The Dark is Rising

Tonight I'm teaching a class on Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, the second in her sequence of fantasy novels of the same name. They're from the late sixties / early seventies, though I didn't encounter them until I was 21 and doing my MA. I was alerted to this wonderful, dark, mythic, snowy sequence of books by a fantastic anthology Puffin published in 1991, edited by Judith Elkin and illustrated by Michael Foreman: a kind of gallimaufry of children's lit from the 20th century.

Since reading the excerpt from Cooper in that book, and dashing out to buy all five books in the 'Dark' sequence, they have become favourites of mine. This second volume, about the Christmas Will is ten, and first discovers his connection to the Old Ones and the powers of the Light and the Dark, is my undoubted favourite. I've read it every winter since the year I first discovered it and it just gets better and better. Cooper writes beautifully. I've often said that overdone descriptive prose is something I find embarrassing. But there's something amazingly absorbing and intense about Cooper's writing about nature, especially. Her action sequences are wonderful. Her scenes which take place in queer, liminal spaces - between times and places, in half-lit, mysterious realms - these are all convincing and authentically spooky and strange. And her characters always ring very true. I know these people - Will with all his siblings, hiding his secret nature from them at Christmas time, as their house gets snowed in. Merriman the Merlin figure, flitting darkly between all these books - all at once avuncular and forbidding and strange.

There was a dreadful film - be warned. I was foolishly hopeful for it, when I heard they'd cast Ian McShane as Merriman, Christopher Eccleston as the Rider. But it was awful. Standardisd, bastardised Hollywood pap, with loads of flashing lights and questy nonsense. They'd turned it into action-adventure, having decided it was a mix of Rowling and Tolkien. But it's more than that - it's a clear rewrite of Masefield's Box of Delights, but with a lovely infusion of Celtic, Nordic, Anglo-Saxon myth.

So the film's rotten - not least because they never used the wonderful song by Mercury Rev from their 2001 album 'All is Dream.' Somehow they just get the atmosphere of that book right into the song.

Susan Cooper's written other books since The Dark sequence. I loved her book about Shakespeare from a few years ago. It's another one about slipping through and between times. But I long for a return to the story of the Dark. Can't we get up a petition or something? Can't we beg her to revisit this world? There's so much drab, forumlaic, idiotic fantasy fiction out there for kids these days. Stuff produced by greedy robots. I just think there's genuine, startling, frightening magic in this particular series of books for kids.