Book Review: A writer's opinion

 

Wilkie Martin:

The Inspector Hobbes ‘Unhuman’ Series

 I first came across Wilkie Martin’s ‘cosy detective’ books a few years back when the first in the series was recommended to me by Goodreads, based on my previous reading. I have to say that, though I enjoyed these books, they clearly didn’t make all that big an impact on me as, when the most recent one came out, I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d read the one immediately before it. I went back to that one on my Kindle and read the first chapter but I was still unsure so I went back to the one before and read the first chapter of that. That rang a very faint bell, so I decided to start from there. Eventually I realised I had read books three and four before but I’d simply forgotten virtually everything about them! This doesn’t really suggest they are particularly inspiring, does it? However, I enjoyed reading them a second time and it allowed me to read the new episode confident that I was up to date with the ongoing adventures of the hapless Andy Caplet.

 

    

   

 

Set in the sleepy Cotswold town of Sorenchester, the stories are narrated by young Andy, who is a reporter on the local newspaper when the first book opens. Andy is incompetent, accident-prone and generally something of a loser, but his life improves considerably after he meets Inspector Hobbes. Hobbes is, we eventually learn, an ‘unhuman’, along with one or two other inhabitants of Sorenchester, though what precisely this means is unclear. He has certain unusual abilities, such as extraordinary physical strength and agility, and certain unusual habits, such as his fondness for chomping up animal bones when he is stressed. He also appears to be extremely long-lived and has been a police officer in the town for several generations. Hobbes is a wonderful character – he is quiet, calm, extremely good at his job, insightful, kindly and irreproachably decent, honourable and brave.  And he seems to see the potential for these qualities in Andy, which is why he takes him under his wing.

           After becoming homeless, Andy moves in with Hobbes and his elderly but extraordinary housekeeper, an expert in both martial and marital arts, and a woman whose incredible cookery skills engender in Andy a keen interest in food which results in him eventually becoming the food critic for the local newspaper. Hobbes and the housekeeper become surrogate parents for Andy, whose own parents are awful, and Andy becomes much more successful and develops many of the traits of his peculiar mentor as the books progress. He even meets and marries the woman of his dreams.

           The novels are sweet and gently funny. Andy resembles the warm-hearted catastrophe-magnet characters played in old films and TV series by comics like Norman Wisdom, Abbott and Costello, Charlie Drake, Michael Crawford and Jerry Lewis, but the novels are set in the (roughly) modern world. The humour generally works and I have been known to chuckle out loud while reading them, though it usually raises a smile rather than a belly laugh and sometimes you just want to give Andy a good slapping, quite frankly. Nevertheless, he is an endearing character, though I think it is surprising that Hobbes and Andy’s wife are so patient and forgiving with him. As the tales are told by Andy himself, the reader is put in the position of seeing events through his naïve and rather stupid eyes. Such an obviously unreliable narrator stretches the reader’s suspension of disbelief at times, but the novels are so quietly charming that I found myself just going along with the silliness and generally enjoying it.

           These aren’t high-brow novels and they won’t appeal to readers who like fast, hard-hitting action or hard-boiled detectives. They are gentle, enjoyable stories about characters who are mostly pleasant and decent, and who fight against injustice and intolerance in a comforting way. It is a bit like Midsummer Murders but with added supernatural seasoning.

 

RATING: Inspector Hobbes series ***

 

 

Interesting fact: Wilkie Martin is having some success with these charming, if undemanding, tales, and has written a recipe book spin-off of dishes that Inspector Hobbes would enjoy.

Tales from a freaked-out bride-to-be

 How To Be A Champion Procrastinator...

No sensible person would decide to get half her house redecorated and recarpeted straight after a worldwide pandemic and right in the middle of organizing a wedding, right? 

    Well, 'Sensible' isn't my middle name. In fact, my middle name isn't even sensible.

