The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (2)

Rosemary Sutcliff, The Silver Branch

The second book in the trilogy 'Three Legions', which I can still remember coming across more than once in my school library. I think I may even have tried to start reading it, but didn't get very far into the first book. It was a copy of the third book in the sequence, The Lantern Bearers, a present in childhood which for some reason I held onto and finally read either during or just after university. So I've encountered them out of order, but really that hardly matters. This isn't much of a trilogy at all, each book taking place at different periods in Roman British history, with little to connect them other the odd subtle link, members of the Aquila family and a silver dolphin seal ring. In fact, if you look at Wikipedia, you can see the series carries on well past this supposed 'trilogy', past the departure of the Roman legions from British shores, up until the Norman conquest, and elsewhere even spinning off into Arthurian fantasy. I shall enjoy following this saga further, as Rosemary Sutcliff really is one of the finest historical novelists I've come across.

It was a rather pompous review of Hilary Mantel's recent Thomas Cromwell novels by James Wood which helped me put my finger on just why Sutcliff's fiction is so successful. I say the review is pompous, because historical fiction, in his words, 'a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness', is a genre he clearly looks down upon. This is his accounting for Hilary Mantel's success:

Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case. In effect, she proceeds as if the past five hundred years were a relatively trivial interval in the annals of human motivation.

But that surely, is the measure of success of a great deal of historical fiction? Having so little time for the genre, Woods compares Mantel's achievement to the work of Peter Ackroyd and Susan Sontag. Now, I'm unfamiliar with Susan Sontag's fiction, but I've read a lot of Peter Ackroyd's work, and it seems to me that he is engaged on an entirely different project, his approach to historical fiction being that of a lively pastiche, enjoying the feel of the language. They are entirely literary games, but then he, like I imagine Susan Sontag, is writing historical fiction post-The Name of the Rose, which might be seen as the marker for the new type of historical fiction which started to be written in the 80s. I wish I'd kept a link to the academic book I found online which delineated this tradition of a 'new historical fiction'. The point I think is that it encompassed a new self-consciousness about narrative, and particularly about language. Hence the profusion of literary pastiche. Of course, this development occurred alongside the development of modern 'literary' fiction, with which it shares many characteristics.

Which isn't to say that people didn't carry on writing the older type of historical fiction, particularly in the genres. We even had the creation of the historical crime story. It's just to note that there's nothing 'mysterious' about Hilary Mantel's achievement. It's exactly the same kind of achievement you can find in a novel published for children in the late-1950s. I've no idea if Rosemary Sutcliff's fictional representation of Roman Britain is true exactly, even if I went through and checked every little detail against the known archaeological and historical facts. But it feels true, as if this must be how it felt to be alive at the time, because all of the human motivations and feelings feel wholly recognisable.

What I also recognise is the time in which it was written. These 'Roman' novels are a portrait of an empire in decline written by the subject of another empire also in the process of decline. A theme which becomes more prominent in The Lantern Bearers is the need to preserve the 'light' of civilisation against the darkness of the surrounding barbarism, is introduced here through the character of the self-proclaimed British emperor Carausius, whose motivation for his declaration is precisely that: a self-conscious attempt to halt, if only temporarily, a slide from civilisation into barbarism. It should come as no surprise that Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a book on Rudyard Kipling, and counted him as a major influence.

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Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

When my wife read the Over Sea, Under Stone, she described it to me as like The Famous Five crossed with The Lord of the Rings. A description I loved. She then proceeded to read the entire series over the course of the last week.

In contrast to the first book, here we're thrown into the magic world underpinning the real one within the first twenty pages or so, as Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, quickly learns that he is in fact one of the 'Old Ones', a secret society of immortal beings who protect the world from the forces of the 'Dark'. The main action of the book can easily be reduced to a kind of 'schooling of a sorcerer' as Will learns of his secret heritage through a series of infodumps and collects a series of plot-coupons which will preserve the world for the forces of light until the next time the Dark attacks. That it doesn't feel shcematic is entirely to the credit of Susan Cooper's ability both to tell a story and root it in a richly imagined world.

