TDIRS: The Grey King
Mar. 21st, 2003 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI retreated into books today.
Read Murder in Scorpio. Not bad, although you could hear the plot groaning in places, and it had some of the bad American cozy traits: relentless proffering of physical details, a kind of artificiality about the world ... can't put my finger on it quite.
Read The Vanished Child and am now torn between wishing I could write like that and a desperate urge to go out and get The Knowledge of Water and A Citizen of the Country right now. Which I'm not gonna.
And I finished The Grey King.
I'm not familiar with Welsh mythology/folklore, and I'm actually rather bored by Arthurian stories, so there may be all kinds of stuff I'm missing. Please feel at liberty to enlighten me. *g*
I have a complete weakness for amnesia stories. They fascinate me, and amnesia in novels tends to be a good reliable source of angst. So the first 30 pages of TGK are probably my favorite; I find Will as an ordinary boy who senses things he cannot understand rather more compelling than Will the Old One, or any of the other ordinary children in the series (with a partial exception for Bran). But overall, TGK does a much better job than either TDIR or Greenwitch of playing off the normal against the supernatural, showing just how fast Will has to juggle to keep the two sides of his life from destroying each other. And Will in this book--as markedly not in Greenwitch--acts like a normal boy, especially in his friendship with Bran.
TGK is also unique in the series because the important elements of the plot are those carried by the mortal characters. Will's quest--find the harp, wake the Sleepers--is intertwined with and overpowered by the unfolding story between Bran and Owen Davies, Caradog Prichard, and John Rowlands. The most cataclysmic and powerful thing that happens in the entire book is Cafall's death at Prichard's hands.
I hate that moment. I make myself read it every time, because it is so desperately important, and because it's so beautifully written, and every time I hate it. I hate Caradog Prichard far more than I hate the Brenin Llwyd, and I always want someone to stop him, one of the other men to see the milgwn, for things not to happen as they do. I've owned this book for almost nineteen years, and the pain of Cafall's death is still sharp and terrible.
I would argue that's one reason TGK deserved the Newberry.
My point, from which I have slightly sidetracked myself, is that the STORY that powers TGK is the story of Owen Davies and Caradog Prichard and the effect of that story on Bran. That story's effect is heightened by Bran's real identity and the growing hold the Brenin Llwyd gains over Prichard's mind, and counterpointed by Will's quest for the harp and the Sleepers, but here the realistic elements overpower the supernatural. The dead sheep are as much a life or death matter as the golden harp. Caradog Prichard is a far more dangerous enemy than the Brenin Llwyd, because he is not bound by any rules.
Cooper's skill at structure has improved immensely (from my perspective, which is that The Dark Is Rising has a very weak structure), as the two stories, the mundane and the supernatural, are interwoven in such a way that they can't be picked apart. Caradog Prichard and the Brenin Llwyd are like two sides of the same coin, just as Bran's identity as Arthur's son is inseparable from his difficult relationship with Owen Davies.
Cooper also starts to insist here, as she has not particularly before, that the true power--and even more importantly, true morality--lies with the mortals, a motif embodied in John Rowlands. John Rowlands says to Will:
And Will agrees, putting it even more starkly: "For us, there is only the destiny. Like a job to be done. We are here simply to save the world from the Dark" (Cooper 146). It becomes clear here, and clearer in Silver on the Tree, that the Light's puissance is limited, that because it cannot deal in shades of gray, it can do nothing for men but save them from the ultimate blackness of the Dark. It cannot save them from themselves; it cannot make their decisions for them. One of the ways, I think, in which the series mirrors the process of growing up which is the main task of its major characters, is the way in which the supernatural powers become less and less helpful, less and less relevant In OSUS, Merriman protects and the children trust him implicitly. TDIR is all about Will's burgeoning power and mortal characters are secondary, when present at all. Greenwitch begins to blend the two--and to show the ways in which they do not and cannot blend. Here in TGK, the novels--and the readers--are beginning to outgrow the idea that magic can solve everything. Nothing can bring Cafall back. Nothing can mend the eleven years of grief and guilt that have trampled Owen Davies down into nearly nothing. The Light's great quest is irrelevant to the mortal men--except insofar as the Brenin Llwyd's defensive malice brings strife and grief among them. The Light can't FIX things. That's not what it's for.
Will's power as an Old One fails him, trips him up, leaves him unable to deal with his mortal opponents and his own physical weakness. It is the men who make choices and decisions, not merely Caradog Prichard's mad obsession, but Bran overcoming his grief and anger to warn Will, Owen Davies's love for Guenevere, his decision to finally tell Bram the truth, his standing up to Caradog Prichard, John Rowlands's calm acceptance of Will for what he is and his desire to help without the burden of knowledge.