The logistics alone felt like we were giving one of M.C.Escher’s interiors a revamp. Our house is tall and thin and there is, quite literally, nowhere to put anything. It's necessary to empty the contents of one room into the space between the contents of another, then empty them back before the painter returns to do the next bit. It’s like a toddler tipping coloured sand from one container to another – most of it ends up scattered all over the floor…

We began by emptying the room we designate ‘great-nephew’s bedroom’, dismantling the elderly self-assembly cupboard (which wobbles alarmingly every time anyone walks past it), and distributing sections of the bed and other bits of furniture and toys between the bedroom on the top floor and the living room downstairs. We also moved the tall bookcase, which has stood on the middle landing for two decades, into our bedroom, which at least gave me the opportunity to stub my toe on it on each of my frequent night-time visits to the bathroom, and ensure that P couldn’t get into his side of the built-in wardrobe (which was fine as I don't make him sleep in there any more). The carrier bags full of books festooning the two sets of stairs were also something of a health hazard, bearing in mind my propensity for falling over - I mean, I fell on my arse this very afternoon outside my front door while standing still and attempting to attract P's attention, so I can't realistically be expected not to fall over obstacles on the stairs.

We hired a local decorator to wallpaper the entire staircase and paint Great Nephew’s Bedroom. The night before Decorator was due to arrive, his father was rushed into hospital so he asked if he could delay the work for a week. I have no idea whether this story was true – the man had a habit of making sure he was alone with me before trying out a cat-like facial expression conveying a mixture of distress and hopeless resignation to the vicissitudes of life, which he clearly felt would work better on a woman than on the man of the house. In fact, he would have done much better using it on P, who is a sucker for this sort of thing. You’d think men would realise, by the time they hit their fifties, that women are basically world-weary cynics who never trust a bloke with a pathetic expression on his face. Nevertheless, I couldn’t very well say no just in case he was telling the truth, so we had an extra week of toe-stubbing and tripping over toys.

Finally, Decorator got on with it. I’d bought the number of rolls of wallpaper he’d advised me to get, plus two extra as I wasn’t convinced by his calculations, but even so we got in from work to find he had run out of paper halfway through the hall. I was a model of patience, which isn’t like me, and I ordered more paper online, but this meant a further week of falling over Lego tables and night-time collisions with tall bookcases. It also allowed me time to examine Decorator’s handiwork, which was definitely substandard in places, but - as the alternative was my doing it myself - I was happy to overlook it. Eventually we got the paper and he put right some of the ‘minor snags’ (eg, a ten inch tear across one sheet of paper, very badly finished bits round the light-switches, paper stretched over lumps of plaster that should have been sanded down, so it looks like mice have been papered over, mid-scamper).

He was still a better choice than the first guy who’d come round to give us an estimate: he was wearing a tight vest over his enormous belly, flips flops, and had his hair cut into a spiky style more suitable on a teenager than a man in his forties – he resembled Kenneth, the camp hairdresser from the sitcom ‘Benidorm’. I have actually enjoyed the succession of workmen who have traipsed into and out of my home during the past six weeks. The enormously fat plumber with a Terry-Thomas moustache who bore an uncanny resemblance to a grey-haired Super-Mario. The depressed-seeming electrician who looked about twelve years old and who fiddled with our switches for an hour before deciding he could do nothing and charged us nothing beyond the lift to and from his house as he couldn’t drive. The little middle-aged electrician who replaced him, did a great job and regaled us with his misery memoirs over a cuppa afterwards. The second carpet-fitting team whose leader, another short-legged overweight bloke with a big moustache, sucked in his breath through his teeth upon seeing the apparently incompetent workmanship of his predecessors, phoned his boss , and he and the boss then spent thirty minutes ‘tightening up’ and ‘putting right’ the mistakes of the previous fitters – mistakes we hadn’t noticed ourselves. How often does that happen? And how many workmen in South Yorkshire look like Super-Mario?

Next thing was getting the stairs and Great-Nephew’s Bedroom recarpeted. My niece took up all the old carpet for us but she could only come round at the weekend, so we spent five days trying to remember not to impale our feet on the exposed carpet-grippers. The new carpet looks and feels great, but it made the twenty-year-old carpet in our bedroom look every year of its age so we decided to have that done too. This of course involved tipping all the stuff from our bedroom into Great-Nephew’s Bedroom (not to mention the bathroom and landing). Basically, for the past month, our house has looked as if a giant has picked it up and given it a massive shake. 

