The Dark is Rising

"Yes. This is a story about a boy who comes of age. It’s around his eleventh birthday, which coincides with the winter solstice. It’s a book that’s very British – some people think of it as English, but there’s quite a heavy Welsh aspect to it, too – depicting a dark, folkloric, oppressive coming-into-reality that children go through. I think it’s one of the reasons why I felt attuned to it as a child: it marks the character’s move into adulthood too young, and an understanding of the world that takes away all of the certainties and the pleasantnesses, and replaces them with dark, historic, unpleasant facts about the past and about the way the world is. Essentially, he’s a character who understands that he has a role in keeping back the dark. There are two sides in the books, the light and the dark, and the magic that goes along with those things is often tied in with the magical landscape – standing stones and stone circles and Arthurian legend and Cornwall. The book before, Over Sea, Under Stone , is mostly set in Cornwall and has to do with Arthurian legend – and rather than being things that you can stick on a tea towel and sell by the seaside, the myth and legends of Britain are understood as an unpleasant closeness and threat. The darkness had never gone away, and the obligation to fight it back had never gone away. And as a child, the character is given a sense of happiness and homeliness against which these terrible facts about the past rise up. I think one of the things that fantasy is good at, without freaking everybody out too much by giving them argument, is allegorizing our relationship with our world in particular ways. For me as a kid, The Dark Is Rising really allegorized my passing from a state of childish lack of knowledge, into understanding that the world was a terrible and dark place with a horrible history, and all of the obligations to fight against that hadn’t gone away. We hadn’t won, and there was instead this terrible looming, foreboding sense that you’re going to be aggressed against by the forces of the past and of darkness. That in general seems to be oppressing me still now, particularly in things that I write. Trying to think about what I write, why I do it, I think it’s that gloomy, beautiful, situated, historic, allegorization of, you know, the nightmare of existence… It is. That darkness against the homeliness and the pleasures of family is one of the things that Susan Cooper does really well. Uncle Merry, for example, is a figure that everyone’s delighted to see, and he’s full of good cheer and all of that kind of stuff. But he also forces them to do some terrible things, and to confront terrible facts about their own existence in the world as it is, and is forcing them not to be children – pushing them into responsibilities and situations which adults would find frightening, let alone children. Now I think I’m wondering whether I just copied everything from The Dark Is Rising without realising it… But it’s that sense of having obligations that the adult world brings in on you, that undermines but also makes shine out the pleasantness and cosiness of the world. Yes. They’re all standalones, essentially, and The Dark Is Rising is where things really took off for me. It was still a little bit Five-Go-Wild-in-Dorset -ish in the first book, I thought. There were dark aspects, in that they were chased by sinister figures, but it was largely more of a holiday-adventure type book. But The Dark Is Rising was where it started to get very much darker."

"A variation on Merlin also appears in The Dark is Rising , and other Arthurian characters will appear throughout the series. The Dark is Rising is actually the second book of the series, but much like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe , it dominates its predecessor – Over Sea, Under Stone – in popular imagination. It is also much better than Over Sea, Under Stone , and there’s a special fascination in reading one after the other – and imagining what happened in the interim, when Susan Cooper took herself from a competent writer of magical capers to a compelling narrator of myth-like, atmospheric, under-explained epics. Will Stanton is the seventh son of the seventh son, and coming into his powers in a snow-buried village in Buckinghamshire round the mid-Winter solstice. He learns that he is the latest instantiation of one of the Old Ones, and locked in an ancient battle between Light and Dark. He needs to obtain certain signs, and keep them from the Dark Rider. This central story is a textbook fantasy quest. But the book is brought to life by the contrast between this deeply unsettling magical world, which Will is assured he has inhabited before and must now re-inherit, and the world where we first found him: the hordes of siblings preparing for Christmas, wassailing and wrapping presents and worrying about the logistics of journeys through the snow. Both worlds are happening at once, and some characters can cross between the two. Whenever Will is cosy at home, we are wondering if he will shortly need to confront a magical foe he barely understands. Best read around Christmas time, somewhere snug."