Just give me a checklist

One of the most for­ma­tive reads of my life was Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence. The books were orig­i­nally pub­lished in the 1960s and 1970s; I sup­pose I read them in the early 1990s. I would have been ten or twelve.

The first book in the sequence towers above the rest. The others are good in dif­ferent ways, and it’s sat­is­fying to com­plete the story, but none are as pow­erful a dose of pure vibes as The Dark Is Rising.

Here we find the donegality of C. S. Lewis:

Lovers of romances go back and back to such sto­ries in the same way that we go back to a fruit for its taste; to an air for … what? for itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere — to Donegal for its Done­gality and London for its Londonness. It is noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to put these tastes into words.

The Dark Is Rising offers above all “its whole atmosphere”. Ask me to sum­ma­rize the plot, and I might sketch the begin­ning accurately … but any­thing after that is a haze of gal­loping horses and whirling snow. But, ah, that’s the thing: ask me to rec­ol­lect images from The Dark Is Rising, and I’ll go on all day, one after another. A sprig of holly set above the door. A window banging open, a pile of snow melting on the carpet. A warm crowded house­hold all cozied up for Christmas. A tree-lined lane.

Early on, our protagonist, young Will, dis­covers an odd object, a sort of proto-cross as wide as his palm, carved from wood — a sign. He learns that he will col­lect six of these signs: wood fol­lowed by bronze, iron, water, fire, and stone.

Each of these proto-crosses he will thread onto his belt, pro­ducing a Batman-style acces­sory of sym­bolic power.

Obviously, this rules.

It helped that I have a mid­winter birthday. Espe­cially as a young person, December was a thrill: birthday, winter vacation, Christmas and its Carol, New Year’s Day, the whole enchilada.

But of course my mid­winter, even its basic climate, wasn’t much like Will’s. His was hyperreal, hypercozy, hyperhaunted — and he had the signs.

What I love best about The Dark Is Rising is that it’s both subtle and simple.

Subtle, because it takes great skill to pro­duce such a pow­erful atmosphere. It emerges from an accu­mu­la­tion of details, from the vibra­tion of place against symbol. Susan Cooper under­stood exactly which keys to play on the Anglo­phone keyboard, in order to build the most deli­cious chords.

Simple, because it’s a check­list! You always know where you are, and what remains, because at the begin­ning you learn about the six signs, and you know by the end you’ll have col­lected them all.

How many grand YA odysseys com­mence this way? It’s ubiq­ui­tous because it works. Of course, there are better and worse treatments. You hope that some items will be obtained in sur­prising ways; ideally, one item will have been there all along.

The check­list makes me think also of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, which I encoun­tered shortly after The Dark Is Rising, fol­lowing it through five or six of its glaciating volumes. (The total number turned out to be fourteen.)

In Robert Jordan’s world, there is a coterie of fear­some Forsaken — pow­erful magi­cians who turned bad, very bad. They were trapped in a meta­phys­ical prison (a la Zod in the Phantom Zone) but, as the series com­mences, they have escaped. Though you learn their names early on, it takes a foot and a half of fan­tasy novels to meet them all, and that slow itin­erary is deli­cious. You’ve met Lanfear, you’ve met Ishamael … but what about Rahvin? Where’s Moghedien?? For a long stretch of reading, you don’t know any­thing except the names, but the names are — the check­list is — enough.

Susan Cooper’s check­list was, for me, the first, and it’s still the best. There’s a check­list in Moon­bound, one that this first book barely begins; it’s a list of names, like Robert Jordan’s. Even though I’m writing this check­list rather than reading it, the effect is, sur­prisingly, unchanged.

What a ter­rific piece of lit­erary machinery: sus­pense in plain sight; the sat­is­fac­tion of set­ting them up and knocking them down.

First published:     June 2024
Last updated: December 2024