osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: susan cooper

Wednesday Reading Meme a day late this week on account of the New Year!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time, because I thought it was a time-slip novel, but in fact there’s a lot of musing about the nature of time and only the dimmest glimmers of timeslip: the squeak of a swing that’s no longer there, the glimpse of a long-ago girl’s face in the glass before her old sampler. Bit of a disappointment really.

Also Susan Cooper’s The Magic Maker: A Portrait of John Langstaff, Creator of the Christmas Revels. I read this solely because Susan Cooper wrote it, as I’d never heard of the Christmas Revels, although now that I’ve read this book I’d love to attend one. Revels differ from other performances in that they have a strong participatory element: the audience sings along with many of the songs and joins the dance at the end. Alas, the Revels seem to be mostly a coastal phenomenon: they started in Boston and spread to New York, California, Portland… Some of these locations have spring and autumn revels, too.

Cooper fans may be interested to learn that it was Jack Langstaff’s encouragement that propelled King of Shadows from a mere idea to a finished book. In fact, he gave her a copy of John Bennett’s Master Skylark, so there is a direct connection between these two “boy meets Shakespeare” books!

What I’m Reading Now

Charlotte Bronte has just left the Heger pensionnat in Brussels and returned to Yorkshire for good. Elizabeth Gaskell doesn’t mention her unrequited love for M. Heger, and neither, interestingly, does Mr. Shorter, who annotated the 1900 edition. Since all the principals were dead at that point (not only Charlotte herself but her father, her husband, the Hegers, etc) one might imagine he would feel more freedom to talk about it, but apparently not.

What I Plan to Read Next

I was planning to read Penelope Lively’s Astercote and The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which are also supposed to be timeslip, but now I feel suspicious as to the actual amount of timeslip they contain. Has anyone read them? Do the characters from the past and present actually meet?

littlerhymes and I have finished our Susan Cooper journey with King of Shadows, a Child Meets Shakespeare novel which was one of my favorite books in my youth. It is, perhaps, a book that is best met when you're about eleven, as

littlerhymes was not so enamored with it as I am, but so it goes.

Our hero, Nat Field, is an actor who has been hired to play Puck at the new Globe theater in London as part of the Company of Boys. However, soon after he arrives, he time travels into the past, changing place with a Nat Field who is spending a week acting Puck with Shakespeare's own company... which means that Nat meets the Bard himself.

The nice thing about a historical figure like Shakespeare, about whom we have only a few verifiable facts, is that you can make him pretty much anything you want, and Cooper wants him to be not only the greatest playwright of all time but also just the nicest guy ever, who takes orphan players under his wing at the drop of a hat. Fatherless Nat, playing Puck to Shakespeare's Oberon, falls headlong into Baby's First Crush, "a spirit in love with his master" - and here his own emotions are sliding into his memories of the performance, for during the actual play, Nat plays Puck as an irrepressible spirit of mischief who "didn't give a darn about real human emotions." It's only in retrospect that Nat imbues Puck with feelings for Oberon.

Reading it as an adult, the interplay between Nat's father-figure feelings for Shakespeare and his crush feelings is maybe a little uncomfortable. As an eleven-year-old, I was just digging the intensity. Susan Cooper had a vision for this book and this vision was "What if you actually MET Shakespeare and you were in LOVE with Shakespeare and Shakespeare loved you too but in, like, a father-son sort of way," and she went all in. Like, "when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest years later, Ariel was inspired by his memory of Nat's Puck" all in. Because why not! To be honest, I think Victory would have been much improved if the hero had had closer and more emotional relationship with Nelson.

***

In an amusing coincidence, as we were reading King of Shadows I was also reading John Bennett's Master Skylark, (a gift from

asakiyume last time that I visited), a Child Meets Shakespeare book from 1898. The genre is venerable! And indeed I wouldn't be at all surprised if it goes back further than that.

In Master Skylark, Stratford tanner's son Nicholas Atwood skips school to see a play in the next town over. However, while he's there, the master player discovers that Nick has a voice like a skylark, and kidnaps him to be part of the troupe! Once they arrive in London, Nicholas's only hope to return hope is to find William Shakspere, conveniently married to Nick's mother's cousin Anne Hathaway, who would surely help him get home...

Nick doesn't meet Wm. Shakspere until near the end of the book, and then - I love this - when Nicholas sees the man who kidnapped his friend Cicely (daughter of the man who kidnapped Nick! lots of kidnapping in this book), Shakspere is too engrossed in a proof to notice when Nick begs him to come help. Nick must run off and save Cicely himself! The two children travel overland to Stratford together, singing for their supper, and arrive just in time to join the festal dinner at which Shakspere celebrates buying the fanciest house in Stratford. Shakspere isn't even the one who reconciles Nick with his angry father! (Nick's father doesn't know he was kidnapped; he thinks the boy ran off with the players.)

