"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

"The Grey King" by Susan Cooper

NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The fourth and penultimate book in the sequence 'The Dark is Rising'. Will, the young boy who is an Old One of the Light, goes to Wales to recuperate from a serious illness and to fulfil a quest which involves finding a harp and playing it so that a sleeper will be awoken. Of course he encounters dangers and obstacles, but he also meets another schoolboy, the albino Welsh boy Bran, the raven boy, who is a mysterious figure who seems to belong outside the battle between the Light and the Dark.

And there is Cafall, Bran's sheepdog, who is threatened with being shot for sheep worrying. 

It's a swiftly written story, with little fat on it, and all the usual tropes. I always feel, with books like this, that the possession of magical powers gives the protagonist an unfair advantage. Will is never really in any peril, there is no sense that he might just fail with devastating consequences. Of course, this is a children's book, so nothing terrible can happen. But the presence of a safety net inevitably dilutes the tension. 

One of the pleasures of this book is that author has crafted the rhythms of the sentences that the Welsh men and women speak, when they are speaking English, so that I could really hear the lilt of Welsh, and the care and precision of the way that they pronounced their word. 

Selected quotes:

• "Will felt that he was in a part of Britain like none he had ever known before: a secret, enclosed place, with powers hidden in its shrouded centuries at which he could not begin to guess." (1: The Golden Harp; The Oldest Hills)
• "The body of Cyngen is on the side between where the marks will be. In the retreat beneath the mound is extended Cadfan, said that it should enclose the praise of the earth. May he rest without blemish." (1: The Golden Harp; Cadfan’s Way) A classic riddle. What a shame that it doesn't seem to be used later in the book.
• "Like life it is, Will – sometimes you must seem to hurt something in order to do good for it." (1: The Golden Harp; Cadfan’s Way)
• "All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it always will be, the most dreadful sight in the world." (1: The Golden Harp; Fire on the Mountain)
• "Wish on a star – the cry of a pleasure and faith as ancient as the eyes of man." (1: The Golden Harp; Bird Rock)
• "that is the price we have to pay for the freedom of men on the earth. That they can do the bad things as well as the good. There are shadows in the pattern, as well as sunlight." (2: The Sleepers)
• "With a man like that, it is dangerous – when at last he loves, he gives all his heart without care or thinking, and it may never go back to him for the rest of his life." (2: The Sleepers)
• "At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe." (2: The Sleepers; The Pleasant Lake)
• "In a great rush his mind filled with pictures of Cafall as a wobble-legged puppy, Cafall following him to school, Cafall learning the signals and commands of the working sheepdog, Cafall wet with rain, the long hair pressed flat in a straight parting along his spine, Cafall running, Cafall drinking from a stream, Cafall asleep with his chin warm on Bran’s foot. Cafall dead." (2: The Sleepers; The Cottage on the Moor)
• "Bran could think of no words to say. His head was crowded with jarring images and questions: a crossroads with a dozen turnings and no sign of which to follow." (2: The Sleepers; The Cottage on the Moor)

January 2024

The other books in the series are:

• Over Sea, Under Stone
• The Dark Is Rising
• Greenwitch
• Silver on the Tree

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

"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

"The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper

This book is the sequel to Over Sea, Under Stone ... but it is almost entirely different. There is only one shared character: Merriman Lyon. The setting has moved from Cornwall in summer to the Thames Valley in the grip of a fierce winter; the tone had changed from bright to very dark.

Will Stanton is the seventh son of a seventh son; on his eleventh birthday he discovers that he is one of the Old Ones, a group defending the Light against the Dark. He has to collect a set of signs; once they are assembled together the Dark will be defeated, although only for a time. The whole plot conforms very closely to that of the 'hero's journey' with a delightful status quo ante in the real world followed by a call, helpers on the journey, tests along the way and a final climactic challenge. 

At he start I was very much enamoured. There was a real sense of menace, there were some beautifully poetic moments, written to be chanted aloud, and there were some beautiful descriptions (which continued throughout). But almost as soon as the magic started, I became, ironically, disenchanted. 

Okay, it's a children's book. But there was no questioning, no resistance. Will was eleven. There was no sense that he was at all resistant when he was told he was special, with magical powers, by a rather strange old man. There was no questioning of the idea that the old ways are good: Will lives in a very cosy country world of carol-singing and church-going, with a Lady of the Manor and her butler, and distinctly feudal ideas. When Merriman exploits and betrays another human being he regrets the consequences but this doesn't raise questions about whether the Old Ones are good or bad.

