The Dark is Rising

[sawyl]

Thanks to today's horrible, if rather appropriate, snowy weather, I've been able to make good on this morning's pledge by reading the The Dark is Rising.

On the eve of the solistice, the day before his eleventh birthday, Will Stanton is given a small iron ornament by a neighbour. After passing a bad night — the skylight in his bedroom gives way under the weight of the falling snow — Will wakes to a world not his own. Walking the snowy paths into the village, he encounters a friendly blacksmith and a mysterious rider in black. He also encounters a pair of wooden doors standing in the middle of nowhere.

Stepping through the doors, Will finds himself a peculiar hall where he encounters two people: a nameless woman and a man called Merriman. They tell him that as well as being a child, he is also the last of the Old Ones, a group who stand outside of time and oppose the forces of the Dark. For the Old Ones, Will learns that his early birthday present, the iron hoop, is actually one of six mystical Signs created in times to add the cause of Light. He is charged collecting all the Signs and told to ensure that they do not fall into the hands of his enemies. Will returns home, to find that no time has passed in his absence, and begins to pursue the remaining Signs.

In the few days remaining before Christmas, Will is able to locate both the sign of bronze and the sign of wood but, in finding the latter, he also finds something else: enlightenment. With guidance from Merriman and a book called the Gramarye, he truly begins to learn what it means to be an Old One and what it is that he can do that others cannot. But the truth comes at a great price.

Once Christmas Day has passed, the rising of the Dark begins in earnest. The cold weather that has gripped the country since the solstice gets steadily worse, trapping people in their homes and cutting off the village from the rest of the world. On the advice of Merriman, acting as a temporary butler to the owner of the local great house, many of the villagers — including Will, his father and one of his brothers — take refuge in the tudor manor. When the Dark, intent on reaching a vagrant being sheltered within, attack the house, they find themselves in conflict with the Old Ones, who have decided to chance everything in an attempt to push the Dark back.

The Dark is Rising is a classic and for good reason. But, unlike it's antecedent, it's a full on fantasy novel. The only character to appear in both stories, Merriman Lyon, here sheds his guise of an eccentric uncle and appears as a full on mystic, while the forces of the Dark, no longer limited to attacking children, are able to manifest themselves more metaphysically, using more than a Cornish bad boy and an antiques dealer with a yatch to get what they want.

The village of Huntercombe and, especially, the Stantons' Farm, are superbly realised — the attention to the small details of the Christmas routine are sheer delight and could have come straight from my childhood Christmases with my grandparents. Will, the main character, is also a delight, treading a fine line between being a child and being an ancient mystic with great magic powers in a way that ultimately convinces — for, rather than being excited by the prospect of his being an Old One, he realises that it actually means that he has grown up too fast and now feels a painful nostalgia for the things he has lost.

And with those thoughts in mind, it's on, perhaps, to Greenwitch...