Two Child Meets Shakespeare stories with two completely different approaches. Is Shakespeare the sun around which the story revolves, or the incidental side character who fails to be the deus ex machina your protagonist devoutly hopes he will prove?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gerald Durrell’s The Ark’s Anniversary, a book commemorating not only the twenty-fifth anniversary of Durrell’s zoo, but also his triumph in establishing captive breeding as an important practice for saving desperately endangered species. “If captive breeding was mentioned twenty-five years ago within the hearing of a group of earnest conservations,” he notes, “they flinched and spoke loudly of other things, rather as if you had the bad taste to confess that you thought necrophilia a suitable means of birth control.”

His earlier books tend to be pure romps, whether they are memoirs of his family or his animal collecting adventures. This one is a little bit more political (“When ecology becomes a luxury then we are all dead,” he comments with exasperation, with regard to certain obstructive politicians), but still very funny, as in this description of a colleague who lost his luggage on a flight.

In one hand Tom clasped what seemed to be all his worldly goods in a briefcase which had apparently been constructed out of the skin of an ancient crocodile suffering from leprosy. His suit looked as though it had been slept in by seventeen tramps and then discarded as being of no further service… His tie – at one time I have no doubt a magnificent piece of neckwear – looked as though it had been seized and thoughtful masticated by one of the less intelligent dinosaurs and then regurgigated. His shoes completed the whole ensemble: Charles Chaplin spent years trying to get his shoes to look like that without success…

littlerhymes and I also finished Ghost Hawk, which we put on our list because Susan Cooper wrote it and it was available in both our countries. I have in the past sung the praises of going into books sight unseen, but in this case I wish we had done a bit of research, because it turns out that this is a book about how Colonialism Is Bad. This is of course laudable, but as with books about how Women Had It Tough in the Ancient World (or indeed simply in The Past), I feel I’ve done my time with this one, and indeed also with Slavery Is Bad, Racism Is Bad, War Is Bad, etc. etc. I’ve got it. I’ve grasped the concept. I don’t need to read another book about it.

Because it’s Cooper, the prose is of course beautiful, and she evokes the woodlands of Massachusetts just as in other books she evokes the mountains of Wales or the Scottish lochs. But I did feel it was really more about its message than about a story.

What I’m Reading Now

After a long hiatus in fairy allusions, Jane Eyre comes back strong when Jane meets Rochester. In fact, the first reappearance of the fairy allusions is from Jane toward Rochester: when Jane first hears Rochester’s horse on the road, she half-convinces herself that this is the sound of the gytrash, a fairy creature who preys on unwary travelers.

Once Jane sees him, the fairy illusion is dispelled, or rather passes from Jane to Rochester, because next time he sees her, he teases, “And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?”

“For whom, sir?” asks Jane, startled.

“For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?”

And Jane falls instantly in with his joke: “The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago,” said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. “And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I have after all acquired Elizabeth Wein’s Cobalt Squadron.

littlerhymes and I continued Susan Cooper readathon with Dawn of Fear, which is quite an oddball among her other work: semi-autobiographical novel set during World War II, centering on young Derek and his friends Peter and Geoffrey. Derek and Peter are closer than either of them is to Geoffrey, and Derek and Geoffrey sometimes spar, with Peter stepping in as peacemaker. It’s a complicated and deftly drawn dynamic.

The boys are young enough that the war is just the everyday background of life to them. There have always been bombs dropping from the sky, it’s normal to spend most clear nights in the shelter, and even though they’ve seen bomb craters, they have no clear understanding that the bombs could be really dangerous to them. They’re thrilled on the rare instances that they get a chance to watch a dogfight before they’re hustled into the shelter.

As a child who was petrified of tornadoes despite never personally seeing tornado damage, I find this mindset completely baffling. But maybe if we had been hiding in the basement from tornadoes just about every night instead of once or twice a year, I would have found it too normal to be scary, just like Derek and co consider bombing raids.

This is not a criticism: Cooper is pretty clearly writing out of her own experience, as she would have been just about exactly Derek’s age during the war. More a reflection on how varied human experience can be.

Anyway, as you might guess from the title, by the end of the book Derek does learn to be afraid - not, initially, of the bombs or the war itself, but through a feud that he and his friends have with some boys from the next street over, which escalates when two older boys get involved. ( spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Cooper’s Victory! I began this in a dilatory fashion, then

littlerhymes decided to spend a sultry vacation day at the library and zipped through the book, so then I had to zip too.

