Nid all hi ddim yn dianc o'i byd yn colli

[sovay]

Susan Cooper has said that Silver on the Tree (1977) was the most unwieldy of The Dark Is Rising Sequence, the one that really got away from her in the writing and was never wrestled back into a satisfactory shape. I believe it, not just because I have never reconciled myself to the ending, but because so much of it reads as though it was flung up out of her cauldron of echoes, like the Drowned Hundred, which she didn't realize Bran and Will were bound for until she had gotten them to the Dyfi estuary and the legend she had learned in childhood was right there for them to walk into. I don't re-read it often, although I loved the dream-quest for Eirias through the fisher-king Annwn of the Lost Land; much of its material works better for me in Seaward (1983). Looking for something else in the book, I kept getting snagged by lines that came with their own echoes, forward as well as past. "Such loving bonds . . . are outside the control even of the High Magic, for they are the strongest thing on all this earth." (Yes, Mr Farlan, nothing is stronger than the law in the universe, but on earth nothing is stronger than love.) "For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time." (Anyway, this is Timeheart. There's nothing here but Now . . .) I had forgotten or not noticed that Cooper gives the motif of the failure still worth its fight not only to Arthur at Badon Hill, but a thousand years later to Owain Glyndŵr, with no assurance until the last minute that it will mean anything six centuries from his own future. "If the Circle spreads that far forward, it is not so bad to find failure here, for a time . . . And if my men and I shall seem to be kept in these hills forever, that will not be such a bad thing, for it will prove to my people that the Lord of the Dark was wrong, and that hope does not lie dead in a tomb but is always alive for the hearts of men." Merriman invokes Drake and Arthur by name in his final speech, entrusting humanity with the world which will not be saved by any supernatural intervention, but he uses Glyndŵr's language for his benison and warning: "The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world." Less intriguingly to me, I had also forgotten that the rationale for the removal of memory runs right against the entire sequence's intensely permeable stratigraphy of ages: "because you are mortal and must live in present time, and it is not possible to think in the old ways there." Excuse you, Merlin, since when has anything mortal ever lived in the moment? The longer the present keeps going, the more time you get under your feet.

Comments

[asakiyume]

There was memory wiping in Seaward, too. I read the book for the first time only recently, and while there were several things about it that I loved, and even more that I could love for my child-self, even if current-me was more detached, that memory wiping really bugged me.

[sovay]

I read the book for the first time only recently, and while there were several things about it that I loved, and even more that I could love for my child-self, even if current-me was more detached, that memory wiping really bugged me.

I mind it significantly less in Seaward both because it seems to fit more organically with that book's sense of a dream out of time and because it is explicitly promised not to be forever: they will remember when they meet again. It seems wholly artificial in Silver on the Tree.

[asakiyume]

*nodding*

I remember nothing about Silver on the Tree, sadly, but I believe your impression. And yeah, the fact that they'll remember each other when they do find each other does lessen the forgetfulness blow.

[sovay]

I remember nothing about Silver on the Tree, sadly, but I believe your impression.

I don't know if I would call it the weakest of the sequence, but Cooper is right that it has almost no structure; it's full of vivid set pieces whose order I can almost never remember of which the last is the final meeting between the Light and the Dark. It's gorgeously, almost feverishly written. It hangs together more on dream logic than any of the other books. Bran's choice at the end has always been meaningful to me. And then it ceases to be meaningful the moment everyone's memory goes pfffft for the handwaviest of reasons. If you do re-read the sequence, I consider genarti's "To Remember for Always" (2004) essentially canonical.

And yeah, the fact that they'll remember each other when they do find each other does lessen the forgetfulness blow.

It's still alteration, but temporarily buried and then assured to be recovered memories feel very different to me from total magical deletion.

[thistleingrey]

*nods* I remember that I tried writing about that aspect of Seaward for an undergrad essay (though not what I said! eons ago), and I struggled so very much. Not a good essay, even a student essay, but worth the struggling attempt, I think.

[asakiyume]

The distinction Sovay makes is a good one: forgetting that's only temporary isn't the same as permanent forgetting. I don't see the necessity for even the temporary forgetting, though.

[thistleingrey]

Yes, to each aspect of your remarks. :)

[selkie]

*squints*

*adjusts adorable seal-snout northeasterly*

[sovay]

*adjusts adorable seal-snout northeasterly*

There's a lot in that line of sight.

*hugs*

[selkie]

Yes, and I am short, but if I were to clamber onto this muddy petrified stump, sight by the glow of Interstate 95 (could follow Rte 1 the whole way but who has that kind of time in this world) and use the Nauset Light for too far, I’d probably see interesting things. Interesting stratigraphy, anyway.
*hugs*