The Dark Is Rising series by Susan
Cooper
Books in series:
Over Sea, Under
Stone
The Dark Is Rising
Green Witch
The Grey King
Silver on the Tree
Susan Cooper is one
of those iconic children’s writers who has attracted a vast army of devoted
fans. Part of the same generation of Oxford-educated children’s fantasy authors
as Alan Garner and Diana Wynne Jones, she attended lectures by Tolkien and Lewis
and was clearly influenced by their work.
Cooper was born in 1935, and began
writing her famous series while working as a reporter for The Sunday Times. She
moved to the US to marry an MIT professor; after his death she married a
long-time writing partner, the actor Hume Cronyn, until his death in 2003. She
lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cooper gave the fifth annual Tolkien lecture
at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 2017. In 2002, Cooper was nominated for the
Hans Christian Andersen Award. She won the American Library Association’s
Margaret A Edwards Award in 2012, specifically citing the ‘Dark is rising’
series of novels. She has also won several other prizes including the Newbery
Medal, the Tir na n-Og Award and the B’nai B’rith Janusz Korczak Literary
Prize.
The Dark Is Rising was made
into a film in 2007 called The Seeker. It starred Ian McShane as
Merriman Lyon and Christopher Eccleston as The Rider. However, it changed the
narrative substantially, updating and Americanising the story, and this wasn’t
appreciated by fans or by Cooper herself.
Despite being an
avid reader of fantasy as a child, I didn’t come across Alan Garner until my
late teens, and Diana Wynne Jones until well into my thirties. I only became
fully aware of Susan Cooper in the past decade, and read The Dark Is Rising
series this year after a recommendation from Ruth Loten, a fellow member of the
Open University Write Club and a fellow blogger. My failure to pick up on these
authors earlier is surprising as I always told people when I was around ten
that C.S.Lewis was my favourite author and, a few years later, that The Lord
Of The Rings was my favourite novel, so I would almost certainly have loved
Cooper at that time. However, I suspect that I ‘discovered’ Susan Cooper when I
was too old to fully appreciate her.
Like Garner, Cooper is adept at
creating a sinister atmosphere; there are scenes from the novels which stay in
the mind long after you’ve finished reading. And like Garner too, her human
child characters seem very slightly undifferentiated – slightly flat, generic
middle-class boys and girls – mostly boys – who reminded me most of Enid
Blyton’s child protagonists, a comparison I suspect Cooper wouldn’t relish.
They are, of course, much more sophisticated than Blyton’s creations, but there
is still a slightly stereotypical quality to their portrayal. She seems more
interested in the folk stories and mystic mythology of ancient Britain,
particularly of the Celts and Arthurian legends, than she is in the purely
human characters (who I felt were actually rather unnecessary to the novels as
a whole), and she weaves this material together deftly, conveying a richly
imagined world.
I
suspect that Garner is the better of the two writers, if I am honest – The
Owl Service is a truly original work of genius, in my opinion, and The
Weirdstone of Brisingamen series ia justly famous. However, Cooper has more
breadth of writing experience, having been a journalist, novelist and
screenwriter over many years. But there are three things I found problematic
about these books. For one thing, I was uneasy about the lack of central female
characters. Even C.S.Lewis, who was often guilty of subtle misogyny, has two
girls and two boys as his Narnia protagonists, and the bravest and most central
of them is Lucy. In Cooper’s ‘Dark is rising’ novels, there is only one female,
Jane, in the central ‘six’, and the other powerful female character, the lady,
only appears on the edges of the tales. Jane is beautifully depicted and I
enjoyed her character very much, but she has a tendency to require rescuing –
whether by being physically picked up and carried to safety by Gumerry (while
her younger brother is expected to trot along on his own feet), or by being
saved by one of the boys. Jane’s two brothers, particularly Simon, don’t
actually seem to do a great deal to advance the story and I’m not sure both, or
either, are really needed. The other female characters are either good ones,
like Mrs Stanton and Will’s sisters, who are presented as being primarily
domestic figures and sometimes a little air-headed and trivial, or tricksy
creatures of the dark – unreliable, deceiving women like the pretty milkmaid
Maggie Barnes, the apparently cosy housekeeper Mrs Palk or the superficially
warm and caring Blodwen Rowlands. In fact, in these novels, as soon as a woman
appears particularly warm and motherly, you know she will probably turn out to
be allied to The Darkness.
