(Re-)reading: The Dark is Rising
Dec. 24th, 2017 11:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartThe Dark is Rising has been one of my favourite books ever since I first read it aged about seven. Given its midwinter setting, it's a book I often re-read at Christmas, though I hadn't done so for a few years; the last time I tried was in 2010, when it snowed heavily the weekend before Christmas and the snow didn't melt until almost New Year, and somehow having actual snow outside and bitter cold instead of the normal damp mild greyness of December made it seem far too bleak and real, and I had to put it aside and didn't go back to it for a few years.
This year, though, Robert Macfarlane is running a Twitter readalong (hashtag #theDarkisReading) and I was inspired to get out my copy and join in. Some people are reading strictly by day, but I tend not to read multiple books at the same time and decided I would read straight through (a decision I was quite pleased with when I remembered that it skips straight from Christmas Day to Twelfth Night, by which time I will be back at work and no longer in the mood for Christmas re-reads).
More that 35 years after I first read it, The Dark is Rising still holds up pretty well. There is a sense of real menace in the Dark's manipulation of the weather and the way they can entice ordinary people into working for them, and the depiction of Will's family Christmas is magical, and sets the standard which my own Christmases never live up to. I really like the way that, unlike so many protagonists of children's fantasy, Will isn't an isolated child who has always felt different, and isn't thrilled to find out that he's special; until his eleventh birthday, he's a very ordinary boy from a large, loving family and his struggle to reconcile his desire for normality with being an Old One is one of the recurrent themes of the series. It isn't perfect; like so many children's books of its era, it is set very firmly in a cosy rural Home Counties England with a very clear social hierarchy - Miss Greythorne at the Manor at the top, the middle-class Stantons below her, and the farmers and farmworkers below them again. On this readthrough, I also noticed that there are things Will can do, despite being newly awakened to his powers, that the older Old Ones of the village - Farmer Dawson, Old George and John the Smith - can't, and I think it's clearly implied that the Gift of Gramarye is only given to certain Old Ones, not to all of them; presumably a middle-class grammar-school boy is better suited to this than a farmer, even an immortal farmer with supernatural powers. And even though there are women among the Old Ones (the Lady, Miss Greythorne and John Smith's wife who never even gets given a name) they play a very limited role in the story, with most of the action being given to the men. Also, the more I read it the more I am struck by the ruthlessness of the Light; just as much as the Dark, they are convinced of their rightness and happy to use ordinary people to achieve their ends. (Having watched The Last Jedi this week as well, I can't help feeling that there are more than passing similarities between the Light and the Jedi Order.)
As always with a re-read, I notice new things each time. Among the things that particularly struck me this time was the description of the fear the Dark attack Will with the night before his birthday ('a dreadful darkness in his mind, a sense of looking into a great black pit'), because that's a feeling I'm increasingly familiar with myself and exactly how I describe it. I also noted a few mentions of how Time appears to the Old Ones that reminded me strongly of Four Quartets: 'For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future...', and the chapter "The King of Fire and Water", set in a flooded, transfigured Thames Valley, feels like it must have been an inspiration for the second half of Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage.
This year, though, Robert Macfarlane is running a Twitter readalong (hashtag #theDarkisReading) and I was inspired to get out my copy and join in. Some people are reading strictly by day, but I tend not to read multiple books at the same time and decided I would read straight through (a decision I was quite pleased with when I remembered that it skips straight from Christmas Day to Twelfth Night, by which time I will be back at work and no longer in the mood for Christmas re-reads).
More that 35 years after I first read it, The Dark is Rising still holds up pretty well. There is a sense of real menace in the Dark's manipulation of the weather and the way they can entice ordinary people into working for them, and the depiction of Will's family Christmas is magical, and sets the standard which my own Christmases never live up to. I really like the way that, unlike so many protagonists of children's fantasy, Will isn't an isolated child who has always felt different, and isn't thrilled to find out that he's special; until his eleventh birthday, he's a very ordinary boy from a large, loving family and his struggle to reconcile his desire for normality with being an Old One is one of the recurrent themes of the series. It isn't perfect; like so many children's books of its era, it is set very firmly in a cosy rural Home Counties England with a very clear social hierarchy - Miss Greythorne at the Manor at the top, the middle-class Stantons below her, and the farmers and farmworkers below them again. On this readthrough, I also noticed that there are things Will can do, despite being newly awakened to his powers, that the older Old Ones of the village - Farmer Dawson, Old George and John the Smith - can't, and I think it's clearly implied that the Gift of Gramarye is only given to certain Old Ones, not to all of them; presumably a middle-class grammar-school boy is better suited to this than a farmer, even an immortal farmer with supernatural powers. And even though there are women among the Old Ones (the Lady, Miss Greythorne and John Smith's wife who never even gets given a name) they play a very limited role in the story, with most of the action being given to the men. Also, the more I read it the more I am struck by the ruthlessness of the Light; just as much as the Dark, they are convinced of their rightness and happy to use ordinary people to achieve their ends. (Having watched The Last Jedi this week as well, I can't help feeling that there are more than passing similarities between the Light and the Jedi Order.)
As always with a re-read, I notice new things each time. Among the things that particularly struck me this time was the description of the fear the Dark attack Will with the night before his birthday ('a dreadful darkness in his mind, a sense of looking into a great black pit'), because that's a feeling I'm increasingly familiar with myself and exactly how I describe it. I also noted a few mentions of how Time appears to the Old Ones that reminded me strongly of Four Quartets: 'For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future...', and the chapter "The King of Fire and Water", set in a flooded, transfigured Thames Valley, feels like it must have been an inspiration for the second half of Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage.
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