Book Review: The Dark Is Rising

[osprey_archer]

I first read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising about a decade ago, and didn’t much like it at the time. “There’s something fundamentally unsatisfying about a story where the protagonist fights the Dark by just sort of knowing what to do when the proper time comes, without having to put any effort into learning,” I complained.

So I reread it with some trepidation. But I enjoyed it more this time around, perhaps because I have less narrow ideas about how protagonists are allowed to protag. Must a protagonist have a clear goal and take purposeful action to reach it? Is it not enough, sometimes, to be buffeted in the right direction by the winds of fate, and/or the occult knowledge of an Old One that you don’t know you know until you need it?

And Cooper is, as always, a wonderful evocative writer. I love the ever-deepening snow, the beauty and the menace of it; the scene where Will Stanton and his brothers and sisters go caroling through the village, ending at the manor house where Miss Greythorne receives them all, and time stops as Will is singing “Good King Wenceslas,” and then like King Wenceslas and his page Merriman and Will going walking together, back through time toward an adventure…

Or the scene, just a little earlier, of Will and Merriman and the Lady in the darkened hall, with the darkness pressing ever closer against the firelight. Just a fantastic visualization of the theme.

Having said that, although Cooper clearly intends this to be a classic dark-against-light story, I must confess that this rereading has only strengthened my earlier suspicion that the clash between the Light and Dark is in fact a John le Carre-type fight between two sides which are, in fact, simply two sides of the same coin.

Exhibit A for this theory is Hawkin, Merriman’s liege man, who betrayed the Light for the Dark and then was cursed, by Merriman, to carry one of the Signs to Will. “You changed me from a man into a creature always running, always searching, always hunted,” Hawkin accuses Merriman, when Merriman invites him to return to the Light. “You stopped me from growing decently old in my own time, as all men after their lives grow old and tried and sink to sleep in death. You took away my right to death. You set me in my own century with the Sign, long, long ago, and you made me carry it through six hundred years until this age.”

Hawkin throws the offer in Merriman’s face and returns to the Dark, only to be cast aside when the Dark has no more use for him: literally thrown off a flying horse, so that he breaks his neck in the fall. (The Dark! Also pretty awful!) Lying broken on the ground, Hawkin demands of Merriman, “Will you make me live on, with the worst suffering of all now to come? The last right of a man is to die. You prevented it all this time; you made me live on through the centuries when often I longed for death.”

Merriman mercifully allows him to die at last, and even takes him back to the churchyard in his own time to bury him in his own ground… but Jesus H. Christ! Six hundred years of hopeless, harried wandering! Of course Hawkin scorns Merriman’s invitation. Sure, they may call themselves the Light, but how good is any side that considers six hundred years of unending torment a just punishment for anything?

Comments

[asakiyume]

This really is making me think about rereading. It's a truism that every time you reread something, you'll discover something new, but I think it's especially interesting when you go back to try something you didn't much like--and you do this a fair amount! Very impressed. So you get (potentially; I realize it's not always going to happen) the opposite of the suck fairy--and how much more encouraging.

I'm curious what has led you to broaden your sense of what constitutes protagging. Is it just reading so widely from such a wide time period?

[osprey_archer]

Do I reread so many books that I dislike? I guess maybe The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle recently... that was for a more general Narnia reread, though, I couldn't just leave them out.

I do think reading from such a wide time period helped broaden my view of protagging, yeah. I think the idea that the protagonist must have a clear goal and take decisive action to reach it (and the idea that a story must have a clear conflict, although The Dark is Rising definitely meets that particular dictum) comes from Hollywood script-writing advice, and if you want to write a summer blockbuster that the studios might actually finance, then yeah! That's good advice! Modern audiences love that, not least because they've been conditioned to expect it from watching thousands of Hollywood films.

But it's not the *only* way to write a story, and a story isn't bad just because it happens not to fit those guidelines.

[sholio]

Having said that, although Cooper clearly intends this to be a classic dark-against-light story, I must confess that this rereading has only strengthened my earlier suspicion that the clash between the Light and Dark is in fact a John le Carre-type fight between two sides which are, in fact, simply two sides of the same coin.

Yeah, the interesting thing is that the books themselves seem to be in conflict about this, where the text and subtext don't line up; it's as if Cooper's own story kept trying to twist around on her and become bigger and more mythic than she planned, while she's attempting to hammer it back into a kids'-book vision of good and evil. I had that feeling about the Light and Dark not being too different when I read the series too (and I feel that feeling even stronger in later books, where we find out there are neutral powers beyond Light and Dark that are more powerful and implacable than either of them). I felt like Cooper kept wanting you to root for the Light side and accept the Dark as unending evil while actually displaying both of them as not too different and caught up in their own struggle without much regard for the people who are used as pawns by both sides.

[osprey_archer]

Per duskpeterson's comment below, apparently the John le Carre of it all was in fact intentional, so maybe in fact that story was trying to twist itself into a classic good'n'evil narrative while Cooper attempted to hammer a bigger and more mythic ambiguity back into it. Or something like that. Maybe it's difficult to John le Carre it when your heroes are not world-weary cynical spies but wide-eyed children (even if Will is also technically an Old One of unfathomable age and power) without a wisp of an inkling that their side might not be all that is good and right.

However it got there, there is a definite feeling of battle between text and subtext, which is perhaps why the books have had such staying power. They give the reader so much fuel for argument, both with the books and with other readers.

[duskpeterson]

Susan Cooper agrees with you! She wrote an entire essay about this: about how her views on this grew out of her experience as a child in World War II, when a very clear line was drawn between Good and Evil. She came to realize the dangerousness of that perspective, so she tried to underlay her Light vs Dark plotline with a sense that the Light can cause great harm too.

