TDIRS: Over Sea, Under Stone

[truepenny]

Continuing my new theme (and I apologize if people are getting ready to tear their hair out from sheer boredom), I'm starting a reread of The Dark Is Rising Sequence. Unlike with the Narnia books, this isn't the first time I've read TDIRS as an adult, but it is the first time I've read it paying attention to anything beyond the story.

I'm taking the books one at a time.

[ETA: Works Cited! I can't believe I forgot the Works Cited! Bad Truepenny! No cookie!]

[ETA2: removing The Hobbit from my contextualization, because papersky pointed out to me that, in fact, The Hobbit was first published in 1937, and therefore it provides historical background, not contemporary context. My edition of The Hobbit was published in 1966 and is mysteriously silent about its past.]


OSUS was published in 1965 (for context, the Chronicles of Narnia were published between 1950 and 1956, The Book of Three was published in 1964, and A Wizard of Earthsea was published in 1968). Now, I don't think there's really a great deal to be gained by a comparison between TDIRS and The Chronicles of Narnia, because Cooper and Lewis are doing such exceedingly different things. But, since I've been talking about Lewis and female characters, and since that's one of the things I particularly want to address about Cooper (especially Greenwitch), I'm going to start by instituting some comparisons, odorous though Dogberry reminds me they are.

So. We have, in Simon, Jane, and Barney Drew, a fairly tidy parallel with Peter, Susan, and Lucy Pevensie. There is no Edmund here, no Bad Egg. And Barney, like Lucy, is a dreamer, sensitive to the otherworldly. Simon, like Peter, is the eldest; like Peter, he tends to be the leader. As I've been saying in comments to my last Narnia post--along with some rank nonsense about Susan Walker, sorry, yonmei!--Jane, like Susan Pevensie, tends to get saddled with what I've been calling the Voice of Adult Reasonableness. Barney and Lucy are the youngest children, able to hare off into danger as they please, although both of them learn that there are repercussions for rashness.

But this nice, tidy, simple parallel is all wrong. Simon is no Peter, no hero. It's Simon who's ready to surrender to Mr. Hastings at the end. And Simon, deftly characterized, is just a bit of a prick, a know-it-all, practicing up for an adult career as a pompous rationalist. (Oh, it's coming. You can see it. But I hope that the events of TDIRS deflect it.) Jane tends to voice the collective child's conscience, the we'll get in trouble that lurks in the background of every childhood escapade. Real responsibility seems to be traded back and forth between Jane and Simon. And Barney's dreamy-headed recklessness isn't merely a function of being youngest (and okay, yes, I am looking ahead to the other books when I say this), but is part of who he is, the dreamy, mystical side of his nature that is leading him towards being an artist. And it doesn't, mercifully, make Barney better in any way than Jane or Simon; as the youngest child, he is legitimately a brat.

And in all other respects, Cooper's project is quite different from Lewis's. She creates no separate world like Narnia, although the books are full of reminders that the past is a different country (and in Cooper's vision more fraught with magic); the quests that her child-protagonists go on have everything to do with the struggle between Good and Evil but very little, in my reading, to do with religion per se. And just as her books do not posit a distinct boundary between the "real" world and the magical world, so too are the distinctions between children and adults persistently blurred. (This comes into play much more obviously once Will Stanton makes his entrance, but it is there from the beginning if it happens to be something you're paying attention to.) Children, like adults may be villainous (Bill Hoover); adults have their own agendas (the little details of the adult Drews trying to have their vacation around their rambunctious offspring are perfectly veristic, especially Dr. Drew's wrath at poor Rufus). Adults are deceivers--Mr. Hastings lying by telling the exact truth for one, Mrs. Palk for the other. I find Mrs. Palk almost unbearably sinister now, reading with foreknowledge, because I know that motherly housekeeper routine is just an act, and it gives me the creeping crawling horrors. It's the subversion of nurturing into controlling, and that's frightening.

But adults, like children, are not necessarily pure evil. The Drews are quite sure that Bill has been entranced (in a non-magical sense, although the other may apply) by Polly Withers, and it's clear he's not terribly bright. And Mr. Penhallow explains Mrs. Palk to us: "Nice lass she used to be--still is, but she turned a bit miserly when old Jim Palk died. Costing your mum and dad a pretty penny, I'll be bound. Do anything for a few extra pound, would old Moll" (OSUS 169). Simple human greed is behind Mrs. Palk's treachery.

