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So very sure his father was always, of the right and the wrong
This time last year, I was on a plane returning from D.C., enthusiastically underslept and thinking about Sherlock. This year, my god-daughter's birthday was Arisia Saturday and one of us needs to cross state lines in the near future. She is three years old now; I am informed there was a pirate party. I should just have recorded myself singing "Captain Kidd" or something.
Desktop note! This one dates from April 2010, when it looks as though I promised it to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asakiyume as an expansion on comments ("By the same token, a few months ago I re-read The Grey King for the first time in literally I don't know how many years and realized that while I could have reconstructed the basic plotline, numerous visual and mythological details, and even quoted some of the text from memory, I had not at all remembered a major supporting character past his plot function and I was flabbergasted, because he was precisely the sort of character I would have expected to imprint on") and then failed to follow through, the usual. I was prompted to dig it up again by something genarti said at the YA panel "Strong Stories with Strong Parents" on Sunday. We were both talking about Owen Davies.
Having just finished Susan Cooper's The Grey King (1975) for the first time in literally I don't know how many years, I find it interesting to note that Owen Davies was not part of the story I remembered. White-haired Bran with his tawny owl's eyes, yes; I am not going to forget his parentage or his harp-playing or the choices he made and the first time I read the book in a slant of sunlight on my grandparents' downstairs couch in Maine, I started immediately trying to apply his Welsh pronunciation guide to all the names in the Prydain Chronicles—I make a point of the voiced dental fricative in "Fflewddur" to this day, even knowing Lloyd Alexander didn't. Cafall with the silver eyes that see the wind, yes, because it is in the poem; and whose hound he was named for, because it is part of Bran. I remembered John Rowlands, although mostly because he reappears in Silver on the Tree (1977), and I remembered Caradog Prichard vividly, because he is Cooper's most convincing depiction of the Dark in human form. (He makes no bargains, he summons nothing, he is not a fallen angel or even a tragic figure like Hawkin; he is a small-minded, spiteful, quick-angering man who nearly does murder over a meaningless grudge and destroys himself for it anyway. And once he wanted to be a poet, so he braved the night up on Cader Idris. He genuinely disturbs me.) I didn't remember the riddles under Craig yr Aderyn, but I remembered the sky-blue, hooded lord of the Dark. The Brenin Llwyd and his milgwn. At least one of the sheepdogs' names. But Bran's foster-father? Looking at him now, I would have expected to him to stick: "the familiar drab Owen Davies with his humourless, slightly guilty air," who for three days was loved by Arthur's Guinevere and for eleven years has been a father to her son, not quite as successfully as either of them might have hoped. That is exactly the sort of character-in-the-corners-of-things that under normal circumstances I re-read for. He was a surprise to me.
I suppose it's appropriate; he's introduced as a nonentity.
"How do you do, young man?" Bran's father came forward, holding out his hand; his gaze was direct and his handshake firm, though Will had an immediate curious feeling that the real man was not there behind the eyes. "I am Owen Davies. I have been hearing about you."
"How d'you do, Mr. Davies," said Will. He was trying not to look surprised. Whatever he had expected in Bran's father, it was not this: a man so completely ordinary and unremarkable, whom you could pass on the street without noticing he had been there. Someone as odd as Bran should have had an odd father. But Owen Davies was all medium and average: average height, medium-brown hair in a medium quantity; a pleasant, ordinary face, with a slightly pointed nose and thin lips; an average voice, neither deep nor high, with the same precise enunciation that Will was beginning to learn belonged to all North Welshmen. His clothes were ordinary, the same shirt and trousers and boots that would be worn by anyone else on a farm. Even the dog that stood at his side, quietly watching them all, was a standard Welsh sheepdog, black-backed, white-chested, black-tailed, unremarkable. Not like Cafall: just as Bran's father was not at all like Bran.
He's not a bad father; he loves Bran, but he has never been able to express it except through the kind of protectiveness (trying to use chapel on Sundays and non-conversation the rest of the week to keep his son away from the mysteries of the Light and the mists of the Brenin Llwyd, because even if he won't admit it out loud, he knows who his Gwennie was) that only makes Bran feel more of a freak, caged away from a normal kid's life with his tight-lipped deacon of a father. And it is Owen's religion which has bent him into "the usual expression of alarmed propriety," his conviction that his love for Bran's mother was a sin and so the faint, always undercurrent of shame or constraint in their relationship that Bran can't help but pick up on and feel is somehow his fault. You could change very little about this setup and he'd be the counterpart to Caradog Prichard, like the two chessboard figures of the Riders in Silver on the Tree: the Dark pressing in through greed on one side and denial on the other. But Cooper has a great deal of sympathy for him, which comes out first in the stories John Rowlands and Jen Evans tell about his past ("He had never loved anyone much before. Very shy, was Owen. It was like a dam bursting . . . With a man like that, it is dangerous—when at last he loves, he gives all his heart without care or thinking, and it may never go back to him for the rest of his life"), so that Will forgets his millennia of inherited experience for a minute and marvels at "this mist of romance surrounding dim, ordinary Owen Davies," and then the ways in which he keeps on surprising the youngest of the Old Ones. He is less vague than he seems; he hears the things Will doesn't say, he follows Bran, he stands with him against Prichard and the powers of the Grey King. He will probably be a lot less of a parental fuck-up from now on. But he's still an odd, regretful character, less Ector than Pellinore, and while his son may stand someday beside his Pendragon father, Owen's Gwennie never will come back to him. The last lines of the book are the echo of his loss.
He wasn't in my head at all. I'm glad to have him back.