A good book for zipping, as it turns out! Very pacy, which is especially impressive as this is a dual timeline novel, and my experience is that usually one of the timelines drags. Usually the modern-day one, since the character in the Past is usually spying on the Nazis or becoming a pirate or something, while the modern-day character is, like, sipping coffee in a Starbucks while googling the adventures of Past character.

Sam does indeed have a more exciting story, as he finds himself on Admiral Nelson’s flagship Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar. But Molly’s modern-day story has a splash of magic to spice it up, as Molly finds Sam’s souvenir swatch of the Victory’s flag, and it kicks off some sort of mystical connection between them, which comes to a head when Molly and her grandfather visit the Victory at Portsmouth…

I expected a bit more to come of this mystical connection, to be honest, and instead it seemed that the book sort of petered off at the end. But nonetheless, an enjoyable read on the whole.

I also completed William Dean Howells’ Italian Journeys. Howells was the American consul in Venice during the Civil War, and this book, originally published in 1867, is an account of his vacations throughout Italy during that time. This time period was also, of course, in the midst of the reunification of Italy, and as my copy is a reprint of an edition that Howells lightly updated in the 1890s, there is an interesting palimpsest effect. He’ll describe, for instance, the Austrian soldiers still in northern Italy in the 1860s, then note that they are long gone now.

There’s a particularly charming bit where he describes a woman at the opera, wearing a white dress and carrying a fan that is red on one side and green on the other… the forbidden Italian colors! And every Italian in the opera knew it, and glowed with pleasure at the demonstration.

He also occasionally modifies his own reflections, as in this note on the unfinished excavations of Herculaneum. “[Herculaneum] was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.)”

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Chantemerle, where Gilbert has renounced his claim on Lucienne in favor of Louis! Gilbert’s religious advisor/father figure is hopeful that in sacrificing his betrothal, Gilbert will at last be able to accept the Catholic Church, and thus become a suitable leader for the deeply religious peasants of the Vendee. We shall see! Slightly concerned that this theme will lead to Gilbert drinking the cup of renunciation to its dregs and dying for the Vendee. But no, I still think this will end in a double wedding of four cousins… although it must be admitted that I am often unwisely hopeful about the endings of Broster books.

What I Plan to Read Next

skygiants and

genarti and I are going to read Franny Billingsley’s The Robber Girl.

As you know, I enjoy a retelling of Tam Lin, so when I saw that Susan Cooper did a picture book version I was on that like white on rice even though the illustrator is the uninspiring Warwick Hutton.

Cooper’s Tam Lin is a 1990s girl power! version of the tale. We begin with the princess Margaret, forced to sew with other demure young noblewomen as they dutifully recite their lessons about how to be a proper young lady. Sew your stitches, behave yourself, and whatever you do, don’t pick the roses at Carterhays, or else you’ll get picked up by the Elfin knight and no one will marry you!

Who cares if no one marries you! Margaret cries. The roses at Carterhays are the most beautiful in the kingdom! And she tosses aside her sewing, walks out of the castle, and goes down to pick a rose in Canterhays, where a voice asks, “Why pick you the rose, Margaret, without asking leave of me?”

The voice belongs to a beautiful young man, who offers Margaret an apple from a tree. It’s only June, so the apples shouldn’t be ripe, but Margaret doesn’t think of that.. She eats the apple, spends a day with the young man, and goes back to the castle - to find a week has passed! “No man will wed you now,” wails the nurse, but that’s fine, because Margaret doesn’t want to marry anyone but the beautiful young man ANYWAY.

And now we segue into the classic Tam Lin story: the beautiful young man is a mortal captive of the fairy court, about to be sacrificed, and the only one who can save him is a woman who loves him and holds onto him even as the fairy queen changes his shape, etc. etc.

I am not entirely convinced that Tam Lin needed a 1990s girl power! retelling, given that Janet/Margaret/Kate/etc is already a brave and forthright heroine who (in some versions) gets pregnant outside of wedlock and is positively rewarded for it. Does it really add anything to make her hate sewing, too? But on the other hand: more Tam Lin! Hard to go wrong with more Tam Lin.

I posted about The Boggart Fights Back when I first read the book a few years ago, and now that I’ve reread it with

littlerhymes I can only reiterate that the book is a romp. Not perhaps one of Cooper’s deepest works, but it’s very satisfying to see a sleazy real estate developer routed by the boggarts, with a little help from their human friends.

Some scattered thoughts:

I love that the boggarts conceptualize Trout as an invader, like the Hanoverian armies come to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie.