Men and women seem to embody equal, if different, dangers. Mr. Hastings is dark, dominating, the epitome of patriarchal authority (and seen in that light, his masquerading for Jane as the vicar even makes a certain amount of twisted sense). Polly Withers (who seems like a kind of trial run for the absolutely petrifying Blodwen Rowlands in Silver on the Tree) uses her sexuality as a tool. Jane is particularly sensitive to this:

She was a very pretty girl, Jane thought, watching her. Much older than any of them, of course. She wore a bright green shirt and black trousers, and her eyes seemed to twinkle with a kind of hidden private laughter. Jane suddenly felt extremely young.
(Cooper 45)

But I think it's also evident in her symbolic seduction of Barney. (Oh god I'm going straight to hell for writing that sentence.) The cat-costume, the emphasis on her eyes and mouth as the only parts of her that are visible, the dionysiac dance she propels Barney into ... there's a lot of sexual symbolism, even if Barney is too young for it. (Rather like the appearance of Frey and Freya in Diana Wynne Jones's Eight Days of Luke, come to think of it.) Polly, like Blodwen, is a figure of the Seductress and therefore a figure of feminine evil. (Looking ahead for just a second, I do want to point out that women are not the only seducers in TDIRS, witness the temptation and fall of Hawkin in TDIR. [ETA: by MAGGIE BARNES. So that point falls through with a resounding crash. Will watch for male seducers in later books.])

There are ways and ways of being an adult; Cooper is dealing with this from the beginning, and it becomes more and more apparent as the sequence progresses that the mortal children (Bran in particular) are having to choose what kind of adults they want to be. Mr. Hastings and Merriman are in stark opposition; while there is no direct contrast to Polly, Mrs. Drew, who has her own career (which no one except that smiling villain Mrs. Palk every suggests is a bad thing), and Miss Hatherton (is she an Old One? Do we ever find out?) are evidence that women don't have to use their sexuality to get what they want. (Again, I'll be coming back to this with later books.)

The thing that always surprises me about OSUS when I reread it is how little it predicts the books that are to follow it. Partly, yes, there's an eight year gap between OSUS and The Dark Is Rising and presumably her sense what she was doing evolved dramatically, but I think also there are reasons that make sense in terms of the sequence itself. The Drews represent, throughout the sequence, the "real" world, the normal, mundane, non-magical world; their normality is heightened by contrast in later books, but I think it's important to have this book, OSUS, simply to establish with rock-like solidity two things: (1.) that the normal world exists and is recognizably the same as our own, and (2.) that the magical world can intrude on the normal world, that you don't have to go through a wardrobe or ride a cyclone to find operating magic, that it lies beneath the normal world, an uneasy co-inhabitant of the wild cosmos that contains them both. It isn't a matter, as in (and this is a random example and purely off the top of my head) John Bellairs's The House With a Clock in its Walls, of magic being mundanely available but largely unnoticed; in Cooper, there are whole strata of magical existence that the normal world cannot sense and does not guess at. But the magic can also rise up into normality, as when one discovers that one's great-uncle is actually Merlin. (J. K. Rowling does something rather similar, but I would argue that she does it without any of the sense of the numinous that gilds the edges of Cooper's world. Also quite badly. But that's a different post.)

So OSUS, like a prologue to the story of Will and Bran, introduces us to a world of reassuring normality but with hints of darker and deeper things. There's very little actual magic in OSUS: Mr. Hastings enchants Barney (although if you're pig-headed enough, I suppose you can gloss that as hypnotism), and there's Merriman's spell at the end that drives Hastings and the Witherses back. But that's really about it. (Except that Mrs. Palk seems to have some sort of charm to make Merriman sleep heavily, but we never get to see exactly what's up with that.) Mostly, OSUS is a straight-forward children's adventure story, with the map and the sinister strangers and all the rest of it. A recognizable genre of British children's literature.

