Two little boys
Sep. 1st, 2019 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIn the Classics corner, we have Will, who is within days of his eleventh birthday. Will is the youngest of nine, and the seventh son of a seventh son: he lives with his mother, father and many elder siblings in the Thames valley, near Windsor. Will's quest is to assemble the six signs, and so oppose the Rising of the Dark. To accomplish this, he has the assistance of a number of powerful immortals, because Will is the last of the Old Ones.
In the New corner, Oliver is twelve years old. He lives with his mother, who is currently away helping his sister with the new baby, in a village called Loosestrife. Oliver's quest is to go to the Rainblade Mountains and bring back the rain. To accomplish this, he has the assistance of his familiar, who is an armadillo, because Oliver is a very minor mage.
I didn't set out to perform a comparative reading of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising and T. Kingfisher's Minor Mage. I have been wanting to re-read The Dark is Rising for some time now, not because I loved it on first reading, but because I didn't. That first reading was a long time ago (I thought I had read it as a child, but the copyright date tells me that that isn't possible) and I have heard nothing but good about it since. A conversation at the Diana Wynne Jones conference reminded me of this (and encouraged me to start here, rather than with the first book of the sequence), so I ordered a copy. And because the internet told me that there was a new book - an actual, made of paper, book - available from the fabuloustkingfisher, I ordered that, too.
My copy of The Dark is Rising is the Penguin Vintage edition. I'm failing to persuade DW to display the cover image, but it makes me wonder whether the artist shares my misgivings about the story: it shows a well-wrapped small boy standing in the snow, cheeks pink, mouth downturned, eyes sidelong. Behind him, silhouetted against a huge moon, birds fly up from a clump of bare trees, and a dark figure rides a rearing horse.
He does not look happy, or excited, or brave: hr looks apprehensive. I know that apprehension is a legitimate literary mode, and that many people enjoy it: I am not one of them, and this was why I found myself reading two books in parallel, something I very rarely do. The first two chapters of The Dark is Rising, the day and the night before Will's birthday, are so charged with dread, the fear Will engenders in even the most familiar domestic animals, the terror that engulfs him as the storm batters at his bedroom, the threat that "This night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining," that I really did not want any more of this for my bedtime reading. In fact, I need not have worried: nothing that follows was as frightening as those opening chapters.
This is praise, in its way: it is in the everyday family life that the book comes to life for me, the bustle of a large family, the interplay of the siblings, each with their own character, the excitement of snowfall and the rituals of Christmas. Always winter, and always Christmas, too: I'll stretch a point and admit that my enjoyment of the carol singing includes the timeslip at the Manor, where Miss Greythorne presides through the centuries (why do I associate Miss Greythorne with The Little White Horse?): but I would prefer it not to be interrupted by Will's education as an Old One, magically absorbed from the Book of Gramarye. Will's passivity disturbs me: this is no way to acquire an education. But it is characteristic of his rôle as SignSeeker, for in fact he dies not seek the signs, he simply finds them, or is given them, or watches as they are placed where he will later find them (as happens in this episode with the sign of wood). Less is asked of Will than is asked of Hawkin, for Hawkin is "only a man", but he is given a task at which it is possible for him to fail; Will seems to face greater opponents, but he never faces them alone, for there is always an adult, a fellow Old One, there to guide and support him.
There are advantages, as well as disadvantages, to reducing the dangers to which you expose your child protagonist. I wondered as I read whether my unease at Will's youth was a result of my reading as an adult, and thought of Neil Gaiman's comments about Coraline that children were happy to read it as an exciting adventure in which a brave little girl does the right things, whereas adults were upset at the story of a child in danger (I was amused to discover, in the Acknowledgements to Minor Mage, that Ms. Kingfisher had had the same argument with her editors). I think it's worse than that: that as a 21st century reader, what I saw was a child being groomed by a group of adults, for their own, albeit non-sexual purposes, separated from his family, told he is special, taught secret knowledge...
In short, I know The Dark is Rising is a classic, I can see some of what makes it a classic, but I continue not to love it. Whereas Minor Mage is not necessarily Ursula Vernon's greatest work, but it is full of delights. Oliver is an endearing, resourceful, responsible twelve year old; his familiar is an armadillo, and what's not to like about that? And, while it would be a pity to spoiler this, there's a ballad motif which gets the full 'Ursula Vernon snarks about fairy tales' treatment.
