Peaeater

I'm re-reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series.* I plunder the youth section of our library fairly regularly and last time they happened to have every book of the series on the shelf, and I gathered them up in my arms and headed straight for checkout, baring my teeth and hissing at the children who got in my way.

The Dark is Rising series is "high fantasy" and has all the ingredients I love. Old magic. "The Dark." A group of plucky schoolchildren. Cornwall. A mixture of Celtic and Arthurian mythology. And a peculiarly English sensibility when it comes to danger and horror. When I read this following bit I thought: "That somehow sums it up exactly:"

Upstairs, Simon paused in the little corridor linking the bedrooms, clutching his head in a kind of despairing fierceness. "This is ludicrous! Crazy! One minute we're in the middle of some awful great... watching that, that thing... and then Gummery turns up, and before you know it he's tucking us up with cups of cocoa."

-- Greenwitch, Ch. 10

I mean, the stereotypical American reaction would have been: "Git me my shotgun, Maw." But the English reaction is to fight fear and despair with a quiet intensification of ordinary life. I cannot help but admire it. It's surely a naive and oversimplified romantic admiration, but I don't care. I will always feel a deep kinship with the the British Isles. And their young adult fiction.

* Hey! I just discovered, in making a link to the Wikipedia article on The Dark is Rising, that there is a film version coming out in September 2007! With Ian McShane! You *must* see him as the villanous Al Swearengen in HBO's Deadwood. OH!!! And now I see he is doing a part in a movie version of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass to be released in December 2007! The Dark is Rising and The Golden Compass, all in one year? My stars, I feel faint. Fetch the smelling salts, Amelia!