posted on 01 Jan 2018

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

Born in 1935, Susan Cooper is the British-born but US resident author of the cult classic fantasy series usually known as The Dark Is Rising. There are five books in the sequence and Over Sea, Under Stone  is usually counted the first of them but it was, in fact, written in 1965 pretty much a decade before the other four were even begun. Cooper herself acknowledges that she had not initially thought that the story would be anything other than a stand-alone novel but The Dark Is Rising sequence developed almost of its own accord and she subconsciously used Over Sea, Under Stone as the platform on which to rest the remainder of the fantasy.

This first novel is much more obviously a children’s novel than the ones that come later but it contains many of the key elements – most especially the idea of the permanent battle between good and evil that is played out on Earth on a daily basis. Fortunes in this never-ending battle ebb and flow and Cooper makes links to age-old mythologies such as the Arthur stories and The Mabinogion to add to the atmosphere of ancient magic she wants to create.

Later books in the sequence are probably closer in tone to the work of that other great fantasy writer, Alan Garner but Over Sea, Under Stone  is something of a hybrid between dark fantasy and Enid Blyton-style adventure story. Arriving in Trewissick, Cornwall with their parents, Simon, Jane and Barney Drew are there to stay with the slightly eccentric and definitely mysterious, Great Uncle Merry (not in fact a relative at all but a long-standing family friend). It seems at first that the story will be one straight out of the Secret Seven mould before it takes a distinctly darker turn with the children set on a quest to locate an ancient ‘grail’ that, it turns out, is also being looked for by the forces of the dark.

With only Uncle Merry to protect them – he is, of course, a guardian of the light – they find an ancient parchment, are menaced, kidnapped, sent on a perilous journey into caves until they eventually prevail despite the evil machinations of their pursuers. Sarah Crown writing and appreciation of the book in The Guardian in 2011 gives us a vivid description of the children’s travails:

Like Simon, Jane and Barney, through whose eyes we're peering, we find ourselves in the position of children everywhere who are scared of the dark: terrified of something ageless, edgeless and implacable. The evil that's anatomised in the later volumes is only hinted at here: lurking in the shadows cast by the Cornish sun, it is unknowable and therefore unassailable, capable of reaching out and bending even the most benign-seeming characters to its will. The story quickly shifts from a light-hearted, sun-splashed lark into something far deadlier and more desperate, in which the children, aided by Merry, must track down the Grail before the agents of the Dark – personified by the crow-like, terrifying Hastings – get their hands on it.

Cooper ends the book by offering us the interesting possibility that there are in fact direct links to be made between the reassuring but mysterious Great Uncle Merry and Merlin the wizard of the Arthurian romances.

The next book in the sequence is The Dark Is Rising, the book that gave its name to the whole sequence. I have seen the movie that was made of this back in 2007 and apparently Cooper wasn’t very happy with what had been done with it, so I’m looking forward to reading what she created in the next instalment.

I’ve been reading the Folio Society edition of Over Sea, Under Stone which is illustrated superbly by Laura Carlin and which is part of a uniform set that includes all five novels in The Dark Is Rising series.

 

Terry Potter

January 2018