As in TDIR, the women are largely background figures: Betty Prichard who never appears on stage and can do nothing with her husband (and one does wonder what kind of woman she is, to be married to a man like that); Aunt Jen, who nurtures; Megan Ty-Bont Jones, who so splendidly lies to Caradog Prichard; and of course Guenevere, like Helen of Troy, leaving a trail of dissension and heart-break wherever she goes. Cooper does not demonize Guenevere; she is in no sense responsible for Prichard's petty evil. But I think she is to blame for weakness--the prior weakness of betraying Arthur, and the great weakness of abandoning her son, abandoning the man who loves her. She makes bad decisions--as Merriman has done, as Will has done--and Cooper goes ahead and lets the consequences of those decisions play out.
Looking ahead to Silver on the Tree for a moment, I can never make up my mind in TGK whether Cooper has already decided on Blodwen Rowlands's other identity. Is she the lord in the sky blue cloak? Will (who, as TDIR and Greenwitch establish, has a certain unthinkingly sexist attitude and has not yet fully learned his lesson about it) never sees that lord clearly enough for any kind of identification. And what of the only mention of her as Blodwen Rowlands in the story?
And over the page:
And then the bit that makes my blood run just slightly cold: "Blodwen and Mrs. Evans, your auntie, looked after Bran between them" (Cooper 125). It is certainly clear that Blodwen Rowlands--who makes no on-stage appearance in TGK--had rather a lot to do with the beginning of Bran's life in modern Wales. And if John Rowlands arrived just in time to prevent Owen Davies from killing Caradog Prichard ... well, eleven years later the Dark would have been in a bit of a bind if it hadn't had Caradog Prichard like putty in its paws. I'm not going to lean on it too heavily, just note that Blodwen Rowlands is introduced into the background as someone with a special interest in Bran.
This is a book about mortality, about the realization that the price of life is death, and the price of love is loss. This is why it is more than just a children's adventure story, why it is the best of the TDIRS books--why it is beautiful and painful and long-lingering in the mind.
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. The Grey King. The Dark Is Rising Sequence 4. New York: Aladdin-Atheneum, 1975.
Read Murder in Scorpio. Not bad, although you could hear the plot groaning in places, and it had some of the bad American cozy traits: relentless proffering of physical details, a kind of artificiality about the world ... can't put my finger on it quite.
Read The Vanished Child and am now torn between wishing I could write like that and a desperate urge to go out and get The Knowledge of Water and A Citizen of the Country right now. Which I'm not gonna.
And I finished The Grey King.
I'm not familiar with Welsh mythology/folklore, and I'm actually rather bored by Arthurian stories, so there may be all kinds of stuff I'm missing. Please feel at liberty to enlighten me. *g*
I have a complete weakness for amnesia stories. They fascinate me, and amnesia in novels tends to be a good reliable source of angst. So the first 30 pages of TGK are probably my favorite; I find Will as an ordinary boy who senses things he cannot understand rather more compelling than Will the Old One, or any of the other ordinary children in the series (with a partial exception for Bran). But overall, TGK does a much better job than either TDIR or Greenwitch of playing off the normal against the supernatural, showing just how fast Will has to juggle to keep the two sides of his life from destroying each other. And Will in this book--as markedly not in Greenwitch--acts like a normal boy, especially in his friendship with Bran.
TGK is also unique in the series because the important elements of the plot are those carried by the mortal characters. Will's quest--find the harp, wake the Sleepers--is intertwined with and overpowered by the unfolding story between Bran and Owen Davies, Caradog Prichard, and John Rowlands. The most cataclysmic and powerful thing that happens in the entire book is Cafall's death at Prichard's hands.
I hate that moment. I make myself read it every time, because it is so desperately important, and because it's so beautifully written, and every time I hate it. I hate Caradog Prichard far more than I hate the Brenin Llwyd, and I always want someone to stop him, one of the other men to see the milgwn, for things not to happen as they do. I've owned this book for almost nineteen years, and the pain of Cafall's death is still sharp and terrible.
I would argue that's one reason TGK deserved the Newberry.
My point, from which I have slightly sidetracked myself, is that the STORY that powers TGK is the story of Owen Davies and Caradog Prichard and the effect of that story on Bran. That story's effect is heightened by Bran's real identity and the growing hold the Brenin Llwyd gains over Prichard's mind, and counterpointed by Will's quest for the harp and the Sleepers, but here the realistic elements overpower the supernatural. The dead sheep are as much a life or death matter as the golden harp. Caradog Prichard is a far more dangerous enemy than the Brenin Llwyd, because he is not bound by any rules.
