I first read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising the summer I turned 13, the year the Berlin Wall came down. I read it by torchlight under the bedclothes, not because of parental curfew or power cut, but because that seemed the safest place to read what was, unmistakably, the eeriest novel I’d ever met.
Eeriness is different in kind to horror. Eeriness thrives in edge-of-the-eye glimpses; horror is full-frontal. The eerie lives in the same family of feelings as Freud’s “uncanny”, which in its original German, unheimlich, means “unhomely”. A core power of Cooper’s novel lies in its counterpointing of the homely and the unhomely. It opens in the domestic clamour of the Stanton family house, in a quiet English village in the upper Thames valley. It’s 20 December: the eve of both the winter solstice and the 11th birthday of Will, the youngest of the Stanton children. Inside the house, all is pre-Christmas chaos, baking smells and familiarity. But in the wintry landscape around, something is very wrong. Rooks are behaving strangely, dogs are suddenly afraid of Will, a blizzard is coming, and “a shadowy awareness of evil” is building. Will’s life is about to change for ever – for he will become caught up in an ancient battle between the forces of the Light and those of the Dark, which are always strongest at midwinter. His young shoulders are soon to bear an immense burden.
The Dark Is Rising sank deep into my bones. Its characters – tall Merriman, capable of such warmth and such wrath; the Lady with her leitmotif of haunting, ethereal music; wise young Will; horned Herne – leapt into my imagination, and have never left. I was also deeply influenced by Cooper’s sense of landscape as a memory-shaping, time-slipping medium, present more widely in the tradition of Anglo-American fantasy fiction that runs from John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, through Alan Garner, Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Cooper herself and on to Robert Holdstock and Philip Pullman.
Photograph: Bryan Appleyard
Places, in the work of all these writers, carry auras and memories; they act both archivally and prophetically. Landscape is a palimpsest upon which ancient stories are both contested and renewed. Such ideas were powerfully formative for me as a writer, and Cooper’s presence is particularly strong in a book I wrote about walking, paths and history called The Old Ways (there’s a significant “Old Way Lane” in The Dark Is Rising).
I know of many other writers and artists, among them Katherine Rundell and Helen Macdonald, for whom Cooper’s work has also been influential. For Max Porter, the series “did more for my imagination, for my vocabulary, for any curiosity or concern I had for Englishness, for history, for listening, than anything I learned at school”; it gave him and his brother “a mythology that we could see and feel around us in rural England, and on our windswept holiday weeks in Snowdonia”.
Millions of other readers have met Cooper’s work and never forgotten it. Five years ago, with the poet Julia Bird, I co-ran a midwinter Dark Is Rising reading group on Twitter. Thousands of people joined from dozens of countries. #TheDarkIsReading trended nationally on Twitter, and the online outpouring of affection for the book was immense.
This winter, I hope The Dark Is Rising will find new audiences around the world. For, working with the actor, director and theatre-maker Simon McBurney, and supported by Complicité (the theatre company that Simon co-founded) I’ve spent the past year adapting The Dark Is Rising as an audio drama. It will be broadcast first on BBC World Service in 12 episodes, beginning on 20 December, with an episode following each day, such that the broadcasts correspond to the “real time” of the novel’s own unfolding across the solstice, Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
I gave a copy of The Dark Is Rising to Simon back in 2017, when I realised he’d never heard of it. Simon read it aloud to his son, Teyo. Then he read it aloud to Teyo for a second time. Then he and Complicité developed the idea of adapting it, and I jumped at their invitation of involvement. It made immediate sense to me to translate The Dark Is Rising into sound. For this is a novel, far more than most, to which one listens with the mind’s ear as well as seeing in the mind’s eye. Its soundscape is deeply complex; brimful of noises, melodies, songs and chants. Speaking aloud is crucial within it: words hold force when given voice – you must watch what you say.
It’s long been a puzzle to me that there aren’t more adaptations of Cooper’s novels (the book we’ve adapted is the second in a five-novel series, usually referred to as the Dark Is Rising sequence). There was an American film “version” in 2007, so appalling that I and all true Cooper fans refuse to speak its name. A radio adaptation for BBC Children’s Radio 4, 25 years ago. Other than that, nothing I knew of.
Early in the process of adaptation, in discussion with Complicité’s brilliant producer Tim Bell, Simon and I resolved on four creative principles. First, that we would honour Cooper’s novel and its 50-year-long power of enchantment. Second, that we’d make something far more ambitious than “just” an abridged reading of the book; third, that the supernatural elements of the production would be recorded binaurally, to immerse the listener acoustically; and fourth, that we’d draw out the transnational nature of Cooper’s vision. For the “Old Ones” – the warriors of the Light – are drawn from every country and background, and it is a Jamaican Old One who gives to Will an object of immense power, without which his quest cannot be completed. It feels right to us that this adaptation will be broadcast on the World Service, and heard in nearly 90 countries.
Working with Simon on the adaptation was inspirational; a 12-month masterclass in the skills of narrative pacing, dramatic tempo and creative perfectionism. As well as co-adapting the text with me, Simon also directed the performances and voiced the narrator. Complicité slowly gathered a superb cast including Toby Jones, Harriet Walter, Miles Yekinni as Herne, Natasha K Stone as the “devil-girl” Maggie Barnes, and 13-year-old Noah Alexander, who plays young Will Stanton.
Though it’s structured around a Manichean opposition of Light and Dark, Cooper’s novel refuses to cleave into neat binaries. I think of it, in fact, as a cold war novel, first published in 1973 and kindred in its moral complexities to early Le Carré; describing a conflict fought in the shadows, in which no one is clean. At its heart is the relationship between the central Old One, Merriman (played by Paul Rhys in our adaptation), and his “liege man” Hawkin (played by Toby Jones). Merriman must have a splinter of ice in his heart to do what he does to Hawkin. “This is a cold battle we are in,” Merriman tells Will, chillingly, “and we must sometimes do cold things.” At the novel’s core is a hard question: when the dark comes rising, who will turn it back?
Susan Cooper was born in Buckinghamshire in 1935. When I met her in the US, she told me how, when the air raid siren sounded during the blitz, her mother would hurry her and her brother down into a nearby bomb shelter. There, by candlelight, she would tell stories to the children to take their minds off the danger. What Cooper recalled – a detail that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck as she told me – was that when the bombs fell, their detonations would cause the candle flame to quiver. The nearer the explosion, the more the flame shook. Boom… shiver…Boom… shiver…Boom! Shiver!
People have been telling stories to one another around fires of one kind and another for thousands of years. Cooper learned the power of storytelling in the air raid shelter as bombs fell around her. I first read her books by torchlight, and they helped me cope with the anxiety I felt then at the possibility of nuclear conflict. Now new-old fears – climate chaos, war, ecological collapse – menace our minds. The dark is always rising, and it is the work of the greatest stories to hold it back.
The 12-part BBC audio adaption of The Dark Is Rising, commissioned by the World Service, will be broadcast on the World Service from 20 December, and on Radio 4 from 26 December
