Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree
The final book in a series that I could have read as a child. Frankly, I really should have done, but for some reason I never came across this series. It's exactly the sort of thing I liked though, ancient mystical forces appearing in a rural English landscape. Welsh landscape in this case, which is oddly appropriate to me now that I actually live in a Welsh landscape myself. Not that I had any inkling about that move when I was reading the Susan Cooper's series throughout what is now the year before last.
It being so long since I read it, this post has obviously been hanging around unfinished for some time. It's one of several, and my current plan for the blog is either to finish or else give up on this handful of unfinished posts, and then hopefully start posting a little more regularly. As here, more recent reading will likely intrude. Like most plans, it will no doubt prove to be unrealisable.
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But I really did want to write a final piece about this series, and the last book seemed to the right place to do so, since it's where all the characters introduced throughout the series are finally brought together. As satisfying as the ending is with a resolution the supernatural conflicts between the 'Dark' and the 'Light' which stretches throughout the series, it's not perhaps the strongest entry. Although the first book was published in 1965, with the following volumes taking place over the following seasons/year, yet it feels as though time has moved on in other ways, and we're now in the mid-70s. Or at least that's the way it feels to me, with an encounter early on with a moment of everyday racism in the tormenting of a Sikh boy Harry Singh that seems to belong more to 1977. That period which encompassed the immigration of Asians from Kenya as well as economic/industrial decline, coming after Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of blood' speech in 1968, and after the 1973 oil crisis.
Once again, we have the ambiguity of precisely what the nature of the threat is that the dark represents. At times it's equated with the nationalist fear of historical attacks on England, yet elsewhere it seems to a more general sense of evil. Equally, as I've said before, the supernatural is never an excuse for human evil. The ignorance and racism of Harry Singh's tormentors as well as their bigoted father is only a means for the supernatural to enter and influence their lives, rather than being the source of their evil.
This is also in keeping with a fantasy in which magic is not only something kept apart from the world, but also kept to strict rules. This is most obvious in the climax to The Grey King where Bran and Will Stanton are tested by representatives of the Dark and the Light, balanced by a member of the 'High' magic, one of several forces which exist apart from the warring factions of the Dark and the Light. Similarly there is a long section in which our heroes are travelling through a magical landscape - the 'Lost Land' - in which they are occasionally threatened by a representative of the Dark. Yet there's something lacking in his threat. The Dark is as bound by the rules of this world as is the Light, and with so much of the action seemingly foretold, there's never any real feeling of a convincing threat. Of course we know with a story of this kind that 'good' will eventually triumph, but if there is no sense that the opposing force could ever achieve victory, then it can ultimately feel rather hollow.
In contrast, the earlier novels, perhaps because they aren't intended to conclude anything, are rather more effective in portraying the Dark as a credible power. They also have more space to investigate more human concerns. The Grey King, the fourth book, with it's depiction of the relationship between King Arthur's son Bran and his adoptive and overprotective father Owen Davies in contemporary Wales, is possibly one of the most emotionally powerful children's novels that I can remember reading. Despite it's supernatural elements, with a hunt for the golden harp which will wake the magical Sleepers in preparation for the final battle, at it's heart it's a very human story about their relationship.
There's a similarly human, and very touching, moment towards the end of Silver on the Tree. The character John Rowlands is offered the choice of whether he should remember the horror of what his wife Blodwen became in the service of the Dark. In fact, all of the human characters eventually choose amnesia. Bran ultimately decides to remain with his adoptive father, rejecting his immortality. Magic is ultimately banished from the world. Whilst the Dark is ultimately defeated, the victory of the Light is ultimately to free humanity from supernatural influence, which also includes the workings of the Light. Although the forces of the Dark are clearly evil in their intent, those of the Light are not always wholly admirable. It gives a real sense of the cost of this conflict, as well as an implicit judgement that it is ultimately quotidian human experience which is most important.
An important message for a children's story to provide. And by 'message', I don't mean anything that's didactic in intent. By it's nature, the 'quotidian' has little moral force. It's - merely, if you like - the experience of the lives we live. One consequence of the use of fantasy is that perhaps part of it's appeal can implicitly denigrate the ordinary lives we lead when we close the covers of the book. After all, what child wouldn't want to discover they had inherited mystical powers as part of magical elite? Or else, find themselves caught up in an exciting adventure? Well, that's the kind of child I was, at least!
So fantasy is given up for the realities of (eventually) adult life, but not until after we've thoroughly enjoyed the adventure.
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On final point. A contemporary review of Silver on the Tree, helpfully quoted on Wikipedia, compares the series to Narnia, and makes the point most of the assembled heroes are ordinary children who 'do not seem up to the task' of defeating the Dark. Whilst it could be suggested that this a rather condescending view of what are, after all, fantasies intended for a readership of children, it's worth thinking through a bit more deeply. Simply because, in today's world, we have a real world example of children pressed into service in real world wars. Child soldiers are one of the moral horrors of our time (not that children weren't involved in warfare in the past, of course, but was it in quite the same way?). I don't think I'm stretching a point here to find a metaphor in the roles imposed on characters who are children in these kinds of stories.
Of course, this is surely part of the attraction to a young reader, the identification with child heroes who can take on such roles. Yet, is that not a danger it self? I'm reminded of a criticism by A.S. Byatt, that Narnia is dangerous because it embodies an uncritical and solipsistic over involvement with fantasy, in which the child protagonist is literally swallowed up by the product of the imagination. Put like that, such fantasies do clearly embody a worrying model for reading. Byatt's complaint is also part of her general distrust of the imagination. It's a distrust she shares with figures as disparate as Alan Bennett and - going further back - Flaubert. I can't help feel that such distrust of the imagination is Protestant in its inspiration. Children - most readers in fact - are for the most part perfectly able to distinguish between the imagination and reality. Part of the attraction of fantasy is precisely the fact that it is fantasy.
Yet that isn't to deny that there is something troubling here in the figure of a child pressed into service in a supernatural conflict. And we do now have one novel which confronts precisely this issue. Alan Garner's Boneland shows how profoundly traumatic it might be to survive such an encounter with the supernatural as a child in its portrait of the deeply troubled Colin Whisterfield. For all that the psychotherapist Colin meets is also a magical figure, and the service she provides seems remarkably quick in it's effects, it's still one of the most convincing portraits of the therapeutic process that I've come across in fiction. Boneland is a novel I'm glad I read as an adult.
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