Cooper's skill at structure has improved immensely (from my perspective, which is that The Dark Is Rising has a very weak structure), as the two stories, the mundane and the supernatural, are interwoven in such a way that they can't be picked apart. Caradog Prichard and the Brenin Llwyd are like two sides of the same coin, just as Bran's identity as Arthur's son is inseparable from his difficult relationship with Owen Davies.
Cooper also starts to insist here, as she has not particularly before, that the true power--and even more importantly, true morality--lies with the mortals, a motif embodied in John Rowlands. John Rowlands says to Will:
... those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun. ... At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe.
(Cooper 145-6)
And Will agrees, putting it even more starkly: "For us, there is only the destiny. Like a job to be done. We are here simply to save the world from the Dark" (Cooper 146). It becomes clear here, and clearer in Silver on the Tree, that the Light's puissance is limited, that because it cannot deal in shades of gray, it can do nothing for men but save them from the ultimate blackness of the Dark. It cannot save them from themselves; it cannot make their decisions for them. One of the ways, I think, in which the series mirrors the process of growing up which is the main task of its major characters, is the way in which the supernatural powers become less and less helpful, less and less relevant In OSUS, Merriman protects and the children trust him implicitly. TDIR is all about Will's burgeoning power and mortal characters are secondary, when present at all. Greenwitch begins to blend the two--and to show the ways in which they do not and cannot blend. Here in TGK, the novels--and the readers--are beginning to outgrow the idea that magic can solve everything. Nothing can bring Cafall back. Nothing can mend the eleven years of grief and guilt that have trampled Owen Davies down into nearly nothing. The Light's great quest is irrelevant to the mortal men--except insofar as the Brenin Llwyd's defensive malice brings strife and grief among them. The Light can't FIX things. That's not what it's for.
Will's power as an Old One fails him, trips him up, leaves him unable to deal with his mortal opponents and his own physical weakness. It is the men who make choices and decisions, not merely Caradog Prichard's mad obsession, but Bran overcoming his grief and anger to warn Will, Owen Davies's love for Guenevere, his decision to finally tell Bram the truth, his standing up to Caradog Prichard, John Rowlands's calm acceptance of Will for what he is and his desire to help without the burden of knowledge.
As in TDIR, the women are largely background figures: Betty Prichard who never appears on stage and can do nothing with her husband (and one does wonder what kind of woman she is, to be married to a man like that); Aunt Jen, who nurtures; Megan Ty-Bont Jones, who so splendidly lies to Caradog Prichard; and of course Guenevere, like Helen of Troy, leaving a trail of dissension and heart-break wherever she goes. Cooper does not demonize Guenevere; she is in no sense responsible for Prichard's petty evil. But I think she is to blame for weakness--the prior weakness of betraying Arthur, and the great weakness of abandoning her son, abandoning the man who loves her. She makes bad decisions--as Merriman has done, as Will has done--and Cooper goes ahead and lets the consequences of those decisions play out.
Looking ahead to Silver on the Tree for a moment, I can never make up my mind in TGK whether Cooper has already decided on Blodwen Rowlands's other identity. Is she the lord in the sky blue cloak? Will (who, as TDIR and Greenwitch establish, has a certain unthinkingly sexist attitude and has not yet fully learned his lesson about it) never sees that lord clearly enough for any kind of identification. And what of the only mention of her as Blodwen Rowlands in the story?
... I was not there, but my wife was, and he [Owen Davies] told her about Gwen and the baby. My Blodwen has a warm heart and a good ear. She said he was like a man on fire, glowing, he had to tell somebody . . .
(Cooper 123)
And over the page:
Then I arrived, and a good thing I did, or he [Owen Davies] would have killed the man [Caradog Prichard]. Blodwen had sent me with some things for the baby.
(Cooper 124)
And then the bit that makes my blood run just slightly cold: "Blodwen and Mrs. Evans, your auntie, looked after Bran between them" (Cooper 125). It is certainly clear that Blodwen Rowlands--who makes no on-stage appearance in TGK--had rather a lot to do with the beginning of Bran's life in modern Wales. And if John Rowlands arrived just in time to prevent Owen Davies from killing Caradog Prichard ... well, eleven years later the Dark would have been in a bit of a bind if it hadn't had Caradog Prichard like putty in its paws. I'm not going to lean on it too heavily, just note that Blodwen Rowlands is introduced into the background as someone with a special interest in Bran.
