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Turning your pain into a work of art has never been easier
Well before any advent of the plasterers who were finally supposed to fix the ceiling our bathroom has been mostly lacking since August, we were blasted awake by jackhammers and a vacuum truck. With the blessing of my live-in mate, I fled the house.
Because the 2022 BBC The Dark Is Rising is audibly a labor of love, I am a little sorry not to have been able to love it uncomplicatedly in its own right, but it is atmospherically invested in the eeriness of the story and its interleaving of narration and dialogue and the constant drift and sting of music is theatrically immersive and I had expected Toby Jones to make a good Walker, but he almost warps the production into the event horizon of his own damned time loop, which must have haunted co-adapter Robert Macfarlane as strongly as it noped my godchild out of the sequence. I would have let the script give a little more of the gleam of the bright-eyed original Hawkin, his green velvet coat not yet turned—his actor has the charm for it and it hurts more—but when he confronts Merriman at the Manor among the cold-burning candles of winter, every one of his six hundred unwanted years can be heard in his voice, all that pain dragged up through time as hopelessly endured as the great doors in and out of Time are a seamless sleight of hand. His incantation of the long chain of names that open the way for the Dark is a chilling high wire and he calls the Dark in at last with ironic courtesy, triumphant as his own mourning. I still feel bad that only two years ago did it occur to me that Cooper was writing a fantasy of the Cold War when it's right there on the surface of the text: "This is a cold battle we are in, Will, and in it we must sometimes do cold things." I didn't know when I was eleven to wonder if Merriman had made the mistake not of trusting a mortal man with more than he could bear, but of loving the asset he was running as far as his death. The music remains terrific and annoys me a little by not apparently existing on CD.
(Aside from choices made in the adaptation, it turned out I had opinions about the voices of Merriman and the Black Rider, which were not the fault of Paul Rhys or Tim McMullan. Without thinking much about it, I had always heard the latter with a kind of dry dark copper voice, like the color of his hair—Loki-red, his artisan's guise of Mr. Mitothin. I had never imagined his accent because it canonically sounds like no human language's trace, the natural dialect of the Dark. The former had always sounded as deeply to me as a bell in the bones of the land and I had not realized it was important to me for him not to sound exactly modern, even knowing how chameleonically the Old Ones belong to any time they choose. On the other hand, the incorporation of multiple voices into lines of the Light worked beautifully, especially when one of them reminds so strongly that the Circle is not English alone. The ominous, rook-cawed acceleration of the ending into the present moment is against the book, but not necessarily the sequence: and you may not lie expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. It is perhaps unfair of me to think from the way he delivers the last question of the radio series that director and co-adapter Simon McBurney could have done any of Merriman, the Rider, or the High Magic.)
I don't know how good a sign it is that I have been listening on repeat to the retro-pop dystopian cycle of Descartes a Kant's After Destruction (2023), but I also like the videos.
It doesn't seem to be plague, but I have spent most of this month increasingly sick and feeling that the entire year has been reeling past me in brainless exhaustion, one stressor on top of the next. I appreciate that Hestia has been spending a majority of nights curled against me, a solicitousness she did not always display. She is the sole doctor in the house now.
Because the 2022 BBC The Dark Is Rising is audibly a labor of love, I am a little sorry not to have been able to love it uncomplicatedly in its own right, but it is atmospherically invested in the eeriness of the story and its interleaving of narration and dialogue and the constant drift and sting of music is theatrically immersive and I had expected Toby Jones to make a good Walker, but he almost warps the production into the event horizon of his own damned time loop, which must have haunted co-adapter Robert Macfarlane as strongly as it noped my godchild out of the sequence. I would have let the script give a little more of the gleam of the bright-eyed original Hawkin, his green velvet coat not yet turned—his actor has the charm for it and it hurts more—but when he confronts Merriman at the Manor among the cold-burning candles of winter, every one of his six hundred unwanted years can be heard in his voice, all that pain dragged up through time as hopelessly endured as the great doors in and out of Time are a seamless sleight of hand. His incantation of the long chain of names that open the way for the Dark is a chilling high wire and he calls the Dark in at last with ironic courtesy, triumphant as his own mourning. I still feel bad that only two years ago did it occur to me that Cooper was writing a fantasy of the Cold War when it's right there on the surface of the text: "This is a cold battle we are in, Will, and in it we must sometimes do cold things." I didn't know when I was eleven to wonder if Merriman had made the mistake not of trusting a mortal man with more than he could bear, but of loving the asset he was running as far as his death. The music remains terrific and annoys me a little by not apparently existing on CD.