That said, I think she depends too heavily on her readers to figure out this theme of moral ambiguity. This is a rare case of an author being too subtle for her own good.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think it's helpful (perhaps especially in a children's book, but adults often need a helping hand too!) to have at least one of the characters come to this realization on the page - which, admittedly, Hawkin does! He lays it out! But he's a traitor, so a lot of readers will dismiss what he says. It would have to be a character we like and respect, someone like Jane or Will laying it out there to Merriman. Which might happen before the end of the series; it's been so long since I read it that I've forgotten quite a lot. But I do think I would have remembered that.

[duskpeterson]

"But I do think I would have remembered that."

I didn't, and I reread the novels every few years. The trouble is, the sentiment can't come from Will or Merriman; they're on the wrong side of the equation. And Jane et al. are too caught up in the worldview of the Light, I think. So it's a minor character who voices the sentiment.

I was on my iPod Touch when I made my last comment. I'm back on my laptop, so I can quote from Susan Cooper's essay, "Swords and Ploughshares," which appears in her essay collection, Dreams and Wishes.

First she quotes John Rowlands in The Grey King saying, "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."

Will defends the Light, saying the Dark wants to destroy that is best about humans, and so the Light "can make no use of them [charity, mercy, and humanitarianism]. We are fighting a war."

John Rowlands responds, "It is a cold world you live in, bachgen. I do not think so far ahead, myself. I would take the one human being over the principle, all the time."

To which Susan Cooper's comment is:

[osprey_archer]

It looks like your comment got cut off at the end! But thank you for digging out the quote: it is good to know that the feeling that the Dark and Light might not be so opposed as they see themselves being is a purposeful theme on Cooper's part.

[duskpeterson]

Whoops! Sorry about the cut-off. I think it was a formatting problem (I was replying by email). Here's Susan Cooper's quotation.

"So would I. But that is my adolescence talking, not my childhood. That cold white flame at the heart of the Light, and Will's justification of it, comes from the absolute certainty I was given, when I was small, that we were right. Hitler was evil, and the greedy advance of the Third Reich across Europe was the rising of the Dark. Little Britain, Jack the Giant-Killer, was the last repository of the Light, and anything we did to defeat the Dark was okay. Even our churches confirmed this: one should pray for victory, said the Archbishop of Canterbury, adding to the prayer 'if it be thy will' or 'for the victory of righteousness.' . . .

"The self-righteousness of the Light is no doubt preferable to the depravity of the Dark, but it too holds great dangers. It can reach to the point of a holy war, fought for the promotion of one of the historically militant religions, like Christianity or Islam – and at that point the Light enters the Dark, or vice versa, and gives birth to monstrosities like the Inquisition, or the death sentence pronounced on Salman Rushdie."

[osprey_archer]

Thank you for coming back with the rest of the quote! And it fits in, too, with something that the Greenwitch says in Greenwitch, when the Old Ones are trying to coax her to give something to the Light: "You are all self-servers, Light, Dark, men. There is no place for the Wild Magic except its own... no care... no care..."

Except then the Greenwitch remembered that someone did show her care - Jane showed her care - and, in a classic fairy tale twist, that bit of human kindness is repaid hundredfold, where all the powers of Dark and Light availed naught.

[duskpeterson]

Oo, cool, I hadn't thought of that quote! And you're right: the twist is wonderful - Jane being able to accomplish what the Dark and Light couldn't do.

[skygiants]

We listened to the BBC audio adaptation that came out ... last year? two years ago? and I remember being very struck (negative) by how much I felt that the audio Merriman didn't land any kind of sense of regret and despair overlaid on top of the terrible purpose in the Hawkin scenes. In many ways the cruelty of what's happened to Hawkin is the heart of the text, and if an adaptation doesn't understand that then it doesn't really have a heart!

[osprey_archer]

Oh dear! I've been thinking about listening to the BBC audio adaptation (assuming it is the same BBC audio adaptation), but any audio adaptation would need to really land those Hawkin scenes. In the book it is clear that in some sense Merriman truly is filled with regret and despair, although somehow this regret & despair is not enough to turn him aside from laying 600 years of wandering torment on Hawkin... but he does feel it.

[skygiants]

There were a couple things I do think they did well and iirc some of the Foley effects to capture moments in the book were very cool, but unfortunately at this remove I mostly remember my complaints ....

... oh okay this is not true I also remember the theme song which went and the dark, the dark is riiiisiing, and the dark, the dark is RIIIISING which cracked me up every time. This is not a complaint because I enjoyed cracking up every time.

[just_ann_now]

*waves from the Network* But also AAAAAARGGGGH the earworm! The earworm!

[littlerhymes]

Sometimes a protagonist is slaying dragons or sailing boats into the unknown, but sometimes they are just the 7th son of a 7th son who is bearing witness to unspeakable miseries. Sorry Hawkin.

[osprey_archer]

Seventh son of a seventh son simply dragged through adventures, watching the miseries of a man who has wandered for 600 years without truly understanding said miseries. (Can even an Old One comprehend 600 years from the vantage point of being eleven?)

[anelith]

I've always thought that Merriman could have been kinder to Hawkins from the start -- that scene where Hawkins faces the realization that Merriman is willing to let him die, the reader can see the seed is planted that will make Hawkins turn to the Dark. Even as a kid reading that scene I thought Merriman could have said something about how much he loved Hawkins, how much he regretted putting him in danger, etc. Human things. The coldness of the Light is very clear in the absence of those loving words.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, it's so striking that Merriman doesn't even try to reassure Hawkins. Given the time travel of it all, it feels like maybe he can't - he already knows, as he's talking to Will, what is about to happened (has already happened), and perhaps at the time he didn't realize he needed to reassure Hawkin and now can't change anything... But he doesn't even try! Perhaps he could try, at least?