Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden: An Interview with Lizza Aiken
One of the great pleasures of my year was the arrival on the doorstep of Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories, from the new Big Mouth House (the children's imprint of the brilliant Small Beer Press). The volume collects all 24 classic Armitage stories, four of which are published here for the first time. A charming mix of magic and the hilariously mundane, these stories chronicle the eccentric and wonderfully original adventures of a special family. Ghosts, goblins, and much more make an appearance. It's lovely and sometimes serious stuff--the kind of work that really deserves the "will thrill and delight readers young and old" tag.
The book also includes such lovely flourishes as wonderful illustrations by English comics artist Andi Watson, an introduction by bestselling author Garth Nix, and another introduction by Aiken's daughter, Lizza Aiken. Aiken's introduction provides a measured and information-packed look at the creation and publication of the stories.
I interviewed Lizza Aiken recently via email about the book, and her involvement in it...
Amazon.com: What in your opinion is the appeal of the Armitage Family stories?
Lizza Aiken: With these stories Joan Aiken found the perfect framework for gently making fun of family life, and particularly of the fallibility of parents and the prevailing social order, and shows how children see right through all the arbitrary rules and learn to deal with life in their own way--if necessary by magic. I’m sure she would acknowledge a debt to E.Nesbitt, whose gleeful wickedness Joan greatly admired, and who wrote some wonderfully satirical stories for children about the horrors of Edwardian family life--books she read in her own childhood. The Armitage stories cover a span of about fifty years and embrace all the craziness of twentieth century consumerism from Breakfast Briks to automatic home help in the form of the robotic Helots, and make the absolute most of everything that can possibly go wrong, which of course embarrasses the grown ups and delights the children.
Amazon.com: I'm curious if you'd care to share a more personal anecdote or two relevant to the stories and yourself in relation to them?
Lizza Aiken: Joan began writing the Armitage stories in her teens, as a gently parody of her own family and the village where she grew up, and which I knew when I was a child as my Grandparents still lived there. It was quite possible to believe that some of the old ladies were witches, as the real and made up elements of the stories were often inextricably mixed for me. A lady Gardener did come to my Grandmother’s house and try to buy the Quince tree, and I vividly remember dutifully ploughing through boxes of dreary breakfast cereal so I could get to cut out the models on the back of the packet.
Amazon.com: How involved were you in the creation of this edition?
Lizza Aiken: I have been trying to make it happen right from the start--it was one of the last projects my mother had planned before she died. She had come to the end of the Wolves series, and resolved the problems of Dido and Simon so that readers would not be left wondering how their story worked out. The story of The Serial Garden had always haunted her, and many of her readers too, and I think she felt a real duty to try and resolve the terrible sadness of its ending. It was her idea to use the name of this story for this collection, and I understand that this was why she chose it. She had written a couple more stories about its hero, Mr Johansen and his lost Princess, and gave them the possibility of a happy ending, but perhaps was still worried that she had been unduly harsh to Mrs Armitage, whose brisk spring cleaning had caused an unwitting tragedy. Mrs Armitage was in many ways a portrait of Joan’s mother, and it is she who is really redeemed in a later story, Milo’s New Word and remembered as the patient and loving mother she really was.
Amazon.com: Have you had a chance to re-read the stories recently? And if so, did anything surprise you about them, reading them now?
Lizza Aiken: Yes, while helping put the collection together I read them all many times, and tried to fend off questions about their wild inconsistencies! I think I found that I enjoyed them almost more now than I did as a child. Now they bring back memories for me, but then I really lived in that world. The real Mr Armitage was by then the very elderly and difficult step-grandfather that I also had to deal with, and I sympathized with my mother’s predicament, herself a rather lonely child living with this ‘adopted’ fussy parent, and finding the only way to freedom was through her own magic - the power of her imagination.
Amazon.com: Do you have a favorite, and why?
Lizza Aiken: One favourite is Harriet’s Birthday Present. I suppose I always thought of Mark and Harriet as my brother and myself, although they were also Joan’s older brother and sister, and I loved the idea of my brother being wrapped in a brown paper parcel ready for roasting with herbs stuffed in his mouth by a witch who called him ‘my cherub’! But I also loved that he escaped with the wonderful present for his sister, and that although everyone admires it, and says they always wanted one, you never discover what it is. Mark and Harriet’s relationship demonstrates a nice balance between the reality of sibling struggles and disagreements, and their faithful solidarity in the face of the absurdities and injustices of childhood.
As part of the launch of The Serial Garden, Lizza, along with Michael Dirda and Charles Schlessinger will celebrate these stories at an event in New York City on November 16th from 1 to 3pm (18 West 18th Street, 212-989-3270).
JoAnn Burton on November 12, 2008 at 09:00 AM
I recently read this book and I loved it. It left some unanswered questions but the stories were delightful and the characters are folks I wish I'd known. By the way, I 'm a 52 year old woman and I say we should all take time to read books written for other age groups. You just don't know what you're missing. My boyfriend says I'm in a state of arrested development. What do you think? Just so you know, I read all types of books from fiction to non-fiction, history to mystery and everything in between.
Jo