Silver on the Tree

[sawyl]

After a brief hiatus, it's back to Susan Cooper for the last book in The Dark is Rising Sequence: Silver on the Tree.

Enjoying lazy midsummer days with his family, including his often absent brother Stephen, Will Stanton's calm is disturbed by visions of the last rising of the Dark. Acting on advice from Merriman, Will retrieves the six signs, gather two years ago at Christmas, from their hiding place and passes them to Arthur in advance of the battle against the Dark at Badon. The Light's attempts to push back the Dark for good fail because they are unable to complete the circle without the presence of the Lady. Returning to his own time, Will have an unpleasant encounter with the modern face of the Dark — racism — and decides that he must return to Wales in pursuit of the crystal sword.

Following the suggestions of Merriman, the Drew family also find themselves on holiday in Gwynedd and conveniently placed to meet up with Will and with Bran Davies. Following the lines of a rhyme, which promises that when the mountains are signing, the Lady will appear, they search out a sites associated with King Arthur. When the Lady does finally appear, Jane is attacked by a monster, the afanc, dwelling in Llyn Barfog. Once the creature is driven off, Jane tells the others what she has learnt, allowing Will and Bran to work out where they must go to recover the sword.

Returning to Aberdyfi alone, the Drews find themselves cast back in history and caught up in a skirmish with the Dark, only for Merriman to step in at the very last minute. But this has the consequence of keeping the Old One from helping Will and Bran in their quest.

Meanwhile, in the Lost Land, the two boys find themselves confronted by a series of riddles which seek to block their progress to the palace of the king. With the help of a bard called Gwion, they find the path from the palace to the tower of glass, where the crystal sword is kept, but on their journey they are challenged by two of the Great Lords of the Dark: the Black Rider and the White Rider. After passing all the tests and outwitting the Riders, the boys obtain the sword just as the Lost Land sinks beneath the sea.

With the sword in the possession of the Light, all is now set for the final confrontation between the Dark and the Light, for whosoever succeeds in cutting the silver mistletoe from the tree of life will be able to drive their rivals out of the world. As things get desperate, the Dark seek to trick the Light out of the things that they need to win the confrontation, with everything hanging in the balance as the mistletoe on the tree starts to blossom.

Silver on the Tree seems to me to be a fitting end to a fine series of novels. The opening section has all the mystic splendour of The Dark is Rising with its intermixing of the past and present. The use of Welsh mythology in the later sections is reminiscent of The Grey King, with the portrayal of Cantre'r Gwealod particularly fine.

An especial delight is Cooper's ear for dialect. She really seems to capture speech patterns of North Wales, the precise way of speaking English that many Welsh speakers have, the way that the word order is varied when a particular point is being emphasized. Also enjoyable was the way that the text was threaded through with bits and pieces of Welsh — enough for me to lament the fact that I never got round to learning more than a handful of bits and pieces, most of them appallingly bad chat-up lines now long forgotten. Perhaps the time has now come to take a sabbatical and spend a year studying the language properly.