It’s extremely funny that Nessie’s first attempt to scare Trout off is to turn into the Loch Ness Monster, and Trout instantly gets dollar signs in his eyes and is not even slightly frightened at all. Oh Nessie. I understand why this seemed like a good plan to you, but any human could have told you it wouldn’t work!

The boggarts talk a lot more in this book than in the earlier books. It does take away somewhat from their Old Thing mystique, but it’s also a lot of fun to see them having a council of war with the Camerons to decide how best to rout Trout.

Coming right off reading the other Boggart books, I was a little bit sad that we didn’t see more of Emily and Jessup in this book. (We get only the briefest mention of Jessup!) But it didn’t bother me at all the first time I read The Boggart Fights Back, so I don’t think it’s actually a flaw in this book, just that reading about Emily and Jessup so recently reminded me how much I like them.

Shout out to Captain Macdonald, the captain of Trout’s yacht who is extremely done with everything. Good on you for saving your ship from the Blue Men of the Minch, sir! Please find new and more congenial employment!

At the start of the book, Nessie is still his sookish self from The Boggart and the Monster, but having an outside enemy to fight really cheers him up. By the end he’s cavorting through the loch, a happy mischief-filled boggart once again. Go Nessie!

In the days of my youth, Susan Cooper’s The Boggart was one of my favorite books. Just so much as I loved that book, I loathed and despised the sequel, The Boggart and the Monster. In fact, I loathed and despised it so much that I haven’t reread it for twenty years, so I felt a great curiosity as

littlerhymes and I approached The Boggart and the Monster in the great Cooper reread.

Me, a few chapters in: What did I have against this book? This is great! We’re back in Scotland… Emily and Jessup are in top form… the Boggart is pulling some wonderful tricks…

Two chapters later, after we have made the acquaintance of the Loch Ness Monster: Ah, yes, Nessie is SO pathetic. That’s why I hated this book.

Nessie, it seems, is in fact a boggart, whose castle (that is, the castle of the human family he had attached himself to) was blown up three hundred years ago during one of the Jacobite Uprisings. Distrait, Nessie sunk to the bottom of Loch Ness, and there he has spent the last three hundred years, mostly sleeping, occasionally rising to the surface in the form of a massive plesiosaur, in which shape he has gotten stuck because he’s too sad to shift.

Now I realize that the Boggart himself spent a certain amount of time grieving in The Boggart, too, but he also remained an active spirit of mischief who was having great fun stealing pizza and mucking about with traffic lights. Nessie is simply a sad sack! A wet blanket! “A sook!”

littlerhymes helpfully supplied, a piece of Australian slang that I had never heard before but instantly understood.

Nessie is such a sook that when at last he realizes that he needs to leave Loch Ness (a pair of remote-controlled submersibles are searching the lake for him), he needs five people to help him hold the seal form to swim out. Five people, all thinking constantly of seals for moral support. FIVE!

Rereading this as an adult, I actually did quite enjoy the book. Emily and Jessup remain in fine form, the Boggart has some wonderful fun with the submersibles, Emily and Tommy’s budding romance is cute, and the Scottishness of it all is delicious. And I could see what Cooper was trying to do with Nessie, and even why the boggart PTSD must have seemed like a good idea: “He’s sunk in despair at the bottom of the lake” is a clever way to explain why the Loch Ness Monster is sighted only once in a blue moon.

But it was also just not any fun to read as a kid, and even as an adult I’m kind of reading around the wearisome Nessie portions to enjoy the good bits, which, again, are many. A book is not a curate’s egg, thank god, it can have both good bits and bad.

And now there will be a little hiatus before

littlerhymes and I pick up with The Boggart Fights Back, as we are MEETING UP IN PARIS next week! Land of croissants, here we come!

Although I've enjoyed all the Susan Cooper books that

littlerhymes and I have read, I have also all this time been waiting impatiently for The Boggart. The Boggart was the first Susan Cooper book that I read in my youth; we had it on audiobook, and I listened to it five hundred times, and can still hear the exact intonation of the narrator's voice on certain lines, all of them to do with Emily because Emily was my secret favorite.

But really I love all the characters in this book, except of course the evil Dr. Stigmore, but I love to hate him. Such a good antagonist. The MacDevon dies at the end of the first chapter, but he's such a vivid presence, as indeed is Duncan the Boggart's first friend hundreds of years ago; and I think the description of Duncan MacDevon's funeral, with the drums and the pipers and the procession all taking the clan chieftain to the island of Iona, is the most beautiful in the book, perhaps the most beautiful in any of Cooper's books, and she has many, many beautiful passages.

