Compulsory Christmas Eve Post 2019!

Last year at this time I was celebrating Jolabokaflod, the Icelandic Christmas Eve, where you exchange books as gifts and spend the evening reading something new. For family reasons, I haven’t had the time to go out book shopping, so I’ve decided to reread something special, and very suitable for Christmas reading: Susan Cooper’s wonderful The Dark Is Rising, the title volume of the five book series. I may even see if I can get it read in a single sitting. 

I’ve posted about this before, so I will keep it short. However, no harm in talking about my memories of my first reading. It was in the late 1970s, when I was just starting out as a young teacher. I’d already read the first book in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone. That one was definitely a children’s book, with the standard story about kids having an adventure while on holiday. The Dark Is Rising has more of the flavour of YA fiction, even though the hero, Will Stanton, is only eleven. See, he turns eleven early on and finds himself one of a group called the Old Ones, and has responsibilities no ordinary eleven year old has. Basically, he is helping to save the world from the Dark, and he can’t share that with his siblings or parents. That does age him. 

The last two books in the series come out while I was beginning my teaching career, and it felt like  everyone at that school, staff and students alike, was reading them. I remember seeing the fourth book, The Grey King, at my local bookshop while the publisher’s agent was showing it to the bookseller. I got so excited, the man from the publisher gave me the book! I still have it. 

 The Dark Is Rising is more or less standalone, in that you could simply read this one and not feel anything was missing. Possibly it’s because the previous novel is the first about the Drew children, this is the first about Will Stanton. 

Will Stanton, the last of the Old Ones, discovers this soon before Christmas. He is picking up several tokens in the course of the novel, circles with crosses in them, which will help him do the task he has been set. 

And the Dark want the tokens and they want to stop him. 

It’s full of folklore, and there is a wonderful climax, with the Wild Hunt led by Herne, pouring rain and melting snow, and a mysterious mask...

Amazing to think that the British author of such a very British story was living in the US when she wrote it. 

I’ve also downloaded an audiobook to listen to in bed, a dramatised version of Susan Cooper’s later novel, King Of Shadows, in which a young American boy, in a London with a troupe of boy actors to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream, finds himself in Shakespeare’s London and performing the same play with Shakespeare’s company. There is a good reason for making the hero American. He is from North Carolina, where there are people whose accents are actually closer to the British accents of Shakespeare’s time than modern British accents. It was a beautiful novel - so nice to know Susan Cooper didn’t go downhill after her most popular series. 

So, I’m off to wash and curl up with Cooper’s Christmas classic and listen to a dramatised version of another of her great books.

Good night!