Where the Kids Stumble on an Ancient Mystery

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think this book is quite good, well written and entertaining, so I give it 4 out of 5. But that's an old man judging a MG (YA?) book. I can't say for sure, but I think a young me would have given this a 5, and I'm sorry I didn't get to read it way back when.

I found The Dark is Rising, the second book--the only book, as far as I knew, at the time--when I was in 7th or 8th grade. It's kind of a Christmas book, and I read it around that time of year, and it really struck a chord. I loved it. It felt deeply significant and mysterious, becoming a type I tried to find over and over again. (The closest I ever found was another fun book, The Weirdstone of Brisangamen.) When I learned there were other books in the series, I really wanted to get my hands on them, but our library only had the one book. I never got back to the series until recently, wanting to satisfy a curiosity from 45+ years ago.

Too bad I didn't find this back then. It's a well written, exciting story in the same vein as the sequel, and from an analytic perspective is probably a better novel. Unlike the second book (which, again, I really liked) the children in this book are active from the start, taking things into their hands, facing and evading dangers, solving mysteries. In the second book, exciting things happen around the main character, but he is responsible for little of it. The children having greater agency, taking an active role in the outcome, is, IMO, preferable.

The kids are staying with their parents in a cool old house near the coast in Cornwall. They find a document leading to something; their unconventional Great Uncle Merry seems tapped into secrets he's not explaining, though he's a good guy; certain people in the neighborhood act friendly but seem scary and creepy; and there's an ancient mystery they're starting to unravel, which the bad guys want to beat them to. It's a good story.

It's not flawless. It's a bit long; the children sometimes do silly things, like keep important details secret from the others, that create conflicts unnecessarily; and the bad guys vary from threatening to feckless. But the biggest problem in the novel, I think, is how Merriman does his Dumbledore impression, letting little kids face great dangers without explaining things very well or strategizing with them how to accomplish their goals. The author did it, I believe, to achieve a certain feeling. For kids, it's a great fantasy, having an adventure like this, doing things on their own in the face of great risk (like drowning). But for adults, it looks a lot like irresponsible behavior that is definitely child endangerment. Bit of a plot hole.

Despite that, it's a lot of fun, and probably very appropriate, 60 years after it was published, for YA readers or MG readers, especially those who enjoy books nearing 300 pages. (It would be nothing for those young readers who plow through LOTR or the Harry Potter series, obviously.) And it's still pretty good for old dudes who missed it the first time around.

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Where Tennyson Improves on the Original

Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Answering the question, "How good is this?" I might give a 4 or 5. Tennyson wrote some amazing poetry. More on that later.

But answering the question, "How much did you enjoy this?" a 3 is about right, if maybe a slight exaggeration. Not Tennyson's fault. I just don't like most of the stories here.

After reading Mallory's Morte d' Arthur, which I actually didn't like, I decided to read Tennyson's reboot, see if the stories read any better this way. And they definitely do. This is the way to deliver the King Arthur stories to your veins, if you need that fix. But only if you already like them.

Turns out, I don't like the Camelot/round table/Arthur stories very much. They don't go anywhere, IMO. They don't achieve anything. You can impose something on it, some meaning, some deeper significance, (which Tennyson does, IMO), giving meaning where meaning seems elusive, but I don't think you find it in the originals. I don't want to become the main character on the internet today, so I have to temper that a little. Sure, there are themes in the stories that seem significant: we learn, to our sorrow, that imperfect humans can't make anything perfect; we see that righteous authority, even when it is temporarily established, is undermined by unjust power; humans, we are reminded, are fallible, and heroes are human; the powerful should defend the weak, but may fail even when they try to do it; and so on. That and more is in the text, if you're looking.

But those judgments all seem to come from outside the system, looking at it from a modern perspective, asking what we learn by reading the stories. The action all takes within a terrible social milieu, where the poor, the aged, the common, and the powerless are ruthlessly mocked and ridiculed by those entrusted with their protection, the privileged nobles. The most treasured values are noble ancestry, skill with weapons, great strength, attractive physical appearance, and the kind of bravery indistinguishable from foolhardiness, to the point that participating in senseless violence is much less damning than avoiding it, even if you end up killing your brother or friend. Oops. Everyone lacking these attributes is like dirt beneath their feet, barely tolerated, and only defended (when they aren't being taken advantage of) in an accidental and condescending way. We see this, and judge it, and we tell ourselves that the stories demonstrate this deep truth--but I don't think it's in the text.

The original stories seem much more interested in telling about great people and their drama, their ups and downs, and just marveling at it or enjoying their tragedy than in making meaning from it all. These are action-filled romances, not fables, and definitely not parables. At least, that's how I think Mallory saw it.