And I had my usual problems when magic is involved. It's a cop out. There can be no real danger when you can perform tricks. Will is repeatedly protected from harm by the signs, by Merriman, and by other Old Ones. It all seemed too easy.

So it was a wonderful start but as it went on it became more stereotyped and predictable. Probably I was expecting too much. It's a children's book. 

Great descriptions:

What makes these descriptions great is their simplicity. A single word (picture-writing!) or a short phrase conjures up so much. 

• "The snow flurried against the window, with a sound like fingers brushing the pane." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "The fear jumped at him for the third time like a great animal that had been waiting to spring." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "all around them was a quivering of things, a movement like the shaking of the air over a bonfire or over a paved road baked by a summer sun." (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "nobody had been along the path since the snow began; down there it lay untrodden, smooth and white and inviting, marked only by the picture-writing of birds’ footprints." (1, The Walker on the Old Way)

Selected Quotes:

• "The radio let out a sudden hideous crackle of static as he passed the table. He jumped." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "this night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "It was then, without warning, that the fear came. The first wave caught him as he was crossing the room to his bed. It halted him stock-still in the middle of the room, the howl of the wind outside filling his ears. The snow lashed against the window. Will was suddenly deadly cold, yet tingling all over. He was so frightened that he could not move a finger." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "He had never known a feeling like this before. It was growing worse every minute. As if some huge weight were pushing at his mind, threatening, trying to take him over, turn him into something he didn’t want to be." (1, Midwinter’s Eve)
• "All his senses sprang to life at once, under a shower of unexpected sounds, sights, smells." (1, Midwinter Day)
• "Any great gift of power or talent is a burden, and this more than any, and you will often long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law." (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "For the Dark, the Dark is rising. The Walker is abroad, the Rider is riding; they have woken, the Dark is rising. " (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future" (1, The Sign-Seeker)
• "You changed me from a man into a creature always running, always searching, always hunted. You stopped me from growing decently old in my own time, as all men after their lives grow old and tired and sink to sleep in death. You took away my right to death." (3, The Hawk in the Dark)

The full poem:

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back; 

Three from the circle, three from the track; 

Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone; 

Five will return, and one go alone.

Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long; 

Wood from the burning, stone out of song; 

Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw; 

Six Signs the circle, and the grail gone before.

Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold 

Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old; 

Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea; 

All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.

November 2023

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

"Over Sea Under Stone" by Susan Cooper

The first novel in the series The Dark is Rising.

It was rather stereotyped. Three polite and well-brought-up middle-class kids come to Cornwall for their holidays, staying in an old house in a fishing village. Their parents (a doctor and an artist natch) more or less leave them to their own devices. They discover, in the loft, an old parchment and a map; there seems to be some suggestion of King Arthur. There are sinister people in the village including a clearly lower-class boy. Their mysterious great uncle, known as 'The Professor' looks after them. It's very reminiscent of the Famous Five. There's even a dog!

It became quite exciting towards the end and there were some moments of great description:

• "The end of the headland, rocky and grey, stretched out far beyond them into the sea, and sweeping towards it the land looked immensely solid, as if it were all rock and the soil above it no more than a skin." (Ch 7)
• "it was easy to scramble from one grey jagged ridge to the next, skirting the small pools where anemones spread their tentacles like feathered flowers among seaweed leaves, and shrimps darted transparent to and fro." (Ch 13)

It was well-paced and easy to read. It is aimed at young children. IO have always liked this sort of book in which mysterious and mystic forces intrude upon everyday life. But this wasn't a patch on Alan Garner's work (eg The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and especially Red Shift and the superb The Owl Service).

Selected quotes:

• "A part of him which had not quite gone to sleep at all was warning him of some danger very near." (Ch 9)

November 2023

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

"The Sword in the Stone" by T H White

Wart is a fatherless lad who lives with foster-father Sir Ector and foster-brother Kay in a castle near the Forest Sauvage; Merlin comes to tutor him. His lessons include turning into a fish and a hawk and a snake and a badger; there are some adventures, one involving a witch and another involving Robin Hood and the Anthropophagi. There are other adventures, in which Wart is turned into an ant and a goose, which were not included in the original but were later added when the single book was turned into a tetralogy called The Once and Future King.

This is a traditional boy's adventure story set in a nostalgic world that mixes Merrie England and the Age of Chivalry with the customs and manners of early twentieth century aristocrats of the hunting, shooting, fishing country set. It's full of anachronisms, which emphasise its status as fantasy, whilst being underpinned by what it presumably immense knowledge and understanding of the mediaeval world (there are a lot of outdated words and some didacticism) which seems designed to add verisimilitude. 