To add to the chaos, I had to deal with P's bedtime peculiarities. Most bookworms might have one, possibly two, books on their bedside cabinets ready for their twenty-minute read before nodding off each night. I personally have three hardback books and two notebooks beside my bed, but this is because I like to read my Kindle while lying on my side resting my arm on the impromptu pile of books. However, P is different. I suspect that, if he lived alone, he would sleep in a nest made of books, magazines and scraps of paper (usually old receipts and lost shopping lists). At the best of times, the floor at his side of the bed resembles an office after a  messy burglary. The waste bin is beside his bedside cabinet, but I can’t get to it without slipping on items of loose debris so there are usually rolled-up bits of paper and other detritus around the bin from where I’ve attempted to throw rubbish into it from my side of the bed in order to avoid the sensation of trying to ride a skateboard over a rocky beach. I've tried many things to improve this situation. I’ve argued that no one actually needs 38 books about chess, three volumes of political memoir, and 18 back copies of Prospect, Philosophy Now and New Scientist, beside their beds. Who could read all this stuff in the twenty-minute window before they nod off? But no matter how many bookshelves I denude of my own books to give him more space, or the large wicker basket I have placed on the floor on his side of the bed so he can put his current stock of reading material within easy reach, or the Kindle I bought him so he can have his books in electronic form, the nest is always slowly reconstructed over a period of weeks. I wouldn’t mind, but most nights he just solves chess problems on his bloody phone before going to sleep, so when does he actually read any of this stuff?

Anyway, the clearing was finally done and the carpet was laid and most of the stuff is now back where it started. And that's when my brain thought up another way of putting-off sorting out the wedding. Seeing my collection of Terry Pratchett hardback novels on the bookshelf in our bedroom, I had a sudden lightbulb moment. I have most of these books in other editions on other bookshelves, so why not get rid of this collection so P could have most of that bookshelf for his nesting materials? This particular bookcase is special to me because I bought it, years ago, with money I won in a poetry competition, but nevertheless giving up most of it to P’s books seemed a small price to pay for a tidier bedroom. And, I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to pass on some of these beloved Sir Terry novels to members of the online Pratchett group I belong to, people who would really appreciate them?  I assumed naively that people in that group would already have the books so I thought only one or two would find homes that way, but I was wrong. I was deluged with requests. I ended up spending more than a week wrapping up and labelling books to send to strangers round the world, making numerous trips to the post office, sending apparently endless messages to individuals about their Paypal reimbursements for postage etc, having to make decisions about who would get which book. It was incredibly hard work and immensely time-consuming. And it was an excellent form of wedding-planning-avoidance. In fact, as a method of self-induced stress, I can recommend it highly. 

I have to add that it was also weirdly nice to be giving these books away to people who really value them. The very last book was given to a man who works in a homeless shelter, for him to pass on to a homeless man who is a massive Pratchett fan. Several people had added an extra pound to their postal-reimbursement payments to cover miscellaneous costs, and there was enough money to send this book free to this particular recipient. One lovely person even sent me a private message offering to pay the postage for this book himself! The whole experience has definitely reinvigorated my sense of the fundamental niceness of most people, particularly Terry Pratchett fans, despite the fact that one recipient decided not to reimburse me for postage until he received the book (on the grounds presumably that I was attempting to scam him in some way) and another, having said he would love to receive ‘any of the books’, asked whether he could have a different book to the one I’d allocated him, after I’d packaged the novels up and stuck address labels on them. But there are always one or two people in any group like this. 

This is all displacement activity, obviously. It’s what we all do when we know we should be working on our novels: ie, something else. I'm double-procrastinating now - or meta-procrastinating, if you will!  I'm taking it to a whole new level! Organising TFW is something I do instead of writing, and now, instead of organising TFW, I’m redecorating the house and wasting time giving well-loved books away to strangers…

 

Book Review: a writer's opinion

 

Little, Big by John Crowley

 

I’m not sure now why I first downloaded this novel onto my Kindle. I'd never heard of it before I downloaded it, so I’m guessing it was a recommendation on my Kindle based on other fantasy novels I’d read. Anyway, for whatever reason, I bought it, and promptly forgot all about it - until a few weeks ago,  when I came across it by chance while flicking through the library on my Kindle, and decided to read a bit, reluctantly, as I was pretty sure I’d hate it.

              I was wrong. 

