The Whispering Mountain
by Joan Aiken

Owen Hughes is the son of the same Captain Hughes who accompanied Dido Twite on her adventures in The Cuckoo Tree and The Stolen Lake. Only just now, his father is missing, last seen doing his duty in the midst of an uprising in China. So Owen has found his way to his grandfather's home in the Welsh town of Pennygaff, where the old man (a retired naval captain himself) runs a museum of antiquities. Unfortunately, the elder Mr. Hughes does not altogether accept Owen as his grandson, so he is inclined to believe, when an ancient harp of gold goes missing from his collection, that Owen has taken it.

On the contrary, Owen is doing his best to save the harp from the real thieves, a couple of cockney bunglers named Bilk and Prigman, who set the whole misunderstanding in motion by kidnapping him and threatening his life. The thieves, in turn, work for a ghastly, yellow-eyed villain named the Marquess of Malyn, who is obsessed with gold, and fills his castle atop the "whispering mountain" with equal numbers of gold articles and instruments of torture. The Marquess believes the harp belongs to him. But he has more than the incompetence (and crookedness) of his hired agents to contend with. He is up against the clever and courageous Owen and his growing circle of admiring friends, the gypsy poet Tom Dando and his resourceful daughter Arabis, a wiry little monk named Brother Ianto, a hotblooded, Scottish-accented Prince of Wales, and an ancient tribe of little, hairy people who live under the mountain and work in gold.

Not to mention the prophecy:

"When the Whispering Mountain shall scream aloud
And the castle of Malyn ride on a cloud,
Then Malyn's lord shall have and hold
The lost that is found, the harp of gold.
Then Fig-hat Ben shall wear a shroud,
Then shall the despoiler, that was so proud,
Plunge headlong down from the Devil's Leap;
Then shall the Children from darkness creep,
And the men of the glen avoid disaster,
And the Harp of Teirtu find her master."

The story is everything you should expect from a Wolves Chronicle-an adventure crawling with memorable characters who speak in a variety of interesting dialects; the tale of a mild-mannered, bookish boy finding the valiant hero and leader within; a tale in which the evil get their just deserts while the good sometimes suffer terrible loss; a tale of comedy, horror, and a subtle tinge of magic, which can also be rather instructive.

It's hard to say whether this book is intended to be part of the "Wolves" series, which mainly deals with the exploits of Dido Twite, or is just another freestanding novel set in the same historical-England-with-a-fantasy-twist (in which James III is King when, in our world, Victoria was Queen). The edition published by Starscape does nothing to clarify the matter, since instead of listing the works of Joan Aiken, it just lists books published by Starscape. While I'm griping about it, I might as well also mention that the typesetting of this book is atrocious, at one point even disastrous. I hope another edition is coming!

Robbie Fischer
Arizona USA

Recommended Age: 12+

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