The Grey King

When I was in 4th grade I won a school-wide poetry contest with a poem entitled "Grey".  I didn't know I was spelling it the "English" way. I was shy, and often found myself  gravitating towards places where I could hide, and in the poem I find myself exploring dusty places and corners where a shadow has just been.  I spent seven years in Oregon  many decades ago--a gray misty magical place wedged between the Oregon sea and Mount Neahakahnie.  I instinctively crafted an incantation to the god of the mountain every time I traversed its foggy, treacherous reaches.  These memories bring  me to the 1976 Newbery Medal winner by Susan Cooper.
        The Grey King is a distinguished novel.   I do not think I would have even finished it had I read it as a young reader.  I often bemoan the fact that I am unfamiliar and uncomfortable with contemporary fantasy since I did not read any when I was in school, and then I realized that there wasn't much out there in the sixties.  I didn't like A Wrinkle in Time (still found it rough going as an adult), and I found The Hobbit dense and impenetrable.  I had read some of the Narnia books which I liked, but never pursued with any serious purpose. I don't remember ever encountering the Lloyd Alexander books (Prydain Chronicles) which were published in the sixties and won two Newbery awards (The High King won the Medal in 1969 and The Black Cauldron an honor in 1966).  By the time the seventies rolled around I was off to college and children's books were no longer on my radar. But many years passed.  I became a children's librarian, and I began reading everything old and new.  Three months ago I read The Dark is Rising (Newbery Honor 1974) - the second  in Cooper's the Dark is Rising Sequence, and came under its spell.  The night I finished it I dreamed a powerful and unsettling dream about a murder of crows that chased me from a village to a city square where a dark shrouded figure stood on a raised platform. This evil presence was creating chaos.  There were no lights, and no electricity, and no technology, and people were running riot.  I felt alone and terrified, but assured of my place in the design of this terror. That is powerful story making.
       Poetry, Welsh mythology, Arthurian legend, English history, and a brilliant evocation of landscape combine to make The Grey King -the fourth installment in the Dark is Rising sequence- a glorious reading experience. WhenWill Stanton is sent to Wales to stay with relatives while he recovers from hepatitis, he struggles to retrieve memories he knows are critical for resuming his role in the fight against the rising dark.   The clues are enshrined in a poem and certain words and images trigger his memory.  Remembering the verse is key to remembering who he is (last of the Old ones) and his final mission to combat the dark (finding the golden harp which will awaken the Sleepers who will aid in the war aginst the Dark whose agent is the Grey King).  Children need poetry, and Cooper shows her readers how much magic a poem can summon and contain.  Verse is part of the magic and its tool as well.  Cooper renders landscape/setting so fully realized that as a reader one feels the power and magic emanating  from those places.  The landscape is not just a "character" in the novel or the "setting" of the novel, but the very magic of story itself. The Grey King (evil one) lives in the mountain Cader Idris, a mountain that dominates the Dysinni Valley. When Will is picked up by his cousin at the train station he makes note of the ragged cloud that covers the hill. Rhys tells him 'The Cloud? Oh, when it hangs like that we call it the breath of the Brenin Llyd. The Grey King.'  In fact the Grey King is the hill that contains the golden harp and the site of the final battle between the forces of light and dark. Cooper says that when she began writing The Dark is Rising she was living in America and missed her country so much she decided to set the action in England.  When we read we are reading sometimes to find our way or to find ourselves there in the story.  The more beautiful and strong the elements are in a story the stronger and more assured we feel about stepping outside of the story.