Eden

Because Jo Walton is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers, and because I loved this book, and because this is a new book and I think people should buy it, here is my review of it, all on its own, immediately I've finished the book.

I tried to write this review without spoilers, but it depends on what you consider to be spoilers. I think it's a book based more on characters than events, and I don't think knowing some of the events will spoil the whole, but you might want to exercise a bit of caution...

( Jo Walton -- Among Others )

I've been pondering this since I did my Robin Hood module, last semester. My lecturer talked about Robin Hood stories and King Arthur stories as opposed -- never popular at the same time, rarely appearing in the same text. King Arthur stories are generally popular when there is a perceived need for order. Robin Hood stories are generally popular when there is a perceived need for change. Yet the BBC's Merlin turns this on its head because Merlin, a symbol of disorder, is the main focus. This is especially clear in the BBC's Merlin because magic is explicitly figured as disorder by Uther: the kingdom was in a state until he got rid of magic.

Merlin is rarely at the centre of stories, but usually on the edge, where he can't disrupt the order of the established Camelot. In fact, the story generally has him imprisoned, relatively early in Arthur's reign. Not just in traditional stories -- in The Dark is Rising, Merriman, who is Merlin, leaves the world as soon as the Dark has been banished and order established. Merlin helps restore order and then he has to leave/be taken out of the story.

However, this Arthur story isn't about Arthur's Camelot. It's about an established order, yes: Uther's court. It is ordered, but it's cruel. It's ordered wrongly, and the very principles used to establish it are now tipping over into injustice.

Given how much I've been writing to my MPs and getting involved in grassroots campaigns at the moment, it's apparent to me that people want change, which would normally mean Robin Hood stories. However, by focusing on Uther's court, before Arthur's reign, the BBC can use Merlin as the instrument of change, rather than Robin Hood, whose thievery is illegal even now. It's still a desire for order, but a different order -- changed, not destroyed and then rebuilt.

That reflects what I've been seeing: by and large people don't want to destroy the current system in Britain, they just want reform. Arthur instead of Uther, so to speak.

Fandom: The Dark is Rising
For: Someone's Christmas present
Quality: Barely checked
Characters: Will, Bran

( A little echo )

In this last book, everything comes together. All the characters, all the plots and threads, all the separate pieces of mythology. Again, it's a beautiful book, and again, as always, there is some amazing characterisation. The things that catch my eye especially in this book are the initial awe/resentment of Bran from the Drews, Gwion's loyalty to and grief for Gwddyno, and John's grief when Blodwen betrays him. There's a lot of complex emotion going on here beneath the actual plot, and parts of it really, really hurt. There are also some parts that never fail to make me smile, like Barney's enthusiasm, and Bran and Will's Arthur/Merlin dynamic.

The actual end of the book and sequence both is at once exhilarating and hurtful. "Five shall return, and one go alone", says the prophecy, but I can't help but think that is ambiguous. Is it that Will, Jane, Simon, Barney and Bran return to our world, and Merriman goes alone? Or is it that Jane, Simon, Barney, Bran and Merriman return to where they belong, while Will is left alone? I suspect it's the former, but there's truth in the latter too: when you imagine how abandoned Will is.

I do love Bran's choice, despite what it leads to, because that's realistic. An adopted child doesn't lose their feelings for their adoptive parent just because they meet their biological parent. Bran still loves Owen (and, arguably another father-figure, John).

Merriman's last few speeches are amazing, but particularly this, and this is how I'll end my reviews. It's a very appropriate thing to be saying to a child, I think, after a book in which two moral opposites clash over and over. It leaves you to think.

"For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you."

I'm probably becoming repetitive with my reviews of this sequence. Parts of this book, especially the descriptions, are just glorious and perfect. I think of it as the book that focuses more on Jane, too, which is always interesting as she's the only real key female character. It also contains one of my favourite scenes/images from the sequence: Barney scrying.

There are some very interesting newer concepts introduced in this book. We've already met the Wild Magic, in a sense, in the form of Herne the Hunter, but the Greenwitch really personifies it. We also get to see Will growing into his power a lot more. He's still a boy, in some ways, but we get a more outside perspective of him so we see the part of him that is more than that shining through his boyishness. It's really interesting to see him through the eyes of the Drews.

It's also interesting to see the Drews drawn further into the deeper parts of the plot. It's always strange to me to realise how little they know. The characterisation of them is brilliant -- they're such ordinary kids, so resentful of another kid "interfering".

My only real complaint about Greenwitch is how short it is. I want more. There really isn't much action in this book and while I like it a lot, it feels somewhat lacking in climax.

Very few people are unaware that The Dark Is Rising is possibly my favourite series of books in the history of ever. Still, I haven't done a series of proper reviews for them, which is a horrible shame, and I'm going to do that this time through.

