osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2024-03-03 02:52 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2024-03-03 02:52 pm
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Book Review: The Dark Is Rising
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?
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?
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... 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.
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