Tennyson, to his credit, does take a wider (meaning modern, with the benefit of hindsight) view, imposing some meaning on the text, recognizing the imperfect message of the original. He asks the queen, to whom he is dedicating his work, to

...accept this old imperfect tale,
New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul,
Ideal manhood closed in real man,
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him
Of Geoffrey’s book, or him of Malleor’s, one
Touched by the adulterous finger of a time
That hovered between war and wantonness,
And crownings and dethronements...

It's the mixed messages in it that make me feel that the messages I do find are all mine, invented by the pattern-finding part of my brain.

TL; DR: Most of the stories in the King Arthur cycle are about short-tempered bullies and tyrants who I just can't care about very much.

However, I can somewhat appreciate the language. That isn't my norm; I seldom to never read something for the words, for the language. That's not my thing. If it's yours, good news: Tennyson has some beautiful passages. Here's the description of the beach where Arthur fought and killed Modred (that's how he spelled it), receiving his own death wound at the same time:

Last, as by some one deathbed after wail
Of suffering, silence follows, or through death
Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,
Save for some whisper of the seething seas,
A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day
Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide
Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle: but no man was moving there;
Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon,
Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave
Brake in among dead faces, to and fro
Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down
Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen,
And shivered brands that once had fought with Rome,
And rolling far along the gloomy shores
The voice of days of old and days to be.

That's some pretty awesome imagery, some impressive poetic language. I like it. And there's lots throughout.

You know, probably the best way for me to enjoy this book is not to read it through, but to open it at a random page and just admire 20-30 lines. Then close it back up.

I may give that a shot.

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Where Rich Dudes Fight All of the Time

Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I by Thomas Malory
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dude, I was trying to like this. I thought I was gonna. I mean, I did a little, enough for a 3/5 stars. But this was not a fun read.

I was hoping and expecting something like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Tasso's Jerusalem delivered, and there are similarities. But where those have a thread or two connecting everything, this retelling of King Arthur feels much more random.

The book has no direction, no real plot, no coherent storytelling. Sometimes you know what a character is feeling, if it's a strong emotion, but most of the time you just can't tell. The dialogue is wooden and trite, devoid of emotional content. Every character, in my head, sounded like Keanu as on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Here's an exchange from Marhaus and Gawain after fighting almost all day:

"Sir Knight," said Sir Marhaus, "I have well felt that ye are a passing good knight and a marvelous man of might as ever I felt any, while it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great, and therefore it were pity to do you hurt, for I feel ye are passing feeble."

"Ah," said Sir Gawain, "gentle knight, ye say the word that I should say."

Motivations are occasionally clear, but most of the time they're opaque. They go on quests with no point. They refuse to tell their real name, sometimes. They'll fight over small things and then, on a whim, forgive huge injuries. Sometimes they act predictably, according to knightly norms, and other times nope.

And the form of the stories is super repetitive. Every story in it--since it's more like a collection of incompatible legends than a single narrative--feels like it's kicked off with generic story-starts (maiden at the crossroads crying is a favorite), has the middle bit assembled from a collection of stock phrases, and gets concluded one of several stock ways, as if the author rolled his D&D dice to decide what happened this time.

Some of the characters behave in an admirable way, and you feel like maybe Mallory is piecing the old stories together to give the impression that King Arthur's impact was to teach these knights how to be better men, to make the nobility more responsive to the needs of the people around them. That was my hypothesis partway through. But then the knights show no discernible sense of morality besides being considered a worthy fighter. In fact, almost every knight in the story is at times a horrible person.

The fighting is just stupid. So many knights fight for hours, causing horrible injuries, for no good reason, and then stop and become friends. Hey, fellas, how about you make friends first and quit fighting people you have no quarrel with? Brothers kill brothers by accident. Friends injure friends. Lots of men with promise die young. All of this is because somebody says "Wanna fight?" And then they always do. Launcelot says that "when men be hot in deeds of arms oft they hurt their friends as well as their foes." Ya think? Any ideas how to fix that, Launcelot? Sheesh.

And the setting is so weird. Story after story after story has a knight setting out and encountering some horrible knight blocking a bridge or attacking travelers or holding women hostage, and the way the story is told it sounds like all of these terrible places are about an hour outside of Camelot. Did nobody have a map? How could they all travel half a day and find castles they've never heard of with customs that are crazy? I guess this is kind of a fairyland or dreamscape where everybody apparently has terrible head injuries so that they know nothing about the country they all live in.