              This book wrapped itself around my brain and I wasn’t able to put it down once I’d begun to read. It isn’t always easy to grasp the length of novels when you’re reading on Kindle but I soon realized this is a hefty novel, but that only made me happier because I knew the pleasure of reading it would last longer.

              Crowley published the book in 1981 and it won the World Fantasy Award in 1982. As I’d never heard of it or its author, I knew nothing of this background as I read. In fact, I assumed it was a recently-published novel. I think this helped as I was without expectations about it. I was drawn in by the weirdly convoluted writing style at the beginning but had no real intention of reading much of it, so I was surprised to find myself enjoying the peculiar narrative. As I read on, I found myself increasingly drawn in until I was hurtling through the text like an addict.

              So, why?  It is very difficult to describe Crowley’s style. He frequently uses very long, complex sentences, with odd syntax, sentences which bend and twist and fold back on themselves. He loves unusual words (desuetude, congeries, machicolations, etc). There are some passages which go too far, where the purple prose starts wearing thin, but generally I found his style utterly captivating. He broke every writing ‘rule’ I’d been taught on my MA in Creative Writing. I have since read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon which have suggested that some readers find his style utterly tedious and virtually unreadable, but others, like me, find it compelling, magical and entirely appropriate to the tale he is telling. He is the ultimate ‘marmite’ writer.

              I think his writing is enchanting, and I use that word very deliberately. It enchanted me, which is absolutely fitting for a book about enchantments, about the confluence of humanity and faerie, the collision and interconnection between different worlds. It is partly a book about a dystopian future, partly a story of conflict, partly a tale of secrets that pass down through generations. The reader is mostly placed in the position of Smoky Barnable, the story’s first protagonist, who never quite believes in the existence of the faerie realm and never quite gets to see it. We are outsiders, hovering on the edges of the multi-generational ‘Tale’ the Drinkwater family appear to be living. The city itself, an unnamed New York, is described in a way that makes it mystifying, depressing, gorgeous and terrible, all dark alleys and thoughtless crowds and sinister political groups who manipulate the world. Edgewood, the mysterious house out in the country where the Drinkwater clan live, is even weirder, though not always as frightening, and often idyllic, though there is always a darker element lurking in the background. It's name suggests its positioning on the edge of the wood, in that border country between the forest (the location of so many fairytales) and the mundane reality of the human world. In my locale, there used to be an institution called 'Middlewood' for those with psychiatric problems, and people would give dark warnings about it like 'She'll end up in Middlewood' - it was one of those talismanic words always uttered very slightly under the breath. Edgewood reminded me of this.

Little, Big is a story about humans and faeries, but it is not in any way a nursery tale. This is a book for grown-ups, drawing on Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Arthurian legend, the tales of Thornton Burgess, and the Cottingley Fairies, among many other allusions. It is a fascinating family drama echoed by the soap opera that the second protagonist, Auberon, ends up writing for TV. The story has many interwoven layers of plot, moving back and forth through time, revealing secrets in arcane glimpses. It reminded me very much of Gabriel Garcia Marques’s A Hundred Years Of Solitude, though I enjoyed it much more.  The magic realism is there, for sure, but there is also real magic twisted through the fabric of these ethereal pages.

 

RATING: Little, Big *****

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

 

A few lightweight book recommendations:

 

The following books are lightweight tomes for gentle, mindless entertainment – if you’re looking for something intellectually challenging, wet-your-pants funny or seriously thrilling, don’t look here.  But if you fancy something undemanding, a little cosy, with a soupcon of humour or a touch of the supernaturals, to read while you’re having lunch or standing in a queue, these will fit the bill.  And they’re all series so if you find you like them, there’s more of the same to be had.  All available as ‘proper’ books or on Kindle.

 

Deanna Raybourn

Lady Julia Grey series

Starting with ‘Silent In The Grave’, these novels are set in late Victorian England and feature the aristocratic Lady Julia, whose cold and secretive husband dies on the first page of the first novel.  Julia has a huge, eccentric family who provide a large portion of the entertainment. During the course of the novels, she gets herself embroiled in a series of mysteries and a will-they-won’t-they relationship with a Heathcliff-esque half-gypsy detective.  If you like gorgeous posh women with a masochistic streak, Byronic heroes, and a historical setting that encompasses London, India, Italy and even ventures into Yorkshire, you’ll probably enjoy these.  Humorous tone and mild peril.

