A see-sawing journey through Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, complete with spoilers.
You have to admire the Dark for its tenacity. Throughout the entire five-book series it kept rising and falling without ever losing hope…just like my reading experience. I started with the second one, The Dark Is Rising, and when I found it much better than I’d expected I backtracked to Over Sea, Under Stone. That was a bit too slow for my taste. Then Greenwitch was fantastic, The Grey King excellent, and Silver on the Tree wildly bipolar.
It’s hard to pin down what makes these books so good. The plots get repetitive (forces of Darkness try to take over the world and end up defeated by the Light), the pacing is pretty slow, there’s little humor and the side characters are thinly defined. Even the protagonists comes across as symbolic. The Dark has horsemen robed all in black, crows, bloodthirsty rodents, sheep-killing foxes and greedy humans. The Light follows the enigmatic wizard-like (“Old One”) Merriman—someday I’d like to stick him in a room with Gandalf and Dumbledore to see who comes out swinging. His colleague, and technically his boss is a nameless Lady of unparalleled power. Then we have the five kids: Will Stanton, another Old One in the body of an 11-year old boy (read: a future Merriman in the making); Bran, a broody teen of mysterious parentage (talk about The Chosen One); and the siblings Simon, Jane and Barney, normal British kids for readers to relate to.
As the only important female, Jane unfortunately comes across as a wet blanket. Her brothers seem to be having fun (Barney has a tendency to get kidnapped, but it doesn’t slow his enthusiasm) while Jane spends half her time worrying and shivering and hoping for Merriman’s help. I have no problem with cautious characters. It’s just sad that the thankless role goes to the only female protagonist. As for the other women, there are lots of aunts and sisters who barely contribute to the plot. And the nameless Lady gets put on a pedestal. She may be the most powerful of the Old Ones, but she sure spends a lot of time fighting off-the-page while in a trance/coma, waking up to deliver prophecies or give Will some magical training.
And yet, for all my complaints, I would read these books again in a heartbeat (okay, maybe not Over Sea, Under Stone), because the writing just blew me away. The language feels so precise. It’s descriptive and earnest without corniness or unnecessary embellishments. I’ve read enough fantasy books that all talk of Light and Dark and High Magic should feel cliché. Now I’m convined Susan Cooper invented the genre…yes, Narnia came before, and Lord of the Rings etc, but Cooper wasn’t hampered by allegory or the weight of invented mythology and languages. These books tell a darn good story; they seem like the Genuine Article, the original version copied by countless fantasy writers since.
Cooper’s genius is to ground the magic in reality. The Light works through well-meaning, curious children like Jane, Barney and Simon. They don’t make a fuss when they discover magic. They trust Merriman and do whatever they can to help, and in-between times they act like normal kids—exploring, bickering, drinking foamy cups of hot chocolate. The Dark takes a different tack by tempting likely candidates. It’s not about possession or mind control: the men they choose (and it’s almost always men) are already bitter, proud, racist, lustful for power or plain old lustful, so the Dark simply exploits their willingness to serve.
Some characters get caught between the worlds. When Will’s brothers sense his powers and freak out, Will erases their memories as a mercy. Others, like Bran’s adoptive father, accept the magic and bear up under the strain. And the wisest “normal” human has to be John Rowlands, a family friend who understands enough to warn Will:
“But those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun…Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders — oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe.”
His warm, deep voice ended, and there was only the roar of the engine. Will looked out over the grey-misted fields, silent.
“There was a great long speech, now,” John Rowlands said awkwardly. “But I was only saying, be careful not to forget that there are people in this valley who can be hurt, even in the pursuit of good ends.”
Thank goodness for people like Rowlands. Without them we’d end up with the book version of battle fatigue. I only appreciated the magic because it bled into normal life. When the Dark comes howling, the real world experiences storms and other unpleasantries: Bran scorns his adoptive father, neighbors turn on each other, bullies go after an innocent kid. Cooper keeps bringing the story back to the everyday people, and I appreciated the kids’ struggle to keep their families blissfully ignorant. It’s hard enough to fight evil—these kids have to do it in secret, then rush home for afternoon tea with their relatives. I enjoyed these mundane scenes more than the magical fights, because they reminded me of what’s at stake. Happiness in the real world is what matters the most.
This is where Silver on the Tree lost me. For most of the book the five kids get tossed between different time periods, adjusting constantly to normal life and magic. I sped along swimmingly until Will and Bran end up in the Lost Land on a Prolonged Magical Adventure. I’m no Arthurian expert and don’t know much about Wales, so a lot of the symbolism was lost on me…but the whole thing read like a dream sequence. They use random psychology to escape from mirrored mazes, get chased by a horse skeleton spreading Nazgul-like fear, only to be saved by a flowering tree.
And both Light and Dark keep tossing around random rules about High Magic and who can do what at certain times. Thankfully it improves by the end, and the final blow comes from a human decision about betrayal and letting go, not one created by magic. Then Cooper pulls another brilliant move: when the war ends, and the Dark defeated for the time being, Merriman erases the kids’ memories (all except Will, doomed to be an Old One forevermore) of their magical adventures. As fun as it was, it’s time for them to move on. Now they can concentrate on leading normal lives, because that’s what they were fighting for in the first place.