After the modern MacDevon's death, the distantly related Volnik family in Toronto inherits his castle, a tumbledown place near Port Appin. Kidnapped fans: yes, that Appin, and there's are a number of Kidnapped callbacks that I never appreciated as a child. And the Volnik children Emily and Jessup befriend local boy Tommy Cameron, who takes them around and introduces them to the seals, and Emily gazes into a seal's eyes... a hint at selkie lineage.

When the Volniks head back home, Emily takes a rolltop desk with her (this book introduced me to rolltop desks, and I still lust for one), and accidentally locks the Boggart in one of the compartments.

So the Boggart is off to Toronto! And this becomes a fish-out-of-water story, always one of my favorite kinds of stories, in which the Boggart learns about pizza and peanut butter and computers. I've shared my theory before that children's authors are often, sometimes accidentally, writing about their own childhoods. On the whole, I think this holds true, but this book is an exception to the rule: reading this as a child in the 1990s, it really felt like the nineties, especially in the use of computers. And reading it now, it feels so nineties in a different way. Jessup's black and white monitor! The computer disks!!!

The Boggart is the disembodiment of harmless mischief - but out of his element, dealing with forces he doesn't understand (like, say, the electricity in traffic lights), he sometimes causes harm by mistake. His memory is none too good - here again we have that favorite Cooper theme of forgetting, only this time it's the magical creature forgetting, rather than causing others to forget - but he knows he is out of his element, and he begins to pine for his own home. The way that he communicates this to Emily and Jessup and the way they send him back is - well, I won't spoil it, but it's one of my favorite parts of the book; as beautiful in its own way as Duncan MacDevon's funeral, with the pipers piping as the clan bears the MacDevon's body up and over the hills.

Both

littlerhymes and I had read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence before we embarked on our buddy read. Neither of us, however, had read Seaward, and it turns out to be a fantastic book for a buddy read, because it’s very odd. Mostly in a good way! I think I enjoyed it! But also I’ve had to sit with it for a week after reading it to decide, cautiously, that enjoyment is the right word for it.

In the first chapter of the book, we meet Westerly, who is traveling across a blighted landscape. He catches and eats a fish, then enchants the bones, which call out “in a thin high scream shrilling like a cicada,” which tells Westerly that he’s being followed and must hurry on.

Then, in the next chapter, we meet Cally, who is at home in our world. Her father is very sick, and is taken away to the seaside, and soon after her mother follows. Cally, left alone in her house, hears her mother singing, and the singing goes on and on and on, till Cally presses her hands to the mirror, and “the glass seemed to melt under her hands as if it were water, and took her in, and she stepped through the mirror, out of the room.”

In some ways this is going exactly where you think it’s going: yes, of course they’re going to meet, and yes, of course they’re going to fall in love. Otherwise, though, it’s a strange dreamlike book, a quest story in a way, because both characters are seeking the sea. But they don’t know quite why, or quite how to get there, and they drift through a strange dreamlike land where nothing is quite as it seems. Stones turn into people, people turn into stones, figures stand on the high hills and play chess with armies in the plains below, and one of these chess-players seems to be a friend and the other an enemy… but, all the same, at the end of the day, aren’t they both playing chess?

It’s an unusual book, full of lovely imagery; if you liked the bits I quoted, they are very characteristic of the book as a whole. Not quite like anything else I’ve ever read, and in some ways not wholly satisfying (( spoilers )), but a strange and wonderful experience nonetheless.

Silver on the Tree is the last book in The Dark Is Rising sequence, and also, perhaps, the least. It’s not nearly as well constructed as the other books in the series, and the person who gets the most character arc is poor John Rowland, who learns ( Spoilers ) The children in comparison are pretty static. And I found the climactic battle underwhelming, especially in comparison with the similar combat between the Light and Dark at the end of The Dark Is Rising.

For all that, there are still some lovely descriptions here. Will and Bran’s journey through the Lost Land has a wonderful dreamlike quality, as does the sequence where all the Six finally meet up on the magical train that becomes a boat.

A couple of stray thoughts: in the last chapter, the Lady touches Arthur’s arm with “the casual closeness of those who belong to the same family.” Are the Lady and King Arthur related? Does that mean the Lady… is Morgan le Fay? Or okay, maybe this is more metaphorical and the family they both belong to is simply the side of the Light, but I do love the idea that here one of Arthur’s usually evil sisters is in fact on the side of the angels.

Also, when I started this reread, I had the vague memory that the books hinted at Will/Jane. Now that I’ve finished, I can’t understand how I came to that conclusion, as if the books are purposefully hinting at any pairing, it’s Jane/Bran. Overall, however, the strongest pairing is still perhaps Will/Bran, though moreso in The Grey King than in Silver on the Tree, I think. I feel compelled to give this shipping report even though I came out of the books with no strong shipping feels myself.