My story "The Boy Who Learned How to Shudder" is in this anthology. I am greatly looking forward.
Desktop note! This one dates from April 2010, when it looks as though I promised it to
asakiyume as an expansion on comments ("By the same token, a few months ago I re-read The Grey King for the first time in literally I don't know how many years and realized that while I could have reconstructed the basic plotline, numerous visual and mythological details, and even quoted some of the text from memory, I had not at all remembered a major supporting character past his plot function and I was flabbergasted, because he was precisely the sort of character I would have expected to imprint on") and then failed to follow through, the usual. I was prompted to dig it up again by something genarti said at the YA panel "Strong Stories with Strong Parents" on Sunday. We were both talking about Owen Davies.Having just finished Susan Cooper's The Grey King (1975) for the first time in literally I don't know how many years, I find it interesting to note that Owen Davies was not part of the story I remembered. White-haired Bran with his tawny owl's eyes, yes; I am not going to forget his parentage or his harp-playing or the choices he made and the first time I read the book in a slant of sunlight on my grandparents' downstairs couch in Maine, I started immediately trying to apply his Welsh pronunciation guide to all the names in the Prydain Chronicles—I make a point of the voiced dental fricative in "Fflewddur" to this day, even knowing Lloyd Alexander didn't. Cafall with the silver eyes that see the wind, yes, because it is in the poem; and whose hound he was named for, because it is part of Bran. I remembered John Rowlands, although mostly because he reappears in Silver on the Tree (1977), and I remembered Caradog Prichard vividly, because he is Cooper's most convincing depiction of the Dark in human form. (He makes no bargains, he summons nothing, he is not a fallen angel or even a tragic figure like Hawkin; he is a small-minded, spiteful, quick-angering man who nearly does murder over a meaningless grudge and destroys himself for it anyway. And once he wanted to be a poet, so he braved the night up on Cader Idris. He genuinely disturbs me.) I didn't remember the riddles under Craig yr Aderyn, but I remembered the sky-blue, hooded lord of the Dark. The Brenin Llwyd and his milgwn. At least one of the sheepdogs' names. But Bran's foster-father? Looking at him now, I would have expected to him to stick: "the familiar drab Owen Davies with his humourless, slightly guilty air," who for three days was loved by Arthur's Guinevere and for eleven years has been a father to her son, not quite as successfully as either of them might have hoped. That is exactly the sort of character-in-the-corners-of-things that under normal circumstances I re-read for. He was a surprise to me.
I suppose it's appropriate; he's introduced as a nonentity.
"How do you do, young man?" Bran's father came forward, holding out his hand; his gaze was direct and his handshake firm, though Will had an immediate curious feeling that the real man was not there behind the eyes. "I am Owen Davies. I have been hearing about you."
"How d'you do, Mr. Davies," said Will. He was trying not to look surprised. Whatever he had expected in Bran's father, it was not this: a man so completely ordinary and unremarkable, whom you could pass on the street without noticing he had been there. Someone as odd as Bran should have had an odd father. But Owen Davies was all medium and average: average height, medium-brown hair in a medium quantity; a pleasant, ordinary face, with a slightly pointed nose and thin lips; an average voice, neither deep nor high, with the same precise enunciation that Will was beginning to learn belonged to all North Welshmen. His clothes were ordinary, the same shirt and trousers and boots that would be worn by anyone else on a farm. Even the dog that stood at his side, quietly watching them all, was a standard Welsh sheepdog, black-backed, white-chested, black-tailed, unremarkable. Not like Cafall: just as Bran's father was not at all like Bran.
He's not a bad father; he loves Bran, but he has never been able to express it except through the kind of protectiveness (trying to use chapel on Sundays and non-conversation the rest of the week to keep his son away from the mysteries of the Light and the mists of the Brenin Llwyd, because even if he won't admit it out loud, he knows who his Gwennie was) that only makes Bran feel more of a freak, caged away from a normal kid's life with his tight-lipped deacon of a father. And it is Owen's religion which has bent him into "the usual expression of alarmed propriety," his conviction that his love for Bran's mother was a sin and so the faint, always undercurrent of shame or constraint in their relationship that Bran can't help but pick up on and feel is somehow his fault. You could change very little about this setup and he'd be the counterpart to Caradog Prichard, like the two chessboard figures of the Riders in Silver on the Tree: the Dark pressing in through greed on one side and denial on the other. But Cooper has a great deal of sympathy for him, which comes out first in the stories John Rowlands and Jen Evans tell about his past ("He had never loved anyone much before. Very shy, was Owen. It was like a dam bursting . . . With a man like that, it is dangerous—when at last he loves, he gives all his heart without care or thinking, and it may never go back to him for the rest of his life"), so that Will forgets his millennia of inherited experience for a minute and marvels at "this mist of romance surrounding dim, ordinary Owen Davies," and then the ways in which he keeps on surprising the youngest of the Old Ones. He is less vague than he seems; he hears the things Will doesn't say, he follows Bran, he stands with him against Prichard and the powers of the Grey King. He will probably be a lot less of a parental fuck-up from now on. But he's still an odd, regretful character, less Ector than Pellinore, and while his son may stand someday beside his Pendragon father, Owen's Gwennie never will come back to him. The last lines of the book are the echo of his loss.
He wasn't in my head at all. I'm glad to have him back.
My story "The Boy Who Learned How to Shudder" is in this anthology. I am greatly looking forward.
no subject
I actually helped run a two hour Arthur roundtable with music and scholarship last year at Lunacon that was a lot of fun. Sadly, I missed out half of it, but for very good reasons.
I can't find the song on YouTube, but there is a DropBox with your name on it.