My recommendation, Arthur, is that you put aside finding the grail and instead have some guys do a real good survey of the country, noting castles where they kill travelers and stuff like that. It'd be super useful. Sending guys off in random directions is not a productive policy. Let's get organized!

Anyway, this was worth reading. I'm glad to get an idea of the original, or nearly original, stories about King Arthur. I was never interested in them as a kid and avoided every fantasy novel that was based on them because it seemed well picked over already. But my curiosity finally got me, and I'm glad to finish this volume. I may someday pick up the second volume of the book, but for now I have had my curiosity quenched.

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Where Orlando Loses It but Gets It Back

By Ludovico Ariosto - Orlando Furioso (Oxford World's Classics) (1999-02-12) [Paperback] by Ludovico Ariosto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you've got the time, this is amazing.

Partly, I wanted to track down whatever stuff Don Quixote had been reading, see what he loved so much, and this is one of those chivalric stories (a long epic poem, actually) that he supposedly read. And yeah, it's very cool. I'd like to have a chat with Don Quixote about it.

This poem by Ariosto is the continuation of another Italian poem--Orlando Innamorato, or Orlando in Love, [or Roland, actually, to use a more familiar form of his name], written by Boiardo--but that poem was less successful and has received much less attention over time than this continuation. The Orlando here is the same Roland we might know better from The Song of Roland, the story of Charlemagne's withdrawal from Muslim Spain back to France, where Roland and his men, the rear guard of the army, are ambushed by a Muslim army (or a Basque army, depending on the version) and Roland is reluctant to use his horn to call for help. This epic brings together many of stories found in other forms that are collectively called the Matter of France, mostly stories of Charlemagne's knights. The so-called Matter of Britain, mostly King Arthur stories, is thrown into the mix.

In general, this tells how certain key knights (including women, several of whom are nearly unbeatable) participate in the war between North African Muslims on the one side, who are trying to take Paris, and the multi-national force of Christians led by Charlemagne, who are trying to defend it. Most of the story, though, follows individuals as they go on separate quests and fight strangers and save maidens or warriors or whoever from monsters and sorceresses and all sorts of bad guys, especially the type who will stand on bridges and challenge all comers. The story starts with Orlando in love with Angelica, though she doesn't love him back (because they drank from different magic streams in the original poem by Boiardo) and he is chasing after her. Other knights are just as in love with her, which she doesn't enjoy. The "furioso" part of the book (meaning crazy, not angry) comes in the middle when Orlando learns Angelica has fallen in love with someone else and has gone off to live with him. (She leaves the story at that point.) He loses his reason, rips off his clothes, and starts tearing up the countryside, killing people everywhere he goes.

(The English knight Astolfo goes to save Orlando, with direction from a kind sorcerer. He rides a hippogriff to Africa, where he helps the Christian king Prester John with his harpy problem and has many adventures, eventually being allowed to ride Elijah's flaming chariot up to the moon where lost things, like Orlando's wits, can be found. He eventually restores them to Orlando, who as a result no longer loves Angelica.)

One of the best passages, earlier on in the poem, tells how Angelica is captured (even though she is a top fighter) and is chained to a rock like Andromeda to be a sacrifice to the sea creature called an orc.

The orc, seeing the shadow cast by the spreading wings flitting here and there across the water, left its certain prey awaiting it on shore and started a furious chase, curving and coiling, after the elusive one instead. Ruggiero dropped down and struck a blow, like an eagle dropping from the sky when it has spotted a snake weaving through the grass, or lying on a bare stone in the sun...

Ruggiero--supposedly an actual ancestor of the poet's patrons, the Este family, even though he was a Muslim--defeats the orc and rescues her from the rock with the help of the hippogriff that Astolfo later rides to Africa. He gives her a ring of invisibility and she uses it to go hide from all the guys trying to find her.

So many modern fantasy elements and tropes are found here that, with a little revision and updating of some 500-year-old stylist things, it could be on the shelves beside LotR or Wheel of Time or Mistborn books. Like a grandpa fantasy near it's descendants.

The original ~40,000-line poem in Italian was in ottava rima stanzas, which rhymed abababcc. There are English versions that attempt a similar format, but that's a terrible thing to do to a nice poem. This translation is given in prose, split into paragraphs, written in a way that doesn't do violence to the poem's meaning. The only sign of the original format is a / placed between stanza breaks. This translation is very readable with only a hint of quaintness, and it has an extensive annotated index in the back for those of us who need help remembering who is Brandimart (a knight who is Orlando's best friend) and who is Bradamant (a female knight who ends up marrying Ruggiero) and things like that.

I read this in tiny pieces. That worked for me. I don't know about other readers. In any case, I really enjoyed it. 5 stars.

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