My life in books

I know, it’s hard to believe, but I’d never read Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series before this year. But, what with the movie coming out and everyone talking about what a mess it had made of the books – plus the fact that I knew they were part of that large body of modern fantasy with Arthurian themes – I finally got around to reading the series.

Over Sea, Under Stone
The Dark is Rising
Greenwitch
The Grey King
Silver on the Tree

I should begin with the admission that I’m rather iffy about young adult books. Sometimes I like them a lot, and sometimes I don’t like them at all, and I’ve never really been able to figure out what it is that makes the difference. But these, I liked. And not just because Merlin was hanging about being all archetypically mysterious.

Like many epic fantasies, this series is another take on the battle between good and evil, drawing on both the history and the mythology of Britain to tell the story of the last-born Old One – a young boy named Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son, whose destiny it is to complete, with the aid of both the other remaining Old Ones, including the Merlinesque Merriman Lyon, and three young, and very brave and inquisitive but otherwise quite ordinary children Barney, Jane, and Simon Drew, a sequence of magical tasks that will allow him to stand as the last Merlin at the side of the last Pendragon in the final battle.

Yummy stuff. And fine reading for a few unusually dark and dreary winter’s eves.