And then there are the bits around the edges. Merriman's description of the ongoing war between good and evil (and given the inherent Manicheanism of her construction, Cooper does reject the more simplistic models):

That struggle [between good and evil] goes on all round us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. Nor ever will," he added softly to himself, "for there is something of each in every man."
(Cooper 82)

And we see the truth of that, for a brief moment, when Simon yields to Mr. Hastings. Not that Simon intends--or is--evil, but he is, in this moment weak, and therefore vulnerable. (Again, I think this moment looks forward to Hawkin, and Merriman's terrible lesson about putting too heavy a burden on mortal shoulders.) Merriman himself is not perfect, although the children have complete faith in him. He is out-foxed at every turn by Mrs. Palk without ever seeming to suspect her; he makes mistakes. He and Will are going to go on to make more mistakes. Cooper has not confused "able to do magic" with "infallible," even if her system seems to lean that way.

Cooper does not glory in the struggle, as Lewis has a tendency to do. TDIRS are also tremendously sad books, although that, here, is the barest murmur of a leit-motif, mostly concentrated in the figures of Bedwin and the anonymous Cornishman who hid the grail. This is an essentially sunny book, and that, too, is important for the sequence as a whole; again, it establishes--as do the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring--what the protagonists are both protecting and at the same time, on the most personal level, losing. OSUS is the lightest of the five books, but that lightness has purpose. And it is not entirely untroubled by the rising dark.

---
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. Over Sea, Under Stone. The Dark Is Rising 1. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1965.

Comments

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

The first book in the sequence that I actually read was TDIR itself, and will probably have more to say in response to that when you come to it. Having found TDIR (aged about 15, I think, when I first read it: I bought it last Christmas for my nephew, who is just past 10) I looked for the first book in the series, found it, read it, and was deeply disappointed. It didn't occur to me to look at the relative dates of publication, but, as you say, OSUS is just another children's fantasy adventure story: a good one, but nothing out of the way. TDIR is something else.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I think I read them pretty much in order from The Dark is Rising through to Silver on the Tree with Over Sea and Under Stone somewhere in the middle. And I've just ordered the collection from Amazon 'cos I don't appear to have any of them on my bookshelves here and I remember them as being great.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Factual correction: The Hobbit was first published in 1937, by George Allen and Unwin, London. I'm glad I checked, because I was going to say 1938.

The Cooper is the first series I ever had to wait to be finished. Waiting for Silver on the Tree foreshadowed lots of waiting afterwards.

I generally tell adults who have not read it to start with The Dark is Rising, but children to start with OSUS.

I think they fall into an interesting place, between Alan Garner on the one hand and Ransome/Blyton on the other, with tDiR nearer the Garner end and OSUS nearer the R/B end, which many adults of my acquaintance cannot enjoy. (Lewis was amazingly optimistic actually to think that people get old enough to like them again.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Argh! That will teach me to rely only on the colophon. Will edit post so as not to continue to make egregious fool of self.

I read TDIRS in a weird weird order: The Dark Is Rising, then The Grey King (both given to me for my eleventh birthday); then, I think Silver on the Tree, then Over Sea, Under Stone, and finally the rare and elusive Greenwitch. So I have no opinion about how one ought to come at the books, except that reading The Grey King out of context makes it extraordinarily difficult to figure out what's going on. I like OSUS just for what it is, but I can see why one wouldn't.

Ransome I do enjoy as an adult. Blyton ... well, I haven't tried, but my memory of the books of hers I've read (some of the Five books, most of the St. Claire books, all (I think) of the Malory Towers books, plus doubtless a lot of other popcorn reading that I've forgotten) does not encourage me to believe that the experiment would be a happy one.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I also read them out of order - The Dark Is Rising, The Grey King, back to Greenwich, and then around to Silver on the Tree. It was only after all that (and being deeply confused in the middle) that I managed to find a copy of Over Sea, Under Stone. I've since gone back and reread them in the proper order, but I still find OSUS to be less important to read in order than the rest of them.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Well, I was kind of startled to see you analyse the Narnia books in the order Lewis wrote them, not in their historical order. (I have a friend with whom I have two Perpetual Disagreements: one of which is to do with pancakes, but the other is the order in which the Narnia books should be read for the first time. I say historical, she says in the order Lewis wrote them.)