It is told it 'traditional' style as a third person omniscient past tense narrative; there are moments of authorial intrusion when White becomes didactic. 

The message, if there is one, seems to be that we should respect nature while at the same time hunting and eating it. Providing nature doesn't eat you! There is a rather distasteful war against the 'Anthropophagi' who are deformed creatures (straight out of the pages of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville) who are cannibals and seek to eat Dog Boy and Wat; after these monsters have been slaughtered (one by Wart), Kay asks to take home the head of one of them and it becomes a trophy in the castle: this whole episode reads a little like the triumphalism of a colonial war against dehumanised 'savages'. White wrote TSitS in 1938, having retreated from teaching at Stowe to living in a cottage in the woods (perhaps he thought he was Merlin!). Some of the later books in the tetralogy express White's distaste for the Nazi regime and there have been suggestions that White was a pacifist but the war against the Anthropophagi and the hunting episodes don't bear this out. What seems not in doubt is that White was a social conservative who was very much in favour of maintaining the traditional class structures which kept the English aristocracy in power.

My main criticism of the novel is that the hero, Wart, never changes. I think the purpose of his education is that he should develop into the sort of King that Arthur is but he's a nice lad at the start, he's nice in the middle and, despite the way he is treated, he's still nice at the end. As a bildungsroman, TSitS leaves a lot to be desired.

We had a lively discussion about this book in my U3A 'The English novel' group; we watched a BBC interview with the author from 1959 in which T H White came across as a rather angry old man longing for the ways of a previous age. But he had a dreadful childhood, being unwanted and then used as a pawn by his ever-warring parents before being sent to live with grandparents and then sent to boarding school which he hated. If the character of Wart, a parentless boy, reflects the author, he seems to have forgotten the anger and bitterness he showed in a poem he once wrote. 

Our discussion was complicated by the fact that there are two versions of TSitS. Most of us had the original, 1938 version, most often sold nowadays as a stand-alone, but some of us had read the 1948 version which was revised in order to fit in with the Once and Future King tetralogy. There are aspects of this later version, such as its message bewailing the futility of war and promoting internationalism, that simply don't appear in the original. Mostly I learned that THW wanted us to return to a benevolent feudal system with strong predetermined classes , overseen by a kindly patriarch. This was born out by the interview.

Selected quotes:

• "Oh, my own random, wicked little lamb." (Ch IV): Wart's nursemaid seems to have inherited the persona of Nanny Slagg in Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. 
• "He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas." (Ch V)
• "A face which had been ravaged by all the passions of an absolute monarch, by cruelty, sorrow, age, pride, selfishness, loneliness and thoughts too strong for individual brains." (Ch V)
• "Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution." (Ch V)
• "He did say it, pushing the words out as if he were breathing against water." (Ch VI)
• "I believe Sir Ector would have been glad to get a by-our-lady tilting blue for your tutor, that swings himself along on his knuckles like an anthropoid ape." (Ch VII) The traditional academic's dismissal of sporting types. 
• "It just goes on to the end, you know, and then stops - as Legends do." (Ch XIII)
• "Each realised how beautiful life was, which a reeking tusk might, in a few seconds, rape away from one or another of them if things went wrong." (Ch XVI) The justification for boar hunting: that it gives an adrenaline rush; that you are never so alive as when you are risking your life. 

September 2023; 286 pages

This novel is the first in the Once and Future King tetralogy which was selected by Anthony Burgess as one of his 99 best novels since 1939.

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

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

The classic children's novel, first published in 1865. Lured by a White Rabbit, Alice falls down a rabbit hole and arrives in Wonderland where she meets a variety of strange characters including a hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Mad Hatter and the (also mad) March Hare, the slowly vanishing Cheshire cat, the mournful Mock Turtle and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts.

My U3A group (Eastbourne Central) discussed whether the story represents the transition to adulthood. Certainly the size changes reminded us of adolescence, during which some parts of the body grow faster than others, and some changes are more difficult to accommodate, sometimes leading to clumsiness. There was the suggestion that Alice learns defiance and this is a sign of maturing. But on the whole, although we could see the argument that Wonderland represents the bizarre and confusing, sometimes cruel and inhospitable, world of adults, with all its inconsistencies, as seen from the perspective of a child, it was not clear that Alice was successfully making the transition to adulthood. Perhaps this is part of the wish fulfilment of the author: it was pointed out to the group that Lewis Carroll found it difficult to remain friends with children after they had grown up.