Whilst the Light is characterised by a patchwork of characters drawn from myths which have attached themselves to the British land - Merlin, Herne the Hunter, Wayland the Smith, even Arthur (or so I assume; he isn't named here, presumably to reappear later in the sequence?), the Dark is largely amorphous, a mysterious threatening entropic force. The characters we meet who are on the side of the Dark only serve it, they don't embody it in the way that those of the light appear do. The character who comes closest to such a role is the mysterious 'Dark Rider' who appears as a Mr. Mithothin (or, 'Myth'-o-thin, embodying the entropic quality of the Dark).

As with the earlier book, there's a wonderful sense here of another world existing behind the cover of the world we see in front of us every day. Here though, we get to see what that world actually looks like, with it's surreal trips into the past. Again, it's not just myth, but the presence of the past which is impinging on the present. I love how so much of this sense of the numinous appears to be conveyed through music. There's so much music in this book: carols (it is set at Christmas), church music, a setting of A.E. Housmann, Greensleeves (which seems to be related to the mysterious tune Will hears at moments of greatest significance), even the Hunting of the Wren. The use of music matches the way in which, whenever magic appears in the narrative, Cooper's writing becomes diffuse, in contrast to the rootedness in a realistic sense of place and character she employs elsewhere. The picture of what's going on becomes a little unclear, like a half remembered song.

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I know from a piece I read in Alan Garner's essay collection The Voice That Thunders, that one of the common experiences shared by all of the writers who came to prominence in the golden age of children's fiction in the 60s and 70s is that of having grown up with the experience of the Second World War. Certainly, there is something of the spirit of the Blitz in the way in which the Dark is presented:

He saw one race after another come attacking his island country, bringing each time the malevolence of the Dark with them, wave after wave of ships rushing inexorably at the shores. Each wave of men in turn grew peaceful as it grew to know and love the land, so that the Light flourished again. But always the Dark was there, swelling and waning, gaining a new Lord of the Dark whenever a man deliberately chose to be changed into something more dread and powerful than his fellows. Such creatures were not born to their doom, like the Old Ones, but chose it. 

...He saw a time when the first great testing of the light came, and the Old Ones spent themselves for three centuries on bringing their land out of the Dark, with the help in the end of their greatest leader, lost in the saving unless one day he might wake and return again.

My wife (the medieval historian in the family) tells me that the imagery of waves of ships comes straight from Bede and Gildas. I don't doubt that you're right about that my dear, it's clearly an echo of the popular image of the Viking raids, but I also think that such imagery must have seemed particularly apt to someone who had lived through the Second World War as a child and to a readership growing up in it's aftermath (and in Britain the aftermath of the Second World War lasted well into the 60s; in fact, in some ways, culturally we're still living in that aftermath). The evil that the Dark represents is never explicitly defined, allowing it carry a multitude of metaphorical possibilities.

As well as World War Two, they also belonged to the generation which grew up celebrating Empire Day, before it was superseded by Commonwealth Day. They belonged to the last generation for whom the British Empire was an inescapable fact, part of the furniture which made up the cultural background. Will's older brother Stephen is in the British navy, stationed out in the West Indies, where he meets a magic foreigner who gives him one of the essential items Will needs to complete his quest. It's a very odd moment. I mean, what on earth is an avatar of Herne the Hunter doing there? It feels like a somewhat clumsy attempt to make a story which is otherwise intensely focused on the matter of Britain a little more universal.

In the imagery Susan Cooper deploys above, she's also using essentially the same symbolism as Rosemary Sutcliff. Civilisation is the 'light' which has to be protected against the Dark. And these quasi-aristocratic Old Ones are born not made, defending a light which is centred on this island nation. It's appropriate that there's a degree of Royal symbolism floating about the narrative. Which is not to say that it doesn't also complicate and simple assumption about the definition of the British nation and forces of the Light. Arthur, assuming it is he, is described by Merriman as 'part-Viking', suggesting a mingling of the native and foreign. And the forces of the Light aren't always kind. The figure of the Walker, condemned to walk through the centuries because he betrayed his master's trust, is hugely sympathetic; his actions, his choice of the dark, the result of the way his trust had been abused by his former master.

That ultimately, is what is so refreshing about Cooper's conception of the Dark. It is, ultimately, always a matter of choice, not something which is intrinsic to an invading race or person. In time, the invader's settle down. Evil is contingent.