Finding Arthur

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been reading Susan Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" series for young people. I read the second book, The Dark Is Rising, years ago when I was studying children's literature, but I'd since forgotten most of the plot details. What I mainly remembered was its tone of eerie suspense and the elaborate interweaving of the ordinary with the supernatural in the adventures of its young hero, Will Stanton.

I've been reading the books out of order, which has actually made it more fun than if I'd done it linearly. This is not surprising if you know the story line. The plot involves a lot of time hopping, past lives, recovery of things forgotten, and travel from one world to the next, so jumbling the order of the books just increases the pleasurable sense of not knowing what's going to happen next mixed with a bit of deja vu. It's similar to the way I might have read the books when I was a kid, coming across one at random and not being overly concerned with sequencing. It's a very relaxing way to read, I have to say.

After reading just The Dark Is Rising for class, I didn't realize the extent to which the series relies on British and Celtic mythology for some of its characters and themes. This would have been clear if I'd read the first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, first, because it contains a major plot reveal concerning one of the characters. Finding out the probable identity of that character makes it clear that the series is steeped in Arthurian legend, which for me is the icing on the cake. I knew there was a reason I liked that book!

Taking a children's lit class cured me of any tendency I might have had to think of young adult literature as escapist. The Dark Is Rising (as well as many of the other young adult books I read) has a much more serious outlook on life than you might imagine given the sometimes fantastic elements of plot. All of the fantasy and magic is in the service of a gigantic and ongoing battle between the Light and the Dark, or Good and Evil, in which even a little boy has a great and inescapable responsibility. Young Will, with his unique role in the age-old struggle, sometimes feels the loneliness of a burden that's impossible to share with others, including his family.

The series deftly portrays ordinary time and mythic time co-existing and interacting. A basic dualism in the stories is somewhat complicated by natural magic, which is independent of Light and Dark and not easily biddable. While it's essentially neutral, it sometimes plays a role in the fight by lending its influence to one side or the other. There's an indication that the Light/Dark struggle will end, although I don't know how because I haven't gotten there yet. If the Light wins, presumably this ushers in a Golden Age of some kind, so that although the membrane between past, present, and future is very fluid in the stories, there is a kind of historical movement. Does that mean that ordinary time will be subsumed into eternity at the end of the story? It's hard to say, which is why I'm continuing to read.

I was thinking today about the role of figures like Arthur and Merlin in this story, guardians for the Good with a special authority and responsibility. This is, I suppose, a bit elitist, since they are portrayed as a category of beings with powers and superior wisdom that more or less set them apart. The author plays down the elitism by incarnating her heroes into fairly conventional people who find out that they are not merely who they think they are but something more. Will comes from an average family, and so do many of his allies, but they are born with inherent abilities that are part of their special destiny.

There's an old saying that King Arthur never really died and will come back again in an hour of great need; this series interprets that part of the legend in its own way, depicting a world in which anyone, even the youngest boy in a large middle-class family or a lonely child on a working-class farm, can discover inner nobility and purpose. That matches my idea of the return of Arthur, which is to say that if he lives anywhere it's inside all of us. It's no good waiting around for him to come back; if we want him, we have to discover him in ourselves and bring him back around that way. Even in America, where we don't have kings, this is possibly a good thing to remember.