Over Sea, Under Stone

[lightreads]

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am on a serious childhood nostalgia bender over here. Let that be a warning to you.



This series came back to me like a bolt from the blue on a perfectly normal day last week, and I suddenly had to read it right now. But, fantastic, no problem, I thought. When I originally read these books -- and read them, and read them, and read them -- it was on cassette. The good old National Library Service for the Blind cassettes in their snap plastic cases. And the NLS has been busily digitizing the collection (only about a decade late) and I could swear I saw these books go up . . .



Indeed. The NLS had digitized four out of the five, and I was sure I could ahem find Greenwitch on the back of a truck in one of the internet's ahem alleyways. So I snagged this first one and put it on my handheld and trotted off to groom the dog.



And then I turned on the book.



And it was not my narrator.



I remember her very clearly: she was British, a contralto. A gentle delivery, but with a lot of life for the children, particularly Barney, and even more gravitas for Gumerry. She read this book to me a good twenty times between the ages of eight and thirteen, and she was all that is right and proper.



And sometime in the last few decades, the NLS re-recorded the books and reissued the titles. Those old cassettes were wearing out, I'm sure, even the master copy.



And it was not okay. He was American, and he was doing his best, I'm sure, but he was not right.



Which consumed my attention for the entire book, so I don't actually have much to say aside from outraged nostalgia. This is younger and lighter than I remember. A quest story with cartoonishly simple us/them dynamics and some cute kids. Reminded me a startling amount of Arthur Ransom, because the whole thing had that quality of taking place in a bubble of childish creation, where great adventures happen and then you have tea. I was also interested to see the near-total lack of magic here, given the scope of the powers at work. Made me think about the work the rest of the series does to make sure the Drews, the mortals, remain separate. Three from the circle, three from the track. How that matters to these books in ways I'm still unpacking. But that's a subject for a later book.



But the narrator was wrong.





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Comments

[readerjane]

Oh, goodness, The Dark is Rising! That series owned my soul when I was little. I haunted the grade school library, asking the librarians if the fifth book had come in yet. No internet in those days, and I had no idea what resources there were to find books not yet published: all I had to go on was the blurb on the back of The Grey King saying, "the last book in this series will be Silver On the Tree."

I can imagine how wrong that narrator's voice must be. Audible.com's narrator is Alex Jennings (male), who is at least British: would that help any? Or would it still be just WRONG?

I remember the poetry in that series almost as well as I remember the inscription from the One Ring. "Though grim from the grey king shadows fall, yet singing the golden harp shall guide to break their sleep and bid them ride." happy sigh

[cahn]

I remember the poetry in that series almost as well as I remember the inscription from the One Ring.

Me too! "And where the midsummer's tree grows tall, by Pendragon's sword the Dark shall fall!"

[lightreads]

Yes, I ended up turning to Audible for the Jennings when I couldn't cope with the wrongness anymore. He is doing a quite lovely job of it, too, with a Cornwall accent for all the background characters in Greenwitch.

Last year sometime a whole pack of us went out to our local bar on a Thursday night and had a few drinks. And as we were walking home the topic of these books came up, and axiom_of_stripe and uschickens recited the entire poem -- "when the dark comes rising, six shall turn it back," from start to finish cold, no prompting. It was one of the geekiest and most impressive things I've seen in a while.

[readerjane]

Best of all? I felt such an outcast for *caring* so much about these tales when I was a youngling. But now? It's OMG!You!Too time. At last.

[livingbyfiction]

Here's the other thing about Over Sea, Under Stone: even in the poem, "and the grail gone before" sounds like a stumble.