortune, both writing wonderfully about children’s books on this site, and then spent much of last Friday rootling around in my own loft, fetching all these books down again and restoring them to their proper place (a large pile in the corner as I don’t have enough bookshelves).

I can’t
think why I put them in the loft in the first place. I got just as much out of ‘The Shadow Guests’ reading it this third time, and what really impresses me is the accessibility, and utter readability of these books. I’m not going near that loft again, and that isn’t just because of the spiders.

I’d recommend ‘The Shadow guests’ to anyone, it’s simply too good to leave for ‘bright nine year olds’ alone, and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind sharing. Like all the best books, it takes you into its world while you read, and you come out of the book blinking, like going into bright sunshine after watching a good film.

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