Over sea, under stone

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has been on my "to read" list for about four years now, as has the whole The Dark is Rising series. because friends recommended it, or wrote good reviews of it.

My search became more urgent when a reviewer compared my children's books Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove (ISBN 978-1-920707-65-1) to the whole "The Dark is Rising" sequence, and suggested that it might have been an influence on my writing.

It couldn't have been an influence on me, because I hadn't read it yet, but there certainly are similar tropes in both my children's books -- children on a quest, getting separated and searching for each other, an older boy who is a bully, some getting captured by the villains and threatened by them. There is even a hair binding that comes undone causing one character to lose her pony tail. But my influence came more from Alan Garner and I wonder if Susan Cooper's did too. It seems that they did meet, and regarded each other as kindred spirits.

Anyway I found the book a very good read. I liked the characters, the children especially, since more than half the adult characters were evil. It is a story of three children, Simon, Jane and Barney Drew, who go with their parents and a great uncle (who is not really a relative, but rather a friend of the family) to spend a holiday in a house in Cornwall, whose owner has gone off for a holiday somewhere else. They find an abandoned document and map, which they use to play games of seeking treasure, and then find that it is really old, and some evil people are also looking for it. 

In the Good Reads page for the book there was a question about why the book was written in such an old-fashioned way, and so I watched out for that while reading it. As some people remarked, it could be because it was written over 50 years ago, and speech was different then. In the book the children wore "plimsolls", but by the time the Harry Potter books appeared, 30 years later, "plimsolls" had become "trainers", so that would probably have appeared old-fashioned even 25 years ago, when the Harry Potter books first appeared. I was particularly aware of that when I went to England in the 1960s, because I thought of "plimsolls" as marks on ships, and we called such footwear "tackies" (sometimes spelt "takkies"), both then and now -- the term is applied to any shoes with canvas uppers and rubber soles.

Some language would have appeared old-fashioned even in the 1960s -- I don't recall any children at that time referring to their male parent as "Father" with a capital F. But what really struck me as an anachronism was that one of the characters found two 50 pence pieces in his pocket, in a book published in 1965. Even in 1968, when the edition I read was alleged to have been published, though two of the new decimal coins were beginning to circulate, a 50p piece was not among them, they were still 10-bob notes. So if 10-bob notes miraculously changed into 50p coins, why did plimsolls not change into trainers? Or Father into Dad?

The edition of Over sea, under stone that I read was illustrated by pen and ink drawings by Margery Gill. The illustrations were appropriate to the text, but though the faces were drawn very well, the legs were not, and looked like those of children in pictures used to illustrate children freed from concentration camps suffering from malnutrition. Such legs could not have carried anyone fast enough to do all the running away they had to do from the villains. This particular picture, however, was one of the ones with more realistic legs. 

I recently re-read three of Alan Garner's children's books, and comparing his language to Susan Cooper's, I find his more terse and taut, which conveys a sense of urgency in the way it is written. 

I was inspired to write my children's (and other fiction) by a conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in which they said that if they wanted to see more of the kind of stories they liked, they should have to write them themselves. And I liked stories by Charles Williams and Alan Garner. But it seems that Susan Cooper has also written the kind of stories I like, and all but two of them are waiting for me to read therm.

Her writings are not entirely new to me, however. Back in the 1960s I did read Mandrake by Susan Cooper, which was adult science fiction rather than children's fantasy. I was reading it on the train from London to Bournemouth at the very time Dr Verwoerd was shot, and it was in fact about an English version of the Verwoerdian dream, where a British prime minister decided that everyone had to go back to their "homeland", and enacted laws to force them to do so. I never saw another book by Susan Cooper in a bookshop after that, though I see she has written quite a lot, and I'm putting more on my "want to read" list. 

I've spent some time commenting on the language in this review, but that's because I found little else to criticise, and because someone asked a question about it. And now I hope I'll be able to find the rest of the series and renew my acquaintance with the characters. 

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The Horse Road (book review and some reminiscences)

The Horse Road by Troon Harrison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is an interesting mix of genres.

It is set in Central Asia in the first century BC, so it is basically a historical novel. The protagonist, Kallisto, is a horse-obsessed 14-year-old girl, and there is an entire literary genre aimed at horse-mad 14-year-old girls. It is also a Bildungsroman. because she has to cope with a series of crises when her father is away on business and her mother is ill, so she has to grow up fast. The crises include war, famine and earthquake.

The Horse Road also has cultural and racial diversity. Kallisto's father is a Greek merchant, her mother a Sarmatian horse breeder, and they live in the Fergana valley in what is now Kyrgyzstan, at the meeting place of East and West.

For the horse-obsessed 14-year-old girls there is plenty of detail about the horses, their care and grooming, their gaits, harness and training, their character and the skills of the rider. At times I thought it went a bit overboard on the details. One horse is described as an Appaloosa, a specifically American breed which would be very unlikely to have been found in Central Asia in that period. And cruppers are mentioned several times -- the leather loop attached to the rear of the saddle that goes under the horse's tail and stops the saddle from sliding forward over the horse's withers. I'm not sure that cruppers had been invented at that time. But those are the kind of details that appeal to the horse-mad young.

It's now 20 years since I last sat on a horse, and so this book took me back to times long past. One of the priests in our diocese, Father Justin Venn, was a farrier by trade, but he recently gave it up because it required too much travelling in the Johannesburg area, and he too observed that in today's urban society the only people who keep horses are middle-aged middle-class women and 14-year-old girls, but  perhaps the range of readership of books about horses is slightly wider.

I certainly enjoyed reading about horses at the age of 10 or 11, and perhaps the interest of boys in horses peaks slightly younger than among girls, at about 11 or 12. At that age boys are big enough to mount a horse bareback, but not so big and heavy that they are a burden to the horse.

Steve Hayes, Brassie & Elizabeth Dods, Aug 1952

When I was 11 I had a horse called Brassie, and he became to object of attraction to a 14-year-old girl, Elizabeth Dods, who asked if she could ride him. She rode him so much that I had to go by bicycle, which did not have off-road capability. Fortunately a riding school across the road closed and sold off all their horses cheaply, and so I acquired a pony called Tom as a Christmas present, and the first ride on him on Christmas day was to St Nicholas Church in Sandringham, Johannesburg with Elizabeth. That was the first church service I had ever been to (apart from a couple of family baptisms which I was too young to remember).

A few months later Elizabeth turned 15, and lost interest in horses, but she had a marvellous collection of horse books that she had acquired during the period of her obsession, which I eagerly borrowed and read. One of my favourites was Silver Snaffles by Primrose Cumming, which also had an element of fantasy.


The Horse Road has all the details that horse book addicts seem to love, but there is also enough drama, excitement and danger to make it a gripping adventure story for those who wouldn't know a crupper from a martingale..







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