Beyond Selidor

My living room is full of lit candles, I've broken out the sloe gin for the first time this year, and daylight saving time ended last night. I'm not really one for Halloween (although I love seeing photos of friends' small children dressed up in adorable costumes), but I am very much one for marking arbitrary turning points in the year with my own invented rituals.

And so, this year, I decided that I would not limit my annual Susan Cooper reread to The Dark Is Rising at the height of midwinter. Instead, I would add to that by reading all five books in Cooper's sequence at the times during which their action takes place. The books in this series are as grounded in time — the turning points of the seasons — as they are in place, so much so that it would be impossible to switch out one book for another (moving Over Sea, Under Stone to autumn, for example, or Greenwitch to high summer). The stories they tell wouldn't work at any other time of the year.

The Grey King, is, above all things, a ghost story. Folkloric 'Sleepers' wake at the call of a magical harp and ride the land again, driving out evil. Will Stanton, the lonely child hero of the series, chases after the ghosts of old Arthuriana, hovering at the edge of his supernatural awareness. And, at the heart of novel are the unquiet ghosts of the past — family secrets, hidden small-scale conflicts in a Welsh farming community, a lonely boy bewildered by his confusing heritage, and the pain all this causes by being left unacknowledged by all concerned. Everyone in this book is haunted, and its story could not be told at any time other than the days on either side of 31st October. The Dark Is Rising sequence is at its strongest when it weaves the personal and domestic with the supernatural, the human with the cosmic struggle between the dark and light, and it does so with particular poignancy in this book.

The Grey King is, in my opinion, the heaviest of Cooper's works in this series. It's still a children's book, and so good must triumph in the end, but here the triumph feels particularly hard won, like coming up for air for one exhausted last breath before the next onslaught, a temporary respite from the storm. There is hope, yes, but it's the hope that comes from surviving to fight another day, and the weary knowledge that each battle is getting harder, and taking more and more of a toll. It's a beautiful book, but not a restful one — the literary equivalent of the end of daylight saving time, and the knowledge that the dark of night will last a little longer every day for some months now.

I'm so glad I chose to reread this perceptive, melancholy little book today.

I've got a life post, a post about my birthday books (where I mostly whine at Robert Harris for the audacity of not being Steven Saylor) and an announcement post on Longvision.

Here's Neil Gaiman being awesome (when is he not, really?). Here is Justine Larbalestier's list of new blogs she discovered in 2009. I'll probably end up following lots of them.

My mum emailed me the link to this great New York Times article about Katherine Paterson, the new 'ambassador of children's literature' in the US. Her advice? Spend time reading to your children. I love Paterson. Her novel Of Nightingales That Weep was a staple of my childhood. I could probably quote it from cover to cover if I thought about it.

Finally, Jo Walton (papersky) wrote a beautiful post about The Dark Is Rising on Tor.com. Until I got back to the UK, where it is currently blanketed with snow, I didn't appreciate one of the major plot points of the eponymous second book in this series: snow, when you're in England, is sinister and scary. There's something very offputting about the way it swallows sound, the way it makes the landscape harsh and hostile. Walton makes the important point that this excellent series is heavily rooted in the land - Cornwall, Wales and the south of England (near Windsor), and until I lived in England, I didn't really understand quite how accurate Cooper's depictions of these places were.

Some of these links are quite old, but I thought you should read them if you haven't already.