Raybourne has also written a series based on a character called Veronica Speedwell.

 

Linda Stratmann

Frances Doughty series

Beginning with ‘A Poisonous Seed’, this is another female detective series set in Victorian England, mainly in London.  However, Frances, the heroine, is a less serendipitous detective than Lady Julia, setting herself up in business as a private investigator after solving a murder that is very close to home in book one.  Yes, there is a propensity for mysteries to be solved by the application of outlandish coincidence and sudden bursts of intuition, BUT that’s true of Sherlock Holmes and it never did him any harm.  I learned a few things about Victorian London from these books too, and there is an unexpected twist in the final novel (well, it surprised me anyway!).

 

Genevieve Cogman

The Invisible Library Series

Warning: contains fantasy.  The heroine here is a young librarian in a magical library – another name to add to the great librarian heroes of literature, the Orang-Utan in Pratchett’s Unseen University library and the Cheshire Cat in Jasper Fforde’s Bookworld  library – who, with her friendly and sexy human/dragon assistant, travels between worlds to safeguard the books.  Look, I didn’t say it made sense, did I?  But they are imaginative and well-written, so why not give them a go if you like this sort of thing?

 

Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children

I loved the first one, got a bit bored somewhere after that in the series but enjoyed the last two books (I loved about 90% of the series).  They made a film out of the first book, so many people liked it enough to buy it!  The basic premise is that Riggs built a story around a series of weird photos he found in secondhand shops etc, which is interesting in itself, but he used his awesome imagination to create an unusual and exciting story involving children with strange abilities, time-travel, particularly horrible nasties and an engaging hero.  He incorporates the old photos into the novels so you can see them as illustrations which is cool – it even works on Kindle.

The Ongoing Wedding Shenanigans of Lou Wilful

 A Sight For Sore Eyes

I’ve sorted my hair out for the wedding (or TFW, as it has become known inside my head). I’ve been cutting it myself for the past two decades after a series of traumatic encounters with hairdressers. No, I wasn’t mugged at knifepoint by Vidal Sassoon, but it felt like it as I paid out large sums of money to stylists in the London area (you know who you are) and left their salons looking, on different occasions, like:

a)     1.  one of those Mabel Lucy Attwell children’s book illustrations;

b)      2. Velma in Scooby Doo;

c)      3.  Mick Hucknell.

At least hacking at my barnet with varying degrees of thoroughness depending on my mood and the amount of time available cost only the price of the scissors. I also applied hair-dyes at home, and I’ve tried every shade except brunette and black, so up until a week ago my hair was a sort of washed-out dirty blonde (which started life a month earlier as light auburn) with an inch of dark roots (at least it wasn't grey, astonishingly). It was cut into a shoulder-length style I think of as ‘sexily shaggy’ but is actually ‘middle-aged frump’.  I knew I couldn’t turn up to my wedding with this hair-do, as I would face ridicule from my sister, contempt from my niece, and embarrassment from my mother (it’s great having a supportive bunch of female relatives!). So, I started searching for a local hairdresser.

The first FIVE I rang were fully booked for months and had no appointments at all over the Christmas period (TFW is on 21 December). Who knew that booking a wedding hairstylist seven to eight months before your wedding day would be, as one hairdresser put it, ‘leaving it to the last minute’? 

Anyway, in the end, a friend recommended her hairdresser, only ten minutes away by car. It's a tiny salonette of a place, run by a magnificent and gorgeous woman called Louise, like me (well, in name anyway!). She could fit me in. She didn’t make me feel like Quasimodo’s ugly sister. She didn’t badmouth my hair-cutting ‘talent’. She was, in fact, completely lovely. She booked me in for a colouring last week and I was as nervous as if I was going to the dentist, but it was actually a pleasant experience. Who knew?  She coloured my hair expertly, cut it into a slightly better shape without cutting much off, and dried and curled it (a bit more curly than I like, if I’m honest, but P said it looked pre-Raphaelite – though he was looking at the back when he said this).