(Aside from choices made in the adaptation, it turned out I had opinions about the voices of Merriman and the Black Rider, which were not the fault of Paul Rhys or Tim McMullan. Without thinking much about it, I had always heard the latter with a kind of dry dark copper voice, like the color of his hair—Loki-red, his artisan's guise of Mr. Mitothin. I had never imagined his accent because it canonically sounds like no human language's trace, the natural dialect of the Dark. The former had always sounded as deeply to me as a bell in the bones of the land and I had not realized it was important to me for him not to sound exactly modern, even knowing how chameleonically the Old Ones belong to any time they choose. On the other hand, the incorporation of multiple voices into lines of the Light worked beautifully, especially when one of them reminds so strongly that the Circle is not English alone. The ominous, rook-cawed acceleration of the ending into the present moment is against the book, but not necessarily the sequence: and you may not lie expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. It is perhaps unfair of me to think from the way he delivers the last question of the radio series that director and co-adapter Simon McBurney could have done any of Merriman, the Rider, or the High Magic.)
I don't know how good a sign it is that I have been listening on repeat to the retro-pop dystopian cycle of Descartes a Kant's After Destruction (2023), but I also like the videos.
It doesn't seem to be plague, but I have spent most of this month increasingly sick and feeling that the entire year has been reeling past me in brainless exhaustion, one stressor on top of the next. I appreciate that Hestia has been spending a majority of nights curled against me, a solicitousness she did not always display. She is the sole doctor in the house now.
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Thank you. She is an excellent kit and makes an immovable little round in the night.
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reminded me startlingly of the ending of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Different corvid species, but it's just that idea.
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Hah! I haven't read that novel in some time and now I want to compare it to the Cooper (and the Macfarlane/McBurney).
I would love to hear what you think of the full sequence, especially since I bracket some of Cooper and Garner very strongly.
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The best-ia!
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And even if the adaptation was a mixed thing for you, you still have written it up so beautifully here. And thank you for the link to the music. <3
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I am informed that the jackhammers and the vacuum truck did eventually depart the scene, but the plasterers pulled a Godot and never showed and so now we are stuck waiting for them tomorrow morning, no bets will be taken at this time.
And even if the adaptation was a mixed thing for you, you still have written it up so beautifully here. And thank you for the link to the music.
Thank you! And you're welcome! I am not sorry to have listened to it. It's about the one thing I did with the weekend.
*hugs*
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That's the absolute worst, I'm so sorry. I'm glad you have a comfort kitty! <3
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*hugs*
She's being really sweet. I don't even think it's just because the temperatures have plunged. She's slept happily over the heating grates and on her little electric mat for years.
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You know where the boy stands on the subject, but for contrast's sake, I never saw it that way - that the greater wrong is to sell out someone you love because fuck the abstract of the greater good - until he did. I was always team Merriman because, like. The world! It's ending! Everything is in the balance! And I missed the manipulation that completely burnt Gummery in the eyes of my kid. Get away from that guy, Barney, he is not your uncle or your friend.
(Still not as funny as "Oh, he's having visions of flowers? He dead. How many pages, Mama, until he dead?"
*riffle riffle* "....Six.")
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It is probably an unfair introduction to him as an actor. I have admittedly seen him in one quite excellent horror movie and as a character actor with a flexibly odd-looking face he has played his share of weirdos, but he came to my notice as the dissolute and decent deputy commissioner in The Painted Veil (2006) and I am currently delighted by him in Detectorists.
You know where the boy stands on the subject, but for contrast's sake, I never saw it that way - that the greater wrong is to sell out someone you love because fuck the abstract of the greater good - until he did.
It goes both ways, is the problem, because it's a tragedy in the formal as well as the emotional sense: Merriman is right to feel that he did too little to show Hawkin that he was valued as more than a key in the lock of the Light and Hawkin is right to feel that his six centuries without dying under the weight of the Sign were desperately cruel and he betrayed his beloved liege lord twice to the Dark which hunted him all the while the Light had abandoned him and none of it squares. It's very le Carré, the collateral damage of people who get caught up behind the curtain of the shadow world. It's amazing to me how it's inset among the candles of winter and the ship burial and the Chiltern flint and the owl-eyes of Herne the Hunter.
*riffle riffle* "....Six."