This is probably the fifteenth time I've read Over Sea, Under Stone, give or take a few times. Someone I knew recommended skipping it, since it's the most childish book in the series -- written, if I recall correctly, well before the other four, and most definitely aimed at kids. The scenario reminds me a little of a faintly Arthurian Enid Blyton story: three kids are on holiday and stumble into a mystery. On the other hand, it's much fuller than an Enid Blyton story. It's a fantasy story, at its most basic, really: the Dark vs. the Light. There's hints at an underlying story about King Arthur.

Character-wise, at this point it's relatively simple. Simon, Jane and Barney are pretty typical kids: the bossy older one, the practical and prepared girl, the youngest daydreamy boy. Still, they're endearing: Barney would have had my heart from the moment he opens his mouth and calls his big brother "cleversticks" -- if he hadn't had it already from being as devoted to King Arthur as I am. They may be simple characters, but they're also realistic. They get scared about what they're getting into, they doubt things, they underestimate the danger...

The writing itself is lovely. Not too fancy, and yet still describing things well. There's a real sense of ominous danger in parts of it, and yet the writing also brings across a feeling of childhood, summer vacations and sunburns and going to see the sea.

All in all, reading it now and knowing what the rest of the series is like, I look for the hints and things that will connect up, later. Something I've noticed this time through especially is the hints at Barney being something special, which is followed up on in Greenwitch and Silver On The Tree. It's interesting how often he knows or intuits things which seem hidden from everyone else.

Over Sea, Under Stone isn't my favourite book of the sequence, but it's still worth reading if you can get into it for the light it sheds on the later books.

Now, onto The Dark Is Rising itself! Spending a book with Will and the other Stantons feels like a lovely idea right now.

I really don't like Harry Potter. It's one of those little concealed but apparently not widely known facts about me, which shocks everyone when I say I love books and they're all, "yeah, rite, Harry Potter is so awesum rite?" and I say "...no, it really isn't." I confess: when I was eleven or twelve or so, I read them. I also read the Sabrina the Teenage Witch novels. I read everything and wasn't very discriminating about it. I did enjoy them. I continued to enjoy them until I got to Order of the Phoenix, and then I decided that all the hype aside, I just wasn't interested anymore. Bear in mind, then, for the rest of this "essay", that I have only read up to and including The Goblet of Fire.

Cue a few years of irritation while everyone insisted I must read the rest of the books, and how dare I prefer Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin (and later, Susan Cooper). I have really no objection to people reading the books and enjoying them, taking part in the fandom that surrounds them, dressing up in witchy costumes to go and pick up the most recently released volume at midnight. Have fun with that! As far as I'm concerned you're welcome to. I'm even quite happy to concede that yes, Harry Potter did get more people reading. Whether it got them reading literature or not is another matter: how many people, I wonder, have discovered a mania for reading after reading Harry Potter and then gone onto the likes of Crime and Punishment and War and Peace, or even Lord of the Rings? Not that many, I'll bet. I think they're probably reading Twilight and the like, more often than not.

But I. Don't. Have. To. Read. Them. Just because I like books, does not mean I like those books. And I detest it every time someone shoves them in my face as 'great literature'. I actually had to study Harry Potter, in my English Literature and Language Advanced Level GCE (for those outside the UK: your results in A Levels determine whether or not you can go to a top university; mine required me to get grades AAB, I actually have ABBB[B], but that's a whole 'nother story). One of the questions we had to answer was whether we thought Harry Potter was good literature, whether we thought it would stand the test of time, and how it was suited to the time it's currently in.

It was then that I figured out that, yeah, there are things wrong with Harry Potter beyond just the hype that was irritating me so much and the feeling that Rowling in no way matched up to the giants of fantasy and sci-fi, like Tolkien. I studied it alongside Tom Brown's Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes. Do note that I didn't like that book either. But it's a well written, well shaped, well considered book -- and it doesn't use the same cheap tricks as Harry Potter does. I'm not going to say much about that, since it's not a book I liked: if I'm going to compare/contrast, I'll compare with my favourite book that is also supposed to be for younger readers, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising.

There's nothing wrong with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone being an amateur first novel. 'cause that's what it is. I'm sure many people's first novels don't even see the light of day, and yet Harry Potter somehow made it to a publisher's and was accepted. The thing is, people mostly refuse to recognise that and the cheap tricks J. K. Rowling uses. For example, her character's names. 'Draco Malfoy'. Mal, the French for bad, immediately obvious. 'Draco', suggesting dragon? Or perhaps 'draconian', which has negative connotations aplenty (not that I'd necessarily attribute those particular ones to Draco). Not very subtle, is it? 'Dumbledore'. Who doesn't get the image of a well-meaning, if strange, old man? 'Minerva', straight out of Greek myth: a goddess of knowledge. Gee, I wonder why Rowling chose that for a female teacher... 'Remus Lupin', 'Sirius Black', 'Mad-Eye Moody'... Do I even have to say anything?

And 'Harry Potter'. Nothing striking about that: perfectly ordinary, as names go, right?