I was lucky: all five TDIR books were in both my local library and my school library. I was spoiled for choice. (Of course, this meant I still don't own the whole set: I've always borrowed it when I read it.)

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I'm with your friend on the Narnia books. When I read them for the first time I felt slightly betrayed by The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle which were so different in tone (and, dammit, inconsistent) from the other books in the series. In fact I'd be happy to recommend that people not bother with those two books.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

See, and I just can't accept a world in which The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia. The idea is just wrong. Like Lovecraft's description of the city in "The Mountains of Madness." That kind of wrong.

(Okay, yes, hyperbole for effect, but still.)

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

See, I can accept that from anyone who was born back when the series got written, so that they had to read them in the order that Lewis wrote them. But I was born after: all seven books have always been available in my lifetime, and, as with any series, I feel the right way to read it is start with Book 1 (TMN) and move on through to Book 7 (TLB) in order, no peeking ahead, no skipping to the end to find out how it came out, and so on.

But, no: I didn't read the Narnia books like that myself, because I picked them up one at a time wherever I could get hold of them, and I can't now remember how I read them - for each time, the first reading was so long ago that the memory is wiped by all the subsequent readings. Wish I had, though, in the same way as I wish I had read all the Lord Peter Wimsey books start to finish in their internal chronological order.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And I have no excuse, I suppose; I was born well after the Chronicles of Narnia were published. But my set, which I've had for so long I literally don't remember a time when I didn't, numbers them in publishing order rather than chronological order. It never occurred to me that one could read them in any other way until the recent spate of re-ordering.

Also, the animated movie--anyone else remember that?--which I adored (tho' I'd probably cringe at it now), was TLTW&TW, and that probably cemented things.

It also means I can mentally separate them into quartet (TLTW&TW, PC, TVotDT, TSC) and trio (TH&HB, TMN, TLB) and that's very comforting since I love the quartet and rather dislike the trio.

So I have reasons, but I admit they're all highly idiosyncratic and have more to do with my experience of the books than with the books themselves.

But I still think the proper way to enter Narnia is through a wardrobe.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've read it several times both ways, in various spirits of adventure, and I'm totally with you. Enter through the wardrobe, or the incluing is all screwy -- if you read TMN first, you have no idea why you are supposed to care about this stuff. I am often in favour of chronology -- I read Brust and Bujold preferentially chronologically -- but not for Narnia.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

I'd hate to try and read Blyton now (I was a Famous Five and '... of Adventure' fan). In fact I stopped reading her because I was finding the books hard to read then as well. I'd hate to go back to Willard Price or the Hardy Boys come to that. I used to like the HE Bates Larkin books as well, 'til my brother put his finger on what was wrong with them: "Famous Five for grown-ups", which (for me) hit the nail exactly on the head.

Gonna have to read them again

[opalturtle.livejournal.com]

It's been so long since I've read these I'll have to read them again. I'm going to have to read Narnia again, too. yep yep yep. It'd be interesting to read her Dreams and Wishes, Essays on Writing for Children book. I've got C.S. Lewis' On Stories. Very interesting reading.

Seaward is also an interesting book of hers. My copy seems to have gone missing, but I remember really liking it. I'll have to see if I can find out where it went. If I can't find it there's always Half.com. :D

I've missed analytical reading. I was an English major in college and got used to reading books to pick them apart, then I graduated and started working and got out of the habit. I've missed it. I shall have much fun reading your posts.

Re: Gonna have to read them again

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Seaward is interesting; after TDIRS, it's probably the book of hers I best like.

It's a little simple-minded, though (not to say heavy-handed); it didn't hold up to adult rereading quite as well as I had hoped. But West and Callie remain two of my favorite YA protagonists.

Re: Gonna have to read them again

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

When are we going to do the Dalemark Quartet then? Now there's a fantastic sequence of books I didn't actually read until last year and was bowled over by how good they were.

Re: Gonna have to read them again

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The trouble is, I don't think I have anything to say about the Dalemark Quartet. I love them, I've read them several times, but I don't have anything to say except: DWJ is a genius! Everyone must read her books!

OTOH, if you want to post about them, I'll read what you have to say with interest. *g*

Re: Gonna have to read them again

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Hmm... beyond 'I concur' I must confess I'm stuck.