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Dear walking book clubbers,

I am beyond excited to be reading The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper with you this December. It’s had - in fact, it continues to have - a profound impact on me. I defy anyone to read it and look at the English landscape in the same way ever again. And one could be forgiven for thinking that the weather gods arranged the recent cold snap to create the perfect atmospheric reading conditions for this book in which the cold brings with it the Dark …

For a brilliant 3-minute introduction, I suggest you listen to Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk, describe why she recommends this book on NPR’s BookMarks HERE. She says:

“This has been very influential for me — when you look at the landscape wherever you are in the world, it's very fascinating to try and imagine who stood there before you. And this book plays with that sense and plays with the stories we've told about the places we live.”

We’re meeting this coming weekend to discuss it on the Heath - so read it now!

In this email, you’ll find:

Sunday 10th December, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £5-15: please decide where you are on this scale of what you can afford to pay.

Join me for a special walk-talk on Hampstead Heath, featuring a festive book swap as well as our discussion. Please bring a wrapped-up book from your shelf that you’ve enjoyed and would like to give away - feel free to include a note saying who it’s from, or to keep it anonymous. I’ll collect the books, shuffle them around, then give them out. (I might even manage a Ho ho ho…) You can open your present on the walk or take it home to put under your tree. I will have spares for those who aren’t able to bring one.

N.B. Our walks are for grown-ups, but children who have read the book are certainly welcome to take part in this one too, in case you’d like to bring one along for a Christmas treat.

Book your walk place

Monday 11th December, 8-8.40pm, £1-10: please decide where you are on this scale of what you can afford to pay.

Feel free to tune in even if you’ve not read the book - our zooms are open to all.

Book your zoom place

Buy The Dark is Rising from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in the group if you’re buying it in the shop.

In the Bleak Midwinter

Reading this book that begins on an unusually cold Midwinter’s Eve and carries on until Twelfth Night at this time of year, as the temperatures plummet and the world outside darkens, makes for a particularly atmospheric experience. I’m not surprised to discover that many readers and writers make re-reading this book around now an annual tradition; I wonder if any of us will take it up? It’s not just the cold and the dark, there’s a deeper menace at this time of year - the flipside of festive cheer that I think many of us experience, feeling a need to cloister ourselves away, shut down and reboot. At this time, when we’re struggling to find the strength to keep going, this doubt can feel more cosmic - as though the Dark really is rising, and the Light might not manage to see it off.

Time

Time in this book is far from straightforward. On the one hand, there’s the clear calendar progression of its days (which make it so fun to read along in the book’s ‘real time’), but it is also a time-slip novel, a world in which Will can wake up on the morning of his birthday, step out into the snow and the deep past, where the Walker and the Rider are abroad … and there are the carved wooden doors offering ways in and out of time. I really like what Simon McBurney says in the interview below about the time of our consciousness being somehow timeless, and how this makes this aspect of the book touch something deep within us.

Light and Dark

The battle of light versus dark, good versus evil is such a potent idea - no surprise it underlies many great children’s books. I was fascinated to read this about Susan Cooper’s wartime childhood in the interview on her website The Lost Land (link below):

Since every air-raid was a reminder that an enemy was trying to kill us, I developed a very strong sense of us and them, good and evil, the Light and the Dark.

I feel this England versus the Nazis narrative has been such a shaping part of mine and many other people’s lives. But this Light vs Dark can also be felt in other ways: How about The Cold War (it was written in the 1970s)? And of course it has resonance today with Ukraine, and in the fight against Climate Change deniers, and other wielders of power… Can you think of other resonant comparisons? There can be a terrible feeling of impotence when we fight these battles - perhaps one of the reassurances in reading this book is sharing in Will’s power and agency.

Hiraeth

Hiraeth is a Welsh word that loosely translates to a deep longing for home. In the interview with Simon McBurney and Robert Macfarlane (below), Rob reads out an email from Susan Cooper in which she says she wrote the book out of hiraeth. It is astonishing to think of her writing The Dark is Rising in New England or their holiday house in the British Virgin Islands; the books are so full of the British countryside and all its power. But perhaps it’s not so surprising - many writers write best about places once they’ve left them. Perhaps it is hiraeth that gives the landscape such power. Is there anywhere for which you feel hiraeth? I wonder if it is not just a longing for a place, but also for a lost time.

Myth and folklore

I mean, there is too much to go into here. I will only ask: how did you find the book’s deep engagement with myth and folklore? Did you feel it brought an element of timelessness to the book? Or of terror? Or something else? Or did you find it a bit much? Has it inspired you to delve further into British lore and tradition?

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You’re in for a treat, as there is a wealth of great material out there about this book and author. Here are some highlights:

• Firstly, HERE’s that link again to the 3-minute recommendation by Helen MacDonald.

• The wonderful writer Robert Macfarlane has done so much to bring this book to a wider audience. Keen-eyed fans of his own books might have spotted the allusion in the title of The Old Ways. HERE is a fantastic piece he wrote about it for the Observer, HERE he is discussing it with illustrator Jackie Morris on the inimitable podcast Backlisted, and HERE you can watch a fascinating event with him and Simon McBurney of Complicite discussing the book when launching their compelling and terrifying adaptation for the BBC World Service. DO listen to the adaption if you’ve not yet done so. They’ve condensed the book into twelve 20-minute episodes, which you can listen to in the ‘real time’ of the novel, beginning on 20 December. Or you can binge and listen all at once. It’s available on all podcast channels, and you can find out more about it including photos of the making of it HERE.

• HERE you can read a beautiful Dark-is-Rising-focussed interview with Susan Cooper for the Guardian, from 2012. And HERE is another one on the about page of her website, The Lost Land.

• Susan Cooper wrote these books in the 1970s, and her work is a key moment in the trajectory of British Fantasy writing, coming somewhere between Tolkien and Pullman. HERE she is giving the 2017 Tolkien Lecture in Fantasy Literature at Pembroke, Oxford. Brilliant. I missed her (ironically because I was in Cornwall with the children, see below) giving the opening talk for the British Library’s new Fantasy exhibition, and I think sadly it wasn’t recorded - did any of you make it? Report back please! I went to the exhibition this weekend and came away with a long list of books to re-read, and was inspired to rewatch Princess Mononoke on Sunday afternoon, also featured.

• The 1970s Puffin covers for this series (the one I’m holding in the picture) were designed by artist Michael Heslop, who’s got something of a cult following. You can see more of his 1970s covers on his website HERE.

• Finally, if you enjoyed this book, I expect you’ll love the others in the series. Over Sea, Under Stone is an exciting Cornwall adventure featuring Merriman and the three Drew children; in Greenwitch (also set in Cornwall) Will Stanton teams up with the Drew children from the first book; The Grey King, set in Wales, features Will and ‘The Raven Boy’ on another quest; and finally, Silver on the Tree brings them all together in a climactic ending. I’ve been reading them to my kids over the past months, and am currently in the middle of the 4th. So far so good - they even begged me to take them to Cornwall because of the books, which I did in half term! - but I do remember the final one being a little anticlimactic, so let’s see. Here is the piece of paper on which Susan Cooper planned out the whole sequence!!!

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Can you guess any of our first four books of 2024 from the back covers? All will be revealed in a bonus email with the full programme later this week.

I’m also excited to announce that in 2024, I’ll be starting a Regent’s Park walking book club in addition to our Hampstead Heath one. This will take place monthly on a Friday lunchtime, meeting at Daunt Books Marylebone - the ideal lunchbreak activity for those of you who work in town, and a perfect excuse to go into town if you can’t make our Sunday Heath walk.

Happy reading!
Emily

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