   

I even tried out the make-up I bought for the wedding, after a discussion on Facebook made me throw out my decade-old slap and invest in some new stuff. I can only wear certain brands due to allergies, but even sticking to the mid-range brands, it cost more than a hundred quid to buy foundation, powder, eyeshadow, blusher, lipstick, nail varnish, mascara and some new make-up brushes, and that included a £20 off voucher for No 7 and a free gift – so imagine my irritation when I tried it all out and realized that the foundation is a shade too light and makes me look like Morticia Addams, neither of the two lipsticks I bought work on me unless I go over them with a cheap watermelon-flavoured slightly tinted lip salve I already owned, and orange and gold eyeshadow just doesn’t look right on a woman in her fifties. However…

So, all I need now are clothes and shoes. She gives a hollow laugh…

I ordered a made-to-measure outfit from an online store. P measured me, which might have been where the problem started. The clothes arrived well before the deadline, though they were screwed up inside a plastic bag inside a small cardboard box which didn’t bode well. When I took the suit out (trousers, an embroidered top and a loose flimsy jacket, all in ivory), I couldn’t stop laughing. The top fitted ok but was several inches shorter than the photo on the website and looked more like an upmarket crop top than a bridal outfit for the mature bride. The jacket fitted too but was so diaphanous (ie, thin) that it was like wearing a cheap negligee. 

But it was the trousers that made me laugh. They looked like they’d been made for a clown. The Chinese seamstresses who made them must think that British women are a very peculiar shape. The waistband was around six inches too wide, so they would only stay up if I held them up manually, and the crotch was hanging down almost to my knees. When I rolled up the waistband until the crotch was in its normal position, the trouser legs only reached halfway down my calves.  I’m 5’2” and quite overweight, so you can probably visualize the shape of a woman who would fit these trousers.

I am now continuing my search for a suitable trouser suit in an appropriate colour, in a plus size, reasonably cheap. It isn’t going well. I’ve found several online but they are almost always out of stock in my size, or just out of stock (despite sometimes being described as ‘new arrivals’) . There are no department stores anymore in local towns and cities, and the risk of catching Covid-19 makes me reluctant to do a lot of browsing in actual shops.

And this is before I start searching for shoes…

             

A Writer's Opinion: book review

 

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

Wedding update

 

Two declarations and hopefully no funeral

Our wedding has expanded slightly from our initial conception – having transformed from ‘cheap’ and ‘secret’ to ‘more expensive’ and ‘incomprehensibly complex’ – but it is still, essentially, a modest affair. Therefore, it’s surprising to me that it feels like a series of puzzles, riddles and obstacles that I’m slightly too incompetent to fully understand.

Neither of us is good at organizing stuff, but, in the past at any rate, I have generally been considered to be the more efficient of the pair, so most of the organizing has been left to me. And let’s just say that I’m not doing too well so far…

I’ll give you an example.

Have you noticed how, in American sitcoms and romcoms, within a millisecond of proposing, couples seem able to marry, anywhere they like, with one of their mates performing the duties of a registrar/priest after getting a quick online certificate? You never see any couple on TV having to make an appointment at the Town Hall in order to formally notify the authorities of their intention to get married and declare that they are not related to each other, already hitched to another or under duress, and that they are happy to have this information made public for at least 29 days so that anyone who disputes the legality of the marriage has the opportunity to come forward, do you?

I suppose this is the secular version of having the banns read out in church. I’ve always secretly thought it would be rather cool to have some breathless stranger arrive mid-service, like Bertha Rochester’s brother, shouting out an objection to the marriage at the eleventh hour: ‘LOUISE WILFORD IS ALREADY MARRIED! I HAVE PROOF THAT SHE MARRIED BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IN 2010 AND HE DESPERATELY WANTS HER BACK!’. It wouldn’t have quite the same dramatic impact, though, in the ceremony suite at the Town Hall.

My first error was trying to make an appointment by phone. I am so naïve! After dialling the number, I listened, for twenty minutes, to Mozart being played on an accordian, interrupted every 30 seconds by a pre-recorded voice which sounded like Philomena Cunk telling me I was the first person in the queue. The person before me must have had a very complicated query, or else Philomena was lying. In the end, I decided to make the appointment online, and – like many things I try to do these days – I did it wrong. I thought I had booked an appointment for 11.30 on a Thursday in August, but when we arrived, we discovered that the booking hadn’t worked.

