The Grey King

[sawyl]

Following on from this morning's thoughts on Susan Cooper's Greenwich, here are a few short musings on my re-read of The Grey King.

Will Stanton is recovering from a bout of hepatitis that has drained his strength and, worse, caused him to forget the rhyme written on the Trewissick Grail. Sent to his Uncle and Aunt in Wales to recuperate, he soon finds himself embroiled in a dispute with a neighbouring farmer, Caradog Prichard, who is convinced that a dog is killing his sheep. After a shocking encounter with a local boy, Bran, and his dog, Will suddenly finds his memory returned, causing him to realise that some of the nearby landmarks are actually mentioned in his poem.

When a great fire breaks out on the side of the mountain, Bran and Will with the rest of the farm to help extinguish it, but the in process they become separated from everyone else. In the smoke, they encounter the milgwn, malign foxes commanded by the Grey King, and are forced to enter a cave under the mountain. After undergoing a set of trials, they are given a golden harp by three guardians of the High Magic. But their moment of triumph is snatched from them when, following their decent from the mountain, Bran's dog Cafell is killed by Prichard.

With Bran desolate at the loss of his dog, Will starts to undertake the last part of his quest, to awake the six sleepers, alone. But the Dark is close upon him and the Grey King seeks to stop him by disguising a milgwn as a sheepdog in order to enrage Prichard further. In order to prevent this, Will and one of his Uncle's workers transport the accused dog to Tal y Llyn to stay with a nearby farmer. Whilst walking the hills, the Grey King again strikes at Will, sending him tumbling down a cliff, but with his survival will learns an important fact about the lake: that it's proper name, Llyn Mwyngil, refers to one of the places in the rhyme.

As soon as he becomes aware of this last fact, Will knows what he must do to complete his quest. But he also has to keep the increasingly crazed Caradog Prichard at bay and somehow recruit the grieving Bran back to his cause.

I liked The Grey King a lot and thought that it benefited very strongly from being set in North Wales, with it's beautiful landscape and quixotic weather. I also thought that the characters of the farmers were particularly strong, with their unflappable way and precise speech. The fact that the whole story was run through with a decent quantity of Welsh, including a perfectly delightful lesson on pronunciation, added a strong note of authenticity to the whole proceedings.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book was the far more ambivalent attitude of some of the characters to the Light. Rather than accept it as an absolute good, one of the farmhands notes that the Light can be just as inhuman as the Dark when it comes to achieving its ultimate objective. When Will counters this with a claim that the ends justify the occasional callous treatment of a person if all else would be lost were the Light to behave with compassion, he is forced to accept that his own situation, his own illness, was engineered by his own masters to put him in the right place at the right time.