The Grey King, Susan Cooper

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language: English
country: UK
year: 1975
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, children’s
series: The Dark Is Rising Sequence, #4
dates read: 9.1.13, 8.4.15, 12.3.24

it’s cliché to say this, but Susan Cooper’s The Grey King really did profoundly change me when I read it for the first time in ca. 2001. Bran Davies, with whom I fell hopelessly in love, however childishly at the time, set me in motion in the direction of the rest of my life. this book is so good — a careful balance of fantasy and romanticism with realistically-drawn characters and community, emotionally charged not because of the magically heightened stakes but because of the all-too-real dramas of petty intracommunity rivalry, surprisingly bluntly expressed sexual jealousy, and, above all, grief.

inevitably, as “Celtic fantasy,” there are a few places where it falls back on conventions (the description of Will’s arrival at Clwyd as entering another world) and one passing reference to a “Celtic” phenotype, but these are, I think, far outweighed by its constant emphasis on the community Will enters not as a romanticized elsewhere but as a real, living, modern, and Welsh-speaking community. Welsh is not the language of fantasy here but the language of — as it were — real people in a real place.

Will Stanton, last and youngest of the immortal Old Ones, arrives in rural Wales to convalesce after a severe illness. here he befriends a strange boy named Bran, and together they set out to unravel the prophecy Will recovered at the end of the previous book in the series. it is, in part, Arthurian, but rooted in Welsh culture and literature specifically, from the triads (2 and 92) to modern Welsh folklore (the Brenin Llwyd) even to modern Welsh literature (though the novel’s Caradog Prichard, unrelated to the writer, is portrayed quite negatively). Will and Bran as echoes of Merlin and Arthur are extremely gay. there’s something about this as a novel of awakening: Will’s coming into himself as an Old One and Bran’s coming into himself as Pendragon, of course, but also the sudden end to solitude (Will’s; Bran’s), turning towards someone else, finding unexpectedly desire (perhaps) for them and also (fairly explicitly) to love / protect / serve them. the joy of this, when the turning is mutual.

and grief: Owen Davies’s grief; Bran’s grief; John Rowlands’s not-quite-grief but certainly a profound sadness when talking to Will. it is, more than perhaps any of the other books in the series, for all that Silver on the Tree centers on the final battle, a novel about a war, one in which Will is very much a soldier and where collateral damage is not only possible but inevitable.

the rest of the series is, of course, also very good (though Over Sea, Under Stone in particular is marred by its reliance on colonial tropes and the structure of the adventure story), and Silver on the Tree is perhaps a close second, but The Grey King is truly something else.

moods: emotional, hopeful, inspiring, tense


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