felis_ultharus | (no subject)

So I finally finished The Dark is Rising series, one of those Harry Potter precursors that have been returning to the limelight in the reflected glory of its famous progeny.

(I read one book of it when I was a kid, and enjoyed that. My sister and

infinitecomplex got me the whole series for my birthday.)

It's a good series overall, and generally got better. The first entry is a bit lacklustre, but her writing improves throughout.

Cooper is an excellent character writer, and it's the characters and some of the imagery that really keep the series moving through its weaker spots. I like her Will better than Harry a lot of the time. He's a lot more practical.

(Comparisons to Rowling's series are inevitable -- a lot of the same themes, and Rowling blatantly rips off this series from time to time.)

Bran is the fan-Draco that the fans kept searching for but who never actually materialized in Rowling's books -- a jerk, but a jerk on the good side, and with a traumatic backstory. And it works in the hands of a skilled writer, which Cooper is.

The other thing she has going is marvellous images, both in her imagescapes and her idea of magic. Many of the scenes were excellently constructed, and not like anything I've read in fantasy before or since. This is especially true of her second and her fifth books. The Candles of the Dark, the hidden ship, the Lost Land, and the Midsummer Tree scenes will all stay with me. The last battle was nearly perfectly executed.

There are some problems here, though, and while these improve as the series progresses, they are quite distracting near the beginning:

The very first thing you in do in a fantasy story is explain how the rules of the world work. Or you at least know what those rules are. Through a lot of the first half of the series, it really feels like she's making them up as she goes along.
On that note, never, ever, ever give your characters the power of indiscriminate time travel. She starts off by doing this, and then spends the rest of the series trying to downplay it.
Although the crucial things are never explained -- and we don't even find out what the hero has to do until 100 pages before the end -- there's loads of exposition in this series even by fantasy-novel standards. Her essays on good, evil, and magic would choke Dumbledore.
Also, the Dark really, really needs to read the Evil Overlord list. No, you don't give the enemy a fighting chance. And your status as pure evil embodied would work better if the worst you were capable of was getting a kid's dog killed. Honestly, I'm surprised sometimes they don't go back in time to steal Will's mojo -- there's a definite Dr. Evil vibe off this series' villains sometimes.

All that said, it's an impressive series, and well worth the read.

It's particularly intriguing from a Pagan perspective. One thing about world-creation is that the author's religious assumption tend to colour the resulting creation very powerfully (think Lewis and Rowling versus Pullman and Pratchett). On that note, I have to I wonder if Susan Cooper is Pagan. There's a heavy Christian dose here -- the good versus evil thing as the poles of the universe -- but it's tamed and encompassed by a very Celtic mythological vibe, and the final battle seems more like Ragnarok than Armageddon.

That's a nice antidote to the usual alternating selection of Christian and atheist fantasy writers, whose worlds both seem a little foreign to me.

Right now, I'm reading a book called Reinventing the Sacred, which is one biologist's attempt to refute reductionism and recuperate concepts like free will in scientific terms. It's rather disappointing so far, I'm afraid.

However, it is impossible to hate a book that includes the sentence, "I will try to show that a tiger is both epistemologically and ontologically emergent with respect to physics."

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Would that be a Canadian vegetarian tiger (Panthera tigris canadensis vegetariana)?

Only if you're Wagner!

I thought I was the Canadian vegetarian tiger.

You'll always be our vegetarian tiger!

Nah, this one's actually emergent, and I've never seen a vegetarian tiger emerge from anywhere (not even the foliage in the wilds of Mississauga).

I'm glad you enjoyed them, as we picked them out on my recommendation! I always suspected that Susan Cooper had strong pagan leanings from the strength of the Celtic imagery.

This was one of my favourite series as a kid, when the plot and the characters were the big appeal. Rereading them as an adult, I found the same thing you did: that the imagery is just phenomenal, far over and above even the finest modern children's fantasy (and a fair bit of adult fantasy, too.)

Thank you!

I read one of the books as a kid -- for some reason The Grey King was on the reading list for a sort of game show-like thing I was involved with as a kid, called "Battle of the Books." I really liked it, so I re-read it as an adult.

What is disappointing about Reinventing The Sacred? I heard the author being interviewed on The Current and I really liked what he had to say. I was hoping he would provide a rebuttal to the Dawkinites' insistence that "Religion is just for [people who need fairy tales to cope with life]/[those who are scared of Hell]/[genocide enthusiasts]". For example, the woman behind the atheist bus ads in Britian was leaning on that crutch. I am starting to feel very weary of being lumped in with Phelpses because I am "a religious person".

I heard that interview too, but he misrepresents his own book somewhat. In a lot of ways it's Dawkins-lite -- a politer, Canadian version of Dawkins (Kaufman is a Calgarian).

At first, he talks about bridging the gap between religion and science, but as the book progresses, he becomes increasingly critical of religion as it exists now -- talking about how the creativity in the universe "should be the only god we need."

He does make it explicit that he wants to bridge that gap by eliminating both religion and reductionism and founding a new religion, essentially, on the wonders and miracles of science.

The only thing worse than a proselytizer is one who wants to eliminate the rich religious diversity we've achieved now.

Still, for all that, there's a lot of gems among the dross. His arguments about emergent qualities are very useful and very interesting. His defence of agency, meaning, and consciousness are a great antidote to the materialist cynics out there who think these things are illusions and lean on science to prove their point.

I'm two-fifths through, so maybe it'll get better. Here's hoping.

That series has been on my "to read" list for a while now. My mom has taught it to her classes in the past, which is how I became aware of it.

It's definitely worth it. It's similar to the Potter series, and clearly strongly influenced it.