24. The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper (Children’s Fantasy) 244 p.

I made a slight mistake when I picked up this book yesterday. I’d got it into my head that Over Sea, Under Stone was a prequel written later and didn’t have much connection to the rest of the series, so I could safely skip it (rather like The Magician’s Nephew in The Chronicles of Narnia.) Apparently I was wrong, but oh, well. Too late now.

The Dark Is Rising begins on December 20, in the small English town of Huntercombe, on the Thames. The next day will be Will Stanton’s eleventh birthday, and what he wants most is a real snowfall, not just the light dusting they usually get in the south. When he and his older brother, James, go out to feed the rabbits, some unsettling things happen—things only Will seems to notice. A farmer he’s known for years gives him two things: a sign—a circle of iron crossed by two bars—and an ominous warning.

The next day, his birthday, Will walks out of his sleeping household and six hundred years into the past. He finds out that he’s one of the Old Ones, immortals whose job it is to fight the Dark, and that he is the sign-seeker, the one who must find the six signs that can be joined to forge a much-needed weapon against the Dark.

The plot of The Dark Is Rising is standard children’s fantasy fare: a boy finds out he has special powers, and heavy responsibilities to go with them, and goes on a quest to find magical objects, receiving help from mentors, supernatural beings, and magical animals along the way.

In fact, if anything, the details used to flesh out the plot lower, rather than raise, its quality. Although Will is called upon to make moral choices, he merely reacts to events, rather than taking any initiative. Although he is called the sign-seeker, he never has the knowledge that would be necessary to look for the signs himself; instead, they are revealed to him through various events.

If there is anything in The Dark Is Rising that lifts it above the commonplace, it’s Susan Cooper’s writing. Although some of the grown-ups are rather cardboard cutout-ish (namely Merriman and the Lady), she does some lovely characterization with Will and his family, particularly his brothers and sisters.

The book has a marvellous sense of time and place; after reading it, I felt I knew Huntercombe personally: the river, the village, the fields, the manor, the woods, and all the lanes and roads. And most of all, the weather. The book is set during a very particular time of year, Midwinter Eve through Epiphany, which worked perfectly for the story being told. Like the Stantons, Christmas is my favourite time of year, and Cooper did a brilliant job of capturing all the traditions, friendship, and love that make the holiday season such a magical time of year.

The contrast of the warmth and excitement of Christmas with the cold and unending snow sent by the Dark made the latter feel more genuinely menacing, although I think as a Canadian, I was at a disadvantage. Toronto, my hometown, has some of Canada’s mildest winters, but I think all Canadians grow up with a cultural consciousness of the truly hideous weather that winter can throw at some parts of this country. Even though Cooper did a good job of showing how crippling the snow was for England, I couldn’t let go of my knowledge that to be a truly credible attack from the Dark, it ought to have been much worse.

Quibbles aside, this book was very absorbing and hard to put down. I even spent an extra forty-five minutes in Tim Horton’s last night, because I didn’t want to close the book for the two-minute walk to the nearest subway station.

Pages read: 7,214

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Fantasy Classics Challenge, Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising