"Silver on the Tree" by Susan Cooper

 In the final instalment of 'The Dark is Rising', all the characters from the previous books come together to defeat the powers of darkness. Will and Bran (whose true nature is divulged) have to travel through time to the Lost Land where they will undergo a series of tests in order to win a sword. Simon, Barnaby and Jane have rather more minor roles. Great Uncle Merriman acts as guide and controller. The most important scene is given to a bit player, the ordinary human sheep farmer John Rowlands.

The book is the opportunity for the author to display her descriptive powers:

• "Grasshoppers skirled unseen from the grass, chirruping their solos over the deep summer insect hum" (1: Midsummer’s Eve)
• "Oak and sycamore and Lombardy poplar reached high on either side; houses slept behind hedges fragrant with honeysuckle and starred with invading bindweed." (1: Black Mink)
• "the face was fine-boned, kindly yet arrogant, with clear blue eyes that shone strangely young in the old, old cobweb-lined face." (2: The Bearded Lake)

She also delightfully captures the rhythm and structure of spoken Welsh.

Many weird and wonderful things take place; it is clear that the author possesses .considerable powers of imagination. This, I suspect, is this book is loved by so many.

But the fact that Will is able to do magic, and immortal, and the promise repeatedly made by Merriman that there is no mortal peril, undermines the tension of the book. We know things are going to be all right so that the monsters and the horrors fail to terrify. And, as with the other books, no test is ever failed. Everything is too straightforward.

At the end there are two decisions made that could go either way and these stand out for me as the moments when the book escaped from being no more than a decorative fairy tale and nudged its way towards being a myth.

The initial relationship between Bran and a newly pubescent Jane also produced some moments of edginess, although the rift between Will and Simon which was a feature of book 3 had healed. The character of the King of the Lost Land was also one of the strengths of the book.

Of course, this is a children's book and I am judging it by adult standards. But for my money this book, though prettily written, was too tame.

Selected quotes:

• "it cures the toothach being snift up into the nosethrils, especially into the contrary nosethril." (1: Midsummer’s Eve)
• "For all times coexist, you said, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future." (1: Black Mink)
• "The mindless ferocity of this man, and all those like him, their real loathing born of nothing more solid than insecurity and fear . . . it was a channel. Will knew that he had been gazing into the channel down which the powers of the Dark, if they gained their freedom, could ride in an instant to complete control of the earth." (1: Midsummer Day)
• "If you have seen the raising of fear, and the killing of love, and the Dark creeping in over all things, you do not ask stupid questions. You do what you are intended to do, and no nonsense." (2: The Bearded Lake)
• "there was more than a mood invading her mind; this was a strangeness she could not define, had never known before. A restlessness, a half-fearful anticipation of something part of her seemed to understand and part not . . ." (2: The Bearded Lake)
• "Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes – blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads." (3: The Rose-Garden)
• "For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it, Old One, do we not? For ever and ever . . . so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time." (3: Caer Wydyr)
• "my useless life is the empty cawing of a crow, and any talent I once may have had is dead. Let the toys that it made die with it." (3: The King of the Lost Land)
• "Boy, callow boy, do not speak to me of life that you have not lived. What do you know of the weight that drags down a king who has failed his people, an artist who has failed his gift? This life is a long cheat, full of promises that can never be kept, errors that can never be righted, omissions that can never be filled. I have forgotten as much of my life as I can manage to forget." (3: The King of the Lost Land)
• "despair, which is the tomb of all your hope" (3: The King of the Lost Land)
• "‘Cowardly it is,’ he said in a cold adult voice, ‘to shelter behind those who love you, without giving love in return.'" (4: The Train)
• "Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth." (4: One Goes Alone)
• "The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past." (4: One Goes Alone)

January 2024

The previous books in the series are:

• Over Sea, Under Stone
• The Dark Is Rising
• Greenwitch
• The Grey King

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