Indeed, AiW doesn’t seem to be a conventional story at all. Although there is the real world to wonderland transition, similar to the liminal experience of many ‘Hero’s Journey’ type stories, and while one could regard Alice’s experiences as tests or trials, Alice as hero has no companions (except the incidental Cheshire cat) and learns nothing; the episodes are almost stand alone and the novel format is most like a picaresque.

It could be argued that Alice is repeatedly trying to make sense of the world but discovering that, although it has rules, these rules are always, in the end, subverted. Thus the Mad Hatter’s tea party has its own logic but when Alice asks what happens when they reach the end and all the dishes are dirty, the subject is swiftly changed. Similarly, Alice tries hard to make sense of the Croquet game played with hedgehogs and flamingos. This reminded some of us of a child repeatedly asking ‘why?’ only to be told, in the end, ‘because I say so’.

Given that LC was an academic mathematician, he must have encountered the strange and confusing world of non-Euclidean geometry. Riemann published his variant of this in 1854, eleven years before the publication of Alice, although there had been attacks on Euclid’s fifth postulate almost since he published it, including one by Omar Khayyam (of Rubaiyyat fame). Riemann’s geometries include one which works for the surface of a sphere, whilst Euclidean geometry works for a flat surface (so, for example, whereas the internal angles of Euclid’s triangles always add up to 180o they don’t in Riemann’s triangles). Perhaps Wonderland was LC’s reaction to the discovery that Euclid, the gold standard of learning for two millenia, was not necessarily the last word in maths.

What is clear is that AiW was written as a satire. It lampoons the current fashion for ‘improving’ verse for children (Robert Southey’s Father William and Isaac Watt’s Busy Bee) and it caricatures a large number of people known to LC. The nonsense tradition had already been established (Edward Lear’s limericks first appeared in 1846, nineteen years before Alice).

There was some criticism of the prose. Certainly, much of the writing appears to be staid, although this might be typical of Victorian children’s books; AiW only really comes alive in the dialogues. I suggested that the stodgy prose might be necessary when writing nonsense or fantastic prose, comparing AiW’s everyday approach to a weird world to the opening lines of Kafka’s Metamorphosis: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.”

We were given some personal biographical details about the author, although it was pointed out that much in his biography has been contested. AiW was, it seems, first shown to Henry Kingsley, a novelist and the brother of Charles Kingsley, a more famous novelist whose novel of magical realism, ‘The Water Babies’, in which the child hero is transported to a magical place underwater, was first published as a serial between 1862 and 1863, thus appearing shortly before AiW. On a local note, Henry Kingsley retired with his wife to Cuckfield.

Selected quotes:

• "'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" (Ch 1) This quote has stayed with me since I first read the book as a child.
• "I'll stay down here! It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say 'Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else."(Ch 1)
• "Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station." (Ch 2)
• "Speak roughly to your little boy/ And beat him when he sneezes:/ He only does it to annoy,/ Because he knows it teases." (Ch 6) This also I remember from a child.
• "'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. ''I don't much care where -' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go'" (Ch 6)
• "'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied: 'at least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know.' 'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter." (Ch 7)

March 2022

Nominated by Robert McCrum as 18th in the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

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

"Legions of the Eagle" by Henry Treece

Gwydion, the son of a Belgic lord, the right-hand man to King Caratacus, and his Silurian slave Math, are captured by the Romans invading Britain. Math escapes but Gwydion is sent to Gaul as a slave to be the companion of centurion's son Gaius. Following a plague, the boys return to Britain seeking Gwydion's mother and the father of Gaius. They also find Math and a whole lot of trouble.

I loved this boys' adventure story when I was nine. Now I don't. Gwydion is the typical Treece hero (see his Viking books): brave, boastful, and reckless. His experiences as a slave don't seem to have changed this. He doesn't seem to learn. He's also blond and Treece seems to have favoured flaxen hair: the dark-haired (and dark-faced) Math might be cunning but he is despicable. Although there are moments when Gwydion catches glimpses of Math's resentment of the master-slave dynamic (despite the author's protests that Gwysion and his mother treat Math like one of them) this doesn't spill over into justice in terms of the story arc and I have to conclude that Treece, like Gwydion, never properly understood that a favoured slave is still a slave, that power can only exist with powerlessness, and that conquest does not give the conquerors the moral right to belittle the conquered in any way, even by patronising them. At the end, Gwydion says: "Life isn't given to us just so we can exert our strength on other men and turn their lives inside-out for our own advantage." (Epilogue). But there is no evidence, in his character, or in that of his best friend Gaius, that he understands this. The lesson is learnt by Math, perhaps, but by this time Math is the antagonist.