Generally, however, any discussion of this book is dominated by discussion of the ending, which of course necessitates another ( spoiler cut )

Years ago, when I was in college, my friend Dorothea recommended The Dark Is Rising sequence to me. “The first book is a slog,” she assured me, “but it starts getting better when Will shows up, and then it gets really good when Bran arrives.”

It is perhaps just as well that I didn’t read the books till after college, because this is almost the opposite of my experience. I enjoyed the first book, where the plucky Drews stumble into a magical adventure while on holiday in Cornwall. Then I slogged through the second book, politely waiting for Will to become even slightly interesting. Then we returned to Cornwall and the Drews and the atmospheric presence of the Greenwitch, so intense that even Will’s dullness couldn’t spoil it! (Sorry, Will.)

Then in The Grey King we lose the Drews again! Fortunately

littlerhymes and I are on the same page that the plucky Drews are where it’s at, and throughout The Grey King we pined for them together.

For all that, I do enjoy this book more than The Dark Is Rising. Bran not only goes some way to counteract Will, but he actually makes Will interesting in spots. I love their meeting on the hillside, when Will at once recognizes Bran as the raven boy, and Bran in return knows Will as an Old One.

This is because Merriman told Bran about Will, but it’s still quite a magical meet-cute, and although I don’t ship it, I can see why Dorothea did. Their friendship is compelling, even more so because of the implied contrast with Bran’s isolation before Will came, which is all the more powerful for being lightly sketched. This makes it especially devastating ( Spoilers )

Just as compelling are Cooper’s landscape descriptions. She is so good at evoking the mood of a place, so that you feel like you’ve been there even if you never have, and at molding the magic of the story to suit the setting. The magic of Wales feels different than the magic of Cornwall.

littlerhymes and I have propounded the theory that there’s a specifically British subgenre of children’s fantasy where the magic is deeply rooted in a very specific locality. Practitioners include Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Jenny Nimmo—perhaps David Almond? It’s been ages since I read Almond’s books, but I remember Skellig and Kit’s Wilderness both having that intensely local quality, which I liked but didn’t fully understand because at eleven I didn’t really grasp that there are different regions within Great Britain that are quite culturally distinct from each other, actually.

And now onward to Silver on the Tree!

In my previous entry about The Dark Is Rising, I commented that for all their supposed opposition, Dark and Light seemed like two sides of the same coin.

duskpeterson pointed out that this is, in fact, the point: as Susan Cooper wrote in an essay later, "The self-righteousness of the Light is no doubt preferable to the depravity of the Dark, but it too holds great dangers."

The series as it turns out is much more enjoyable if you understand that you and Susan Cooper are on the same page about this! (It's funny that I twigged the "two sides of the same coin" issue the first time I read the quintet, but did not at all grasp that it might be intentional. The danger of assigning intentionality to the author!)

littlerhymes and I just finished Greenwitch, which was my favorite on my first go-round a decade ago, and I liked it even more this time.

As Greenwitch opens, the Grail has been stolen, and Simon and Jane and Barnaby Drew are on the way to Cornwall with their Great-Uncle Merriman on a quest to get it back... only they discover, when they arrive, that Merriman has invited along one Will Stanton, who is evidently expected to take part in their adventure.

But they have little time to indulge their outrage, because very soon after their arrival, Jane is invited to attend the Greenwitch ceremony. Every year, the women of Trewissick make a Greenwitch, a figure of hazel and hawthorn which will be thrown into the sea. A wicker man figure, only the element of human sacrifice has long since dropped out, leaving only the brooding creature of leaves and sticks.

Before the Greenwitch is tossed into the sea, the women at the ceremony can touch it and make a wish. Jane, struck by the power and isolation of the creature, impulsively says, "I wish you could be happy."

And the Greenwitch, touched by Jane's good wishes, comes to Jane that night in a dream. Beneath the waves, near the cliffs, where the children lost the cipher that went with the Grail last year, the Greenwitch has found a secret...

I love a wicker man story, and this is such an unusual and lovely take, with the emphasis on the loneliness of the Greenwitch. The Cornwall setting is evocative, as is Will and Merriman's visit to the deep ocean (and the comment by Tethys, the queen of the deep, that Merriman came fifteen hundred years before with another boy - hi Arthur!). And I enjoyed also the representative of the Dark in this book, a modern artist who is, as Barney-the-budding-artist notes repeatedly, tremendously talented: it's not that modern art is inherently depraved, but that any art can be twisted to foul ends. And this artist is twisting his talent so that his paintings are not paintings, but spells in the service of the Dark.