Yeah. And that's the point. Harry Potter himself is not a real character -- certainly not at first. He's a cypher, a convenient space into which a kid can very easily insert himself or even herself. He's brave. Okay, generic hero characteristic. He has doubts. Again, the same. He has a Tragic Past. Don't we all? Or don't we all like to think we do? Look at the Mary Sues/self inserts people write in fandom -- so often they're people with incredibly dark, melodramatic pasts that they rise above. Harry Potter is a convenient place to insert yourself. The other characters are archetypes more than anything -- Hermione, the know it all girl; Ron, the loyal friend; Dumbledore, the mentor; Malfoy, the rival...

All of that is actually what makes Harry Potter a highly readable, enjoyable book, for young people and even adults. It's targeted very precisely toward the readership of today. Maybe that makes J. K. Rowling a better author than I might paint her as, that she can know her audience so well -- there's that view, I'm sure. But it's all very basic, and I tend to look on it as cheap tricks. The whole chapter, in the first book, about the Mirror of Erised -- how sad does it make you feel for Harry? It's sentimental, it's sad -- and it's meant to do that, very obviously. There's a whole chapter written just to enforce the love between the members of Harry Potter's family.

Susan Cooper does it in a single paragraph that makes me want to cry every single time I read it, coming after all the build up of guilt and pain in the relationship. "Bran went to [his father] and put his arm round his waist, and stood close. It was the first gesture of affection between the two that Will had ever seen. And wondering, loving surprise woke in Owen Davies's worn face as he looked down at the boy's white head, and the two stood there, waiting."

That paragraph does for me what Rowling's whole chapter cannot. It's so effective, actually, because Cooper spends a whole book leading up to it, showing us Owen and Bran's relationship. Rowling shows us Harry's parents, but in an unsubtle way that actually throws me out of it because I think, "Oh, yeah, this is the chapter in which we're supposed to feel very sorry for Harry."

There's also a very easy, blunt misdirection. You're supposed to hate Snape, supposed to believe he's the one to blame for everything, and at the end, you're supposed to be as surprised as Harry when it's Quirrel waiting there for him. At the age of eleven, I think I went right along with that, but when I reread it for A Level, I had to wince at how heavy-handed the misdirection was. I understand that later in the series Snape comes into it more, and I don't know whether the misdirection turns out to be not that misdirected when it comes down to the real truth: but in the first book, you're meant to believe it's Snape all along, and I don't think J. K. Rowling does a very good job of giving us clues that it's not actually Snape, because she's so busy blackening him to lead people astray.

It's also very black-and-white. Questions aren't raised, by this story -- and that's a thing I think is actually important in literature. Raise questions, discuss issues, end with a question. I don't know what to call stories that don't fit into that, really. I'm going to go with 'novels' as opposed to literature. Harry Potter is a novel. It's a story. I don't think it has any real lasting values. Susan Cooper's books, while also quite basic, discussing the Light and the Dark, do end with a question. If man is left on earth, to do as man will, will man be Light or Dark? The immortals leave earth, and say that the world -- for better or worse -- belongs to humans. Right now, a lot of people think the answer to that question would be 'worse'. But Harry Potter does not raise this question, does not raise any question, and does not answer one either. That's why I don't think it will last except perhaps as a phenomenon to be studied: the 'Potter mania' and what caused it.

That's why I don't like Rowling's writing. It's not particularly refined, it's unsubtle -- and that's okay, you know, I'm not saying you can't enjoy that, can't find it refreshing. I don't. I'm also not saying that 'novels' are bad -- they're good, they can provide valuable escapism, they can be incredibly rich fodder for the imagination, and I suspect Harry Potter is, for many children. But I don't call it literature, and I myself don't like it.

I wrote this by way of a) justifying my feelings on Harry Potter and b) getting me back into thinking critically about literature, after a year of mostly doing small book reviews but nothing in depth. Obviously there's reams of stuff I haven't discussed/remembered/considered: feel free to discuss that with me! I welcome it. Contradict me, even, and then I'll pray I remember more of the examples I used to use to back up my points!

(I can't believe I just wrote a 1600 word essay on Harry Potter. Apparently I'm not as rusty as I thought. My style needs to become more formal, of course, once I'm writing papers, but...)

Fandom: The Dark Is Rising
For: eventual Will/Bran untitled WIP
Quality: Briefly checked
Character: Bran, Rhys
Notes: Trying to get me to talk more about this one and expressing interest/confusion/curiosity will all help me actually get going with writing it. I've got about five hundred words so far.

( Thick as thieves )

I know my last recs post was fairly recent, but my del.icio.us account has been amassing quite a few links in the meantime. Probably due to me reading more fic. If we talk on IM often, share the same flist content, share fic recommendations or you watch my del.icio.us, then you've probably seen all these before.

( Fic )

( Art )

Fandom: The Dark Is Rising
For: Loyalty chapter seven
Quality: Barely checked
Characters: Jane, Simon, Will, OC

( Take us all home )