‘But I definitely booked,’ I said, feeling the red mist begin to descend. ‘I had a confirmation email.’

‘It isn’t on our records,’ said the twelve-year-old boy behind the counter. ‘And I’m afraid our registrars are really busy today so there aren’t any appointments left. We have weddings going on all day.’  As if to confirm this, we caught a glimpse of a white-frocked bride scuttling past the end of the corridor; a similarly-bedecked bride and her groom had been having photos taken on the steps of the Town Hall as we’d arrived, and, as we were directed to the registrar’s office, we’d noticed another couple heading towards the ceremony suite. It was slightly surreal, like stepping into a peculiar dream.  If someone did want to burst into the ceremony suite to stop a wedding, they’d be lucky to get the right one, considering the conveyor-belt of happy couples.

‘But we’ve both taken days off work to come here,’ I lied in an outraged voice.

The young man looked as if he was about to go full nervous breakdown. ‘Let me go and talk to someone…’ he muttered, before hurrying off down the corridor, presumably to find a prefect. He was gone for some time while we waited outside the office, P patiently and me muttering behind my Covid mask as I was at this point convinced it was their mistake. Finally, he returned with the news that one of the registrars had agreed to interview us in her lunch hour so we had to return at one thirty.

Back home, I discovered that I hadn’t actually ever received a confirmation email after all. Clearly, the whole thing was my error, though I still have no idea what I did or didn’t do. Slightly chastened, we returned for the one thirty meeting.

We had to be interviewed separately as if one of us was an illegal immigrant without a green card attempting to engage in a marriage of convenience. It’s just as well we weren’t as I got P’s birthday wrong, twice.

‘I know it’s in January,’ I said, lamely. ‘And in the teens.’ Fortunately, the pleasant registrar had by this time realized I was a post-menopausal woman and put me out of my misery by telling me what date the man I’d lived with for thirty years was born.

She didn’t ask for the names of our witnesses, which surprised me, as P and I had once been witnesses at a friend’s registry office wedding (in another town) and we’d arrived late, having got lost – we held up the whole wedding as they couldn’t just use two other random people as witnesses (another movie cliché exposed for the nonsense it is!), as our names were already on the official documents. She did, however, want to know the names and professions of both sets of parents. I actually know very little about my own father and I didn’t think ‘possibly deceased roofer, pub singer and all-round fuckwit’ sounded right, so that was slightly awkward.

When I emerged and P went in, I had a vague unease that he might say things which contradicted my answers, like in that old TV programme ‘Mr and Mrs’ where couples used to reveal the fragility of their marriages based on their mutual lack of knowledge about each other. Perhaps they’d tell us we’d failed the exam?

While I was waiting for him, there was a sudden surge of movement in the corridor and several members of staff began half-running back and forth into the main office. Apparently, a female staff member had somehow fallen, badly enough I believe to lose consciousness for a few seconds and be unable to rise from the floor. A younger woman who appeared to be wearing a hessian sundress closed the office door very ostentatiously  as if she was worried that me and the young Asian girl beside me in the corridor might be tempted to force our way in to have a good old rubber-neck at the prostrate woman. A short fat man with an official-looking lanyard round his neck kept asking if anyone had phoned an ambulance. I’m not sure if he ever got a reply.

P emerged from his interrogation, followed by the registrar. She had to go into the office to get the card machine so I could pay the £70 fee I had failed to pay online, and as she did so we caught a fleeting glimpse of the prone woman’s feet, toes upturned like in a cartoon.

As we left the building, the short fat man was waiting at the door to greet the ambulance that was presumably, at that very moment, speeding through the streets of Barnsley from the hospital half a mile away. Dodging another bride, we stepped out into the August rain feeling the mild euphoria that accompanies the aftermath of any interaction with local bureaucracy. I think it’s caused by relief that it’s over. We were one step closer to our goal.

I almost tripped down the steps into the Cooper Gallery next door, where we’d decided to get some lunch and use up the remaining time on our parking meter, but P managed to grab my arm before I did one of my now-commonplace spectacular public falls-on-my-arse.   So all-in-all it was a day well-spent.