This is a book about mortality, about the realization that the price of life is death, and the price of love is loss. This is why it is more than just a children's adventure story, why it is the best of the TDIRS books--why it is beautiful and painful and long-lingering in the mind.
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. The Grey King. The Dark Is Rising Sequence 4. New York: Aladdin-Atheneum, 1975.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Sarah Smith
Date: 2003-03-21 07:09 pm (UTC)I think The Vanished Child is my favorite, but the sequels don't disappoint. Colette! The early film industry! It's great.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-21 07:12 pm (UTC)Oh, but you should. You so should.
I love The Knowledge of Water best out of the three, but Citizen of the Country has some excellent moments in it, as well.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-21 08:25 pm (UTC)Soon. Definitely soon. But I *am* an adult and I *can* exercise self control. Sort of.
Am heartened by the fact that there have been two ringing endorsements, each with a different favorite book. That bodes well.
Re: Sarah Smith
Date: 2003-03-21 08:31 pm (UTC)And, yeah, early film industry. Coolness. When I reread Bride of the Rat God now, I have this tendency to skip the plot (the Shining Crane is just boring like a very boring thing--the boringest wizard Hambly's ever given us) and just read the bits about the movie-making. Because those bits are fascinating and funny and gorgeous, and I wish they'd just go on and on and on. The "plot" is a grafted-on piece of clockwork--like a steampunk Borg eyepiece, or those freaky cult guys in La Cite des Enfants Perdus (who are, come to think of it, pretty well summed up by the phrase "steampunk Borg")--not an organic part of the book at all. Books like that drive me nuts, because they could be SO brilliant, if the author had just realized they needed to refocus their camera about six inches to the right.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-22 05:08 am (UTC)Beyond that I don't think she uses any Arthurian stuff anyone wouldn't know, from general cultural osmosis, the baby, Bran, is new, in most versions G is barren, in the oldest, there were two sons, Amr and Llacheu, and Llacheu's murder by Cei caused a lot of trouble. (You would, I want to say, like my Arthurian, with no white samite and no triangle. But maybe not.)
I think the structure of TGK is the poem as well (and it's a better poem) but the characters are more real -- the non Will characters in TDIR aren't very much more than pawns, but in TGK they are solid. And I agree entirely about Cafall.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-22 05:51 am (UTC)My boredom with all things Arthurian springs mostly from MZB & The Mists of Avalon. By the time I'd dutifully slogged my way through to the end of that, I never wanted to think about ANY of them EVER AGAIN. (I know that this is not most people's reaction to TMoA, but it sure was mine.) Also I think I was exposed to one too many of those Guenevere's PoV novels that were such a fad in the 90s. So, yes, a lot of the trouble is the triangle.
I knew, because DWJ mentions it in the notes to Hexwood, that there are versions of the story in which Arthur has sons (aside from Mordred, I mean). But that was the sum total of my knowledge. Are they Guenevere's? Does the one who doesn't get killed by Kay get to do anything interesting?
no subject
Date: 2003-03-22 07:49 am (UTC)Now I am going to be excessively long and boring, but there isn't a short answer, and this is within my area of competence.
Arthur's sons: you have to know that the whole thing is very weird -- some history happened, or didn't happen, followed by four hundred years of silence and oral tradition we can't hear, followed by a Latin guide book with brief historical notes, called "Nennius" or the "Historia Britannorum", which mentions Arthur, his thirteen battles (by name and location), Cafall, and Amr, nobody and nothing else of the tradition at all. Amr, according to Nennius, has an interesting tomb near Builth Wells well worth checking out (it doesn't appear to have survived, or anyway, I can't find it, and I have looked hard) and was killed by his father. He is otherwise a total blank. No mother mentioned.