Furthermore, the history seems surprisingly sloppy for such a well-known author. "Then Gwydion saw his mother do a strange thing; she suddenly stood in her stirrups" (4.1). This would have been strange indeed during the Roman conquest of Britain (43 CE).  Although rope loops may have been used as early as 200 BCE (in Asia, perhaps reaching Rome but probably not Britain) there is no evidence for the stirrup as such before 500 CE. Furthermore, Gwydion travels through "Londinium" (2.1) but there is no evidence for pre-Roman settlement in London and Londinium as such was founded by the Romans after their invasion.

A very disappointing read.

Selected quote:

• "When men go to war, they do not think of their opponents as being of the same nature as their own families." (2.5)

August 2021

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

"Horned Helmet" by Henry Treece

 A Viking story, very similar to Treece's Viking's Dawn. Beorn, an orphaned Icelander, is 'adopted' by Vikings and grows up sharing the hardships of the Viking way of life. It's all about being a man and fighting bravely and ensuring that you face death with a smile.  Little thought is given to the lives of those who suffer these predatory sea-borne brigands. It is written in the style of the sagas and includes incidents from them and genuine period poetry. 

But there are moments when Treece encapsulates profundities in just a few words. For that, he must be reckoned a great writer.

Selected quotes:

• "Greek ... was like trying to read the thorns in a bush." (Ch 4)
• "But it is against the will of the gods to let a man's days run too smoothly with laughter. It is the sort of pattern they will not weave, even though warp and weft seem set to pass the cloth out clean from the loom." (Ch 11)
• "Though he was older now, he had known more mealtimes than meals in the time since he had left Iceland." (Ch 13)
• "Five times he was closer to death than the shod foot is to earth." (Ch 13)
• "If this place is too quiet for you, then you must do what many young hounds do, and go sniffing the hedgerows for yourself." (Ch 13)

A very boyish boys' own adventure. August 2021; 122 pages

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

Also by Henry Treece

• The Viking trilogy: Viking's Dawn ,  The Road to Miklagard, and Viking's Sunset
• Legions of the Eagle: Romano-British adventure
• The Golden Strangers: A story from prehistory

"Viking's Sunset" by Henry Treece

Harald Sigurdson, whose Viking career has already been chronicled in Viking's Dawn and The Road to Miklagard, sets of on a voyage to revenge himself on a renegade Viking who has looted and burned Harald's own village. With his best mate Giant Grummoch and a crew of characters, he chases northwards to becomes the first Viking to visit Greenland and live with the Inuit; they then voyage on to North America.

As with the other books, this is concerned with bravery in battle and manliness. Cowardice and weakness are despised. Meeting a good death is everything. Women must stay at home, keep house and bring up children. It is a sobering reminder of the mindset not only of the Vikings but of writers for children as recently as 1960.

Some moments:

• "Thorfinn said, 'A poet must live, Harald'. Gudbrod said, 'Why'?" (Ch 10)
• "Before death, man stands alone, and no one may comfort him." (Ch 23)

A very macho boys' adventure story. August 2021; 176 pages

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

Also by Henry Treece

• Horned Helmet: more Vikings
• Legions of the Eagle: Romano-British adventure
• The Golden Strangers: A story from prehistory

"The Road to Miklagard" by Henry Treece

 The sequel to Viking's Dawn.

Harald Sigurdson sets off a-viking in charge of his own ship. He travels to Ireland, seeking fabled treasure. Battles and adventures ensue. With a variety of companions including Haro, Radbard and Giant Grummoch, Harald's travels take him to Jebel Tarik (Gibraltar) and thence to Miklagard (the Viking name for Byzantium, also known as Constantinople, now Istanbul). 

This is a classic picaresque except that the main character is not a humorous trickster who survives on his wits but a defiant fighter whose main strategy is to threaten and bluster. Strangely, this seems to work. He is, perhaps, a typical Viking hero but I found him charmless.

There is a great deal of action in this book which presumably appealed to the young me (I first read this book as a pre-teen). The chronology moves in spurts: some days are treated in great detail, in other places weeks pass in a paragraph. This made the narrative feel jumpy and the adult me thought that much of the story was treated superficially. This, combined with my adult reaction to the character, made me rather indifferent to the story.

But I loved it as a kid!

One magic moment:

• "The black beetle climbs up the table-leg, but there is a hand waiting to crush him when he reaches the top." (Ch 8)

This book is followed by the third in the trilogy: Viking's Sunset.

A fast-paced adventure story for boys' a quick and easy read. August 2021; 223 pages

Other books by Henry Treece:

• Horned Helmet: more Vikings
• Legions of the Eagle: Romano-British adventure
• The Golden Strangers: A story from prehistory

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