In the end, the painter makes an evil painting that summons the Greenwitch from the deep, and demands of her the secret. But he is only a lesser minion of the Dark, and he's overplayed his hand: he can't control the Greenwitch, and she breaks free and unleashes on the town old memories of times past, times when the town was sacked by Vikings and the local smugglers taken by revenue cutters.

At this point, Will, Merriman, and their Old One ally Captain Toms show up, and try to convince the Greenwitch to give them the secret. But she refuses. "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 remembers that someone did show her care - Jane showed her care. And so, in a classic fairy tale twist, the Greenwitch gives Jane the secret. That bit of human kindness is repaid hundredfold, where all the powers of Dark and Light availed naught.

Another picture book by Susan Cooper! This time, The Selkie Girl, a classic retelling of a selkie story, which is one of those stories that speaks to my soul and someday I would like to do to a retelling of my own, although the whole "and then the selkie swam away in the blue water" is a tough ending for a romance novel...

Anyway, as I was saying, this is a classic selkie story: the naked selkie singing on the rocks, the fisherman who steals her skin, she lives with him in his cottage till the day one of her children asks, “Why is my father keeping an old sealskin in our wall?”

At which the selkie leaves the oatcakes, and goes out to fetch her skin, for she must leave them now. “I have five children in the sea and five on the land,” she tells her land-children. “And that is a hard case to be in.”

(I don’t believe I’ve seen a version where the selkie mentions having sea-children. Perhaps it’s meant to soften the blow as she leaves her land children behind.)

Unfortunately Warwick Hutton’s illustrations are not in a style that particularly appeals to me – doubly unfortunately, since he also illustrated Cooper’s book The Silver Cow: A Welsh Tale! I thought the book would have benefited from something a bit more delicate and detailed. But at the end of the day, I can’t complain too much, for it’s still a selkie story.

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?

This Dark Is Rising reread inspired me to check out Susan Cooper’s other novels, which is how I discovered (a) there is a second Susan Cooper, and only some libraries distinguish the two in their catalogs, and (b) the right Susan Cooper has a thriving side gig in picture books.

I started out with The Word Pirates, illustrated by Steven Kellogg (who I knew previously through his folktale retellings of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed; he’s got a very distinctive style). The Word Pirates sail the world, sending their Bumblebirds to steal words fresh off the page so the pirates can eat them! (The crew likes short, crunchy words, with milk.) But one day they learn of “a Word Wizard, a zany New Zealander,” and go off to steal words from her stories, only to discover that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.

The Word Wizard wears a rainbow wig when she reads her stories to delighted children. “Is it,” I asked, “Can it be…”

The dedication made it clear that indeed it is! “Dear Margaret Mahy, We made this book for you because you were certainly A WRITER WIZARD. And because we miss you. Love from Susan and Steven.”

Isn’t that lovely? The book was published a few years after Mahy died, and it’s nice to see such a charming story to honor her legacy.

The young reader works in mysterious ways. Even though I loved Susan Cooper’s The Boggart and King of Shadows, and even though we had a box set of The Dark Is Rising for my entire childhood—and even though I first started my Newbery project when I was eleven, and the fourth book won a Newbery Award!—I didn’t read The Dark Is Rising quintet until after college.

Now

littlerhymes and I are rereading it together, starting of course with Over Sea, Under Stone. My recollection is that this book has a very different feel from the rest of the series—not that the rest of the series is all of a piece, either; I’ve always found that interesting about it, that the books should feel so different from each other, it really feels like it just grew.

This one has that very distinctive mid-twentieth century British children’s adventure story feel, like Arthur Ransome, only with some magic coming at the end. Simon, Jane, and Barney are on holiday in Cornwall, staying in a big old house that their parents have rented. They decide to play explorers, and in the process of exploring they stumble upon a strange old map, covered with writing in a language they don’t recognize…

Fortunately their Great Uncle Merry is an Indiana Jones type, a professor who is always dashing about the globe finding treasure, and translating the strange script on the map is a mere bagatelle for him. And it turns out that the map leads to the Holy Grail, which Great Uncle Merry has been looking for himself. But so have his enemies (enemies of the Grail itself), who have been following Great Uncle Merry in hopes that he’ll lead them to it, and now that the children have found the map, Great Uncle Merry takes it upon himself to try to lead these enemies astray so the children will have a free hand to search…

It’s often a difficulty in children’s adventure stories to get the adults out of the way so the children can take a central part in the action, and this particular excuse in Over Sea, Under Stone has always seemed a bit thin to me. Of course it ends up with the children in great danger.