I
found the character of Will Stanton - and to a slightly lesser extent, that of
Bran – very interesting and distinctive. The Dark Is Rising, the second
in the series, is the best of the five novels, and I particularly enjoyed the
chapters focusing on Will as an ordinary ten year old boy living with his
large, appealing family, and beginning to realise he is special. This is of
course almost a cliché of children’s literature, from Harry Potter to Matilda,
but Cooper does it very well. Writing Will convincingly as both a ten year old
child and the youngest of the mysterious ‘Old Ones’ is a very difficult
challenge and Cooper doesn’t always manage it. Sometimes Will comes across as
suffering, slightly creepily, from dissociative identity disorder, or even
possession, but on the whole Cooper does manage to make him vivid and
believable. Bran too is a character who
is both a human child and also Arthur’s heir, a boy of both the contemporary
Welsh hills and also the mystical past of Camelot and Avalon. Cooper seems preoccupied
with such duality.
Merriman
(or ‘Merlin’) is the archetypal ‘wise but unnecessarily obfuscating’ older male
figure embodied in numerous fantasy tales (think Gandalf or Aslan), a creature
so well-known to a reader my age that he seems almost stale. He is at times a deus
ex machina who steps in to rescue the children in a way that begs the
question of why he doesn’t just sort stuff out without the kids being involved
at all. At others, he seems curiously powerless and it is difficult to work out
what his actual powers are anyway.
The
lack of a larger female presence is probably a sign of the time the books were
written (though Diana Wynne Jones had no problem with creating interesting
female characters). Another was a problem with the plots. They are essentially
‘quest’ stories, with Will, the sign-seeker, searching for a series of objects
which will help The Light overcome The Darkness. This is fair enough, but the
tales are full of mysterious portents, comments about things that are foretold
or destined, and it felt to me that this was a whole layer of stuff that wasn’t
needed. Surely it would be more dramatic if Will wasn’t given the enigmatic
hints about things that should or must happen, and just had to
use his guile and courage to achieve his ends? I sometimes felt that the
resolutions to some of the stories were a bit lame as a result. If things are
predestined, then some of the tension is removed. I wonder whether readers with
a strong religious faith are drawn to these books – the symbolism of light and
dark is well-worn and clearly suggests a battle between good and evil. However,
Cooper does make it clear that human religions are not part of the books’
central conflict.
I
also felt that at times the plots contained elements that felt tacked-on, such
as the episodes involving racism (such as the rescue of the Pakistani boy from
the bullies and the subsequent conversation between Will’s father and one of
the bully’s fathers). I wasn’t really clear about how these elements contributed
to the plot.
My
third niggle is Cooper’s tendency towards long-windedness. She has a wonderful
writing style on the whole, though personally I find the cod-Medievalism at
times a little wearing. She can certainly structure and convey sinister scenes,
and build a vividly scary atmosphere. But at times, particularly in the final
book, the descriptive passages became too much for me and I found myself
skip-reading, just wanting to get to the end without the lengthy explanations
and repetitive descriptions. I felt that at times the novels’ pacing was flawed.
I
very much enjoyed The Dark Is Rising and think it is definitely worth reading.
I also enjoyed Green Witych, where Jane’s role becomes more central, and The
Grey King, where the Arthurian legend moves into centre stage. I found the
first and last books in the series less appealing, though both contained
imaginative ideas. I can understand why she has gathered so many fans and they
can’t all be wrong – I think it is simply that I found the novels at an age
when I was sloightly too old to appreciate them as they should be appreciated.
RATING: The Dark Is
Rising series *** (probably four stars for the best of the series and ttwo for the
very worst)
Key:
***** highly recommended - a 'must-read'
**** good - well worth taking the time to
read
*** ok - will help to
pass the time in a boring situation
** not very good
- just about readable but flawed
* not recommended -
boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way
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