Then, after Nennius, we have three more centuries of silence, and then we have Geoffrey of Monmouth drawing together everything he's heard out of the oral tradition plus making things up to make a better story, and he has a barren and abducted G. Then, exploding all over the place, we have other stories and songs and poems and stuff, in Welsh, French, Latin and eventually even English. If you look at the Welsh stuff, which can be assumed, where it differs from Geoffrey, to be either a) part of the oral tradition or b) a new invention, and you weigh it up very carefully, there is... some stuff. The story Culhwch and Olwen contains so much stuff that nobody would bother to invent out of nothing for fun and so much exactly like things we have from oral tradition (Homer, Yugoslav stuff etc.) and so little concerned with what Geoffrey was concerned with, that it's generally considered to be authentic but weird, and is consequently totally ignored. Then there's a bizarre compliation of things in threes, called the Triads of the Island of Britain -- they list the three best and three worst of everything, and they're a crib, you were supposed to learn them and then pop them into poems and stories as appropriate. They weren't written down until the C.14, two hundred years after Geoffrey, but again, if you weigh things, you have some scraps. Llacheu appears in there, twice, and he's probably there because Welsh is a crazy language (sorry people who like it) with crazy poetry patterns that take account of patterns of consonants more than anything. ll-ch is an unusual consonant pattern, and hence a valuable one, and it seems likely the name survived because it meant bards could slip in the odd ll-ch and have their friends think they were way cool. In the Triads, Llacheu's mother is not mentioned. His death however is in some detail, he was killed while wearing blue armour by Cei, in a quarrel over the head of a monster.
There, now you know everything there is to know about Arthur's sons Amr and Llacheu. (Oh, and I have a Llacheu poem, in English but using a really hard Welsh poetic form, at http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk/poetry/poems/llacheu.htm which is probably the only thing ever written about him in English. I suspect that had his name survived into the modern tradition going through the French-English mill the other Celtic names did, it would have become Loheris, or maybe more Germanically Loholt.)
Welcome to the field of Arthurian scholarship, which is not so much a field as a small thorny thicket.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-22 09:40 am (UTC)I mean, of course, thank you. And also, I like the poem a lot, although I found myself wanting "lake's" to scan with two syllables, which I think is probably just me.
The bit about Llacheu's name surviving because of the consonants has run a distant and muffled bell in my mind. Not to do with him, but with ... something. Probably something about Anglo-Saxon poetry, back in the dim recesses of the junk shop that is my brain.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-22 10:44 am (UTC)I once ran a roleplaying game on the death of Llacheu, or rather the investigation afterwards. Most of my players probably thought I made the whole thing up.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-22 11:00 am (UTC)And now I want to write Arthurian noir. Call it The Second Son or something. I always want to write Mordred against canon anyway (natural contrariness on my part), so let him be the detective. Noir detectives should always be people no one wants to talk to.
The Tale of Sir Gareth
Date: 2003-03-22 04:15 pm (UTC)I tend to think the only thing left to do in Arthuriana is burnishing up the lesser characters. Something like what Steinbeck did with "Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt" (which is my favorite part of that book I do wish terribly that he'd finished).
My own lingering wish is to do Sir Gareth. There's a lot of good meaty stuff in there begging for reinterpretation. Social status. Women and knighthood. Hero-worship. An honorable man in a society rapidly turning dishonorable. Dissent and civil disobedience leading to death.
But I don't have the talent to do it, I'm afraid.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-23 06:12 am (UTC)(And y'all thought I was kidding about Arthurian noir ...)
no subject
Date: 2003-03-23 06:42 am (UTC)And that is probably worth emailing poor Rachel Bromwich as another potential Triad footnote.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-23 06:56 am (UTC)And I'm sorry, I did put my question badly. I meant, if one were Geoffrey of Monmouth or one of his confreres, what would one do with Amr? But you gave me the answer I needed despite my sloppy phrasing. Ambris is giving me the buzz I want, as Loheris did. And I'm strongly tempted to revert Mordred to Medraut ... well, this THING would be psychedelically insane anyway--Arthurian steampunk comedy of manners noir mystery--so why the hell not?
no subject
Date: 2003-03-24 06:08 am (UTC)Mmmm, Sarah Smith. I managed to space them out a bit, but finally finished the last one during our last snowstorm. I want her to write more now.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-24 12:32 pm (UTC)I think the world has room for a noir Arthur, and you're the person to do it.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-24 02:41 pm (UTC)The thing's getting weirder by the second; I'm now describing it in my notes as an Arthurian steampunk pre-Raphaelite comedy of manners noir mystery. And I think this is where the wombat ends up. But there's all kinds of stuff I want to do with it ... if I can just figure out where to begin. And, of course, figure out why Kay murders Loheris. But I think I need to get into the world before I struggle with that.
Perhaps it begins with Medraut's childhood. Ponder.
I don't think I've read that poem, although it sounds familiar--aside from being by Mike, I mean.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-20 10:05 am (UTC)This is an excellent review.
Actually, I've just read it again, and I would very much like to quote a few things from here, even if that section is too long already. Would you mind? (though heaven knows how on earth I can cite a livejournal entry! That will take some creativity)
no subject
Date: 2004-10-20 11:51 am (UTC)You're also welcome to quote me under my real name, which should at least partially reduce the citing problem to manageability.