"Greenwitch" by Susan Cooper

The third in the 'Dark Is Rising' series of five books aimed at children.

We return to Cornwall, scene of the first book (Over Sea Under Stone). The grail that  Simon, Barney and Jane discovered has been stolen from the museum and they have a week of Easter holiday with Great Uncle Merry to search for it. Tagging along is Will, the hero of the second book (The Dark is Rising); unknown to the other three kids, Will is one of the Old Ones, magicians who fight for the Light against the Dark. 

I was a little disappointed that the opportunities for jealousy and resentment are not really exploited but this is, after all, a children's book. The mood of the book has returned to the light, carefree atmosphere of the first book - these are Cornish holidays - and I missed the dark, threatening mood of the start of the second book, set in a wintry Thames valley. But the arousal of Wild Magic, independent of either Light or Dark, partly made up for this.

One of its strengths is that it did have some excellent descriptions which I have included among the selected quotes below. The best chapters were those featuring Jane: making the Greenwitch and the night of chaos.

It's a very short and simple book which would probably appeal to well-behaved middle-class kids aged about ten.

Selected Quotes:

• "Under the sunset sky the sea was glass-smooth. Long slow rollers from the Atlantic, rippling like muscles beneath the skin, made the only sign of the great invisible strength of the ocean in all the tranquil evening." (Ch 3)
• "Her horror came not from fear, but from the awareness she suddenly felt from the image of an appalling, endless loneliness. Great power was held only in great isolation." (Ch 3)
• "In a little while the mist covered all the sky, so that the sun hung there familiar and yet strange, like a furry orange." (Ch 4)
• "They were moving slowly, the old man still hobbling on a stick; Jane could sense the suppressed impatience in the boys’ deliberate pace." (Ch 6)
• "This was a region of fear and treachery, where every fish ate every other fish, where life was made only of fierce attack and the terror of desperate flight." (Ch 7)
• "They huddled in the dark warehouse doorway, watching. No wind blew now, and the sudden stillness was unnerving, broken only by the rumbling waves. The murmur of passing motor-cars came now and then from the main road higher in the village, but the children did not heed them. Nothing in the world seemed to exist but this thing that loomed before them, rising higher each moment out of the swaying sea." (Ch 9)
• "gently but urgently" (Ch 9)
• "in the darkness, wherever she looked, Jane could see things moving." (Ch 9) As with so many horror films, this statement was more powerful than when the author actually described the moving things.
• "this is why he wanted us to sleep. Safe and empty with a blanket over our minds" (Ch 10)
• "Long grass rose lush and new round rusting pieces of farm equipment left in the yard: a skeletal old plough, a harrow, the remnants of a tractor with its great tyres gone, In the pen of a deserted pig-sty, nettles grew tall and rank." (Ch 12)
• "They lay in variously abandoned attitudes in the sunshine on the beach, recovering from an enormous picnic lunch." (Ch 13)

December 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God