Die Kristallkrähe

by Joan Aiken, Helmut Degner

My worst nightmare, which I get every two or three years, originated, I believe, when some well-meaning adult took me at the age of three for a ride in a fairground bumper-car. The nightmare consists of an endless, helpless ride, culminating in a crash from which, of course, I wake. As it was, when I came to, I thought that I was asleep and dreaming.I rolled back in my seat and watched the landscape hurtle towards me, in a state of dreamy euphoria. I was, positively enjoying my nightmare, quite sorry to think that in the end I'd have to wake.The awakening came rather sooner than I expected. "Coming around, are you?""Ummm," I croaked through the wide piece of surgical plaster which bound my, jaws together."I'm so glad to hear it.. Do you, know, my father - who was a complete megalomaniac - used to make my mother go out with him on his rounds. He was always slightly drunk, and a reckless driver at best. She was sick with terror every time . . . I used to promise myself that once, just once, I'd take him out and scare him sick. But of course I never got the chance. He did it once too often and killed them both. Still, it's some compensation to do it now to you."

Genres: Gothic, Thriller, Mystery, Crime

251 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Joan Aiken was a much loved English writer who received the MBE for services to Children's Literature. She was known as a writer of wild fantasy, Gothic novels and short stories.

She was born in Rye, East Sussex, into a family of writers, including her father, Conrad Aiken (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry), and her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge. She worked for the United Nations Information Office during the second world war, and then as an editor and freelance on Argosy magazine before she started writing full time, mainly children's books and thrillers. For her books she received the Guardian Award (1969) and the Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972).

Her most popular series, the "Wolves Chronicles" which began with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, was set in an elaborate alternate period of history in a Britain in which James II was never deposed in the Glorious Revolution,and so supporters of the House of Hanover continually plot to overthrow the Stuart Kings. These books also feature cockney urchin heroine Dido Twite and her adventures and travels all over the world.

Another series of children's books about Arabel and her raven Mortimer are illustrated by Quentin Blake, and have been shown on the BBC as Jackanory and drama series. Others including the much loved Necklace of Raindrops and award winning Kingdom Under the Sea are illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski.

Her many novels for adults include several that continue or complement novels by Jane Austen. These include Mansfield Revisited and Jane Fairfax.

Aiken was a lifelong fan of ghost stories. She set her adult supernatural novel The Haunting of Lamb House at Lamb House in Rye (now a National Trust property). This ghost story recounts in fictional form an alleged haunting experienced by two former residents of the house, Henry James and E. F. Benson, both of whom also wrote ghost stories. Aiken's father, Conrad Aiken, also authored a small number of notable ghost stories.

Reviews

[Bryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very, very strange, very violent mess of a novel. It is like Aiken was determined to take the tropes of a middlebrow women's novel and turn them inside out and then perhaps jump up and down on them. The book has a typical middlebrow protagonist, Aulis, who is very talented at domestic tasks and sensitive to nature while also being an imaginative writer of fiction, and who is in an impossible living situation with an older, domineering woman -- and the ordinary arc of a middlebrow novel would have her falling in love, figuring out how to extricate herself from her impossible situation (usually without harming the older woman in question, who would find a vocation or her own romance or come into money and decide to travel the world), and eventually marrying the young man. This being a neo-Gothic, I didn't expect it to go that easily -- I thought there would be obstacles and suspense and mystery and maybe the domineering woman would turn out to be murderous. Instead, though, Aiken's innocent protagonist is unbearably narcissistic, the domineering older woman is held out to be a saint despite strangling Aulis until she's unconscious in a fit of jealousy about Aulis's rape on a train and subsequent affair with her rapist, the love interest has little going for him except that he seems to like Aulis, there's a male artist who is held out as one of the better characters and cannot stand to be in the same room as Aulis... and on and on it goes. It has the usual neo-Gothic furniture minus the house; there are chase scenes and murder attempts and a sociopathic plotter who hears voices, but it also has rape and a great deal of casual domestic violence and darling Aulis through it all thinking about poor little her, how difficult her life is, how terrible unkind it is of other people to be suicidally depressed when she is in a good mood, etc etc etc. Plus, for the ending, the male artist manages to kill himself in a plausibly deniable way, and Aulis and her love interest are separated, probably forever, since she knows his sister was a murderous sociopath and he isn't being told because it might upset him.

I am sure Aiken knew how terrible Aulis was, but I cannot figure out what she was going for with this book, unless she was writing it just for the money and was tired of having her nice characters suffer. I think the slang word 'cracktastic' has fallen out of fashion to describe books that use their tropes so bizarrely one cannot figure out what the author was going for, but it is the word that keeps springing to mind when I try to figure out how to summarise this weird mess of a book; it is absolutely cracktastic on every front, and really not in the fun way.

[Anne Seebach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not a book to read if you're feeling a bit down, this was a slightly dated, well-written and even entertaining read - but a little joyless. Immersed as we were in the thoughts and personalities of a few key characters, I largely felt we were on the inside looking out at others who in fact were enjoying their life and company in a way we couldn't quite touch. A peculiar kind of angst trapped within a complicated and turbulent ambivalence on one part, and a carefully lidded raging psychotic fury on another, while in others we ranged despair, depression, misogyny and more. I would have like a deeper exploration of some of these characters - their history and motivations - but it wasn't really necessary to the story. More I think, due to the tactics of a good author who makes the reader think for themselves a little, and leave them wanting more.

Grim with brief moments of sunlight.

[Anita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obwohl dieses Buch zur Kriminalsammlung der Süddeutschen gehört, habe ich es nicht als Krimi empfunden, eher als sowas wie ein Roman, der sich mit der menschlichen Psyche beschäftigt.
Ich habe als Jugendliche einige Bücher von Joan Aiken gelesen und deshalb auch jetzt im Tauschschrank danach gegriffen.
"Die Kristallkrähe" konnte mich aber nicht überzeugen. Ich fand keine der Figuren so wirklich interessant, einige sehr unsympathisch. Der Anfang war ziemlich langatmig. Das Ende fand ich eher unbefriedigend.
Für mich leider nur 3 ⭐. Vielleicht sollte ich tatsächlich noch mal die alten Sachen lesen, die ich als Jugendliche so gemocht habe.

[Agnes Chargon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's one of the great books you can read every ten years and still discovering new facettes in it.
There was the subject of a book on double meaning and entendres in popular music. When I first read the German translation of the book somewhere in the 1980th, I didn’t get it at all. Now with some accumulated knowledge of English I hear what she has mentioned and enjoy picking it up. It’s an art of it’s own merits.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classic Gothic thriller mixed with some very interesting characterization and a sadly somewhat lopsided resolution.

[Natascha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein faszinierendes, präzise komponiertes Werk, das einen nicht loslässt, weil spürbar ist, dass was im Busch steckt.

[Lisa Greer · Rating 2 out of 5]

See my review at http://gothicked.blogspot.com