Silver on the Tree

[lightreads]

Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


And now we have to talk about The Thing. Spoilers abound, for once, because I’ve really just gotta get my teeth straight into this.

Before that, though, the rest of the book. It’s . . . honestly, I’m not crazy about it. I remember that this was never one I reread much as a child. Well, that’s not true – I reread the first third all the time, but I’d stop whenever the magic started coming thick and heavy. There is something so wrenching about Will and his brother by the river, about Stephen caring enough to ask, and his blunted adult incomprehension of Will’s answers, the depth of Will’s loss in that moment. Contrast that to the back half of the book, which is having a quite high-level discussion of the production of art, and it just . . . it’s not like it isn’t a good discussion. Cooper is and was a hell of an artist herself, obviously. I’m just not engaging on that level, after the book opens so viscerally.

All right, enough stalling. The Thing.

As a child, the end of this book was arbitrary and cruel because it directly opposed my main interest in fantasy. Nothing unusual about what I was after – I wanted to read about kids having access to a world bigger than the regimented, difficult, pedestrian one I lived in. I wanted to read about kids being able to open a door into power and wonder. And the end of this book slammed the door in all our faces.

This time, of course, I knew what was coming, and as an adult I can follow the argument Cooper has been having about it all along. Mostly in Greenwitch, much to my adult surprise. And it’s . . . look, it’s not like I agree with her. I don’t, to put it bluntly.

But I do get it now, and I think it’s actually some really difficult territory she’s on. Losing the memory of what has happened isn’t a way to strip everyone of the power they’ve accessed; it’s the only way to open the door to a new power and responsibility. That’s what Merriman says, anyway: “For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children,nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping. And you may not lie idly by expecting the second coming of anyone now because the world is yours, and it is up to you.

It makes me think of my favorite monument, which is in fact a “countermonument.” It’s a monument against violence and fascism, a pillar designed, over time, to sink into the ground and disappear. Eventually, the monument space will be empty because, as the monument itself reads, “in the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”

I love it. It’s a symbol of how collective recovery is a process. We have to remember, but the obtrusion of the memory into the world changes over time – the emotional shadow it casts (literal shadow in this case), its usefulness for the business of living.

Not a perfect analog for the end of this book by a long shot, but thinking about the monument helped me to . . . grow a general respect for the decisions Cooper made. She wrote about the passing of an age, about the ascension of man. No longer caught between the temptations of the dark and the outsider rebuttals of the Light. So yes, casting the Dark out of the world means that the Light, too, must go, and I can see the . . . esthetic sense in which she concluded as a matter of course that they must forget. No one is coming to save us, as Merriman says, and the kinds of power she was writing about – the alien magic of the Light and the complicated ownership man has over the world – could not . . . exist in the same space.

It still deeply offends me on a personal level, on behalf of the Drews. They earned those memories with a lot of courage and striving. Living through it changed them, and to have it all so casually erased is still outrageous to me, a kind of assault. But on the broader thematic level . . . yeah, all right. I get it. I don’t like it. But I get it.




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Comments

[cahn]

Thanks for this. I was really wondering what you would have to say about this.

And yet... it seems like there should have been another way, a way to close that door without slamming it in their faces. And yet again, when I think about it I can't really think of a good way this could have been done.

[lightreads]

The puzzling element for me is John Rolands, who is given a choice to remember or not. Why is it okay for him to potentially remember? Which of course he doesn't, ultimatley, but.... Perhaps because he is an adult and thus, in Cooper's mythology, more bound and static? whereas the children are unbound potential for action? *shrug* I got nothing on this one.

[cahn]

This is something that made perfect sense to me when I was a kid, actually... let's see if I can unpack the child-logic -- Rowlands has earned the right to (potentially) remember because he's lost so much in the service of the Light, whereas the Drews haven't really lost anything. I think (at least in my head, at the time) it was an outgrowth of the idea that suffering leads to, or can be a gateway for, greater understanding. (Which, of course, isn't always true, but I suppose it is for Rowlands, as indicated in the text by his wisdom in realizing he can't choose this particular thing...?)

[lightreads]

Yeah, I'd buy it. Though then you're left with Bran, who is arguably also losing a great deal, and he forgets. Though with him, at least we have this notion that he needs to be....neutralized, magically speaking, in order to live in the new world order, as it were.

...I dunno, I'm just never going to reconcile, really. But I knew that.

[templemarker]

I definitely have most of the same feelings you have about The Thing--these were books I would sneak out of my room at midnight to pull from the library and read in secret, because they belonged to my sister and she was petulant and wouldn't share--and I've spend the better part of two decades trying to puzzle out why it ended the way it did, especially because it's so unsatisfying. I don't know that I have an answer, but I do have something of a counterargument. (Not fully fashioned, and not necessarily where I land, but one I've been thinking about.)

In a sense, the whole narrative, apart from Will's own role as the last Old One to remain in this universe or whatever, is one working towards freedom, a freer will than had apparently existed in the battle between the Dark and the Light, framed by the Arthurian saga of a previous age. By wiping the memories of the participants, and especially calling it a mercy, I wonder if Cooper is making an argument about freedom: though all the characters have participated in the conclusion of the event, to a lesser or greater extent, it's only by forgetting the pattern they were actors in that they could truly break free of it.

Furthermore, by banishing it from mortal memory, it becomes a ward against the return of a pattern; Will is the only keeper of that knowledge, with the Dark cast out and the Light having retreated. When those he loves die, there is no mortal avenue left to revive the pattern, so mindwiping is like an insurance policy.

All that being equal, there was a very interesting Yuletide submission in TDIR that challenges the above perspective: Once and Future (1696 words) by Llwyden ferch Gyfrinach. I don't know that I agree with it per se, but I was definitely intrigued by it.

[ravurian]

Oh my goodness, yes: this. One of the Great Betrayals of children's literature, I always thought as a child. And even now, this is the one book I don't reread very often (though I ought). Greenwitch and The Grey King have always been my favourites of the series, and - at least a little - it's because they hold the seeds of all the different ways in which the series could have gone: Barney and his Sight; Jane and her wish, and her affinity for the Wild Magic (and her parallels with The Lady, though yes, that was only explicit in Silver on the Tree); Simon and his 'Kingly' nature; all the little contingency plans in The Grey King that the Light had laid aside in case it lost (the harp; the sword; the shield). If ever I were to write TDiR fic, it would be post-Silver on the Tree, and it would be about Jane and the sea and about a Wild Magic no longer constrained by Light and Dark, but free; and it would be about Barney and his Sight; and it would be about Simon trying desperately to hold onto them both. And it would be about Will realising that he was free to choose for himself, and about everyone else being granted their own choices. (And I have too many feels for Bran to mention).

Um.

[lightreads]

I would read that. All of that. Just sayin'.