In general I feel this book, indeed the whole series, is best read not for the plot (which often doesn’t make a lot of sense) but for the atmosphere: the fascinating old house with its nautical theme, the Cornish coast in the moonlight, the children clambering around the headland on the seaweed-clogged rocks at the lowest tide of the year; the search through the cave for the Grail, with only a box of damp matches and a soggy candle to light the way.

I approached Susan Cooper’s The Boggart Fights Back with trepidation, because it’s been it’s been almost thirty years since the first Boggart book was published, and I wasn’t too fond of the first sequel, The Boggart and the Monster...

But in the end I couldn’t resist, and it was delightful. (In fact, it was so delightful I might need to reread The Boggart and the Monster: perhaps I was unfair to it.) Twins Jay and Allie Cameron have come to spend two weeks in Scotland with their grandfather, only to discover that Castle Keep is in danger of being turned into a resort by a loudmouth American developer, Trout, who talks like this: “It’s going to be environmentally perfect. I’ve built resorts all over the world, and I’ve had many, many environmental awards.”

“He’s Trump,” I bleated, as I read his superlative-laden dialogue. “Oh my God, it’s Trump.”

You will be unsurprised to learn that Trout’s resorts have earned no environmental awards. Instead, they destroy local ecosystems. Moreover, despite his nattering about creating jobs, he actually brings in his own people to his resorts and leaves the locals out in the cold.

Fortunately, Castle Keep is the ancestral home of the boggart, who cannot but rise to his home’s defense. Trout/Trump is thoroughly routed by the boggart and the boggart’s cousin Nessie (a boggart who was the Loch Ness Monster for a few centuries), with a little assistance from the Cameron twins (and cameos from many beloved characters from the original Boggart books). They eventually recruit a Nuckelavee, and let me tell you, it’s VERY satisfying to see Trout nearly drowned by a horse demon.

Even aside from this real-world resonance, there are some beautiful scenes in this book. I particularly loved the part where Jay begins to sing a Scottish ballad about routing an English general, and as the song goes on and the other characters add their voices and eventually the boggarts join in with the sound of bagpipes, and the song is more than just a song, it’s knitting everyone together in preparation for the battle that lies ahead.

One other thing I did on the camping trip is finally finish The Dark is Rising sequence, which was great fun even if it did take the series a few books to get going. I liked the first book’s jolly English adventure story air, thought the second and third were rather a slog, and quite enjoyed the final two even though Will Stanton remains as dull as two posts.

And even though the ending is the worst ending ever, OMG, disapprove times a million, I intend to pretend the last two pages never occurred.

( Spoilers, obviously )

So yeah. I’m glad I finally read the Dark is Rising sequence, if only because I’ve been meaning to for lo these many years, but they aren’t a patch on The Boggart or King of Shadows for my favorite Susan Cooper books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Grey King. It took four books, but finally I understand why people feel such great devotion to The Dark is Rising sequence, because this book was pretty awesome. My friend Dorothea said things would get good when Bran arrived, and lo! she was right.

Also ( spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Have you been yearning for fantasy set in an African-inspired world about a shy girl with vines in her hair who finds out she can fly? If any part of that sounds appealing to you, then I’ve been reading a book that I think you will like: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu’s Zahrah the Windseeker.

Dear Reader,

My name is Zahrah Tsami. This is my story. As many of you may know (and some of you may not, for who knows how far this book has come), I decided to write this book because of the stupid photos published in the Ooni Inquirer....Yes, it was Dari and me in those photos. Yes, I can fly. No, I am not a witch, a jini, or a ghost posing as my living self. I am a Windseeker. And no matter where you’re from, I want you to understand it well.

Sincerely,
Zahrah Tsami

That’s the introduction. Don’t you just want to run out and read it now?

What I’m Reading Next

Probably Sherri L. Smith’s Flygirl, about a light-skinned black woman during World War II who pretends to be white so she can join the WASPs. World War II! Airplanes! Women pilots! ALL THE THINGS.

I have been meaning to read this book forever - this is the summer of reading books I have been meaning to read forever - I should probably get around to Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter, too. I liked Sunshine very much, although I couldn’t get into the Damar books.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: susan cooper

Wednesday Reading Meme on Thursday

Book Review: King of Shadows

Wednesday Reading Meme

Book Review: Dawn of Fear

Wednesday Reading Meme

Picture Book Monday: Tam Lin

Book Review: The Boggart Fights Back

Book Review: The Boggart and the Monster

Book Review: The Boggart

Book Review: Seaward

Book Review: Silver on the Tree

Book Review: The Grey King

Book Review: Greenwitch

Picture Book Monday: The Selkie Girl

Book Review: The Dark Is Rising

Picture Book Monday: The Word Pirates

Book Review: Over Sea, Under Stone