In the New corner, Oliver is twelve years old. He lives with his mother, who is currently away helping his sister with the new baby, in a village called Loosestrife. Oliver's quest is to go to the Rainblade Mountains and bring back the rain. To accomplish this, he has the assistance of his familiar, who is an armadillo, because Oliver is a very minor mage.
I didn't set out to perform a comparative reading of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising and T. Kingfisher's Minor Mage. I have been wanting to re-read The Dark is Rising for some time now, not because I loved it on first reading, but because I didn't. That first reading was a long time ago (I thought I had read it as a child, but the copyright date tells me that that isn't possible) and I have heard nothing but good about it since. A conversation at the Diana Wynne Jones conference reminded me of this (and encouraged me to start here, rather than with the first book of the sequence), so I ordered a copy. And because the internet told me that there was a new book - an actual, made of paper, book - available from the fabulous
tkingfisher, I ordered that, too.My copy of The Dark is Rising is the Penguin Vintage edition. I'm failing to persuade DW to display the cover image, but it makes me wonder whether the artist shares my misgivings about the story: it shows a well-wrapped small boy standing in the snow, cheeks pink, mouth downturned, eyes sidelong. Behind him, silhouetted against a huge moon, birds fly up from a clump of bare trees, and a dark figure rides a rearing horse.
He does not look happy, or excited, or brave: hr looks apprehensive. I know that apprehension is a legitimate literary mode, and that many people enjoy it: I am not one of them, and this was why I found myself reading two books in parallel, something I very rarely do. The first two chapters of The Dark is Rising, the day and the night before Will's birthday, are so charged with dread, the fear Will engenders in even the most familiar domestic animals, the terror that engulfs him as the storm batters at his bedroom, the threat that "This night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining," that I really did not want any more of this for my bedtime reading. In fact, I need not have worried: nothing that follows was as frightening as those opening chapters.
This is praise, in its way: it is in the everyday family life that the book comes to life for me, the bustle of a large family, the interplay of the siblings, each with their own character, the excitement of snowfall and the rituals of Christmas. Always winter, and always Christmas, too: I'll stretch a point and admit that my enjoyment of the carol singing includes the timeslip at the Manor, where Miss Greythorne presides through the centuries (why do I associate Miss Greythorne with The Little White Horse?): but I would prefer it not to be interrupted by Will's education as an Old One, magically absorbed from the Book of Gramarye. Will's passivity disturbs me: this is no way to acquire an education. But it is characteristic of his rôle as SignSeeker, for in fact he dies not seek the signs, he simply finds them, or is given them, or watches as they are placed where he will later find them (as happens in this episode with the sign of wood). Less is asked of Will than is asked of Hawkin, for Hawkin is "only a man", but he is given a task at which it is possible for him to fail; Will seems to face greater opponents, but he never faces them alone, for there is always an adult, a fellow Old One, there to guide and support him.
There are advantages, as well as disadvantages, to reducing the dangers to which you expose your child protagonist. I wondered as I read whether my unease at Will's youth was a result of my reading as an adult, and thought of Neil Gaiman's comments about Coraline that children were happy to read it as an exciting adventure in which a brave little girl does the right things, whereas adults were upset at the story of a child in danger (I was amused to discover, in the Acknowledgements to Minor Mage, that Ms. Kingfisher had had the same argument with her editors). I think it's worse than that: that as a 21st century reader, what I saw was a child being groomed by a group of adults, for their own, albeit non-sexual purposes, separated from his family, told he is special, taught secret knowledge...
In short, I know The Dark is Rising is a classic, I can see some of what makes it a classic, but I continue not to love it. Whereas Minor Mage is not necessarily Ursula Vernon's greatest work, but it is full of delights. Oliver is an endearing, resourceful, responsible twelve year old; his familiar is an armadillo, and what's not to like about that? And, while it would be a pity to spoiler this, there's a ballad motif which gets the full 'Ursula Vernon snarks about fairy tales' treatment.
