lady_schrapnell | Of Myth and Magic and Susan Cooper

Quoted (with permission, natch) from Four British Fantasists. I hope my efforts at concentrated extraction won't do too much harm to the passage - giving two full pages seemed a bit much though (lack of accents, etc, are my fault). This is in the end of a long examination of The Dark is Rising sequence, and considers the nature of the magic presented in the series.

If one never slips down the rabbit hole into fantasy, neither can one really be ejected from it into drear materialism. Throughout The Dark is Rising sequence, Cooper has ... also been quietly showing us another side of the magic of Britain that has nothing to do with narrative suspence or son et lumiere astonishments, but with what is immanent and natural, as present in a gull's cry as in the greatest feat of magic. ... [snip quote from The Silver on the Tree, in which Merriman tells the children to 'look well' at the surrounding countryside] The Drew children are thus given .... an insight into an aspect of the land where magic and nature are integrated, and Campbell's 'mythologization of the environment and the world' becomes reality. This vision is already implicit in the Book of Gramarye, from which Will learns his powers as an Old One in The Dark is Rising. The Book is no grimoire, but rather, a series of poetic evocations of the living world, conjured by means of literary rather than overtly magical language. ... [snip quote from BoG, 'borrowed' from Walter de la Mare's Come Hither] ... ... and elsewhere in her evocation of the Book of Gramarye Cooper draws on other poetic texts.. The Book of Gramarye is clearly more than a poetry anthology, but in seeking an analog through which to communicate something of Will's own deep response to the Book it is to poetry that Cooper turns, and specifically to the poetry of nature. Her account culminates in a quotation from Robert Graves's magico-poetic rendering of the Cad Goddeu:

I have plundered the fern
Through all secrets I spie;
Old Math ap Mathonwy
Knew no more than I.

Graves speaks here as the bard Taliesin, who, like Will Stanton, was given magical insight as a child. For many readers, The Dark is Rising sequence too represents a splash from Ceridwen's cauldron, saturating the material and natural world with depth and meaning. Nor need this experience end with the departure of the Old Ones or the closing of the final pages of Silver on the Tree. Cooper's work, too, can be a Book of Gramarye.

Wish I could ever hope to write (or even read) like that!