That's (y)our death-and-story child!
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There was a lot I really loved about the BBC audio drama. The incorporation of multiple voices was wonderful! So much of the sound design was. And it was so clearly a labor of love, so I wanted to love it wholeheartedly, but as it is I appreciate it very much but my love is somewhat mixed with disagreement.
My biggest quibbles with it, which were unfortunately fairly load-bearing, were that Will's voice actor worked for me as a kid but not as an Old One -- a hard act to ask of a child voice actor, admittedly, but also a fairly critical one -- and that Merriman's actor didn't sell me on the love and regret for Hawkin, only the harshness, and the love and grief and regret are so central to the tragedy that after that episode I ranted to Becca for quite a while about it. But there's so much that's good -- the rook-cawed acceleration, as you say, and the general world of crisp snow crunching and voices on the wind and all the inhabitants of the village and of the Old Ways (some the same after all) turning a corner and coming into the story and moving out again about their own lives and business.
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I wonder if anyone has ever asked Susan Cooper if she had anyone in her head for him.
(I fell down this interview casually trying to find out. It confirms the quarter-year plan for the sequence, but more importantly I don't think I had ever seen any of her family photos. I don't care if she really was better writing for the stage than acting on it, that photo of eighteen-year-old her as a dandy of The Scarlet Pimpernel is a treasure.)
My biggest quibbles with it, which were unfortunately fairly load-bearing, were that Will's voice actor worked for me as a kid but not as an Old One -- a hard act to ask of a child voice actor, admittedly, but also a fairly critical one --
He needs to be able to sound outside of Time, once he is. It's part of what I meant about their Merriman sounding too modern, which was as much a matter of affect as accent or intonation: it seemed a weird oversight in a performance of a story so concerned with the stratigraphy and slippage of time. At no point did I have this problem with Harriet Walter, who sounded as though she only dipped into linear time when she felt like it.
and that Merriman's actor didn't sell me on the love and regret for Hawkin, only the harshness, and the love and grief and regret are so central to the tragedy that after that episode I ranted to Becca for quite a while about it.
Understood. I also wanted more from his side of those scenes. He did sell me on the line, slightly altered from the novel and powerfully for me, "Oh, Hawkin, my son of centuries, how can you do what you are going to do?"
But there's so much that's good -- the rook-cawed acceleration, as you say, and the general world of crisp snow crunching and voices on the wind and all the inhabitants of the village and of the Old Ways (some the same after all) turning a corner and coming into the story and moving out again about their own lives and business.
I loved the double-casting—Will's father with the Rider, his sister with Maggie Barnes, one of his brothers with John Wayland Smith, another with the Jamaican Old One, his mother with Dr. Armstrong which is less numinous but I have no objections to widening the number of female characters in the cast. I made some comment to
I would not mind if this same creative team tackled the rest of the books, but I would have an unjustifiable number of opinions if they did The Grey King.
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Huh. Weird that you would have any reference for what that sounded like.
I'll have to actually listen to it while it's available! I have held off and held off because audio is not my brain's medium per se and because all the voices sound how they should in my head, but now I want to know where I agree or disagree with folks.
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It seems to have been freely available since 2022, which I think is really nice. It can even be downloaded, if you prefer.
It was an interesting experience because I don't hear text as I read it, but I had definite opinions as soon as I heard it read by someone else.
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Fair. It is one of those tricks of double vision that are much more easily handled on the page. Would you have cast an older actor instead, or just a thirteen-year-old who could better shift registers of reality?
(Unfortunately I found the double-casting distracting rather than evocative, especially for Mary and Maggie.)
(I am afraid it's one of the theatrical devices that I am inclined to love if it isn't completely stupid. It also looks like a signature move of Complicité, whose 2012–13 The Master and Margarita doubled the Master with Woland.)
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It aired over the relevant days of December 2022 and is still up at BBC World Service!
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I would be very wary about watching a Dark is Rising adaptation (I'm very susceptible to having my mental images irretrievably replaced by film adaptations, even when I never want that to happen, and I would hate to be afflicted with that curse for a series I love so much.) But you make this audio adaptation sound very tempting, even if imperfect.
I had always heard the latter with a kind of dry dark copper voice.
Yes! I love this way of putting it.
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I did not regret listening to it even where I argued with it and can attest from re-reading the book immediately afterward that it did not interfere with my own associations with the language. And parts of it were shiver-raising.
Yes! I love this way of putting it.
Thank you!